The charismatic movement in the U.S. marks its golden anniversary this year, having begun with Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett in 1960. For more than a hundred years, its parent movement, Pentecostalism, has popularized practices such as speaking in tongues and prophesying. The younger charismatic movement surfaced when many North American Christians in mainline denominations began adopting similar practices.
Vinson Synan, a professor of church history at Regent University in Virginia Beach, documents the movement’s development in An Eyewitness Remembers the Century of the Holy Spirit (Chosen/Baker). CT online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey spoke with Synan about Pentecostalism’s past and future.
What to you has been one of the most unexpected changes of the past century?
The biggest surprise was the Catholic-charismatic renewal that started in 1967. That came as an utter shock to me, to most of my friends, and probably to the Catholic Church. It gave legitimacy to the movement, that the largest and one of the oldest churches in the world was seeing a Pentecostal movement.
What has been the high point of the movement?
The movement reached a climax in America around 1977 during the Kansas City Conference, because all the different streams came together.
The article claims to reflect on Pentecostalism, but really is limited to discussing the Charismatic movement. It seems that a broader look at Pentecostalism would have strengthened the article, after all the Assemblies of God has been one of the amazing growth stories of Christianity in the past 80-90 years.
Here’s an interesting timeline of the Pentecostal movement:
http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1998/issue58/58h026.html
The article claims to reflect on Pentecostalism, but really is limited to discussing the Charismatic movement. It seems that a broader look at Pentecostalism would have strengthened the article, after all the Assemblies of God has been one of the amazing growth stories of Christianity in the past 80-90 years.
Here’s an interesting timeline of the Pentecostal movement:
http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1998/issue58/58h026.html
Synan’s [i]The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century[/i] (Eerdmans, 1997; orig. pub. 1971) does a good job of tracing pentecostal origins from Wesley on.
Dennis Bennett was ‘taught’ to speak in tongues by the Rev. Frank Maguire, a priest of the Irish Anglican church who was serving in North Hollywood, CA (adjacent to Van Nuys where Bennett was rector). Maguire, in turn was ‘taught’ to speak in tongues by a couple who had converted to the Episcipal Church from either Assemblies of God, or Four Square Gospel (I forget which). I was acquainted with both Bennett and Maguire back in those days. The movement really took off when Bennett moved to Ballard, part of Seattle, WA. Most of the older parishioners left and the church now consisted of ‘recruits’ from AG and FSG bodies. There were a lot of casualties in those days since if you couldn’t speak in tongues you were considered a second class Christian.
James Morgan
Olympia, WA
PS: I never got the hang of it. In 1988 I started attending an Eastern Orthodox church and have never looked back.