‘We can’t tame the Spirit,’ Archbishop Justin Welby assured the centenary celebrations of Elim Pentecostal Church, ‘we can’t channel the Spirit, we can’t imprison the Spirit … but we can quench the Spirit’. The enthusiasm with which an archbishop of Canterbury in 2015 could affirm the authenticity of the exercise of charismatic gifts not only within his own denomination but beyond it, attests to the triumph of charismatic renewal (among Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants alike) during the ‘long 1960s’. An Anglican reader of John Maiden’s Age of the Spirit might reasonably conclude that, in the absence of charismatic renewal, there might be no Holy Trinity, Brompton (and perhaps no Alpha Course), no New Wine and no Soul Survivor. This compelling account of second-wave Pentecostalism highlights charismatic renewal’s promotion of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Christian community within churches that had hitherto looked with disfavour on ecstatic religion. Indeed, while some first wave Pentecostals – most notably the Church of England presbyter Alexander Boddy – had remained within their own denominations, ‘come-outerism’ had been the prevailing charismatic paradigm prior to the Second World War.
The early years of the Cold War, by contrast, witnessed the emergence of what Maiden describes as a ‘Spiritscape’ of charismatic renewal in which diverse expressions of charismatic praxis flourished within a context of ‘mutual recognition and exchange’ (p. 5). Across the ‘Anglo-World’ (the United Kingdom, the post-imperial nations of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the Republic of Ireland and the United States) charismatic Christians drew upon a shared English-speaking heritage and tradition of religious interaction (not least within the Anglican Communion) to sustain the work of church renewal. Far more than their first-wave forbears, second-wave Pentecostals were to be found in affluent suburbs and university campus ministry, promoting a cosmopolitan religious ethic that appealed to middle-class sensibilities and fostering an ecumenism less concerned with resolving disputed points of doctrine than with celebrating a shared pneumatological experience. Charismatic renewal’s emphasis on speaking in tongues – as a consequence rather than the evidence of baptism in the Spirit – served further to distinguish its participants from the heirs of Azusa Street (pp. 81-90).
Maiden offers a wide-ranging and impressively documented assessment of a key turning point in the history of charismatic Christianity that can be read with profit by Pentecostal and Anglican scholars alike. The centrepiece of Age of the Spirit are his three chapters devoted respectively to ‘Mediation’, ‘Body’ and ‘Imagination’. Charismatic renewal proved peculiarly suited to the age of affordable air transport and of cassette and videotape technologies which afforded charismatic prayer groups across four continents a degree of connectedness, as revolutionary in its day as the internet revolution has been in more recent times (a point emphasized by Simon Coleman in his 2000 study of global Pentecostalism). A further contribution to charismatic self-understanding was provided by such service agencies as Michael Harper’s Fountain Trust which – despite its Anglican roots – understood its ministry to be pan-denominational and global (pp. 98-105). The ‘base community’ of charismatic renewal, however, remained the house prayer group, which promoted a worship experience grounded in spontaneity and relationality. While many such groups were formed primarily for mutual support, there were numerous examples of intentional community for the purposes either of mission (notably Graham Pulkingham’s Church of the Redeemer in Houston, Texas) or of discipleship. An accompanying charismatic subculture of music, literature, folk art and film affirmed themes of reconciliation and repentance (individual and corporate) that were key to the sense of eschatological expectation that informed the charismatic world view. Maiden concludes his analysis by reflecting on the post-1980 emergence of third wave Pentecostalism (notably the ministry of John Wimber) and the rise of independent charismatic networks that reflected a growing divide between denominational charismatics and independents, on such issues as apostolic leadership and the Prosperity Gospel, that underlined the failure of charismatic renewal fully to transform denominational Christianity, as opposed to achieving acceptance as one church party amongst many.
Anglican scholars will not find the same level of denominational detail as in Graham Smith’s The Church Militant, but the contributions made by Anglicans – whether in the form of the Fountain Trust, the charismatic pioneer Dennis Bennett (an Episcopal priest in the United States much sought after in the Anglo World) or the parachurch Sharing of Ministries Abroad (SOMA) – are clear and undeniable. (It might have been instructive, given the attention Maiden devotes to Bishop David Pytches, to reflect more broadly upon charismatic influences within the South American Missionary Society.) Moreover, the global fellowships fostered by SOMA in the 1980s and 1990s laid the foundation for the Global Anglican Future Conference of 2008 and the separation of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) from The Episcopal Church in the United States of America.
