In 1965, the Presbyterian minister and theologian Lloyd Geering was asked to write an article for the New Zealand weekly magazine Outlook to mark Reformation Sunday. Inspired by the English Anglican bishop, John Robinson, Geering used the occasion to argue for the need of a new Reformation. Christianity must be translated ‘according to the worldview of the twentieth century’. He asserted that for ‘man who has stepped into the twentieth century with his eyes open, the old distinction between a natural world and a supernatural world is a thing of the past’. For Geering, a radical rearticulation of the faith was necessary, with traditional ideas of the ‘supernatural’ put to one side.Footnote 1 Six years later, on Reformation Sunday 1971, J. Rodman Williams, a leading American theologian of charismatic renewal, found himself in Geneva, speaking at the Calvin Auditorium in what was the Notre-Dame-la-Neuve Chapel, a site associated with the preaching of Reformers Jean Calvin, John Knox and Theodore Beza. His theme was ‘The New Reformation’. He felt divinely prompted to end his sermon with a bold statement:
On this Reformation Day, in the year of our Lord 1971, I make bold to announce the New Reformation at hand. And what more appropriate place than that marked by the memory of John Calvin and John Knox! For the New Reformation now under way is surely a carrying forward of the ideals of those before us that the church is to be reformed constantly according to the Word of God. Now we are seeing coming to light, in accordance with the same Word, a powerful renewing and reforming dimension of the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is moving through the churches of western Christendom, both Protestant and Catholic, and bids fair to bring about the unity of Christian forces everywhere. May the people of Geneva – and those in this hallowed spot – join with Christians across the world in praying, ‘Come, Holy Spirit!’.Footnote 2
The two theologians each believed that the movement they represented – charismatic renewal for Williams and Christian radicalism for Geering – occupied a significant cultural moment and reached for the idea of Reformation as a reference point.Footnote 3 The new versions of Christianity they articulated – of demythologising the faith or rediscovering its supernatural power – may have appeared almost diametrically opposed. However, counterintuitively, a closer examination suggests they had aspects in common, not only in their sense of crisis but also in dimensions of their Christian response.
In the post-Reformation history of the Church, it has been common for Christians to relate their own times to the ferment of the sixteenth century and articulate the need for a rediscovery or purification of the faith. The notion of ‘completing the Reformation’ during the English Civil War and the hopes of a ‘Second Reformation’ in early nineteenth-century Ireland were two examples. Furthermore, neither Geering’s nor Williams’s language was out of tune with the wider religious discourse of their time. Throughout the long 1960s in the Anglo-world, the language of ‘new Reformation’ was deployed for various purposes. The ecumenical movement frequently used it. In 1964, at a conference in Manchester, the Revd A. Kingsley Lloyd, president of the Methodist Conference, praised efforts towards Anglican-Methodist reunion, declaring it was ‘Time for another Reformation’.Footnote 4 For others, it referred to the appetite of the young for spiritual experimentalism. The American historian, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, writing in 1960, described a ‘new reformation’ of spirituality which seemed ‘to consist of positive thinking, or justification by faith in faith’.Footnote 5 The sixteenth-century Reformation offered a historic reference point during a tumultuous period. For some it was a process unfinished, for others it was ready to be superseded by another.
The adoption by both charismatics and radicals of new Reformation discourse offers an appropriate starting point for a study which examines the relationship between the movements. What follows argues that ‘renewed’ and ‘religionless’ Christianity were more related than usually appreciated, and that comparing them and examining exchanges between them sheds new light not only on each movement but also on the deeper impulses and transformations of Christianity in the long Sixties. This comparison makes sense in terms of their timing. The movements appeared almost simultaneously in the Anglo-world. The term ‘charismatic renewal’ first appeared around 1963 to describe a movement emphasising a rediscovery of the supernatural power and the presence of the Holy Spirit outside the existing Pentecostal Churches.Footnote 6 Christian radicalism, for which John Robinson’s text Honest to God (London 1963) was a rallying cry, rearticulated earlier, pre-war and wartime moderate liberal calls for a reformation of the ‘outward forms, habits and activities’ of the Churches, but proposed more drastic theological and epistemological change.Footnote 7 The absence of a study of their interface represents a gap in the historiography of religion in the long 1960s.
Drawing on the movements’ vast outputs of literature as well as archival papers of key players, this article offers a new perspective on the religious crisis of the Sixties. First, it argues that these movements were both formed out of a sense of religion-in-crisis emerging from the late 1950s. Both were underpinned by eschatological and to some extent pneumatological emphases. They were opposite sides of the same coin, responding to existential crisis and a sense that conservative forms of Protestantism – putatively the legacies of the Reformation – were unable to meet the cultural and theological moment. Second, it explores the complex interplay of these movements. They certainly had ontological and epistemological differences, often disagreeing over fundamental questions about the nature of reality and how humans could know and relate to God. The closed universe of new theology seemed to undermine the supernatural charismatic imagination, and antagonism could result. However, beneath this conflict were also underlying commonalities and unexpected entanglements which point towards deeper shifts in religious thought and experience. Finally, it examines another contribution to thinking on the Holy Spirit in the long 1960s, which was to have a significant long-term impact: the ‘discovery’ by moderate liberal missiologists and ecumenists of pneumatic movements in global majority Christianity. All this invites appreciation of the wider significance of eschatology and pneumatology in the Churches in the long 1960s and provides historical context for understanding later trajectories of charismatic renewal and Christian radicalism.
Charismatic renewal, religionless Christianity and Church-in-crisis
The leaderships of charismatic renewal and Christian radicalism had similar demographics and cultural backgrounds. Leading English radicals, according to Brewitt-Taylor’s study, were ‘of privileged background and education’ and only a handful were women, albeit these included prominent voices such as the Guardian journalist Monica Furlong and the theologian Kathleen Bliss.Footnote 8 A glance at the backgrounds of corresponding figures in North America reveals the same. Similarly, early charismatic leaders were largely educated, white males – with important exceptions including Jean Stone, editor of the Californian magazine Trinity, who also ministered in Britain in 1964. In contrast to Christian radicalism, a greater proportion of clergy who entered charismatic renewal had studied at conservative theological institutions, but many had not. The Revd Dennis Bennett, a pioneer of American Episcopalian charismatic renewal who in 1960 became a headline in the press after his resignation from a parish in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, over speaking in tongues, had received his M.Div. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1949. Bennett recalled it was an ‘extreme “liberal humanist”’ institution where he was taught the demythologising theology of Rudolf Bultmann and others by a faculty which included the proponent of theistic naturalism, Henry Nelson Wieman.Footnote 9
Both the charismatic and radical movements first thrived in university environs, benefitting from the afterglow of a resurgence of student religiosity in the 1950s.Footnote 10 In Britain, the Student Christian Movement had about 7,000 student members in the 1961/62 academic year.Footnote 11 The next academic year, an outbreak of tongue-speaking within Yale’s Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship indicated the appeal of charismatic renewal within student bodies (as one charismatic report of events suggested hopefully: ‘Political revolutions start in universities. Why not spiritual ones?’).Footnote 12 When a distinctive Catholic charismatic strand appeared in 1967, a key node was the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where early leaders had moved in the same Cursillo circles. The movements both had the potential to attract clerical and lay participation. For the latter, charismatic magazines such as Trinity and from 1965, its British equivalent Renewal were widely read; while for Christian radicals, Honest to God was a global best-seller.
As various studies of the long 1960s demonstrate, the period abounded with narratives of crisis.Footnote 13 From within their overlapping milieux, charismatic and radical notions of crisis were often very similar. Liberals had existing scripts for addressing the spiritual collapse of the old civilisation provided by theologians such as J. H. Oldham during and after the war. With the new crises of the late 1950s, more radical versions of these narratives emerged.Footnote 14 The same sense of crisis was evident in charismatic literature. An American pamphlet What has happened to the Trinity? (Van Nuys, Ca 1961) asked: ‘In these latter days, when men have designed weapons which may well explode the world into fragments, can the Church be content to exist without the fullness of God?’Footnote 15 For both movements, new, unequivocal crises of humanity urgently required spiritual solutions. At the same time, a secularisation narrative (which, ironically, had first emerged in radical Christian circles) was now widely accepted across the mainline Churches.Footnote 16 As the English liberal Anglican Roger Lloyd put it in 1964: ‘What is it that has so alarmed us all? It is the realization that, however hard we try, however faithful we are, we cannot get the Gospel heeded by more than an alarmingly small proportion of the people to whom we ought to be taking it.’Footnote 17 The same sentiments were evident in Dennis Bennett’s preaching: ‘Let us take a straight look. Organised Christianity is a failure. Let us be honest with ourselves. Jesus Christ is not a failure. God forbid! Organised Christianity is a failure. There is no way to put it any other way.’Footnote 18 On this, radicals and charismatics were in essence agreed: the Church was in trouble.
As they assessed the religious situation, they drew from some of the same wells of contemporary ‘prophetic’ literature addressing the religious crisis. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘religionless Christianity’ was inspirational for radicals such as Bishop Robinson. Yet Bonhoeffer appealed also to charismatics seeking to reimagine the body of Christ. Life together (Munich 1939), with the notion of ‘community of the Spirit’ – a divine reality which was ‘pneumatic’ (spiritual) rather than ‘psychic’ (human) – was for the English charismatic, the Revd Michael Harper, the work of ‘One of the finest modern exponents of community living’.Footnote 19 Another broadly read book of prophetic reputation was Pierre Berton’s The comfortable pew (Toronto 1965). This offered an unrestrained critique of the institutional Churches in Canada. The thesis appealed to radicals, as it questioned the contemporary relevance of ‘pre-packed morality’ and theologies which presented God in anthropomorphic terms (for example, as ‘daddy on the cloud’).Footnote 20 Yet, perhaps because the book was written by a journalist who had drifted from Christianity, rather than a radical theologian, the book’s criticism of the institutional Church – that it was ‘shackled’ and ‘something quite different from the Christianity of Galilee’ – was also heeded by charismatics and those who would be drawn into the renewal. One Presbyterian minister in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, recalled that before he experienced baptism in the Spirit, The comfortable pew had ‘produced, to say the least, an uncomfortable pulpit!’Footnote 21 In Britain, Berton was reviewed in Renewal magazine and recommended by its bookshop.Footnote 22 In different ways, both charismatics and radicals found compelling Berton’s claim that the Churches could be ‘on the verge of a fundamental revolution as earth-shaking as the Lutheran Reformation’.Footnote 23
Charismatic renewal and Christian radicalism did not only share a general sense of religion-in-crisis at this quite superficial level. Both also displayed deeper, but contrasting, emphases on the eschatological. For charismatics, of course, the Holy Spirit, was of fundamental importance, and the movement drew heavily on the Holiness, Evangelical and Pentecostal eschatological notion of living in ‘latter rain’ times (the ‘former rain’ being the Pentecost of the book of Acts). As an American charismatic pamphlet stated unequivocally, ‘We are living in a day when the Spirit of God is being poured on all flesh.’Footnote 24 In Britain, one influential text on charismatic origins was Arthur Wallis’s In the day of thy power (London 1956). This laid out an eschatological schema. Since the Reformation, outpourings of revival had become more evident and frequent, but ‘we expect before the coming of Christ a season of mighty outpourings, eclipsing all that the church has experienced since the Reformation, and only comparable in character and in power with the former rain of the early church’.Footnote 25 Teaching on the Old Testament book of Joel and the latter rain was found in Renewal magazine.Footnote 26 In early charismatic literature and preaching, it was assumed that the world was now at a decisive moment: the Church was being renewed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. A global revival, ahead of the return of Christ, was imminent. New spiritual power was the only hope of mankind amidst the crises of the decade.
While most Christian movements tend to assume, to some extent, that they are the work of the Holy Spirit, it is striking how often references to the pneumatic, if not as pervasive as in charismatic literature, were found in radical theology. Christian radicalism, too, assumed that God was doing ‘a new thing’ through his Spirit. As Brewitt-Taylor’s study of its English pioneers has shown, radicalism was a profoundly eschatological movement. Faced with the challenges of the age, theologians were drawn to the hope that heaven could come to earth, as in the book of Revelation. A new situation was emerging where ‘everything is holy’ and religion ‘would inevitably collapse, leaving Christians free to spread love and justice across the whole world’.Footnote 27 If charismatics tended to see the secular in unequivocally negative terms, for radical advocates of liberalism it represented a Kairos moment, where a new humanity was possible. The secular age was framed as a movement of the Spirit; indeed, the pneumatic language was rather striking. This had antecedents in liberal reconstructionist literature of the 1940s. In 1947, for example, the ‘new reformation’ prophesied by the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, W. R. Matthews, was ‘a new movement of the Spirit’ which would be ‘fitted for the new age’.Footnote 28 With the resurgence of liberalism in the 1960s, pneumatic language was everywhere. For Roger Lloyd, the growing awareness of the failure of the Churches – what he called ‘the modern shock’ – could ‘only be explained by an outburst of the awakening power of the Holy Spirit’.Footnote 29 In A new Reformation? (London 1965) Bishop Robinson observed water ready to overflow the banks of the existing streams of church renewal: ‘There has been a troubling of the waters such as betokens the quickening power of the Spirit, a rustling in the tree-tops such as David was given as a sign that the Lord had passed on before him and that he must act.’ Robinson was clear: reformation was primarily ‘a response to a motion of the Spirit’.Footnote 30
Both movements expressed their understandings of being in a new eschatological moment in their ecumenical openness. With this they tended to reject the divisive legacies of the sixteenth-century Reformation. The backdrop, of course, was the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. For radicals, the prospect of Christian unity was an aspect of ‘the re-creation of humanity in Christ’. John Robinson argued that ‘The period of civil war in Western Christendom is rapidly drawing to a close, engulfed in a larger campaign in which we can no longer afford to be divided – and no longer want to be.’ Indeed, one reason Robinson could be cautious about the term ‘new Reformation’ was that the dissolution of an old world, as in the sixteenth century, would be so convulsive and painful.Footnote 31 Radicals were ardent supporters of schemes to bring Christians together. At a grassroots level, charismatics similarly sought to see dividing walls both within and between the Churches broken down by the Spirit. An Anglican charismatic leader in New Zealand explained in 1967 that ‘the Holy Spirit though orthodox, does not belong to any party in the Church’. He continued:
He is Catholic and Protestant, Evangelical and Sacramental. There are moments when His thinking is so broad and liberal that one shudders at the consequences of passing on these new insights. Church parties are made by men imprisoned in their three-dimensional brain-boxes. The truth of the Christian faith, as the Holy Spirit imparts it to the limit of our ability to receive it, is multi-dimensional, transcending our narrow differences, building bridges by means which Christians in all parties can understand and communicate to each other.Footnote 32
For Protestant charismatics, Roman Catholics who had experienced the Spirit came to be seen as brothers and sisters. In England, the leading Anglican preacher, David Watson, described how his view of Rome was ‘almost akin to that of the most extreme Protestants in Northern Ireland’ before his ‘spiritual blinkers’ were removed by encountering Spirit-filled Roman Catholics.Footnote 33 He later told a conference of conservative Evangelicals that where unity was concerned, ‘in many ways the Reformation was one of the greatest tragedies that ever happened to the Church’.Footnote 34 For both movements, ecumenism was a byproduct of their eschatological convictions.
The charismatic and radical ‘new Reformation’ movements took shape in the same post-war cultural soup, shared a sense of religion-in-crisis and were deeply eschatological in their responses. Some of those involved, even those highly critical of the other movement, recognised that they were driven by similar impulses. Michael Harper’s As at the beginning (London 1965), a book which urged Christians to rediscover the charismatic power of the primitive Church, noted that the ‘“religionless Christianity” club’ had the same desire to ‘start all over again’. ‘If the foundations are unsound’, it was natural to reason, ‘the whole building will be affected.’Footnote 35 Liberals could describe the new hope which radical conceptions of God and Christianity released in terms oddly reminiscent of revivalistic religion. For Lloyd, they had experienced something akin to ‘conversion’: ‘their lives have new purpose and their eyes are bright with it’. In Spirit, Son and Father (New York 1958), Henry P. Van Dusen, the president of Union Theological Seminary and a moderate ecumenically-minded liberal, claimed: ‘Always, perhaps at long last, the Holy Spirit has returned, first as an experience and secondarily as a doctrine, to revive men’s souls and banish their defeat and despair, and then to reanimate the dead skeletons of ecclesiastical organization and redeem the dry rot of dogma.’Footnote 36 Van Dusen’s words were prescient. While charismatics and radicals might not have agreed on a theology of the Holy Spirit, both were very consciously eschatological and pneumatic. If the Church of the Sixties was the valley of the dry bones of Ezekiel’s prophecy, both asked the same question. Can these bones live?Footnote 37
Competing epistemologies of ‘new Reformations’
The imagined ‘new Reformations’ of charismatic renewal and Christian radicalism were two sides of a coin addressing the same problem of religion-in-crisis, but the solutions they proposed were quite different. At the root of their difference was the question of how God was to be known. In 1963, Samuel H. Miller, dean of Harvard Divinity School, published The dilemma of modern belief (New York 1963), an agenda for theological education in a modern world which he had previously set out in Yale’s Lyman Beecher Lectures. ‘The world today’, he said, ‘is stripped down, absolved of all supernatural alliances, scrubbed clean of special events divinely arranged, deprived of the deus ex machina , the undeniable proof, the outright arrogance of miracle.’ The scientific revolution had changed the situation for the Churches: ‘The fact that we are no longer children or adolescents, propped up and sustained in our credulity by such assertions of direct invasion, or of immediate and implacably authoritative acts of the divine, means that we have entered a new stage of religion.’ The result was that the nature of faith had changed. Humans should have faith in God ‘not because we have been overwhelmed by direct epiphanies, but because His glory pervades the common structure of things’.Footnote 38 Eight years later, Michael Harper took Miller to task. Miller’s God, so far as he was concerned, was ‘another God’. Harper’s God had come down from heaven and continued to intervene in the world. ‘We are to expect direct guidance and wisdom’, said Harper, ‘and we should be overwhelmed by the epiphanies of God when He manifests Himself to His people.’ Since his own experience of baptism in the Spirit in 1962, Harper had ‘tried to awaken Christians to the power of God that is available, and the acts of God which can help our sophisticated scientific age to have faith again’.Footnote 39
For charismatics, a new Reformation Church would come to the realisation that the reality and power of God could be experienced in both body and mind. Testimony theology – an approach which charismatics inherited from Pentecostals such as David du Plessis – was important to this process, offering accounts of healings, blessings, promptings and other direct encounters with God, and therefore the contemporary reality of the world described in Acts. The emphasis on experienced truth could put charismatics at odds with both conservative Evangelicals and radical liberals. This tension was evident in 1967 in the aftermath of the failed ‘trial’ for heresy of New Zealander Lloyd Geering (the Presbyterian mentioned at the beginning of this article) for his rejection of the physical resurrection of Christ. After the case was dismissed, charismatics, who certainly believed wholeheartedly in the bodily resurrection, might have been expected to rally behind the conservative Evangelicals who had attempted to maintain this orthodoxy. However, as one charismatic Presbyterian minister commented:
The question which crops up is: what do our people want? Legalistically correct doctrine, or a reductionism by which Christ has been rendered virtually powerless? – A growing number of people reject both these solutions. Neither of these have set people on fire for bringing the Good News to others. People want to see reality and truth, and to experience it.Footnote 40
Emphasis on experience of God as a desperately needed aspect of Christianity differentiated charismatics from Evangelical supporters of the doctrinal clarity of the old Reformation and advocates for a radical liberal new Reformation.
Radical theologians had set about recasting Christianity for a modern era, drawing on the theology of German scholars Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann and the German American Paul Tillich. The latter two’s existentialist and demythologised Christianity was particularly relevant here. For Tillich, God was not a supreme being, but the ground of being – being itself. Bultmann saw New Testament cosmology – earth, heaven and hell – as ‘essentially mythical in character’. The earth was ‘the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other’, and God could speak to man directly and give him ‘the supernatural power of his Spirit’.Footnote 41 To preach this mythical view of the world to modern man was ‘senseless and impossible’.Footnote 42 Instead, an existential and unmythological interpretation of the Scriptures was required, one which did ‘better justice to the real meaning of the New Testament and to the paradox of the kerygma’.Footnote 43 In 1963, this thought was repackaged for the general reader in Robinson’s Honest to God. In the preface, Robinson explained, ‘I am convinced that there is a growing gulf between the traditional orthodox supernaturalism in which our Faith has been framed and the categories which the “lay” world … finds meaningful today.’ Robinson popularised these theologians, clarifying, for example, the significance of Tillich: God was not a supernatural Being ‘who can be relied upon to intervene from without’.Footnote 44
With the success of Honest to God (350,000 copies sold in just four months in Britain, the United States and Australia),Footnote 45 Christian radicals tended to not pay much attention to charismatics, whose movement grew slowly at first. One important exception, however, was the liberal Episcopalian bishop of California, James A. Pike, later an admirer and friend of Robinson. The west coast of America was a key area of early charismatic growth, usually in the form of ecumenical prayer gatherings. In 1962, Pike directed his diocese’s Division of Pastoral Services to undertake a Study Commission on glossolalia. The bishop had personal experience of charismatic practice in his diocese. While laying on hands during a confirmation service in Corte Madera, one press report described how ‘the clergy and congregation burst into spontaneous singsong’. (The reporter in fact attempted to report the tongues verbatim: ‘Dyoso ki-i-yeno mayashi yekatona masi yano ma yenda ya kotani masiki’.)Footnote 46 Following the release of the commission’s report, in 1963 Pike issued a ‘Pastoral letter regarding “speaking in tongues”’. Clergy were told not to encourage or spread the practice. Glossolalia in ‘extreme’ forms was linked to schizophrenia and potential overemphasis in worship described as ‘heresy in embryo’. Exorcisms were not to take place without authorisation and the input of a psychologist.Footnote 47
The restrictiveness and some of the headlines on the bishop’s intervention invited a charismatic perception of liberal opposition. Dennis Bennett, who believed a talk he gave on charismatic ministry at Stanford University might have provoked the bishop, reminded the press that the severity of Pike’s position was not characteristic of the Episcopalian hierarchy overall. The bishop of Montana, for example, was approving of the charismatic movement.Footnote 48 However, while Pike’s position seemed highly critical, behind the scenes there were indications that he was not necessarily ill-disposed towards the Spirit-filled members of his flock. When David du Plessis, the Pentecostal ecumenist, happened to meet Pike early in early 1962, he came away with the impression that ‘unfriendly elements’ in the diocese were putting the bishop under pressure about the charismatics.Footnote 49 Bennett came to regard Pike as not ‘antagonistic’ so much as ‘puzzled’.Footnote 50 Indeed, there was some ambivalence in the pastoral letter, which noted reports of the benefits of the manifestation, including healing from illness and addiction, and new devotion. It recognised glossolalia as a phenomenon known over centuries and which was not exclusive to one religious tradition. Pike’s supposed puzzlement about religious experience would soon and unexpectedly deepen further. For now, though, to charismatics he was a notorious figure.
The example of Pike aside, critiques of differing conceptions of epistemology and experience usually flowed in the opposite direction: charismatics opposing demythologisation. Later in 1963, an article by Jean Stone and Harald Bredesen of the Blessed Trinity Society spoke with not-so-veiled reference to Pike’s letter of the modern Church having ‘educated theologians to explain away the miracles and wonders’. It added: ‘We are forbidden to cast out demons without a psychiatrist present and are admonished against laying hands on the sick without a seminary degree.’ A stark contrast was made between the humble charismatic who had experienced the reality of God and the theological elite: ‘sometimes simple people with no theological degrees see the blind receive their sight, the deaf receive their hearing, the lame leap for joy. And we know that God is not bound by man and by his large convictions about small things’. The BTS magazine Trinity was also a catalyst for charismatic emergences in Britain. Here, too, appeared a narrative of Spirit-filled Christians being suffocated by the liberal theological establishment. As Harper put it during the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, charismatics stood against ‘ecclesiological bureaucrats’ and the ‘deadly intellectual approach of some who suggest that man is all head – a soul-less brain’. The Reformation provided a useful historical comparison: ‘While the intellectuals debated their theological positions, and while the Pope amassed his gold for St Peter’s, a young monk had a personal encounter with the living God, and strove to deliver the church from its desecrators. Are we called to anything less?’Footnote 51
Charismatic renewal was sometimes understood as a movement of the Spirit at a moment of theological peril where the very notion of God was threatened. The experience and manifestation of God, through baptism in the Spirit, speaking in tongues and the charismatic gifts, was evidence that God could break into reality. The universe was not a closed system in either biblical or contemporary times. In a challenge to radical Christian epistemology, for charismatics it was precisely the experience of this inbreaking of God which would make heresies disappear. Testimony theology was important to this process. For some Evangelical-minded charismatics, the risk of this approach was a lack of biblical substance, but as Michael Harper reasoned, testimonies could offer ‘a better answer to Honest to God than many a theological dissertation’.Footnote 52
‘New Reformations’ and their entanglements
Amidst the noise of antagonistic rhetoric between these movements the signal of a more complex relationship was discernible. As movements with new Reformation pretentions, they had in common a tendency towards a generous outlook, promoting Christian unity and opposing those ecclesiastical divisions perceived as negative legacies of the sixteenth-century Reformation. The Revd Robert Firebrace, a charismatic Anglican in New Zealand, believed that baptism in the Spirit ‘enables us to use our normal faculties properly so that our thinking is not distorted by prejudices, conscious or unconscious’.Footnote 53 In 1965 he wrote to Michael Harper in England that while he could not agree with Honest to God and similar literature: ‘I do my best to be fair to these people and certainly I find some of Bp Robinson very stimulating, especially his view on the Church and the world and the place the laity ought to be taking. I was thinking along these lines before I ever heard of him and I am sure the Spirit is pushing us in this direction.’Footnote 54 Similarly, as we shall see, radical Christians could display curiosity and openness where charismatics were concerned.
If the ecumenical instincts of these so-called new Reformations increased the possibility of constructive encounters, three underlying intellectual factors also contributed to entanglements of liberal and charismatic Christianity. First, post-war liberal theology had seen a growing interest in the Holy Spirit. Although moderate rather than radical liberal, this was most evident in the work of Henry P. Van Dusen. His interest in religious experience had been awoken first by attending Quaker meetings as a child and later through the Oxford Group in the 1920s, which challenged him to ‘recognize both the inescapable logic and experienced reality of the “guidance of the Spirit”’.Footnote 55 In Spirit, Son and Father, Van Dusen argued that ‘the real crux of contemporary Christian controversy’ was not ‘men’s conceptions of God, the issues of Theism; or their interpretation of Christ and “Last Things,” Christology and Eschatology; but in their silence as to the effective power of faith here and now’.Footnote 56 For Van Dusen the ‘intimate Presence’ was ‘the actual spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, now immediately present and yet the very Being of Ultimate Reality’.Footnote 57 While hardly a charismatic treatise, Spirit, Son and Father was regarded by Dennis Bennett as the ‘greatest book’ on the Spirit and the Churches.Footnote 58 A second factor was the theology of Paul Tillich. Taken alone as a presentation of Tillich’s theology, Honest to God gave the impression that it lacked an experiential dimension. This probably reflected Robinson’s own interests. He later admitted he was more of the ‘prophetic’ than ‘mystical’ type, a tendency which comes through strongly in his earlier work.Footnote 59 Yet Tillich’s writings, particularly the third volume of Systematic theology (Chicago, Il 1963), placed much emphasis on Spirit, which he saw as the ‘most embracing, direct, and unrestricted symbol for the divine life’.Footnote 60 For Tillich, humans could be grasped by ‘Spiritual Presence’ and a sense of ‘ecstasy’ could result. He was open to the idea of tongues, and in lectures on Christian thought in the 1950s had expressed regret at the exclusion of the Montanists by the Catholic Church.Footnote 61 Through the influence of this towering mid-century theologian, some liberals saw that existentialism left room for mysticism. Tillich was also appreciated by some charismatics. Writing in 1971, J. Rodman Williams asserted ‘I would hold that no other theologian of our time has sought more seriously to explore the dynamics of the relationship between the divine Spirit and human spirit’, claiming that Tillich offered guidance to modern people ‘increasingly concerned to find a faith that involves their whole existence’.Footnote 62 A third factor was the influence of psychology and therapeutic spirituality, what Pamela Klassen calls the pursuit of ‘spiritual equilibrium’, on mid-century liberalism.Footnote 63 This drew on Tillich’s own engagement with psychology. As was later evident, for example in the ministry of the Emmanuel Movement and the English Methodist Leslie Weatherhead, liberals, too, could have an interest in healing. The similar tendency towards ecumenism and their overlapping intellectual influences provided the contexts for charismatic and liberal entanglements. We will now explore this through three case studies: the emergence of charismatic renewal at St Luke’s Episcopal, Monrovia, in 1959 and the subsequent ministry of the Revd Dr Morton Kelsey; the Revd Dennis Bennett’s engagement with liberal ‘South Bank’ Christianity on a visit to Britain in 1965; and the experiential trajectory of Bishop James A. Pike.
It is misleading to talk about the ‘origins’ of charismatic renewal, a movement which was the coherence of multiple flows of Evangelical, mainline healing, ‘latter rain’ Pentecostal and lay Catholic influences.Footnote 64 However, St Luke’s, Monrovia, near Los Angeles, can stake a good claim as one of the very earliest nodes of renewal in the United States. A prayer group in the parish began to manifest tongues, interpretations and prophecy in the Fall of 1959. According to a curate, the Revd Stuart Fitch, ‘the Spirit fell’ around the same time as a group in nearby Monterey Park (through which Dennis Bennett experienced baptism in the Spirit) had similar experiences. A distinctive feature of St Luke’s was its association with liberal varieties of psychological and therapeutic approaches to spirituality. Agnes Sanford, the Anglican healer and author, was a member of the parish. Her son, the Revd John A. Sanford, who had an interest in Jungian psychology, was curate up to 1958, when Fitch arrived.Footnote 65 The Rector, Morton T. Kelsey, had the same Jungian interests, and had spent a sabbatical in Zurich at the C. G. Jung Institute in 1956. The congregation attracted educated figures such as Dr Ollie Backus, who taught the congregation Jung and Teilhard de Chardin.Footnote 66 The variety of charismatic renewal to emerge at St Luke’s had a strong psychological emphasis. According to Fitch’s testimony, the parish had ‘long been interested in the tools of psychology as religious tools’. After the ‘quickening’ of the Spirit, psychology was used ‘as the Spirit’s searchlight’ to address issues of bondage, maturity and wholeness: ‘Our Lord said “Be ye perfect.” We believe he meant “be ye whole – discover to the best of your ability that image of God within that is really your true self”.’ This search for the ‘Undiscovered Self’ through the Spirit was used to address interpersonal relationships in the parish. Fitch, for example, described how the Spirit had revealed that feelings of hostility which he had towards one parishioner were a projection of negative feelings towards his governess as a child. The renewal at St Luke’s was the pursuit of sanctification through psychology and the Spirit. As Fitch put it neatly, ‘being made whole, being made holy’.Footnote 67
Although Kelsey never spoke in tongues, he and John A. Sanford became key early advocates for renewal. Kelsey’s Tongue speaking: an experiment in spiritual experience (Garden City, NY 1964) laid out a case for glossolalia from the Scriptures (with an appendix of biblical references to human experiences of ‘non-physical reality’) and church history, as well as a reportage of the Californian charismatic renewal. It framed the whole phenomenon in Jungian terms: ‘If the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious is accepted’, he explained, ‘speaking in tongues makes real sense, as a breaking through into consciousness of a deep level of the collective unconscious similar to the dream.’Footnote 68 A comparable argument was used to justify the acceptance of dreams and visions: ‘man is in contact with non-physical reality as well as material reality’.Footnote 69 Kelsey’s contribution to charismatic renewal was significant. Tongue speaking was the first substantial charismatic book on this topic, and it came from someone with intellectual weight. Kelsey was appointed to a chair at the University of Notre Dame in 1968 and went on to publish various works which specifically engaged with the demythologisation approach of radical Christian theologians – arguing that a rejection of non-physical reality based on material grounds should be reconsidered because of the emerging science of the subconscious.Footnote 70 Sanford, in an unpublished work from around 1967, argued similarly that ‘the intense religious awareness of the ancient Hebrews and the first Christians was connected to what we would now regard as a manifestation of the unconscious. An objective, psychic reality broke through into the consciousness of the great many men of the bible and filled them with a sense of the Holy, numinous, divine will’.Footnote 71 These works, informed by observations of Episcopalian charismatic experiences, engaged directly with radical theology, providing an alternative course to demythologisation but by application of some of the same underlying liberal principles.
A second example of entanglement was the reception of Dennis Bennett to Britain in 1965. He was invited by Michael Harper and the newly established charismatic organisation, the Fountain Trust. It is striking that his British audience was theologically diverse. One of those apparently eager to hear Bennett speak was Hugh Montefiore, vicar of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge, who offered him his pulpit on 24 October.Footnote 72 He originally gave Bennett the topic ‘Is it decent to speak in tongues?’. This topic was changed upon realisation that the mayor and corporation of the city would be attending for United Nations Day. Even so, the new title ‘United Nations – Bable or Pentecost?’ left Bennett some scope. Montefiore wrote asking him not to make tongues ‘the main point’, but hoped he could say something about the ‘Holy Spirit movement’ and left open that he might ‘mention speaking with tongues in passing’.Footnote 73 That Bennett was welcomed by Montefiore – whose radicalism led him two years later to stir controversy by suggesting that Jesus might be inclined towards homosexuality – to speak at the University Church, was not as surprising as one might think. Bennett, as we have seen, had trained at the University of Chicago and, while highly critical of the demythologising project, was far from ignorant on the matter. It is notable, too, that Montefiore, although radical in his theology, had also had a profound mystical experience, albeit in his youth. Montefiore was Jewish and while attending Rugby school, at about the age of sixteen, he claimed:
I saw clearly a figure in white (although the figure was and is still clear in my memory, I would doubt if it would have shown up in a photograph). Although I had never even read the New Testament, or attended a Christian service of worship, I knew immediately that the figure was Jesus, and I heard the words ‘Follow me’.
At this moment he became a Jewish Christian. Many years later he remained convinced that the experience, which he claimed many other ‘messianic Jews’ had known, was ‘an incursion of the Transcendent into my life’.Footnote 74 It is therefore not surprising that Montefiore, the liberal, had some sympathy for Bennett’s message that the universe was not closed. Montefiore’s curate, the Revd Ian Ogilvie, was also impressed, writing in the Cambridge News about Bennett’s experience of speaking in tongues and saying ‘That man has got something, and I want it.’Footnote 75 Nor was this Bennett’s only incursion into British Christian radical circles during his visit. Harper found the bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, open to a visit from Bennett. Stockwood had appointed John Robinson as his suffragan bishop of Woolwich in 1959 and found the views his colleague expressed in Honest to God were ‘more or less my own’.Footnote 76 Stockwood would have felt a duty to welcome Bennett in part because some clergy in his diocese had already experienced charismatic gifts. At a recent holiday retreat for clergy, one had spoken in tongues, with an interpretation offered by another.Footnote 77 However, there was more to his interest. Stockwood had a long-standing interest in psychic research, based in part on his own experiences. He had, for example, known experiences of intuition. He had found he would sometimes ‘know the contents of a letter before I open the envelope, or I know what a person will say to me before he speaks’, and that ‘these hunches occur more frequently when I have kept my rule of silent meditation in the early morning’. He claimed that in 1956 he had once been woken in the night with the thought he should call on Ivor Ramsey, dean of King’s College, Cambridge, only to find the next morning that he had committed suicide in the night.Footnote 78 He applied psychic theories to his interpretation of the Bible, for example believing that the appearances of Moses and Elijah to Jesus and even Jesus’ own appearances to his disciples after his death were evidence of ‘worlds inter-penetrating each other’. In his autobiography, Stockwood was clear: ‘my interest in the psi-faculty was a help to me when the charismatic movement hit this county’.Footnote 79 Bennett was invited to speak to a diocesan ministers’ meeting, chaired by Stockwood, on 5 September 1965. Two days later, at the invitation of the dean, Ernest Southcott, Bennett preached at Southwark Cathedral on the topic ‘The Holy Spirit and you’.Footnote 80 Charismatic ministry continued in Southwark long after Bennett’s departure, partly through the leadership of the Revd Michael Whinney, the Evangelical vicar of St James’, Bermondsey. In 1974, Stockwood informed Archbishop Michael Ramsey that his charismatic clergy were ‘amongst the best priests I have in the diocese’.Footnote 81 He allowed – and attended – a Pentecostal eucharist with the charismatic laying on of hands. Stockwood prepared a statement explaining that the ritual was ‘an outward sign of God’s readiness to straighten us within his Holy Spirit’.Footnote 82 He would anoint with oil anyone who came forward at the service, rationalising the practice based on his own psychic beliefs: ‘Believing as I do in the inter-penetration of dimensions, I regard the sacrament of anointing, or to give it its proper name “unction”, as a symbolic gateway into the area in which the Holy Spirit operates for particular purposes.’Footnote 83 South Bank Religion was not out of bounds for charismatic spirituality.
The third case concerns the intellectual and experiential trajectory of Bishop James Pike – the bogeyman of Californian charismatics. Pike’s hostility towards charismatic experience was likely exaggerated, even if his policy on glossolalia did appear harsh. This was not the only ambiguity. An interview recorded in 1973 with the Revd Darby Betts, who had been Pike’s executive assistant in the diocese, further complicates the matter. According to Betts, during Pike’s ‘great battle with the tongue-speaking people’ the bishop had once arrived at Grace Cathedral with a face ‘the color of putty’ and informed him ‘My God … I’ve been speaking in tongues!’ Pike had apparently woken up in the night ‘reciting a psalm in a language he didn’t understand’ and was clearly disturbed. The bishop had recorded the Psalm on tape and Betts was able to ascertain it was an ‘archaic’ Latin translation. Betts found a book with this translation in Pike’s study and persuaded him, although the bishop had no recollection of reading it, that he must have at some point, and that Pike, who had a photographic memory, had been processing the text in his sleep. The tape was destroyed in case the recording was made public.Footnote 84 As Betts said, ‘Had he told the tongue-speakers of his archaic Latin psalm they would have broken out in hymns of joy.’Footnote 85 It is difficult to know whether Pike was really persuaded by Bett’s explanation, but the very fact that he thought he might have spoken in tongues reveals some uncertainty on the whole matter.
Betts went on to say that it was possible that a few years later, Pike would have found his explanation unconvincing.Footnote 86 Following the suicide of his son, Jim, in 1966, Pike experienced and became interested in paranormal activity, and what his book If this be heresy (New York 1967) described as ‘the extension of the functioning of the person beyond the space-time continuum in which he is set’.Footnote 87 The book listed the ‘apparent phenomena beyond the normal day-to-day experience of persons’ which were to be found in all cultures:
visions and ‘voices’; prophetic predictions about future events; divine revelation not only of ideas but of specific words; possession by demons, and the exorcism thereof; apparitions of angels and of deceased persons; the appearance, disappearance, and movement of objects without physical intervention; raising up of the dead; mind-reading; and the applying or ingesting of various ‘holy’ substances for the purpose of achieving such extraordinary results as healing, ecstasy, and visions; speaking with strange tongues and the interpretation of tongues spoken; levitation; bilocation purportedly involving the separate but connected functioning of an ‘astral body’; and one- and two-way communications with the dead.Footnote 88
Pike discussed the emerging science around ESP, psychedelic experience and mystical experiences. Specifically on glossolalia, although he was ambivalent on any explanation he affirmed that even if not an identifiable language, it tended to have a ‘shape’ and was ‘not just babbling’.Footnote 89 While he urged Christians not to engage in ‘over-belief’ by suggesting tongues verified certain conservative or fundamentalist ideas, he took the phenomenon seriously – and discussed Jung’s theory of group unconscious as a possible explanation.Footnote 90 ‘American’s most controversial clergyman’, as Pike’s biographers William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne called him, was regarded as a heretic by many Christians. In The other side: an account of my experiences with psychic phenomena (Garden City, NY 1968) his relating of the gifting of Spiritualist mediums to the ‘diversities of gifts … diversities of operations’ in 1 Corinthians xii would have been entirely rejected by most charismatics, who saw séances as the work of the Devil.Footnote 91 However, Pike’s direct experience of charismatics and the ambiguities in his response to them was further evidence of the potential cross-overs of the two movements on the question of religious experience.
Looking south: the ‘discovery’ of global majority Reformations
Amidst these entanglements there was a further complexity: the writings of moderate liberal ecumenists and missiologists on the significance of the pneumatic in global majority Christianity. These interventions were a further example of the diversity of interest in the Holy Spirit in the Churches in the long 1960s. Furthermore, they brought a ‘global’ perspective (albeit from the point of view of White westerners) to discussions about the question of Christian experience. In the Anglo-world, it was these moderate liberals, rather than charismatics, who initially offered serious consideration of the pneumatic dimensions of global majority Christianity. Furthermore, again the language of new Reformation appeared.
There had been growing interest from missiologists and ecumenists in the rise of Pentecostalism since the 1950s. In 1955, having observed examples of church life in the Caribbean while on holiday, Henry P. Van Dusen declared that Pentecostals, Adventist and Holiness groups might constitute ‘a New Reformation, the emergence of a new, third major type and branch of Christendom’. It came as a surprise to many that a liberal ecumenist would make such a bold statement. It caught the attention of charismatics – the American author John L. Sherrill, in his journalistic survey They speak in other tongues (New York 1964) interviewed Van Dusen, who told him he had ‘felt at home’ attending a Pentecostal service: ‘I felt like I was stepping back in time to a primitive but very vital Christian experience.’ He observed that speaking in tongues ‘was a kind of spiritual therapy’ and compared the experience to reading poets such as Blake, Auden and Manley Hopkins when they were ‘not communicating intelligible ideas’.Footnote 92
The attention to pneumatic currents in global Christianity would later be picked up in Bishop John V. Taylor’s classic text, The go-between God (London 1972). Taylor’s Churchmanship was best described as liberal Evangelical – he was general secretary of the Church Missionary Society, but his book was published by the SCM. Taylor engaged directly with radical Christian theology, arguing that ‘the uneasy debate’ and ‘present confusions’ about the meaning of ‘God’ were because the Church had ‘relegated the Holy Spirit to the merest edges’ of theology.Footnote 93 Rather than Tillich’s definition of God as the ‘Ground of our being’, Taylor preferred ‘Ground of our meeting’ – with the Spirit as ‘an invisible go-between’.Footnote 94 On this point he referenced Bishop Robinson’s later clarification about Honest to God on the matter of relating to God: ‘I do not pray to the ground of my being. I pray to God as Father. Prayer, for the Christian, is the opening of oneself to that utterly gracious personal reality which Jesus could only address as “Abba, Father!”’Footnote 95 For Taylor, it was being ‘Immersed in the Go-Between Spirit’ which enabled Jesus to refer to God as Abba. The Spirit, an ‘invisible third party’, stood between men and women and God and with the world around them.
Taylor’s work was filled with examples of the growth of Pentecostal and independent movements in the global South.Footnote 96 In a chapter subtitled ‘Pentecostalism and the supernatural dimension in a secular age’, while warning against over-emphasis of the charismatic gifts, he argued that their desire should be understood as ‘an insistence upon the wholeness of man’, adding ‘True growth is not from the intuitive to the rational, but always towards an integration of the two.’Footnote 97 His perspective was clearly influenced by Christian and missionary scholars such as Bengt Sundkler and Christian Baȅta. Taylor was clear that understanding of the pneumatic must make room for the ‘irrational’:
For he is both the Spirit of Truth, the enlightener, the bearer of discernment and understanding, and also the Creator Spiritus, the bracing energy, the mighty rushing wind sweeping along all the subterranean corridors below consciousness. The hidden irrational areas of reality must be contained within any faith which claims not only to satisfy but also redeem mankind. Here in the West we may still doubt the necessity for this if we close our eyes to the best groups and the search for psychedelic states of mind. Anyone who has a concern for the mission of the church to the six continents must come to terms with the fact that the vast majority of mankind is not going to find God through such a cerebral religion as the Christianity it has so far encountered.Footnote 98
Taylor’s was a signal work. It combined openness to the reality of a ‘charismatic’ characteristic in global Christianity – making room for the primitive and elemental work of the Spirit – with insights from contemporary radical theology. It further complicated, and placed in a ‘global’ frame, Christian thinking about how God could be known. Furthermore, this and other works, by emphasising the vitality of global majority Christianity, shifted the geographical focus of where new Reformations might be found.
Charismatics and radicals had in common that their imagined new Reformations in the long 1960s were eschatological responses to moments of political and cultural crisis and the perceived failure of the Churches to effectively communicate their message and respond to contemporary anxieties. Shaped by some of the same inherent concerns and by eschatologically-driven ecumenisms – which assumed that the divisive legacies of the sixteenth-century Reformation should be consigned to the past – the movements had some commonalities. Such a dynamic can sometimes be observed between groups that at first sight appear mutually antagonistic. The surprising insight from Pamela Klassen’s study of twentieth-century liberal Protestant experimentation with technological and psychic supernaturalism is relevant here: ‘The pneumatic theologies of liberals and charismatics are in fact mutually – if often oppositionally – constituted.’Footnote 99 Although charismatics and radicals had fundamental ontological and epistemological differences – and charismatics, certainly, often attacked radical demythologisation – there were nevertheless more complex dynamics at the interface of renewal and ‘religionless’ Christianity.
Various examples in this article have shown that there were no simple binaries of supernaturalist or demythologised Christianity, experientialist or rationalist approaches, delineating charismatics and radicals. In the case of St Luke’s, Monrovia, the advocacy by Morton Kelsey and John Sanford for the early charismatic renewal indicates that one of the earliest expressions of this movement was liberal Protestant. While Christian radicals were unlikely to find any common ground with conservative Evangelicals, with charismatics there could be some surprising interactions, as with the reception of Dennis Bennett in Britain in 1965. Hugh Montefiore remained convinced by his vision of Christ as a teenager and welcomed Bennett on his visit to Cambridge. Mervyn Stockwood’s belief in the inter-penetration of realities made him open to Bennett and to continued engagement with charismatics in the diocese of Southwark. In the case of Bishop Pike, notorious for his treatment of charismatics in the diocese of California, we see how a leading radical changed his mind, coming to see a materialistic and reductionist view of reality unpersuasive. It is true that Pike, although a high-profile figure, is often regarded as something of a liberal maverick, but he was not alone. While Christian radicalism had its rationalists, including Bishop Robinson, there were those open to the idea of experience of a non-physical reality. All this suggests the value of considering ‘Spirit’ and ‘experience’ as wider Christian theological categories in any assessment of the long 1960s.
There was a moment in this period when Christian radicalism and charismatic renewal could display some shared traits. Their putative new Reformations were charged by eschatology, animated by a sense that the Spirit was moving at a particular Kairos moment. It was not the case that only one movement had any interest in religious experience. But what happened to these movements, and what happened to the commonalities? Perhaps the key to answering such questions relates to a wider pattern in the history of Christianity: that often it is precisely how movements respond to eschatological disappointment that determines their trajectory. Both the utopian hopes of Christian radicalism and the revivalistic optimism of charismatic renewal were dashed.
For all the astounding early success of Christian radicalism, heaven did not come to earth as these liberals had hoped. In A new Reformation?, Bishop Robinson had sowed seeds of doubt over the possibility of the Churches being able to reform. He wrote, ‘A Reformation presupposes that the Church can be re-formed and a positive answer given to the question, “can these bones live?”’ He left an open question: ‘will it necessarily be the channel of the Spirit? May not the really significant movements of renewal take place outside it and despite it?’Footnote 100 Though Christian radicals raised important questions in the 1960s which were to have a lasting impact on the Churches – for example, about sexual morality – their own movement disintegrated. Both in the Anglo-world and in their engagement with various global challenges, radical Christianity essentially secularised itself as its interest shifted towards ‘revolutionary social justice’.Footnote 101 In a sense, it looked for the transformative work of the Spirit outside the Churches.Footnote 102 In doing so radicals did not embrace the ‘charismatic’ dimension of global Christianity; a move which may have seemed shortsighted to moderate liberals persuaded by Taylor’s The go-between God.
Nor did a new Reformation, expected in the form of revival, arrive for charismatics. However, there was an important difference. Despite eschatological disappointment (it is noticeable how Anglo-world charismatics used the language of revival far less after the long 1960s) they remained convinced the Spirit was at work inside the Churches. In the 1970s and 1980s, they set out for the long haul, forming denominational organisations or establishing new, independent Churches and networks.Footnote 103 Furthermore, as Anglo-world charismatics looked south to the global majority world, it became clear that in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America developments which might be defined as actual Reformations were taking place, with the rapid expansion of indigenised and ‘pentecostalised’ varieties of Christianity challenging established forms of Protestant and Catholic expressions.Footnote 104 Charismatics engaged with these global majority movements and transnational networks emerged which later helped to produce organisations such as the Global Anglican Futures Conference.Footnote 105 Trends in global Christianity seemed to be working in their favour. In Western Europe, North America and Australasia in the long 1960s, neither charismatic renewal nor Christian radicalism resulted in a new Reformation. However, there were reformations elsewhere. By the end of the century, these seemed more closely aligned with supernatural than demythologised Christianity.
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