The Charismatic Renewal, 1960–1980¶

Azusa Street made the gifts a Pentecostal possession. The second half of the century made them a Christian one. Between 1960 and 1980 the practice of tongues, healing and prophecy moved out of the Pentecostal denominations and into the old mainline churches — Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and above all Roman Catholic. The people who carried it there were often clergy, often embarrassed, and almost never looking for a new church.

The renewal also produced the century's sharpest arguments about excess and discernment, and those arguments are part of the story.

The claim¶

The twentieth century is the period in which the gifts moved from the margins to the mainstream of global Christianity. That is a claim about sociology as much as theology, and it is testable: by 1980 the practice was present in churches that had never taught it, and by 2000 the movement had produced a scholarly literature of its own. The renewal did not settle the doctrinal question. It changed who was asking it.

Van Nuys, 1960¶

On a Sunday in April 1960 the rector of St Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, told his congregation that he had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues. Dennis Bennett was an ordinary parish priest in a growing suburban parish, and he had come to the experience through a prayer group of laypeople influenced by Pentecostals.

The announcement split the parish. Bennett resigned, and the story went national — Time, Newsweek and the Los Angeles papers all covered it, partly because a parishioner, Jean Stone, worked to make sure they did. He became vicar of a church in Seattle, and the "charismatic renewal" acquired its first recognisable Episcopal face.

The significance is the setting. Tongues had been a Pentecostal badge; now they appeared in a respectable mainline pulpit, among people who sang from a hymnal and recited the creed.

Into the mainline¶

The pattern repeated. Lutheran charismatics gathered around Larry Christenson's Speaking in Tongues (1964); Presbyterians formed a charismatic fellowship in the mid-1960s; Methodists, American Baptists and Disciples followed. The Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, founded in 1951, gave professional people a respectable network; David du Plessis, a South African Pentecostal, acted as a one-man bridge to the older churches and attended sessions of the Second Vatican Council as a guest.

What held the renewal together was not organisation but experience and a bookstall: the same few paperbacks circulated everywhere, and the same questions were asked in every denomination — how do we test this, who leads it, and what do we do with the person who wants to speak on Sunday?

Duquesne, 1967¶

The most surprising development was Catholic. In February 1967 a group of students and faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh went on a retreat, prayed for the baptism in the Spirit, and — by the accounts they later published — received tongues and prophecy. Within months similar groups appeared at Notre Dame and Michigan State, and the Word of God community formed at Ann Arbor in 1967.

The Catholic charismatic renewal grew quickly through the 1970s, with prayer groups, covenant communities and conferences that filled stadiums. In 1975, at a charismatic conference in Rome, Pope Paul VI greeted the movement at Pentecost. Whatever the tensions — over Mary, the sacraments and church authority — the renewal had planted itself in the one church with the strongest institutional memory of the gifts, and it did so without leaving.

The Jesus movement and the Third Wave¶

Two further streams fed the 1970s. The Jesus movement of the late 1960s brought converted hippies into Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa and then into the Vineyard; it gave the renewal its music and populist energy, and pushed healing and prophecy into evangelical youth culture.

The "Third Wave", a term associated with C. Peter Wagner, described the 1980s phenomenon of evangelical congregations adopting the gifts without becoming Pentecostal. Its most influential figure was John Wimber, a Vineyard pastor who taught "signs and wonders" as the ordinary equipment of mission. From 1981 to 1986 Wimber and Wagner taught MC510 at Fuller Theological Seminary, a course on signs and wonders and church growth. It drew students from around the world, and it drew a fight: faculty objected, the seminary reviewed the course, and in 1986 it was discontinued. The controversy made the question academic in a new way — not whether the gifts exist, but whether a seminary can teach them.

Toronto and Brownsville¶

The next wave came in the 1990s. In January 1994 the Toronto Airport Vineyard, pastored by John Arnott, became the centre of what the press called the "Toronto Blessing": meetings with holy laughter, shaking, and animal-like sounds, drawing pilgrims from Britain and around the world. In 1995 the Vineyard movement severed its connection with the church, which continued as the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship.

In June 1995 a revival began at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, which ran for years and drew huge crowds. Both movements produced reports of healing, both produced excess, and both were studied by sociologists — Margaret Poloma's work on the Toronto pilgrims is the best-known attempt to measure what was happening rather than describe or denounce it.

The honest problems¶

The renewal produced excess: phenomena that were manipulated, authoritarian leaders, and communities that became controlling in the name of discipleship. It produced division: congregations split over the gifts, often because of the behaviour of advocates as much as the doctrine. It produced disappointment: people prayed for and not healed, prophecies that failed, movements that faded.

Honesty requires saying that the 1970s and 1980s also produced a good deal of nonsense in the Holy Spirit's name. The test the New Testament gives is not "does it impress?" but "does it build up, and does it confess Christ?" (1 Corinthians 12:3; 14:26).

A field of study¶

One measure of how far the movement has moved into the mainstream is that it is now studied in its own right. The Society for Pentecostal Studies was founded in 1970; the journal Pneuma began in 1979. Grant Wacker's Heaven Below (2001) and Candy Gunther Brown's Testing Prayer (2012) treat the movement's claims as serious historical and empirical questions, neither debunking nor apologising. The gifts are no longer a fringe curiosity of religious studies; they are a field.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that between 1960 and 1980 the gifts entered the mainline churches and the Catholic Church, and that the movement became global, self-conscious and academically studied; and that the renewal produced both genuine fruit and serious disorder.

It does not prove: that any particular claim was true, that the renewal was spiritually healthy, or that its excesses can be waved away. It proves that the twentieth-century church could not leave the question alone — and that it is now a question for the whole church, not a sect.