The Charismatic Renewal and the Third Wave

From a Movement to a Renewal

The previous unit followed the birth of classical Pentecostalism, which in a single generation grew into its own new denominations across the world. But the story did not end there. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Pentecostal experience broke out of those denominations and began to appear in unexpected places — among Episcopalians and Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists, Baptists and Roman Catholics — and later among evangelicals who kept their own names and habits. Historians commonly describe this spread in terms of three successive "waves." This unit follows those waves into the churches of our own age.

As with the last unit, we tell this as history. We describe fairly what happened and how it was understood, giving thanks for what was good and being honest about what was troubled, while reserving the testing of doctrine for the units that take it up directly. The wide spread of an experience is one thing; whether any particular teaching is true is another, and we keep those questions apart throughout, as this course has done from the beginning.

The Second Wave: Renewal in the Historic Churches

Around the year 1960 something new began to happen. The gifts that had marked the Pentecostal denominations — tongues, prophecy, prayer for healing — started to appear among Christians in the old, established churches, believers who had no thought of leaving them. A common marker for the start of this second wave is that year, when Dennis Bennett, the rector of an Episcopal parish in Van Nuys, California, told his congregation that he had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues. The announcement caused an immediate stir and drew national attention.

"For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit."1 Corinthians 12:13 (NKJV)

The experience did not stay in one place. Through the 1960s, members of Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican, Baptist, and other congregations reported that they too had received such a baptism and its gifts. Unlike the first wave, which had formed new Pentecostal bodies, these believers for the most part stayed within their own churches, hoping to renew them from within rather than to leave. This movement came to be called the Charismatic Renewal, or sometimes neo-Pentecostalism — the same experience, now flowing through the historic denominations.

The renewal spread not only through pulpits but through lay networks. The Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship, founded among Pentecostal laymen, became an unexpected bridge, carrying the experience across denominational lines in hotel-ballroom meetings where Episcopalians and Baptists and Catholics might sit side by side. Its influence reached even into worship itself: much of the warmer, more intimate style of singing that later filled churches of many kinds can be traced in part to these renewal years, when a more personal manner of praise spread widely.

Alongside the renewal in the established churches ran the Jesus People movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a wave of conversions among the young and the counter-cultural, many of whom embraced the gifts and brought a fresh, informal style of worship into the churches they joined. The lines between these currents were never tidy; together they reshaped the sound and the feel of much Christian worship for a generation.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal

In 1967 the renewal reached the Roman Catholic Church. It is usually traced to a retreat that February attended by students and faculty from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh — remembered as the "Duquesne Weekend" — where a number of those present described receiving a baptism in the Spirit. From there the experience spread with remarkable speed, first to Catholics at the University of Notre Dame and Michigan State, and then across the Catholic world, until it touched millions of Catholic believers on every continent.

This course is non-denominational, and it does not take up here the real and important doctrinal differences that distinguish Catholic and Protestant Christians; those questions belong to other studies, and we do not pretend they are small. What can be said, and said in charity, is this: in these years a great many Catholic believers were drawn to open their Bibles, to pray with new warmth, and to seek the Holy Spirit's help in following the Lord Jesus. For a people whose faith is dear to them and who make up so much of the church in Latin America and beyond, that renewed hunger for Scripture, prayer, and Christ is worth acknowledging with genuine gladness, whatever else remains to be discussed between the traditions.

The Catholic renewal grew into a lasting current within that church, gathering into prayer groups and covenant communities and eventually receiving cautious recognition from its leadership. By the close of the century it counted many millions of participants around the world, especially in Latin America, where charismatic prayer and worship became a familiar part of parish life for a great many faithful. However one judges the wider questions between the traditions, the sheer scale of this renewal among Catholic believers is part of the honest history of our age.

The Third Wave: Signs and Wonders Among Evangelicals

A further stage appeared in the 1980s, which C. Peter Wagner, a professor at Fuller Seminary, named the "Third Wave." By it he meant a growing number of evangelical Christians who came to practice the spiritual gifts — praying for the sick, seeking words of prophecy, pursuing what some called "power evangelism" — but who often did not take on the classical Pentecostal vocabulary. In particular, many of them did not speak of a separate baptism in the Spirit evidenced by tongues, but simply of every believer being open to the Spirit's working in ordinary Christian ministry.

The best-known expression of this third wave was the Vineyard movement, led by John Wimber, with its emphasis on healing prayer and the expectation that God still acts in power among ordinary people. Where the first wave had stressed a distinct Spirit-baptism marked by tongues, and the second had carried that experience into the historic churches, the third tended to set the vocabulary of "initial evidence" aside and to invite all Christians simply to seek and use the gifts.

The debate grew pointed enough to reach the seminaries. For a time a course on signs and wonders, taught at Fuller with Wimber's involvement, drew crowds of students and then enough controversy that it was set aside — a small sign of how sharply the wider evangelical world was divided over whether such practices belonged in the ordinary life of the church. That very debate is part of why this course keeps the historical question of how the movement spread apart from the biblical question of what ought to be believed and practiced.

Three Waves, One Question Kept Apart

It may help to hold the three waves together in a single view. The first was classical Pentecostalism, which formed its own denominations and emphasized tongues as the evidence of Spirit-baptism. The second was the Charismatic Renewal, which carried the gifts into the historic Protestant and Catholic churches, whose members largely stayed to renew them from within. The third was the movement Wagner named, in which evangelicals practiced the gifts without adopting the classical Pentecostal framework. These categories are genuinely useful, but they are not rigid; the streams overlap, and many Christians would be hard to sort neatly into one.

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism."Ephesians 4:4–5 (NKJV)

One thing must be said plainly about all three. That an experience spread so widely, and drew in so many sincere believers across so much of the church, does not by itself prove that any particular doctrine attached to it is true. The growth of a movement is one question; the soundness of its teaching is another. This course honors the breadth of what happened and weighs the doctrine carefully in its own place, testing every claim by Scripture rather than by its popularity.

The Center of Gravity Shifts

By the end of the twentieth century, the movement in all its streams had become, above all, a phenomenon of the Global South. Its greatest growth was no longer in North America or Europe but in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, frequently in independent and indigenous churches, and frequently among the poor and the ordinary. The hundreds of millions counted in this broad family today — by careful estimate approaching six hundred and forty-four million — are the sum of all these waves and streams together: classical Pentecostals, charismatics within the historic churches, third-wave evangelicals, and vast independent movements that fit none of the older labels.

Much of this growth lay outside the older denominational maps altogether. Great independent and indigenous churches arose — African-initiated churches across that continent, huge Pentecostal congregations in Brazil and Chile, and some of the largest single congregations in the world in South Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Often led and filled by ordinary and poor believers, these churches carried the movement's emphases in their own cultural forms, and today they make up a large part of its hundreds of millions.

Reading It Fairly

An honest account will not hide the troubles that came with the renewal any more than with the first wave. Some denominations resisted it, and a few divided over it. Certain charismatic streams drifted toward the prosperity teaching and the other excesses examined in an earlier unit. The Third Wave's stress on signs and wonders provoked serious and searching debate, not least among evangelicals who feared that experience was being set above the Word. And like every movement of people, the renewal carried mixed motives and human failings alongside its zeal.

Yet much that was good came through these movements as well: a renewed love for Scripture and for prayer, a fresh boldness in evangelism, and a recovered sense that the living God is near and at work. We set the good and the ill side by side and judge, as always, by Scripture and by the faithful rather than by the failures or the worst examples. Where these movements drew people to Christ and His Word, we give thanks; where they let zeal outrun sound teaching, that teaching must be tested and, where it fails, declined.

One further note belongs to a fair telling. For all the division it sometimes caused, the renewal also brought together Christians who had long stood apart — Protestant and Catholic, of many labels — to pray and praise side by side, if only for a season and around a shared experience. Such gatherings did not erase the real differences of doctrine that remained; but they were, for many, a first taste of a wider Christian fellowship, and a reminder that the Spirit's people are not confined to any single fold.

What the Story Teaches

The spread of the renewal across nearly every tradition — Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, and independent — carries one clear lesson for us all. A longing for the living God, and a hunger for His Spirit, is found in many folds of His flock, in places we might not expect and among people quite unlike ourselves. That is cause for humility, and for charity toward believers whose worship differs from our own.

"He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you."John 16:14 (NKJV)

And across all these movements the one test remains constant, the test the Lord Himself gave: whether the work exalts Jesus Christ and makes His people more like Him. Where the Spirit draws men and women to Scripture, to prayer, and to the Savior, we give thanks without reserve. Where zeal runs ahead of the Word, we call it gently back to the Word. The doctrinal questions we weigh in their own units; here it is enough to mark, with both gratitude and discernment, how widely in our own age the desire for God's Spirit has spread through His church.

Looking Ahead

In the next unit we turn from history to a subject that has always stood near the heart of this movement: healing, miracles, and spiritual warfare. We will ask what Scripture affirms about God's power to heal and to deliver, and how believers may seek it without falling into the distortions that so often crowd around it.

Discussion Questions

• Why did the charismatic renewal spread within the historic churches rather than forming new denominations, and what challenges might that have created?
• How should a non-denominational seminary speak about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal for students in a largely Catholic region?
• What distinguished the Third Wave from the first two, especially regarding tongues and the language of Spirit-baptism?
• Why does the wide spread of an experience across the church not, by itself, settle whether its teaching is true?

Ministry Application

Write two or three sentences you might use to help your congregation think charitably about believers in other traditions who have sought the Spirit's gifts, while still testing all things by Scripture.