Don Graham said he knew he needed help, but he wasn’t sure what kind of help he needed.
“I was at a critical point in my life returning from the foreign missions field where we had to resign for medical reasons,” said Graham, an Alabama evangelist.
He was down and he didn’t know how to get back up.
And in the midst of that, someone suggested that he go to a Keswick Convention in North Carolina.
He’d never heard of Keswick. But he was willing to try pretty much anything.
“At that point in time I didn’t know Keswick and I didn’t know Stephen Olford, who was preaching at the conference,” Graham said. “But my family and I went, and while Stephen Olford was preaching God turned me every way but loose.”
And through the Keswick message, Graham said his life “was transformed completely.”
Keswick may be a small town in England’s Lake District but big things started there, said Roger Willmore, longtime Keswick speaker and recently named director of missions for Calhoun Baptist Association.
A minister in the Lake District, Thomas D. Harford-Battersby, went to fellow minister Robert Wilson and told him he was struggling, Willmore explained.
The two decided to hold a revival-type convention in Keswick that would serve as an encouragement and reminder of key points of the faith. They thought it would be a one-time thing.
“But 600 people showed up, and there was such an outpouring of blessing that they said, ‘We must do this again,’” Willmore said.
And now, 141 years later, it’s a concept that’s spread around the world, impacting lives from Japan to Alabama.
It’s because of Keswick’s focus, Willmore said — its ultimate purpose is the total dedication of life to God.
To be a Keswick Convention, a meeting has to follow a particular format, Willmore explained. The speakers tackle a particular topic each day:
- On Monday, the issue of indwelling and unconfessed sin and how that mars a person’s relationship with God.
- On Tuesday, the assurance of cleansing from that sin through belief in and reliance on Christ.
- On Wednesday, the reality that forgiveness and cleansing must be followed by absolute surrender to Jesus.
- On Thursday, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit living in the believer.
- On Friday, the power that the Holy Spirit gives Christians to live their daily lives in the world.
“The convention used the systematic expositional preaching of the Scriptures, and each speaker would drive home the relevance of whatever passage he was preaching,” Willmore said. “The relevance to everyday life was so real and practical.”
Keswick in Alabama
Its practicality made it all the way to Alabama, touching lives at convention meetings and in living rooms as groups gathered around tape players.
“It became the source of spiritual formation for me,” Willmore said.
When he was a high school senior in Arab, Willmore was invited to a Bible study in a couple’s home, and it was there he became acquainted with the Keswick concept.
Every second Monday night of the month, a group would gather around an old reel-to-reel tape recorder at their house and listen to sermons from Keswick Conventions.
“We sat with Bibles and open notebooks and each sermon would take about an hour. We would listen to one, take a break, then listen to another. Then we would discuss how to apply the truths we had learned,” Willmore said. “It had the deepest influence on my spiritual development — more than anything else I could point to.”
At that point, from the mid-1960s to 1990, a Keswick Convention happened every March in Birmingham that drew people from all over the state.
“But then eventually the larger churches in town began to invite these speakers to their churches for their own conferences, and the big conferences became not as unique — the speakers were popping up at places like McElwain Baptist, Briarwood Presbyterian and Shades Mountain Baptist,” Willmore said.
And its impact also had begun to shape the ministries of people like Willmore and Graham, people who carried it into Alabama Baptist churches whether they realized it was Keswick or not.
Graham said, “My whole ministry was shaped by Keswick. It’s not a British tradition — it’s the heart and soul of the New Testament. It’s the revival message.”
And Graham and Willmore agree that Alabama needs it.
The target, Willmore said, is to bring Christians to spiritual maturity and living in the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives.
Passing it down
He said that as he looks around Alabama sometimes, he gets concerned — concerned that many Christians will live and die having never really entered into the fullness of the life God has to offer.
“The Christian life isn’t just imitating Christ, it is Christ, Christ lived out in the believer,” he said. “That’s the Keswick message, and that’s the message that modern-day Christians need to hear and heed, the message that will help with our frustration, our worry, our stress and our burnout.”
Keswick has a rich history, Willmore said. He’s been to several historic anniversary conventions in the town of Keswick and heard speakers such as Billy Graham bring powerful messages.
But it has a message for the present still, he said, and he believes this so strongly he’ll be attending a meeting in England in August to help strategize how to best pass the Keswick model to the next generation.
Don Graham said he’s passionate about passing it on too.
“I’m constantly talking to young pastors and sharing this with them,” he said. “Call it Keswick, call it whatever you like, it’s the basics of the Christian life, and we’ve got to get back to it.”
For more information about Keswick, visit keswickministries.org.
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