a history of the charismatic movements ch510 vements mo f ... · mystical molokanism, the molokans...

A History of the Charismatic Movements

Transcript - CH510 A History of the Charismatic Movements © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 15 of 24CH510

The Spread of Charismatic Renewalism

A History of the Charismatic Movements

With this lecture, we begin formally the story of the next phase of the Latter Rain Movement. And that phase is sometimes called the charismatic movement. I prefer not to use that title because I think what I am describing in the entire course is a belief in the charismatic phenomenon. I don’t think any Christian ultimately would deny the place and importance of the gifts of the Spirit. It’s just a degree of focus and definition that ultimately becomes a divisive issue at times. What I am saying by way of beginning is this. Classical Pentecostalism, Latter Rain Movement, “first wave” as it’s called in, say, some Vineyard literature, began to wane in the 1940s. There was deep concern about it. And a hopeful sign of its revival, though proving abortive, was the era of the great deliverance evangelists of the 1940s and 1950s. But by the time you come to the 1960s, there’s a sense where that deliverance evangelism, caused by some of its claims and some of its own internal inconsistencies, was thought not to be the promised renewal of the Latter Rain Movement. Events in the 1960s, with some background to them that I’ll describe in this lecture, do become the promised renewal of the Latter Rain Movement, sometimes called “second wave.”

But let me begin with a brief introduction. At this point in our course, majoritively the discussion of classical Pentecostalism is behind us. And the discussion of neo-Pentecostalism, or renewalism as I’ve qualified the use of the term, is before us. To provide some perspective on the past and upon our direction, James Hill writing an article entitled “The New Charismatics 1973” speaks of three phases of the Pentecostal movement at least up to that time. It has now been superseded of course by a third phase. He says, “Phase one can be traced to the turn of the century, what is now known as classical Pentecostalism.” And we’ve tried to trace that. Phase two may be dated from 1960. This new extension of Pentecostalism was dubbed neo-Pentecostalism. Phase three is 1967. In that year the movement took off in two new directions.

John D. Hannah, PhD Experience: Distinguished Professor of

Historical Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary



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A Roman-Catholic Pentecostal movement got underway, and the Jesus Movement came into being. Now I would combine phase two and phase three and over them put the word renewalism. So I would say in 1901 you have the birth of classical Pentecostalism. In 1960 you have the birth of the second phase of the Latter Rain Movement, as we call it. And I would call that neo-Pentecostalism or more accurately, renewalism. And that renewalist movement has at least two, maybe three, directions: classic mainline Protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic movement, and maybe the Jesus Movement.

But the background for the renewalist movement, the actual date for the former beginnings of the neo-Pentecostal or renewalist movement, is Passion Sunday, April 3, 1960, when Dennis Bennett announced to his Episcopal congregation that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Michael Harper from England writes,

“It was a lovely service, father,” said a sweet elderly lady as she left St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Van Nuys after the morning service on Passion Sunday, 1960. “This is what you always said.” And through her eyes, it had been like any other service on any other Sunday. In actual fact, the service set off an earthquake whose tremors were picked up on ecclesiological seismographs all over the world. The rector, the Reverend Dennis Bennett, had preached that morning and told the congregation that he had been filled with the Spirit and had spoken with other tongues just as the apostles and others on the Day of Pentecost.

That event, Dennis Bennett’s declaration of his Spirit baptism as a cleric in the Anglican-American community, did not occur in a vacuum. The background for his judgment is two things: first, the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, which I’d like to describe, and second, the prolific influence of an international person, David J. du Plessis, but first, the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship and its founder Demos Shakarian. Shakarian was a wealthy Armenian-American, one-time dairyman in California. He is the leading figure in the Los Angeles-based Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. The Shakarian family, originally Molokan in background, immigrated to the United States from Karakala, Armenia, in 1905, an event caused by a prophecy of doom for Christians in the town. Let me by way make some comment upon that former statement.



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The Armenian village of Karakala was deeply influenced by mystical Molokanism, the Molokans numbering 1.2 million in the early twentieth century, was a religious sect founded in 1765 as a reaction to the Russian state church orthodoxy. The sect rejected the sacraments, stressed the Bible including the Apocrypha, and worship. In the nineteenth century, the Molokans divided into two subsets including the Jumpers or the Pryguni, which emphasized prayer, prophecy, and revelation. Pryguni came to Karakala after 1850 particularly through Gregory Ivanovich Mohoff in 1900. Gregory laid hands on Demos Shakarian, and he spoke in another tongue. Efim Klubniken, a Pryguni Molokan, had visions and wrote prophecy which the Shakarians took when they migrated to the United States. Molokan services in Los Angeles were characterized by tongues, interpretation of tongues, visions, and dancing in the Spirit.

That’s a background into which you add the events of Azusa. Having settled in Los Angeles, the Shakarians witnessed the Azusa revival of 1906 firsthand. And Demos’s father adopted the new teaching which in a way questions my origin of the charismatic movement as Kansas or Los Angeles because it seems to have been a phenomenon even before that in Armenia. These must dovetail somehow. After marrying in 1912, Isaac moved to Downey, California, where he bought a small piece of land and three Holsteins and opened the Reliance Dairy. By 1943, he had become the world’s largest independent dairyman with three thousand cows. Like his father, Demos became a successful dairyman. Although he did not feel called into Pentecostal ministry, he began sponsoring evangelists in the early 1930s and 1940s. The Shakarians were personal friends and disciples of Charles S. Price, an English-born, Spirit-baptized under McPherson, independent evangelist in California. Price, more than any other independent evangelist, sensed the nearness of the deliverance revival in the 1940s and instilled it in Shakarian. Shakarian in the late 1940s sponsored such deliverance men as William Branham and William Freeman (a Missouri-born national and international evangelist), and Oral Roberts.

With that background, Shakarian is one of the major founders of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, which has a deep influence on the birth of the renewalist movement. The concept of a lay organization for evangelism gradually came to Shakarian in the late 1940s through some influence of William Freeman. Harrell, in his book, makes this comment: “Freeman early made friends with several influential businessmen who later became



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the nucleus of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship. And he was influential in encouraging the formation of the group.” Walter Hollenweger in his book maintains that Shakarian’s idea rose because the Assemblies of God refused to accept into their ranks those who were not full-time pastors. Shakarian helped to organize the Oral Roberts campaign in Los Angeles in 1950, where he not only shared his vision for a businessmen’s group but was encouraged by Roberts. Later that year, with Roberts the chief mentor of the new concept, Shakarian invited twenty-one businessmen who shared the full gospel experience and who chafed under the restrictions of old-line Pentecostalism to meet in Los Angeles to hear Roberts. At that meeting, the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship was born in a local chapter. By 1950, the struggling fellowship was firmly established with the holding of the first annual convention in Los Angeles as thousands attended. Speakers included Roberts, Jack Cole, Gordon Lindsay, Tommy Hicks, and others. In the same year, the fellowship established its own publication, Voice. The following year, 1954, the second annual convention was held in Washington, DC, with Cole and Branham as speakers and Richard Nixon, then vice president, as observer.

The growth of the fellowship in the 1960s and 1970s was startling. By the mid-1960s, it had established 300 chapters with over a 100,000 members. By the early 1970s, Voice had a circulation of over 250,000; and each issue carried news of new chapters. By 1972, Shakarian reported a membership of 300,000 and a budget of $1 million. The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship sponsored half-hour radio programs through the United States and financed international airlifts for evangelism, that is, businessmen who hold conventions in large numbers abroad. Voice has over 600,000 subscribers and is translated into seven languages. Harper wrote in his History of the Birth of the Renewalist Movement, “Many ministers and lay people came from the churches, have attended the breakfast and luncheons of the fellowship and received the experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Major support for the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship was derived from the Oral Roberts organization, Pat Boone, and George Otis, an electronics manufacturer and early patron of the Blessed Trinity Society.

The purposes of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International were two: evangelism via the Pentecostal message and fellowship for classical and neo-Pentecostals.



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Full Gospel regional, national, and international conventions offered an important platform to charismatic renewalists such as Kuhlman, Roberts, du Plessis, and Harper. Durashov says in his work that “a great stress is placed upon love as the basis of unity rather than doctrinal agreement.” The other background to the birth of the renewalist movement was this transporting of the wonders of Spirit baptism across traditional denominational lines into the mainline churches like Bennett represented. The other source is the work and ministry of David du Plessis. Hill, in his article which seems to be a consensus opinion, says, “One man more than any other is responsible for the changing attitude within the major denominations, David J. du Plessis, Mr. Pentecost.” He was born in 1905, and the Lord took him home in 1987. The person more responsible for neo-Pentecostal growth throughout the world, our Pentecostal father in Christ, was born in South Africa of Huguenot ancestry. His father heard the testimony of two Americans in Johannesburg about Azusa Street, and the family joined the new Pentecostal church there.

After his conversion in 1916, he was baptized in 1918. And later in 1927 he was ordained in the ministry of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa although he took no formal education. From 1927 to 1949 he gradually emerged in his denomination finally becoming its general secretary. As the sectarian traits of classical Pentecostalism began slowly to abate in the postwar era, du Plessis emerged. He took an active part in the World Pentecostal Fellowship organizational meetings, was a leader in the 1948 Paris conference, and took up residence in the United States in 1945, joining the Assemblies of God in 1955. He was involved in a near-fatal auto accident in 1949. And through this, he reevaluated his own ministry. Harper writes in his story,

Gradually, du Plessis came to realize that his future no longer lay in trying to get all Pentecostals to think alike. But where was he to go and what was he to do was not yet clear. He was soon to know. As a Pentecostal, David had regarded the World Council of Churches with grave suspicion. But now he was discovering that God was telling him to go and witness to their leaders. “But Lord,” he pleaded. “I have preached so much against them. What do I say to them now? They won’t listen to me. Their churches have put our people out of their fellowship.”

But still the inner urge and insistence was maintained. So he ordered the early breakfast and caught the early train to New



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York. David found his own attitude changing. Suddenly he discovered that he was no longer talking to stuffy old liberals but to his own brothers. Another wall was coming down. As a result of this encounter, David was invited to his first ecumenical conference, the International Missionary Council, in Willingen, Germany. He checked in for three days reckoning this would be about the limit of the powers of endurance, but he stayed much longer. He then began to attend and was warmly received in the meetings of the World Council in the 1950s. As a result of his new ecumenical contacts and the recognition that he was accorded in the ecumenical movement, du Plessis lectured at Princeton Seminary and at other mainline Christian theological schools in the years just before neo-Pentecostalism emerged as a movement in 1960. Since 1960, du Plessis has continued his ecumenical posture. He was an observer at Vatican II and was co-chairman of a five-year dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the charismatic renewalists. His affiliations brought defrocking in 1962 from the Assemblies of God. But he continued to bring the renewalist movement together. Sadly, he died of inoperable abdominal cancer in 1987.

So the background for the birth of the renewalist movement, the second wave of Latter Rain hope, was one debacle in some sense of the deliverance evangelism extreme, the emergence of Shakarian and Oral Roberts and the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, and the international ministry of David du Plessis. Now before we highlight the actual beginnings of neo-Pentecostalism, that is, the penetration of Spirit baptism into the mainline churches or renewalism, it seems beneficial to gather up the fragments and summarize the causes. First, the classical Pentecostals were being forced into change, end of isolationism, stress on education, the rise of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, and the labor of du Plessis. Second, mainline denominationalism was faced with declining numbers, reduced budgets, dwindling zeal, the fruit of liberal theology, the ecumenical movement. They were anxious for renewal. And third, postwar Americans longed for meaning in experiential existential context.

This brings us to Dennis Bennett in the beginning. Dennis Bennett, English-born in London, came to the US at the age of ten. His father was a Congregational minister and settled his family in California. After a brief period following college as a salesman in an electronics firm, he decided on a ministerial career and attended the University of Chicago Divinity School. In 1953, having become an Episcopalian in the Anglo-Catholic wing,



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he accepted a call to become rector of the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California. At that time, the church was just recovering from serious financial difficulties having some five hundred members. By 1960, the church had grown to twenty-five hundred members. He was quite prolific. The background for an understanding of Bennett’s reception of the charismatic experience is found outside St. Mark’s in a couple, John and Joan Baker. Harper recounts the story.

It really began when a young Episcopal couple came into contact for the first time with Christians who had a deep experience and awareness of God. John and Joan Baker had been searching for reality for some time. A relative had left the Episcopal Church and joined the Mormons, but this did not seem to be the answer for them. Then one day, their close friends, a dentist and his wife, experienced the baptism in the Spirit. The difference in Chuck and Shirley was instant and impressive. They noticed the inward peace and calm they now possessed. So Joan asked Shirley what had happened to her. She answered in the heavenly language that the Lord had given her. Joan tells what her reaction to this was. “I was astonished. For the first time in my life, I knew that God was real, that He was as near to me as Shirley. My first thought was the New Testament is true. How wonderful that God still heals, performs miracles, speaks through His people. Another realization hit me. I was a sinner. Then the Lord led me through a period of repentance.” A week after this first encounter with the power of the Holy Spirit, Joan was similarly baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoke in other tongues as was her husband, John, and their daughter, Kathy. The Bakers then debated what to do. Should they join a Pentecostal church? They determined to go to their church, Church of the Holy Spirit, and eventually told their rector, Frank Maguire. Gradually, a group of baptized Episcopalians emerged. Maguire, not knowing what to do, sought the counsel of a fellow minister and friend, Dennis Bennett. Bennett then [This sounds ironic to me. It’s interesting how it all of this transpired.] met the Bakers and as a result of the encounter, received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It’s in November 1959, John Baker laid hands on him and he spoke in tongues. Frank Maguire had the same experience three days later. Bennett says, “When I was 40 and a half, I found that I was drying up spiritually. I was putting out and taking in little. I didn’t know exactly what to look for. It



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was then that I met John and Joan, a young couple who had a charismatic experience.Meeting John and Joan, I realized that they were then and there experiencing the warmth of God’s presence. And they were in the mountaintop even while they were in the valley. The Charismatic experience helps to bring this about. It is a release of the indwelling Spirit which arises and overwhelms the believer. The Lord comes out of the Holy of Holies to the outer court and then to the outer world. After sharing and prayer with John and Joan, I too felt this overwhelming of the Spirit. I woke up the next morning, and this tremendous sense of God’s presence is still with me. And at noontime, it too remained vivid.” Bennett then began to send members of his congregation who were interested in baptism to John and Joan Baker with the result that during the following four months, eight ministers and nearly 100 laymen from the diocese were baptized in the Spirit. By April 3, 1960, some 70 members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church had received the Pentecostal experience.

One writer has noted, “Although these new Anglican Pentecostals tried hard to keep quiet about their experiences, news leaked out quickly within Bennett’s parish in the city of Van Nuys as a whole. Rumors, dissension, and misunderstanding centering on alleged excessive Charismatic behavior, rolling in the aisles became commonplace. Certainly participants in a Pentecostal experience were intensely enthusiastic. Prayer and fellowship meetings often lasted until 1:30 a.m., even as late as 4:00 a.m., but order was insisted upon. This is much unlike the classical Pentecostal movement. And charismatic activity was not permitted within formal services of worship.” That’s very descriptive, I think, of the renewalist movement as expressed in mainline denominationalism. Order in charismatic activity was not permitted in worship services.

On Passion Sunday, 1960, Bennett explained the Pentecostal experience from the pulpit causing a disruption. Two days later, he submitted his resignation; and the bishop banned any more speaking in tongues under church auspices. Bennett then sent a long letter to the church parishioners explaining his position. I’ll read only portions of it. I wish I could read more, but with the restraints of time. He goes on to say,

But what has happened to this joy and power and peace? What has happened to miracles, healing, and all other gifts



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of the Holy Spirit that are promised in the holy Bible? Let us frankly admit that they are not seen much in the church today. For most of us, religion is a plodding thing, resting on the grim determination of man rather than on the power of God. And yet Jesus said His yoke is easy, and His burden is light. And fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. He did not say that we should not be without troubles in the world, but He did say that our hearts should rejoice and that no man should take away our joy. I’ve been pondering these things for a long time. But about five months ago, I received the spiritual experience that made me realize what I was missing. And that is precisely the power of God in the Holy Spirit in our lives. We talk about Him, but we don’t know Him and recognize His work in us as we should. He does not fill us as the Bible says He will do. So instead of living by the power of God in us, we try to follow God’s rules by our own power. In the words of the Bible, we are living by the law and not by faith. I met some people about five months ago, Episcopalians, who had received the fullness of the Holy Spirit. I have since found that many Episcopalians, both clergy and people, know about this but have been fearful in telling about it for exactly the reason that you see now at St. Mark’s. People just don’t understand. I talked with these folks and found that they did have this joy and power and peace that was so lacking in the lives of most Christians. They explained to me how they received the Holy Spirit into their lives, and I followed their instructions and received the power of the Holy Spirit into my life in a new and fuller way. The key to it I found is praise. It is in praising God that we enabled Him to respond to us.

Although the bishops were reluctant to give Bennett a parish, he was invited by the bishop of Olympia to be the vicar of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Seattle. The church was in such a low condition financially and numerically that thought was given to its closure. Bennett says, “When I came to St. Luke’s in ’59, actually 1 July 1960, the church was in a hopeless state. Bishop Lewis said, ‘Go bring your fire to St. Luke’s.’ Today it is the largest Episcopal church in the diocese.” Within a year, eighty-five of the two hundred communicants, the inner core of the church, were Spirit-baptized. Debts were paid; attendance multiplied.

In 1961, Dennis Bennett resigned from the church as rector of St. Luke’s to pursue a ministry of writing and travel. In 1968, he



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founded the Christian Renewal Association. Miriam Murphy, a Catholic from the congregation of Notre Dame, wrote, “St. Luke’s became a model for a Charismatic ministry in a traditional setting.”

The influence of Dennis Bennett at St. Luke’s and beyond was captured by Quebedeaux when he wrote, “As a neo-Pentecostal facilitator, this Episcopal priest became a modern-day Alexander Boddy and was himself responsible for much of the early growth of Charismatic renewal especially among Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians.” Jorstad wrote,

The new movement emerged rather slowly following the Bennett incident, but is virtually impossible to trace subsequent growth with any degree of accuracy. The early center of neo-Pentecostalism was in Van Nuys, California, through the first charismatic renewal fellowship, Blessed Trinity Fellowship, founded by Jean Stone. [We’ll come back to Jean Stone.] When the fellowship collapsed in 1966 and Stone passed from neo-Pentecostal leadership, the center of activity passed to the non-denominational Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim and its pastor Ralph Wilkerson. [And we’ll come back to Wilkerson.] By 1960, an estimated 200 Episcopalians in the Los Angeles area experienced tongues, six congregations in the American Lutheran Church in California in such prominent Presbyterian churches as Bel Air and Hollywood. Numerous pastors of various denominations experienced this baptism: Harald Bredesen of First Reformed Church Mount Vernon, [Howard] Ervin American Baptist, Larry Christenson Lutheran, and James H. Brown United Presbyterian.

Jorstad again comments, “By the early 1970s, one solid fact seemed clear about the new Pentecostal groups within the large denominations. They had grown rapidly.” One said in the early 1960s, charismatic renewal became a widespread topic for the secular and religious press, radio, and television because glossolalia was for the first time in America being practiced by sophisticated (these are key words) middle-class church members. Neo-Pentecostal leaders and their churches were the subject of numerous interviews and discussions in the media.

In October of 1962, as a result of two campus visits by Harald Bredesen, the glossolalia phenomena broke out in the academic community at Yale University among members of the evangelical



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Intervarsity Christian Fellowship there. Included in this neo-Pentecostal revival were Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and even one Roman Catholic. Five were members of Phi Beta Kappa, and some were religious leaders on the campus. Thereafter, the movement spread to Dartmouth College, Stanford University, and Princeton Theological Seminary, where it was particularly significant.

By 1964, the charismatic renewal prayer groups had sprung up in colleges and seminaries in at least fifteen states in the Northeast, north-central states, and the West Coast. Four years after its inception, neo-Pentecostalism was a clearly recognizable religious movement affecting both clergy and laity, students, professionals, men and women in the Episcopal Church and almost all the mainline denominations in the United States. It was prolific. Words can’t describe it. But as old classical Pentecostalism tended to be a separatist movement coming out of Methodism, prizing its separatist notions with the imminent coming of Christ providing the urgency for activity, the neo-Pentecostal movement is a “come in-ism” movement. It’s a bringing of the wonders of renewal, of the gifts of the Spirit into the mainline churches that by and large were theologically liberal in their orientation. Born in 1960 in Dennis Bennett’s church and then [spreading] prolifically across the United States, a major event in the early history of neo-Pentecostalism was the defection of Oral Roberts from classical Pentecostalism to mainline Methodism, come in-ism as opposed to the earlier come out-ism.

Several events occurred in sequence in 1967 and 1968 with deep importance. In 1965, Oral Roberts and R. O. Corvin established Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, itself a manifestation of Pentecostalism’s end of isolationism. It was the first graduate school and seminary for Pentecostals. The university was dedicated in April 1967 by Billy Graham, another sign of growing Pentecostal acceptance. In March 1968, Roberts shocked the religious world by joining a mainline denomination, the Methodists. Synan wrote instructively in his book The History, “He also transferred his ordination vows as an ordained minister. The world’s best-known Pentecostal since Aimee Semple McPherson, Roberts had since 1947 built a tremendous faith healing empire from his headquarters in Tulsa.

The overwhelming source of his support during his early years had been from Pentecostals. But by the 1960s, a larger share of his income had been from people in the more traditional churches.



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These people, most of whom had experienced speaking with other tongues, were dubbed ‘neo-Pentecostals’ by old-line members of the Pentecostal movement.” Roberts’s defection from the church in which his father and mother had been pioneer ministers and from the Pentecostal movement in general which had brought him to prominence puzzled many. At any rate, the dream of Roberts’s university becoming an intellectual center for the Pentecostal world was shattered by this event.

In April 1968, Roberts removed R. O. Corvin, a Pentecostal Holiness churchman, from the university over a rift in theology and educational policies. The report in Christianity Today reads like this: “‘The problem is not that Roberts has gone liberal,’ Corvin explained, ‘but that he is not an expert on theology.’ And Corvin feels possible inroads of existential theology at the university. However, he’s full of praise for the new dean, [Howard Ervin], a Baptist who teaches Old Testament at the theology school.” Corvin also complained to the Tulsa Tribune that Roberts’s control over administrative decisions at the school is harmful to its academic climate. Corvin’s dismissal was an evidence of Roberts’s effort to end his connection with Pentecostalism and carry his doctrine into mainline denominationalism.

Now a word about the international impact of the renewalist movement, at least the Protestant phase of it; charismatic renewal in Europe in the British Commonwealth was deeply affected by the rise of neo-Pentecostalism in the United States. Although in many countries the stage was prepared by the ecumenical visits and activities of David du Plessis in the 1950s, let me begin with England. The climate of opinion in Great Britain was against Pentecostalism until the 1960s. Pentecostals were significantly fewer in number. And news from the United States received little hearing until 1962. Harper, a leading renewalist in Britain, wrote,

It is very difficult to assess all this as one is seeing the beginnings of a new movement and the scene is constantly changing. But from 1962 onward, there has been a steady increase in interest and support. Minds previously shut completely to this subject have become opened even though many are cautious and unwilling to commit themselves in support or opposition.

The coming of neo-Pentecostalism can be reconstructed as follows. First, David du Plessis made a short speaking tour through England in 1960, but no one from the United States made prior visits to



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discuss the changes in American Pentecostalism. Second, in 1962, copies of Trinity Magazine, the magazine of Jean Stone, were sold in England and attracted initial interest of British Anglicans such as Michael Harper, who then was an assistant to John Stott at All Souls Church in London. As a result, a small number of people received the baptism of the Holy Spirit in 1962. Third, in 1962, the embryonic movement got unexpected assistance from a noted British editor, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes. Hughes, editor of The Churchman, an evangelical Anglican periodical, was in Washington, DC, when he received an invitation from Jean Stone to visit California and see things for himself. Upon his return to London, Hughes wrote an important editorial casting the new movement among Episcopalians in a favorable light.

Fourth, in this favorable context, Frank Maguire, Episcopal rector of the Church of the Holy Spirit, visited Britain on a vacation and spoke at several ministers’ conferences in London. A few received the baptism at the Church Army Training College, but most were reluctant to commit themselves to the new ideas. That summer, August 1963, Larry Christenson, the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, San Pedro, California, visited Helsinki for a world Lutheran conference. After the conference, Christenson held meetings in England, where Michael Harper received the baptism. Michael Harper is called the Jean Stone of England, but we’ll come back to that story.

That fall, September-October 1963, David du Plessis made a second visit to England en route to the United States after a visit to London. He spoke to a packed West End hotel audience with some additional people receiving the baptism. At this point in Harper’s narrative of the movement’s historical development, he says,

So slowly but surely, the movement of the Holy Spirit continued. There was mounting interest and very little opposition. Early in 1964, a well-known magazine, Crusade, carried two articles by Reverend Hywel-Davies, an Elim minister and administrative secretary of the Evangelical Alliance. Interest began to develop in the Baptist denomination, and several ministers entered into blessing. Trinity Magazine was sold in this country, and many copies were in constant circulation.

There were no official pronouncements from church leaders.



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In 1964, Don Stone came to Britain on a business trip accompanied by his wife, Jean. By the time she arrived, an extensive itinerary had been worked out consisting of press conferences, public meetings in London, and trips. Quebedeaux in his book says, “In Scotland alone, nearly 50 people including several ministers received the baptism. The London meetings, incidentally, were the first ones open to the public and arranged by non-Pentecostals since the days of Alexander Boddy and Cecil Polhill.” In the summer of 1964, David du Plessis spent a month in England, where he spoke at many gatherings in England and attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. Harper wrote, “A remarkable meeting was held in London, to which all the clergy of St. Alban’s diocese were invited. The bishop of Bedford was in the chair. And a large number of clergy attended.”

In 1965, Dennis Bennett made his first visit to England telling of his Pentecostal experience, the dramatic growth of a once-dying St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, and the nature of charismatic renewal. And then in 1965 came the huge Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International airlift to London from the United States. Hundreds of full gospel businessmen and clergy, Roberts, Shakarian, Bredesen, Ervin, Ralph Wilkerson, spent two weeks in evangelistic conferences. During the first week, meetings were held in the London area. And in the second, teams were sent out throughout Great Britain. The neo-Pentecostal movement spread rapidly in the 1960s. In the late 1960s, Dennis Bennett and Michael Harper brought neo-Pentecostalism to New Zealand and Australia. In the same period, David du Plessis popularized the movement in South Africa. Not until the 1960s did neo-Pentecostalism penetrate Scandinavia. The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship was particularly active in the worldwide spread of Spirit baptism through rather massive airlifts.

What I am seeking to argue could be summarized this way. The lesson is focused on the context out of which neo-Pentecostalism emerged and its beginnings in the 1960s. In postwar America, classical Pentecostalism dropped its isolationism and mainline liberal churches groped for significance. Through the influence of Shakarian’s Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship and du Plessis’s ministry, a beginning was made in the 1950s to reach the traditional church that bore fruit in 1959 through Dennis


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The Spread of Charismatic RenewalismLesson 15 of 24

Bennett in the Episcopal Church. The experiential significance was brought to a people longing for emotional release in the traditional bodies nationally and internationally.

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