The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901-2001

The Century of the Holy Spirit

100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901–2001

Vinson Synan

THOMAS NELSON PUBLISHERS—Nashville

Copyright © 2001 by Vinson Synan

Chapter 15 and Appendix copyright © 2001 by David B. Barrett

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version of the Bible, copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, 1990, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress

Synan, Vinson

The century of the Holy Spirit: 100 years of Pentecostal and charismatic renewal, 1901-2001

ISBN 9781418587536

To my beautiful wife, Carol Lee,

with whom I have shared forty wonderful years—of the century of the Holy Spirit

Contents

Preface

1. The Pentecostal Century: An Overview

Vinson Synan

2. Pentecostal Roots

Vinson Synan

3. The Azusa Street Revival: The Pentecostal Movement Begins in America

Robert Owens

4. To the Regions Beyond: The Global Expansion of Pentecostalism

Gary B. McGee

5. The Holiness Pentecostal Churches

Vinson Synan

6. The Finished Work Pentecostal Churches

Vinson Synan

7. Charismatic Renewal Enters the Mainline Churches

Vinson Synan

8. The Charismatics: Renewal in Major Protestant Denominations

Vinson Synan

9. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal

Peter Hocken

10. Spirit-Filled Women

Susan C. Hyatt

11. African-American Pentecostalism in the 20th Century

David Daniels III

12. Hispanic Pentecostalism in the Americas

Pablo A. Deiros and Everett A. Wilson

13. Healers and Televangelists After World War II

David E. Harrell Jr.

14. Streams of Renewal at the End of the Century

Vinson Synan

15. The Worldwide Holy Spirit Renewal

David B. Barrett

Appendix: A Chronology of Renewal in the Holy Spirit

David B. Barrett

Contributors

Color Pictures

Preface

In the midst of the millennial fever that gripped the world in 1999 and 2000, few people realized that the new millennium would actually begin on January 1, 2001. For Christians, this anniversary is special because it marks the 2,000 years of Christian history. But for millions of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, this anniversary also marks the completion of 100 years of Pentecostal and charismatic renewal.

The title of this book, The Century of the Holy Spirit, summarizes what is generally recognized as the most important religious movement of the entire twentieth century. Beginning with a handful of students in Topeka, Kansas, on New Year’s Day, 1901, Christians around the world have experienced a renewal of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that dwarfs anything seen since the days of the early church. This movement, which now constitutes the second largest family of Christians in the world (after the Roman Catholic Church), is found in practically every nation and ethnic group in the world. By the end of the century, over 500,000,000 people were involved in this revival which continues its massive growth into the new millennium.

Many readers will wish to learn the distinctions between the Pentecostals and charismatics, which are the subjects of this book. The Pentecostals were the people who pioneered and popularized the idea of a baptism in the Holy Spirit with the necessary sign of speaking in tongues. In the early days of the century they were expelled from the mainline denominations and forced to found their own churches. Some scholars now call them classical Pentecostals. The term charismatic was first used around 1963 to denote those neo-Pentecostals in the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches who also spoke in tongues but who did not see tongues as the necessary evidence of the Pentecostal experience.

Following conventional usage, Pentecostal is capitalized throughout this work, while charismatic is lowercased. In David Barrett’s ground-breaking work in chapter 15, however, an exception is made. Here he makes fine distinctions between Pentecostals and charismatics. These are done for technical reasons that are explained in his notes.

I want to thank Philip P. Stoner, Jim Weaver, Lee Hollaway, and Julia Hoover of Thomas Nelson for their encouragement in bringing this book to life. Their help has been invaluable to me. As usual, my wife , Carol Lee, has been at my side helping with typing, editing, and pushing me to finish the book on time. I also give special thanks to dozens of friends who have contributed photographs to the book. Among these are Wayne Warner, Mike Andaloro, and Harold Hunter. Mark and Virginia Taylor helped me immensely in the area of contemporary charismatic music. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the faculty and staff of the Regent University School of Divinity where I serve as Dean. They have allowed me to take time out of my office in order to complete the job.

Special recognition and thanks are also due to the outstanding writers who contributed several chapters to the book. Two of these, Robert Owens and Susan Hyatt, were my students at Regent University. Ed Harrell, Gary McGee, David Daniels III, Peter Hocken, Everett Wilson, and David Barrett have been friends and colleagues for many years. I have known Pablo Deiros from Argentina from his previous writing and scholarship. These all have added greatly to the literature on global Pentecostalism.

My greatest regret is that space prohibited me from including more information about significant Pentecostal and charismatic movements outside the United States. This subject deserves and awaits a major encyclopedia that can do justice to the vast number of persons and movements that have helped to change the face of Christianity around the world during the past century.

It is my hope that this book will serve as a resource for the average reader, as well as for any professors and students who may choose to use it as a classroom textbook. I have attempted to make it readable as well as scholarly. My thanks to Thomas Nelson for insisting on a book that features so many photographs and vignettes. This should help the reader gain a better grasp and perspective of the story.

In my own lifetime, I lived through two-thirds of the century and have witnessed and participated in many events that I have described. It has been an exciting pilgrimage for me as a Pentecostal preacher, teacher, and historian. In my youth I knew personally some of the old Holiness-Pentecostal pioneers who were active leaders in the late 1890s. In my later years I worked closely with hundreds of important Pentecostal and charismatic leaders around the world. It is my hope that I can pass the torch from these spiritual giants to a new generation who will also tell the story to their children and grandchildren.

Vinson Synan—Regent University—Virginia Beach, Virginia—March 1, 2001

1

The Pentecostal Century: An Overview

Vinson Synan

On January 1, 1901, a young woman named Agnes Ozman was baptized in the Holy Spirit at a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. A student of former Methodist pastor and holiness teacher Charles Fox Parham, Ozman received a startling manifestation of the gift of tongues and became, in effect, the first Pentecostal of the 20th century.

I laid my hands upon her and prayed, Parham later recalled of the event. I had scarcely completed three dozen sentences when a glory fell upon her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.

According to J. Roswell Flower, the founding secretary of the Assemblies of God, Ozman’s experience was the touch felt ’round the world. As Topeka and the rest of the nation celebrated the new century, few people could have imagined that this humble event would trigger the worldwide Pentecostal charismatic movement, one of the mightiest revivals and missionary movements in the history of the church.

Beginning with only a handful of people in 1901, the number of Pentecostals increased steadily to become the largest family of Protestants in the world by the beginning of the 21st century. With more than two hundred million members designated as denominational Pentecostals, this group had surpassed the Orthodox churches to become the second largest denominational family of Christians, exceeded in number by only the Roman Catholics.

In addition to these classical denominational Pentecostals, there were millions of charismatics in the mainline denominations and nondenominational churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. The combined number now stands at more than five hundred million people. This growth has caused some historians to refer to the 20th century as the Pentecostal century.

Holiness Roots

Although the Pentecostal movement had its beginnings in the United States, much of its basic theology was rooted in earlier British perfectionistic and charismatic movements. At least three of these—the Methodist holiness movement, the Catholic Apostolic movement of Edward Irving, and the British Keswick Higher Life movement—prepared the way for what appeared to be a spontaneous outpouring of the Holy Spirit in America. Perhaps the most important immediate precursor to Pentecostalism was the holiness movement that issued from the heart of Methodism during the 18th century.

John Wesley, an Anglican priest, experienced his evangelical conversion in a meeting at Aldersgate Street in 1738 where, as he said, my heart was strangely warmed. This he called his new birth.

From Wesley, Pentecostals also inherited the idea of a crisis second blessing subsequent to salvation. This experience he variously called entire sanctification, perfect love, Christian perfection, or heart purity. Wesley’s colleague John Fletcher was the first to call this a baptism in the Holy Spirit, an experience that brought spiritual power to the recipient as well as inner cleansing.

In the 19th century, Edward Irving and his friends in London suggested the possibility of a restoration of the gifts of the Spirit in the modern church. This popular Presbyterian pastor led the first attempt at charismatic renewal in his Regents Square Presbyterian Church in 1831 and later formed the Catholic Apostolic Church. Although tongues and prophecies were experienced in his church, Irving was not successful in his quest for a restoration of New Testament Christianity.

Another predecessor to Pentecostalism was the Keswick Higher Life movement, which flourished in England after 1875. Led at first by American holiness teachers such as Hannah Whitall Smith and William E. Boardman, the Keswick teachers soon changed the goal and content of the second blessing from the Wesleyan emphasis on heart purity to that of an enduement of spiritual power for service. D. L. Moody was a leading evangelist associated with the Keswick movement.

Dorries, David

The Regents Square Presbyterian Church

Thus, by the time of the Pentecostal outbreak in America in 1901, there had been at least a century of movements emphasizing a second blessing called the baptism in the Holy Spirit. In America, such Keswick teachers as A. B. Simpson and A. J. Gordon also added an emphasis on divine healing.

The first Pentecostal churches in the world originated in the holiness movement before 1901: the United Holy Church (1886), led by W. H. Fulford; the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church (1895), led by B. H. Irwin and J. H. King; the Church of God of Cleveland, Tennessee (1896), led by A. J. Tomlinson; the Church of God in Christ (1897), led by C. H. Mason; and the Pentecostal Holiness Church (1898), led by A. B. Crumpler. After becoming Pentecostal, these churches, which had been formed as second-blessing holiness denominations, retained their perfectionistic teachings. They simply added the baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues as initial evidence of a third blessing. It would not be an overstatement to say that 20th-century Pentecostalism, at least in America, was born in a holiness cradle.

The Origins of Pentecostalism

The first Pentecostals, in the modern sense of the word, can be traced to Parham’s Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901. In spite of controversy over the origins and timing of Parham’s emphasis on tongues, all historians agree the movement began early in 1901 just as the world entered the 20th century. As a result of this Topeka Pentecost, Parham formulated the doctrine that tongues were the Bible evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Teaching that tongues were a supernatural impartation of human languages for the purpose of world evangelization, Parham also advocated that missionaries need not study foreign languages, since they would be able to preach in miraculous tongues all over the world. Armed with this new theology, Parham founded a church movement called the Apostolic Faith and began a whirlwind revival tour of the Midwest to promote this new experience. The origins of the movement are elaborated on in chapter 2, Pentecostal Roots.

Flower, J. Roswell

Charles Parham and Students

Charles Fox Parham is recognized as the theological father of the modern Pentecostal movement.

It was not until 1906, however, that Pentecostalism achieved worldwide attention. This came through the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, led by pastor William Joseph Seymour. Seymour first learned about the baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues in 1905 at a Bible school Parham led in Houston, Texas.

In 1906, Seymour was invited to pastor a black holiness church in Los Angeles. The historic Azusa meetings began in April 1906 in a former African Methodist Episcopal church building at 312 Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles.

What happened because of the Azusa Street revival has fascinated church historians for decades and has yet to be fully understood and explained. The Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission conducted three services a day, seven days a week, for three and one-half years. Thousands of seekers received the baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues.

The Apostolic Faith, a newspaper Seymour sent free of charge to some fifty thousand readers, spread word of the revival. From Azusa Street, Pentecostalism spread rapidly around the world and moved on to become a major force in Christendom. Chapter 3 provides a detailed account of the Azusa Street revival.

William J. Seymour led the Azusa Street revival in 1906, which spread Pentecostalism around the world. The Azusa Street meetings were notable for interracial harmony.

The Azusa Street movement seems to have been a merger of white American holiness religion with worship styles derived from the African-American Christian tradition, which had developed since the days of chattel slavery in the South. The expressive worship and praise at Azusa Street, which included shouting and dancing, had been common among Appalachian whites as well as southern blacks.

The admixture of tongues and other charisms with southern black and white music and worship styles created a new and indigenous form of Pentecostalism. This new expression of Christian life would prove extremely attractive to disinherited and deprived people in both America and other nations.

Flower, J. Roswell

William Joseph Seymour and the Azusa Street staff

The interracial aspects of Azusa Street were a striking exception to the racism and segregation of the times. The phenomenon of blacks and whites worshiping together under a black pastor seemed incredible to many observers.

William Seymour’s place as an important religious figure in the 20th century now seems assured. In his 1972 classic, A Religious History of the American People, Sidney Ahlstrom, the noted church historian from Yale University, placed Seymour at the head of the list of American black religious leaders when he said that Seymour’s black piety exerted its greatest influence on American religious history. Seymour and Parham could well be called the cofounders of world Pentecostalism. The role and development of the African-American dimension are surveyed in chapter 11.

Pentecostal Pioneers

The first wave of Azusa pilgrims journeyed throughout the United States spreading the Pentecostal fire primarily in holiness churches, missions, and camp meetings.

Many American Pentecostal pioneers who received tongues at Azusa Street in 1906 went back to their homes to spread the movement among their own people. One of the first was Gaston Barnabas Cashwell of North Carolina.

Under his ministry Cashwell saw several holiness denominations swept into the new movement, including the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, and the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church.

Charles Harrison Mason journeyed to Azusa Street in 1906 and returned to Memphis, Tennessee, to spread the Pentecostal fire in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Mason and the church he founded were made up of African-Americans only one generation removed from slavery. Both Seymour’s and Mason’s parents had been born as southern slaves.

Although the church split over the question of tongues in 1907, COGIC experienced such explosive growth that today it is by far the largest Pentecostal denomination in North America, claiming almost six million members in more than fifteen thousand local churches.

Another Azusa pilgrim was William H. Durham of Chicago. After receiving tongues at Azusa Street in 1907, he returned to Chicago where he led thousands of Midwesterners and Canadians into the Pentecostal movement. His finished work theology of gradual progressive sanctification, which he announced in 1910, led to the formation of the Assemblies of God (AG) in 1914.

E. N. Bell and Joseph Flower led the AG. Because many white pastors had been part of Mason’s church, when they left to join the AG the departure was seen partly as a racial separation. In time, the AG was destined to become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world, claiming by the year 2000 more than two million U.S. members and some forty-four million adherents in 150 countries.

In 1916, a major controversy within the Assemblies of God led to the non-Trinitarian oneness Pentecostal movement. This belief taught that Jesus was the only Person in the godhead and that the terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were merely titles created by the Roman Catholic Church.

Movement leaders Frank Ewart and Glenn Cook taught that the only valid water baptism was immersion in Jesus’ name and that speaking in tongues was necessary for salvation. Churches that issued from this movement included the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World and the United Pentecostal Church. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the origin and growth of the holiness Pentecostal and finished work churches.

Missionaries of the One-Way Ticket

In addition to the ministers who received their Pentecostal experience at Azusa Street, thousands of others were indirectly influenced by the revival in Los Angeles. Among them was Thomas Ball Barratt of Norway, a Methodist pastor who became known as the Pentecostal apostle to northern and western Europe.

After being baptized in the Holy Spirit and receiving the experience of speaking in tongues in New York City in 1906, Barratt returned to Oslo where, in December 1906, he conducted the first Pentecostal services in Europe. From Norway, Barratt traveled to Sweden, England, France, and Germany, where he sparked other national Pentecostal movements. Under Barratt, such leaders as Lewi Pethrus in Sweden, Jonathan Paul in Germany, and Alexander Boddy in England were brought into the movement.

From Chicago, through the influence of William Durham, the movement spread quickly to Canada, Italy, and South America. Thriving Italian Pentecostal movements were founded after 1908 in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy by two Italian immigrants from Chicago, Luigi Francescon and Giacomo Lombardy.

In South Bend, Indiana, near Chicago, two Swedish Baptist immigrants, Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, received the Pentecostal experience. Believing they were called prophetically to Brazil, they embarked on a missionary trip in 1910 that resulted in the formation of the Brazilian Assemblies of God. The Brazilian Assemblies developed into the largest national Pentecostal movement in the world and, with other Brazilian Pentecostals, claimed some thirty million members by 2000.

Also hailing from Chicago was Willis C. Hoover, the Methodist missionary to Chile, who in 1909 led a Pentecostal revival in the Chilean Methodist Episcopal Church. After being excommunicated from the Chilean Methodist Church, Hoover and thirty-seven of his followers organized the Pentecostal Methodist Church, which now has some 1.5 million adherents in Chile.

African Pentecostalism owes its origins to the work of John Graham Lake (1870–1935), who began his ministry as a Methodist preacher but later prospered in business as an insurance executive. In 1898, his wife was miraculously healed of tuberculosis under the ministry of Alexander Dowie, founder of a religious community called Zion City near Chicago.

In 1907 Lake was baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. Zion City produced some five hundred preachers and teachers who entered the ranks of the Pentecostal movement. After his Pentecostal experience, Lake abandoned the insurance business to answer a long-standing call to minister in South Africa. In April 1908, he led a large missionary party to Johannesburg where he began to spread the Pentecostal message throughout the nation.

Lake succeeded in founding two large and influential Pentecostal churches in southern Africa. The white branch took the title Apostolic Faith Mission in 1910, borrowing from the name of the famous mission on Azusa Street (David du Plessis, known to the world as Mr. Pentecost, came from this church). The black branch eventually developed into the Zion Christian Church, which had six million members by 2000.

Soon after Lake returned to the United States in 1912, the movement reached the Slavic world through the ministry of a Russian-born Baptist pastor, Ivan Voronaev, who received the Pentecostal experience in New York City in 1919. Through prophecies, he was led to take his family with him to Odessa, Ukraine, in 1922. There he established the first Pentecostal church in the Soviet Union. Voronaev was arrested, imprisoned, and martyred in a communist prison in 1943. The churches he founded survived extreme persecution and have become a major religious force in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Pentecostalism reached Korea through the ministry of Mary Rumsey, an American missionary who had been baptized in the Holy Spirit at Azusa Street in 1907. At that time, Rumsey believed she was called to bring the Pentecostal message to Japan and Korea. It was not until 1928, however, that she landed in Korea. Prior to World War II, she had planted eight Pentecostal churches there before being forced out of the country by the Japanese.

In 1952 those eight churches were turned over to the Assemblies of God, whose missionaries immediately opened a Bible school in Seoul. One of the first students to enroll was a young convert by the name of Paul Yonggi Cho. After he graduated from Bible college, Cho pioneered a Korean church that became the Yoido Full Gospel Church. The church today claims some 730,000 members, the largest single Christian congregation in the world. Chapter 4, To the Regions Beyond: The Global Expansion of Pentecostalism, is devoted to the missionary activity of the Pentecostals.

Neo-Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Third Wavers

This first wave of Pentecostal pioneer missionaries produced what has become known as the classical Pentecostal movement, with more than fourteen thousand Pentecostal denominations throughout the world. This phase was followed by organized Pentecostal denominational efforts that produced fast-growing missions and indigenous churches. Some of the most explosive growth coming from these efforts occurred among Hispanics in both the United States and Latin America. Some of the greatest growth also occurred among American blacks as well as in the nations of Africa.

A further phase was the penetration of Pentecostalism into the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches as charismatic renewal movements with the aim of renewing the historic churches. It is worth noting that these newer waves also originated primarily in the United States. They include the Protestant Neo-Pentecostal movement, which began in 1960 in Van Nuys, California, under the ministry of Dennis Bennett, rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal (Anglican) church. Within a decade, this movement had spread to all the 150 major Protestant families of the world, reaching a total of 55 million people by 1990.

Andaloro, Mike

Leon Joseph Cardinal Suenens, Roman Catholic primate of Belgium, gave pastoral direction to the Catholic charismatic renewal while serving as the charismatic liaison to Pope Paul VI.

Mainline Protestant leaders included: Tommy Tyson and Ross Whetstone (Methodist); Brick Bradford, Rodman Williams, and Brad Long (Presbyterian); Pat Robertson, Howard Conatser, Ken Pagard, and Gary Clark (Baptist); Everett Terry Fullam and Charles Fulton (Episcopal); Gerald Derstine and Nelson Litwiller (Mennonite); and Vernon Stoop (United Church of Christ). Chapters 7 and 8 provide a full treatment of the renewal movement in mainline and major Protestant churches.

The Catholic charismatic renewal movement had its beginnings in Pittsburgh in 1967 among students and faculty at Duquesne University. After spreading rapidly among students at Notre Dame and the University of Michigan, the movement spread worldwide.

Its early leaders were Kevin Ranaghan, Ralph Martin, Steve Clark, and Nancy Kellar. Careful theological leadership was given by Kilian McDonnell and Leon Joseph Cardinal Suenens.

In the 32 years since its inception, the Catholic movement not only has gained the approval of the church but also has touched the lives of over 100 million Catholics in 120 countries. Chapter 9 recounts the major events and people associated with the Catholic renewal movement.

Added to these is the newest category that some called the third wave of the Holy Spirit. It originated at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1981 under the classroom ministry of John Wimber, founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches. This wave was comprised of mainline evangelicals who experienced signs and wonders but who disdained labels such as Pentecostal or charismatic. The Vineyard was the most visible movement of this category. By 2000 the third wavers, also called neo-charismatics, were credited with some 295 million members worldwide.

In all these movements, women played leading roles as teachers, evangelists, missionaries, and pastors from the earliest days of the century. Many became effective and even famous for healing ministries that attracted multitudes of followers. Among these outstanding women were Agnes Ozman, Maria Woodworth-Etter, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman, and in more recent times, Marilyn Hickey and Joyce Meyer. Because of the spiritual freedom that abounded in holiness and Pentecostal circles, these women were able to break age-old stereotypes that had hindered women in ministry for centuries. The prominent role of women is treated in chapter 10.

The one area of the world where Pentecostalism spread the fastest from the earliest days was in Latin America. With early beginnings in Chile and Brazil, the Pentecostals grew by leaps and bounds after World War II. By the end of the century, in several Latin American nations the Pentecostals numbered up to 90 percent of all non-Catholics. In some countries Pentecostal growth rates indicated that in a few decades the Pentecostals might have an absolute majority of the population. This was especially true in such countries as Guatemala and Chile. This rapid growth was also seen among Hispanics in the United States and Puerto Rico as well as the countries of Central America. Chapter 12 presents the phenomenal growth within the Hispanic populations of North and South America.

Evangelists and Healers

Throughout this century, Pentecostals produced many evangelists who were known for their mass healing crusades. These included Maria Woodworth-Etter, Aimee Semple McPherson (founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927), Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, Reinhard Bonnke, and Benny Hinn. Beginning in the 1950s with Oral Roberts, the televangelist genre appeared, bringing healing, tongues, prophecies, and other spiritual gifts into living rooms across the nation. Some of the most successful include Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) and Paul Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). Two notable television evangelists, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, fell into disrepute in the televangelist scandals of the 1980s. Chapter 13 presents a lively account of the major healers and televangelists.

Despite these failures, news of the renewal continued to be carried by most of the religious and secular press. This was paralleled by the publication of millions of books and tapes sold in conferences and crusades internationally. New periodicals spawned by the movement included Dan Malachuk’s Logos magazine and Stephen Strang’s Charisma and Ministries Today magazines.

In the late 1970s a newer movement of faith teachers drew national attention. These included Kenneth Hagin Sr., Kenneth Copeland, and Fred Price. In the 1990s, millions of people tuned in to the teachings of Copeland and Price, while others enrolled in Hagin’s Rhema Bible College in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and a host of other Spirit-filled Bible schools. Overseas, the crusades of the German Pentecostal evangelist Reinhard Bonnke regularly drew crowds of up to one million in cities throughout Africa. The same has been true of other evangelistic crusades throughout India.

Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association (OREA)

The mass healing crusades of Oral Roberts helped to spread Pentecostalism into the mainline churches.

Major educational institutions arose during the 20th century as well. Healing evangelist Oral Roberts founded a university under his name in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1965, and Pat Robertson founded Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1978. In addition, literally hundreds of Pentecostal universities, liberal arts colleges, and Bible colleges were planted worldwide.

In a sense, the charismatic movement in the United States reached a peak in 1977 when fifty thousand people from all denominations gathered in Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, for the General Charismatic Conference led by Kevin Ranaghan. Planners for this conference were confronted by the major controversy of the era, which involved the shepherding teachings of five charismatic leaders from Fort Lauderdale, Florida: Derek Prince, Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, Don Basham, and Ern Baxter.

The shepherding-discipleship movement, which taught that every Christian should be under the covering authority of a spiritual leader, fell apart after the five separated in 1986. Other congresses in New Orleans (1987), Indianapolis (1990), Orlando (1995), and St. Louis (2000), kept the many streams of Pentecostals and charismatics flowing together.

Times of Refreshing

By 1990, Pentecostals and their charismatic brothers and sisters in the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches were turning their attention toward world evangelization. During the following decade, Pentecostals and charismatics were reinvigorated by new waves of revival that featured such Pentecostal spiritual manifestations as holy laughter, being slain in the Spirit, and other exotic manifestations. Leading in this new wave was the South African Pentecostal evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne.

Beginning in 1993, many of these manifestations appeared at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church led by pastor John Arnott. Although Arnott’s church was disfellowshipped by John Wimber and the Vineyard movement, the force of the revival continued throughout the decade.

Another wave came in 1995 when a notable revival began at the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. Led by pastor John Kilpatrick and evangelist Steve Hill, the Brownsville meetings attracted more than two million visitors and recorded in excess of two hundred thousand conversions.

Revival fires also are sweeping Latin America, particularly Argentina and Brazil, under the leadership of Claudio Freidzon and Carlos Annacondia. Chapter 14, Streams of Renewal at the End of the Century, updates the growing renewal movement.

All of these movements, both Pentecostal and charismatic, have resulted in a major force in Christianity throughout the world with explosive growth rates not seen before in modern times, as meticulously detailed by David B. Barrett in chapter 15, The Worldwide Holy Spirit Renewal. These times of refreshing show that at the end of the Pentecostal century the movement was far from dead and entered the new millennium with undiminished power. Though renewal and revival have always been a part of Christianity (see Appendix: A Chronology of Renewal in the Holy Spirit, prepared by David B. Barrett), the 20th century has indeed been the century of the Holy Spirit.

For Further Reading

The major source for anyone who wants to know more about leading Pentecostal and charismatic persons and movements in the 20th century is Stanley M. Burgess, ed., and Eduard van der Maas, assoc. ed., New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). An easy to read but scholarly treatment of the entire century is Vinson Synan’s The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). A worldwide perspective of Pentecostal growth can be found in Walter Hollenweger’s Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Press, 1997).

A good sociological study of Pentecostal beginnings is Robert Mapes Anderson’s Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979). A valuable biographical source for early Pentecostalism is James R. Goff Jr. and Grant Wacker, eds., Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders (Fayettville, Ark.: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2001).

The story of the charismatic movement in the mainline churches is given in Kilian McDonnell’s excellent Charismatic Renewal and the Churches (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). A good book on more recent developments among Protestants is Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999), ed. Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker. An engaging account of Pentecostal growth and influence during the century is Harvey Cox’s Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994).

The story of the early Catholic charismatic movement is given in Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan’s Catholic Pentecostals (New York: Paulist Press, 1969). An intriguing historical- theological study of charisms in the early church is Kilian McDonnell and George Montague’s Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Evidence from the First Eight Centuries (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1991).

Those who wish to delve deeper into the sources should consult the library guides written by Charles E. Jones and published by the Scarecrow Press in Metuchen, New Jersey. They are: A Guide to the Study of the Holiness Movement (1974); A Guide to the Study of the Pentecostal Movement, 2 vols. (1983); Black Holiness: A Guide to the Study of Black Participation in Wesleyan Perfectionistic and Glossolalic Pentecostal Movements (1987); and The Charismatic Movement: A Guide to the Study of Neo-Pentecostalism with an Emphasis on Anglo-American Sources, (1995). For official church documents relating to the renewal see Kilian McDonnell’s monumental Presence, Power, Praise, 3 vols. (New York: Paulist Press, 1980).

2

Pentecostal Roots

Vinson Synan

Over the two thousand years of Christian history, there have been many renewals, revivals, and reforms. Without these occasional awakenings the church might well have drifted into corruption, dead ritualism, and ultimate insignificance. Some of these renewals offered their enthusiastic followers a spiritual experience or ritual that went beyond the usual sacraments of the church. For example, among the Montanists in the second century, the ecstatic utterances of a new prophecy brought a sense of excitement and apocalyptic zeal. Among the Jansenists of 17th-century France, Catholic reformers spoke in tongues and prophesied and introduced a new sacrament called the consolamentum.

In the 18th century, John Wesley offered his Methodist followers a second blessing, which he called entire sanctification, an instant crisis experience that he also described as perfect love or Christian perfection. Radical Wesleyans who left Methodism in the 19th century to join the holiness movement often called this second blessing a baptism in the Holy Spirit. Coming from the holiness movement in the early 20th century, a new enthusiastic movement appeared that emphasized signs and wonders and the gifts of the Spirit. Followers called themselves Pentecostals, since they looked back to the Day of Pentecost and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Upper Room as their inspiration. For decades their growth was slow as they struggled against rejection and persecution. But after World War II their worldwide growth could no longer be ignored. The world began to take notice of a new and vigorous movement that was growing like wildfire around the earth.

Synan, Vinson

The teaching of John Wesley (1703–91) on the second blessing made him the theological father of all holiness and Pentecostal movements.

In 1958 Henry P. Van Dusen, then president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, stunned the religious world with a prophetic article in Life magazine titled The Third Force in Christendom. With amazing insight, he announced that already a major new force existed in the Christian world alongside traditional Catholicism and Protestantism. Pentecostalism, Van Dusen proclaimed, was destined to change the face of Christianity in the 20th century.¹

Little did Van Dusen realize that what is now dubbed classical Pentecostalism was shortly to break out in the other two camps. Only two years later, the first Protestant Neo-Pentecostal publicly witnessed to his experience, while less than a decade later the movement had entered the Roman Catholic Church. Four years before this, in 1954, a little-known American Pentecostal evangelist named Tommy Hicks had journeyed, without invitation, from California to Buenos Aires, Argentina, seeking an opportunity to preach. He claimed that God had sent him. Without advertising or outside financial support, he conducted the greatest single evangelistic crusade in the history of the church up to that time. His crowds surpassed the records of all evangelists before him, including Finney, Moody, and Billy Graham. In fifty-two days, from May to July of 1954, Hicks preached to an aggregate attendance of some two million, with more than two hundred thousand persons in attendance in a mammoth football stadium for the final service.²

John Wesley’s Second Blessing

In the year 1764, upon a review of the whole subject, I wrote down the sum of what I had observed in the following short propositions:

1. There is such a thing as perfection; for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture.

2. It is not so early as justification; for justified persons are to go on unto perfection. (Heb. 6:1)

3. It is not so late as death; for St. Paul speaks of living men that were perfect. (Phil. 3:15)

4. It is not absolute. Absolute perfection belongs not to man, nor to angels, but to God alone.

5. It does not make a man infallible: None is infallible, while he remains in the body.

6. Is it sinless? It is not worthwhile to contend for a term. It is salvation from sin.

7. It is perfect love. (1 John 4:18) This is the essence of it; its properties, or inseparable fruits, are, rejoicing evermore, praying without ceasing, and in everything giving thanks. (1 Thess. 5:16, &c)

8. It is improvable. It is so far from lying in an indivisible point, from being incapable of increase, that one perfected in love may grow in grace far swifter than he did before.

9. It is amissible, capable of being lost; of which we have numerous instances. But we were not thoroughly convinced of this, till five or six years ago.

10. It is constantly both preceded and followed by a gradual work.

11. But is it in itself instantaneous or not? In examining this, let us go on step by step.

An instantaneous change has been wrought in some believers: None can deny this.

Since that change, they enjoy perfect love; they feel this, and this alone; they rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. Now, this is all that I mean by perfection; therefore, these are witnesses of the perfection which I preach.

But in some this change was not instantaneous. They did not perceive the instant when it was wrought. It is often difficult to perceive the instant when a man dies; yet there is an instant in which life ceases. And if ever sin ceases, there must be a last moment of its existence, and a first moment of our deliverance from it.

—John Wesley—A Plain Account of Christian Perfection

As word spread about the mushroomlike growth of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, Brazil, Chile, Scandinavia, Korea, and Africa, ecclesiastical leaders of the Protestant and Catholic worlds began to take notice of the Pentecostal phenomenon. What does this mean? became the question of scholars, pastors, bishops, and laymen alike. By 1964, Charles Sydnor Jr., on learning that the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) had surpassed the Presbyterians as the third largest denomination in Georgia (in the number of local churches), declared that it is becoming increasingly evident that the Pentecostal movement we are witnessing … is an authentic, reformation-revival of historic significance, equal with those other great movements of centuries past.³

Clearly a movement of major importance was developing into a major challenge to traditional Christianity. Where did these Pentecostals come from? What did they believe? What were their practices? Were these not the lowly Holy Rollers who were dismissed with pity and scorn only a few years earlier? Who was responsible for bringing this major force into being?

Upon closer investigation, it was learned that these Pentecostals emphasized radical conversion, a holy life of separation from the world after conversion, and the baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues. Following this experience, all the gifts of the Spirit would be experienced in the normal life of the church. Divine healing in answer to prayer was especially emphasized, as was the Second Coming of Christ to rapture the church, which could occur at any moment. Also characteristic was joyous and expressive worship, which struck the first-time visitor as emotional and noisy. This included upraised hands, loud praise, messages in tongues, interpretations of tongues, prophecies, prayers for the sick, and the occasional casting out of demons. Fervent preaching from the Bible offered salvation, holiness, healing, and material blessings from the Lord to those who prayed through at the altars. The most striking teaching was that the gifts of the Spirit or charisms were intended for the 20th-century church as much as for the church of the first century.

The Gifts of the Spirit in History

Many church leaders soon began a crash course on the history of the gifts of the Spirit in the church. Books such as John Sherrill’s They Speak with Other Tongues and Morton Kelsey’s Tongue Speaking provided answers for these seekers. What they found was that the church of the New Testament was indeed a charismatic one, according to the reports in the Book of Acts. It was also clear that the early church retained its original gifts and Pentecostal power in the long period of struggle and persecution before the triumph of Christianity in the West under Constantine. After gaining acceptance and power, however, the church began to experience less and less of the miraculous power of the primitive church and turned more and more to ritualistic and sacramental expressions of the faith.

The Montanist renewal movement of the period A.D. 185–212 represented an attempt to restore the charisms to the church. Despite some early successes, in which tongues and prophecy were restored among the followers of Montanus, the movement was ultimately condemned by the church. The major cause of this rejection was not the presence of the charismata, but Montanus’s claim that the prophetic utterances were equal to the Scriptures. Many scholars now feel that the church overreacted to Montanism by asserting that the more sensational charisms, though experienced by the apostolic church, were withdrawn after the perfection of the accepted canon of Scripture. This opinion was expressed by Augustine and echoed by scholars in the centuries that followed. On the question of tongues as evidence of receiving the Holy Spirit, Augustine said:

At the Church’s beginning the Holy Spirit fell upon the believers, and they spoke with tongues unlearnt, as the Spirit gave them utterance. It was a sign, fitted to the time: all the world’s tongues were a fitting signification of the Holy Spirit, because the gospel of God was to have its course through every tongue in all parts of the earth. The sign was given and then passed away. We no longer expect that those upon whom the hand is laid, that they may receive the Holy Spirit, will speak with tongues. When we laid our hands on these infants, the Church’s new-born members, none of you (I think) looked to see if they would speak with tongues, or seeing that they did not, had the perversity to argue that they had not received the Holy Spirit, for if they had received, they would have spoken in tongues as happened at the first.⁴

As to all the other extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, Augustine’s cessation theory was widely influential on generations of subsequent theologians. As he said:

Why, it is asked, do no miracles occur nowadays, such as occurred in former times? I could reply that they were necessary then, before the world came to believe, in order to win the world’s belief.⁵

A footnote to Augustine’s cessationist theory was the sudden appearance of supernatural healings in public services in his church.

The overreaction to Montanism, which led to a belief that the charismata ended with the apostolic age, continued until modern times. Although the Roman Catholic Church left the door open to miracles in the lives of certain saints (a few of whom were said to speak in tongues and produce miracles of healing), the church tended more and more to teach that the miracles of the apostolic age ended with the early church. With the institutionalization of the church, the less spectacular charisms of government, administration, and teaching came to the fore as the most acceptable gifts available to the hierarchy. The major exception to this acceptance of creeping cessationism was the Orthodox churches of the East. Although the spontaneous manifestation of the charismata also subsided in these churches, Orthodoxy never adopted a theory that the charismata had ceased. Cessationist theology was a creation of the Western church.

The view that the charismata had ceased after the days of the apostles was given classic expression by John Chrysostom in the fourth century in his homilies on 1 Corinthians 12. Confessing his ignorance on the subject, he wrote:

This whole place is very obscure: but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer take place. And why do they not happen now? Why look now, the cause too of the obscurity hath produced us again another question: namely, why did they then happen, and now do so no more? … Well, what did happen then? Whoever was baptized he straightaway spoke with tongues and not with tongues only, but many also prophesied, and some performed many wonderful works … but more abundant than all was the gift of tongues among them. ⁶

The cessation of the charismata thus became part of the classical theology of the Western church. Augustine and Chrysostom were quoted by countless theologians and commentators in the centuries that followed.

Gifts such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) became so rare that the church generally forgot their proper function in the Christian community. As the centuries rolled by, speaking in a language not learned by the speaker was seen as evidence of possession by an evil spirit rather than the Holy Spirit. In fact, by A.D. 1000 the Rituale Romanorum (Roman Ritual) defined glossolalia as prima facie evidence of demon possession. It might have been expected that Reformers such as Luther and Calvin would have restored the charismata to the church as the common heritage of all believers. Yet this was not to be.

One of the charges leveled against the Reformers by the Catholic authorities was that Protestantism lacked authenticating miracles confirming their beginnings. To Catholic theologians, miraculous charismata were seen as divine approval at the beginning of the church. Catholics demanded of Luther and Calvin signs and wonders to attest to their authenticity as true, orthodox Christian churches. Following the lead of Augustine and Chrysostom, Luther responded with the following view about the signs, wonders, and gifts of the Holy Spirit:

The Holy Spirit is sent forth in two ways. In the primitive church he was sent forth in a manifest and visible form. Thus He descended upon Christ at the Jordan in the form of a dove (Mt. 3:16), and upon the apostles and other believers in the form of fire (Acts 2:3). This was the first sending forth of the Holy Spirit; it was necessary in the primitive church, which had to be established with visible signs on account of the unbelievers, as Paul testifies. 1 Cor. 14:22: Tongues are for a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers. But later on, when the church had been gathered and confirmed by these signs, it was not necessary for this visible sending forth of the Holy Spirit to continue. ⁷

Through the centuries, then, Christendom, in its Roman Catholic and Protestant branches, adopted the view that the spectacular supernatural gifts of the Spirit had ended with the early church and that, with the completion of the inspired canon of Scripture, they would never be needed again. The Catholic mystical tradition continued to allow for a few saints possessed of heroic holiness to exercise some of the gifts, but such holiness was reserved, in the minds of most, for the clergy and religious (bishops, priests, monks, and nuns), not for the masses of ordinary Christians.

This view was the conventional wisdom of the church until the 19th century. Then historical and theological developments caused the beginning of a dramatic change of view in various quarters, notably in England and the United States.

The Reappearance of the Gifts

As Ernest Sandeen has pointed out, the event that caused Christians to take a new look at prophecy and the gifts of the Spirit was the French Revolution. As the revolution advanced in the 1780s the radicals imposed a reign of terror that reminded many of the scenes of tribulation in Revelation. The convulsions taking place in France seemed to be signs that the end of the age was near. Once-confusing passages began to have striking contemporary relevance.

In Daniel 7, the prophet spoke of four animals coming up from the sea: a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a fierce beast with ten horns. A little horn on the last grew up among the ten and rooted out three of them. This little horn was a ruler who would persecute the saints of the Most High, and shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand for a time and times and half a time (v. 25). A similar beast was also described in Revelation 13:5 whose time would last for forty-two months. As the French Revolution unfolded, biblical scholars were certain that these passages were literally being fulfilled. The introduction of a new revolutionary calendar and the installation of a prostitute in Notre Dame Cathedral as a newly crowned Goddess of Reason seemed to underscore the apocalyptic event of 1798 when French troops under General Berthier marched into Rome, set up a new republic, and sent the pope into exile. This was seen as the deadly wound marking the end of papal political and spiritual power in the world.

In London, Edward King, a student of biblical prophecy, declared:

Is not papal power, at Rome, which was once so terrible, and so domineering at an end? But let us pause a little, was not their end, in other parts of the Holy Prophecies, foretold to be, at the end of 1260 years?—and was it not foretold by Daniel, to be at the end or a time, times, and half a time? which computation amounts to the same period. And now let us see;—hear—and understand, This is the year 1798;—and just 1260 years ago, in the very beginning of the year 538, Belesarius put an end to the Empire and Dominion of the Goths at Rome. ⁸

To Protestant scholars this interpretation meant they were living in the very last days. The Second Coming of Christ was near: The millennium was shortly to begin; the Holy Spirit would soon be poured out upon all flesh as a further sign that the end was near. The long night of waiting was almost over. At any time the charismata would again be manifested in the earth as on the Day of Pentecost.

The effect of these heady discoveries was the revival of millenarianism in Britain, a new interest in the return of the Jews to Palestine, and a renewed interest in the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Also, there ensued a profound emphasis on the study of biblical prophecy in order to discern the signs of the times.

Leaders in this new wave of prophetic interest were such British theologians as Lewis Way, John Nelson Darby (founder of the Plymouth Brethren), and Edward Irving. In America, the movement found its greatest champions in the Lutheran scholar J. A. Seiss, and in the Princeton theology of Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield, both Presbyterians. The search for a renewed outpouring of the charismata was far more pronounced in England than in America. In later times, these Princeton fundamentalists and others moved to positions defending the literal inerrancy of Scripture and the any-moment Second Coming of Christ to rapture the bride, while their English counterparts continued to concentrate on searching for a renewal of the charismata in the church.⁹

Edward Irving

Edward Irving on the Question of Tongues

This gift of tongues is the crowning act of all. None of the old prophets had it, Christ had it not; it belongs to the dispensation of the Holy Ghost proceeding from the risen Christ: it is the proclamation that man is enthroned in heaven, that man is the dwelling-place of God, that all creation if they would know God, must give ear to man’s tongue, and know the compass of reason. It is not we that speak, but Christ that speaketh. It is not in us as men that God speaks; but in us as members of Christ, as the Church and body of Christ, that God speaks. The honor is not to us, but to Christ; not to the God-head of Christ, which is ever the same, but to the manhood of Christ, which hath been raised from the state of death to the state of being God’s temple, Godmost holy place, God’s shechinah, God’s oracle, for ever and ever.

—Edward Irving,—Collected Works

By 1830, some preachers began to investigate all reports of miracles that occurred anywhere in the British Isles. A leader in this effort was Edward Irving, pastor of the prestigious Presbyterian Church on London’s Regents Square. When a report was circulated that miraculous healings and glossolalia had occurred in Scotland among a small band of believers, Irving hurried to the small Scottish town of Port Glasgow to investigate. In this small town he was amazed to hear a housewife by the name of Mary Campbell speak in tongues. Two of her friends, twin brothers James and George McDonald, not only spoke in tongues, but interpreted their messages into English as well. On April 20, 1830, in the first recorded tongues message and interpretation in modern times, James gave an utterance in tongues and George interpreted it. The message was Behold He cometh— Jesus cometh—a weeping Jesus. In fact, it was said that almost all the subsequent interpretations in England centered on the theme the Lord is coming soon; get ready to meet Him.

Dorries, David

A popular Presbyterian pastor in London, Edward Irving (1792–1834) led a restoration of tongues and prophecy in 1831.

From this time onward, Irving taught that tongues were the standing sign and the root and stem out of which flowed all the other gifts of the Spirit. To Irving, tongues were the outward and visible sign of that inward and invisible grace which the baptism of the Holy Ghost conferreth. ¹⁰

Irving was one of the most popular preachers of his day. His fashionable church saw crowds of two thousand in attendance to hear his eloquent sermons, which often reflected his views on the renewal of the apostolic gifts—especially the gifts of healing and speaking in tongues. In