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home > Transactions > Volume 31 - 2025 > THE QUEST FOR ‘THE ARK OF THE WELSH COVENANT’: DISESTABLISHMENT AND THE CHURCH CONGRESS MEETINGS HELD IN SWANSEA, 1879 AND 1909

THE QUEST FOR ‘THE ARK OF THE WELSH COVENANT’: DISESTABLISHMENT AND THE CHURCH CONGRESS MEETINGS HELD IN SWANSEA, 1879 AND 1909

Absract: The Church Congress was the annual gathering of the Church of England, which convened for the first time in Wales in 1879, when it met in Swansea. It was to return to Swansea thirty years later, but the intervening period had witnessed manifest changes to the Welsh Anglican church and the threat that was now evident. In 1879 the question of Welsh disestablishment was not yet perceived as a serious threat, but by 1909, with legislation imminent, there was reason for the defenders of the Welsh church to glance nervously at those Liberals who had for decades sought to sever the link between church and state. But those same churchmen were anxious that the support of the English prelates and clergy was illusory, and that their Welsh outpost could be sacrificed for the greater good. Their anxieties were to prove well-founded.

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