"One of the highly regarded Particular Baptist pastors in the 18 th century in England and Wales was Benjamin Francis. But there are several challenges to telling his story. The first is that he was preeminently a preacher yet we have no surviving sermons. Second, he was a native Welsh speaker and so most of the hymns he wrote are not in English. Third, he pastored a relatively small and always poor country church about which there is not a lot of information. And finally, there is only one main source of information about his life. This is a biographical account written by his son-in-law shortly after Francis’ death. But what we do know of God’s work through Francis is worth telling and there are several confirmatory lessons that a study of his life yields."