How’s the book going?” Tib asked. She was transferring dishes from the kitchen shelves into packing barrels that the moving company had provided.
“I don’t know. . . .” I looked out the kitchen window at the bright June afternoon. “I’m sick of church squabbles. The last three books I got out of the library didn’t tell me anything but how wrong everyone else is.”
The fact was that now that the golfers were thick on the putting green that I watched from my attic window, the whole subject of religion and actual experience of God and mystic hospital visions seemed impossibly remote. I’d hoped, just for a moment a while back, that my explorations into the Pentecostal story might yield some personal answers too; answers to the dryness in religious life that I felt and Pentecostals apparently did not.
But it was becoming apparent that they had no answers, only fresh problems, and the book was becoming a chore rather than an adventure. The Pentecostals were only confused human beings, and I was another.
A Good Humor truck jangled up the street, and as in a conjuring trick, three faces appeared at the screen door.
“Can we—” Donn began.
“No,” said Tib from deep inside a cupboard. “We’re having ice cream for supper.”
The faces disappeared.
We were moving so that everyone in the family could have a proper bedroom. Tib is a writer too, and together our offices took up the attic of the present small house. Downstairs were two bedrooms. Scott and Donn were in one, Elizabeth and the washing machine in the other, and Tib and I slept on a sofa bed in the living room. Recently we’d found a larger house, and moving day was two days off.
And I had to break the news that I’d just invited a key interviewee for the book up to dinner.
“Speaking of supper,” I began—but Tib emerged from the cupboard still thinking about the research.
“I think I know what your trouble is,” she said. “I think you’ve been spending too much time in the library and not enough time with people.”
It was an opening made in heaven. “You’re right!” I said heartily. “I agree completely. In fact, I’ve invited someone to spend the night.”
The rattle of paper ceased abruptly. “You’ve what!”
“A preacher.”
Tib’s eyes traveled from the wood shavings on the kitchen floor to the boxes stacked in the living room.
“His name,” I went on rapidly, “is David du Plessis. He’s a South African. He’s one of the most influential Pentecostals in the world today and he’s only going to be in town overnight and . . .”
Now she was eyeing me as though measuring me for a box of my own.
“. . . and I’ve booked a room for him at the Kittle House.” I profited from her sigh of relief to add, “He knows we’re moving, and he says he’d just as soon eat cold beans right out of a can.”
“That’s about what it will be,” said Tib. But so skillfully had I conveyed my news that she gave me a smile of pure forgiveness as she said it.
From every side I’d heard the name David du Plessis. Apparently here was a man from as insular and defensive a background as anyone’s who had suddenly, in mid-life, turned into an outgoing and communicative personality, who talked lovingly and not accusingly to people of other traditions. “There’s a change taking place among Pentecostals,” I was told. “If you want to know what it’s all about, you really ought to meet David du Plessis.” When I heard that he was going to be in New York, I invited him out, moving week or no.
David du Plessis turned out to be the kind of person you called “David” right away. You could see the sparkle in his eyes even as he walked up the driveway. Within ten minutes after he entered our house, his suit coat was off and he was wrapping china.
“You’ve an expert helping you now,” he said in the soft South African accent that sounds British to American ears. “My wife and I have moved so often that I pack dishes the way some men tie trout flies.”
And that’s the way we spent the rest of the afternoon, bending over packing barrels and talking. Tib was right: I hadn’t been spending enough time with people. From David du Plessis I caught a glimpse of a Pentecostal world very different from the early days I had been reading about. The change had occurred in the space of a single lifetime, and David’s own personal history was a case in point.
David du Plessis had had a role in the Pentecostal movement almost from its beginning. In 1908—just two years after Azusa Street—two Americans who had witnessed that revival arrived in Johannesburg, rented a long-abandoned Presbyterian church and began to preach. Their message of the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues was new in South Africa, and from the beginning large crowds gathered to listen.
David’s father was one of the people who dropped into the church out of curiosity. David was just nine years old at the time, but he can still remember the effect of that preaching on his father. “He acted like a man on fire,” David recalls. “He wanted to leave his business right away and do something for the Lord.” David’s father was a carpenter by trade. Almost before the family knew it, they were out in the African bush, where his father built mission stations for Pentecostals who were carrying the message into the native territories.
David’s family—and later David himself—came into the Pentecostal movement at a time when it was being severely ignored by the older churches. He grew up in an atmosphere charged with resentment and dislike. When, as a young adult, he decided to go into the Pentecostal ministry, he knew who the enemies were: sin, the devil and liberal churchmen.
David rose steadily in the Pentecostal movement. For twenty years after his ordination he stayed in Africa, preaching in a church of his own, working as editor for a Pentecostal newspaper, then acting as executive secretary of the Pentecostal Fellowships in South Africa. In time, opportunities came for work in the international Pentecostal movement, and he found himself in Geneva, Paris, London, Stockholm. By 1949 he was secretary-general of the World Conference of Pentecostal Fellowships. And in each job, he with the others contributed building blocks to the wall of misunderstanding separating the Pentecostals from the old-line churches.
Then David was in an automobile accident. The accident had a profound effect on him, on his ministry and ultimately on the entire Pentecostal movement.
At the time of the accident, David was in the United States, making arrangements for the second World Conference of Pentecostals, which was to be held in Paris during the summer of 1949. David, as executive secretary, had the responsibility for planning the conference from its broadest concept to its most minute detail.
“And I wasn’t handling the job well,” he recalls. “I was impatient when people’s ideas differed from my own. I tended to see the issues in black and white, and to think of people as villains or heroes. I had come to my opinions the hard way—through experience—and refused even to listen to anyone whose experience pointed in a different direction. I was, in short, repeating on a small scale the same pattern that the whole Pentecostal movement was repeating on a large scale.
“Then, in one instant, all that was changed.”
It was late at night and David was hurrying from one appointment to another in a hilly region of Tennessee. A friend, Paul Walker, had offered to drive him in the interest of time. The night was dark and rainy; clouds of fog hid the road. Conversation had almost ceased because of the late hour and the difficult driving. Suddenly Walker peered intently through the streaming windshield. David remembers him saying, “There’s supposed to be a white bridge . . .” but he never finished his sentence. Out of the fog suddenly loomed the hulk of a locomotive, stopped without lights, directly across the highway.
Walker tried to brake his car, but the road was slick and the automobile skidded into the train.
Paul Walker was hurt only slightly. But David’s head smashed through the windshield. He was jerked back through the glass, cutting himself both going and coming. His left leg was broken near the knee. His back was twisted, his shoulder cut.
Twelve hours later, David regained consciousness. His leg was in traction. His face—held together by thirty-seven stitches—was bandaged so tightly that he could not see. Yet something very strange was going on.
“When I came to,” David remembers, “I felt as if I were waking from a good sleep. The doctor asked me:
“‘How are you, Preacher?’
“‘Just fine,’ I told him.
“The doctor laughed, but I meant it.”
After David had been in the hospital for a week, other doctors came to ask questions. They were mystified. David didn’t have a temperature. He ate normally. He slept normally without drugs. “You should be getting a reaction by now,” one of the doctors said. “You should at least show a fever. You’re an awfully sick man.”
“Oh, but Doctor,” David replied, “that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not sick. I’m only broken.”
Although for different reasons, David was as puzzled about his condition as the doctors were. He began to wonder if there could be some hidden, God-given purpose behind the accident. The circumstances were peculiarly void of harm. Paul Walker had not been seriously hurt; the automobile had been adequately covered by insurance; even the hospital bills were settled by the railroad. And David did not feel the slightest pain.
“The only real effect of the accident,” says David, “was to slow down my bullheaded, steamroller approach to the Paris conference. All of a sudden I had to let some of the arrangements out of my own hands. I had to ask for help, both from other people and from God.”
Over the next weeks, lying in his bed in the hospital, David wrote literally thousands of letters by dictating into a machine. Without deliberately trying, he noticed a subtle change in the tone of his letters, from one stoutly holding a position, to one that was “listening,” as it were, for God’s position, even when it meant listening to men who stood against him.
“The conference that followed was a success, I suppose,” says David. “But I do not think that was the main result of the accident. I found that I had gone through a tempering process. I was simply not the same man. I was now patient, kinder, softer spoken, whereas at the first World Conference I’d been hasty and loud and determined. The accident seemed to have molded me to be the man God needed for a special situation.”
David thought, at first, that the conference itself was the special situation. And the conference did indeed have a different spirit. But it was what happened afterward that intrigued David. As the years passed he began to think more and more often about a group of people he had once summarily dismissed: those liberal churchmen who in his opinion were taking the heart out of the Gospel. Why should they keep coming into his thoughts: surely God didn’t intend him to become involved with the liberals. “Why, I’d never get past their secretaries,” he argued. “I’d get nothing but cold shoulder, and I don’t want to live on cold shoulder.”
David has a habit of talking aloud this way when he prays. At its best he approaches a kind of dialogue with God, when guidance comes to him as a kind of interiorized voice. David has learned over the years to pay close attention to this voice. Now it came to him clearly, using the words of an old hymn. “Trust and obey.” Those seemed to be his orders.
The strange thing was that the trust seemed somehow concerned with those walls he and his fellow Pentecostals had built in an effort to defend the integrity of the Gospel. “Trust Me,” God seemed to be saying. “Let the walls down. Hold out the hand of friendship to any who will take it.” The impression was so clear that David could not ignore it. He would at least make the experiment. He would try going to the very headquarters of the most liberal, the most intellectual, the most ecumenically minded of modernists. To David, this group was not hard to name: it would be the World Council of Churches.
“All right, Lord, if you say so,” said David, picking up the telephone to call his travel agent for a ticket to New York. He was in Dallas. World Council headquarters were in New York. “I’ll go to the World Council next Monday morning and just see what happens.”
Immediately the inner voice spoke. “No, do not go on Monday. Ask for reservations on Thursday so that you can be in the office of the World Council on Friday.”
David thought a bit, then put down the phone. “Wait a minute now; here is something strange.” He thought it over a little longer. “Why should I go there at the end of the week rather than Monday when everyone’s fresh?”
“On Monday nobody will be in the office.”
David was still confused, but he went ahead and booked a flight for Thursday night. On Friday morning he walked into the offices of the Council in New York. He had made no appointments at all. He knew hardly any names of the men there. He did not know what he was supposed to say if he got to see them.
But in he went.
The young lady at the reception desk looked up. David explained who he was and then, “Is–ah–Dr. Carpenter free?” he ventured, bringing up one of the few names he did know.
“No, I’m sorry, he isn’t.”
“Well, then,” said David, “Dr. Barnes?”
“Sorry.”
“Is there anyone at all in the office I could see?”
“No, sir, none at all.”
Well, there it was. It was the cold shoulder he’d expected all along. What wild notion had seized him, anyhow, to make him think it might be different? The word “Pentecostal” had always slammed doors in some circles, above all—
“They’re all in conference just now,” the receptionist continued. “But they should be through pretty soon, and then I imagine you can see whomever you’d like to.” She glanced at the calendar on her desk and laughed. “This is the first day all week anyone’s been here. I’ve been turning people away in droves. But they all came in for the meeting this morning, so you’re in luck.”
David sat down, feeling a little better about his guidance. He saw several people at the World Council that Friday, and they not only listened, they made notes as he talked, they picked up phones and read the notes to others, they paid attention.
It was the beginning. Ultimately, the tempering process of the accident propelled David through many strange new doors. He found himself being introduced to the very men he had spent a lifetime avoiding. One theologian would call another and introduce him. He was shunted from college to university to seminary.
“Which ones?” I asked.
“Well, let’s see.” He drew a well-worn appointment book from his pocket. “Here were a few dates last fall. October 27 I was at the Congregationalists’ seminary in Myerstown, Pennsylvania. The next day, October 28, I was invited to speak at Yale University School of Divinity. And on October 30 and 31, I was with professors from Harvard, Yale, Union, Drew and Chicago at a special retreat in Greenwich, Connecticut. Then on November 2, I was at Princeton Theological. November 5 I went to Union Seminary in New York. . . .”
David put his datebook back in his pocket. “You know,” he said, “something very peculiar was happening. I really enjoyed meeting those professors and scholars and churchmen. I, who haven’t even finished the second year of college. I thought being around people like that would make me self-conscious, frightened lest I show my ignorance. But to my surprise, I found myself relaxed and at ease. I never wrote out my lectures. I didn’t even use notes. I simply made myself an instrument that the Spirit could use if He chose. And the interesting thing is that I was given power of expression I do not normally possess.”
At Seabury House, headquarters of the Episcopal church, David was asked the touchiest question of all—the one that in the past had led to more ill-will toward the Pentecostals than any other. He’d been talking to a group of clergymen for thirty minutes or so about the Pentecostal experience when one of the priests stood up suddenly and said with some asperity, “Mr. du Plessis, are you telling us that you Pentecostals have the truth, and we other churches do not?”
David admits he prayed fast. “No,” he said. “That is not what I mean.” He cast about for a way to express the difference Pentecostals feel exists between their church and others—a feeling so often misunderstood—and suddenly he found himself thinking about an appliance he and his wife had bought when they moved to their Dallas home.
“We both have the truth,” he said. “You know, when my wife and I moved to America we bought a marvelous device called a Deepfreeze, and there we keep some rather fine Texas beef.
“Now, my wife can take one of those steaks out and lay it, frozen solid, on the table. It’s steak, all right, no question of that. You and I can sit around and analyze it: we can discuss its lineage, its age, what part of the steer it comes from. We can weigh it and list its nutritive values.
“But if my wife puts that steak on the fire, something different begins to happen. My little boy smells it from way out in the yard and comes shouting: ‘Gee, Mom, that smells good! I want some!’
“Gentlemen,” said David, “that is the difference between our ways of handling the same truth. You have yours on ice; we have ours on fire.”
David was with us for twenty-four hours and left six months’ worth of work behind him: I had filled page after page of a notebook with names and addresses of people not in the Pentecostal churches but in the denominations—Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians—who had had the baptism.
I could see that it was going to be a mammoth job contacting all these people. Just the mechanics of writing each one, for instance, took me three weeks. Then as replies began to come in, there was the task of setting up interviews. Some I traveled to see; others had plans to be in New York themselves within the year. Some I interviewed over the telephone; some I got to know through correspondence. And with a few, I experimented with a new technique: a conversation by tape recorder where I explained the nature of the book and asked questions on one side of a tape and they talked to me on the other.
Two of the people whom I got to know by telephone were Charles and Helen Maurice from Richmond, Virginia. As soon as he received my letter, Charles put in a long-distance call and, while I wondered guiltily what it was costing him, answered the entire list of questions I had asked. They were strangely reassuring people to know, perhaps because they were a suburban family with problems much like our own who happened, incidentally, to be very enthusiastic about the baptism in the Holy Spirit.
“They have problems with their lawn,” I told Tib.
Either Charles or his wife called frequently after that, with a fine disregard for end-of-the-month bills, just to inquire how the book was coming or to offer me additional leads to tongues-speaking people whose names they thought I might not have.
Charles had a law office in Richmond, he told me, and was an assistant district attorney for the city. He and Helen were both so full of quiet good humor and the joy of living that I found myself wanting to meet them in person, and said so.
Charles thought for a moment. “Have you ever heard of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International?” he said.
“Say it again, slower.”
“The FGBMFI, for short. It’s a group of business and professional people from all denominations who’ve had or are seeking the baptism in the Holy Spirit and get together several times a year to share experiences.”
The FGBMFI was having its annual convention in Atlantic City at the end of November, Charles said, and he and Helen were going to be there. If Tib and I could come, it would be a chance to meet one another.
“It’s lively,” he cautioned me. “But if you’ll come with an open mind, you’ll never be the same.”
“Sure,” I said, little suspecting what I was agreeing to. “Put us down and we’ll see you there.”
Thus casually the date was made. November 30, 1960.
The thing that made this research into tongues-speaking among members of conventional churches difficult was the element of secrecy that surrounded it. There were exceptions, like the Maurices, but for the most part, non-Pentecostal people who spoke in tongues guarded the fact like an atomic formula. Typical of the replies to my letter in early 1960 was this one from a minister in a little town in the Midwest:
I would be most happy to share with you any of my experiences that would further the work of the Kingdom as the Holy Spirit directs. At present however since there is only one other parsonage family with whom I am in contact concerning the Holy Spirit and His manifestations, I must request that my name not be used.
Again and again during the first few months of that year, I would finish an interview with a Presbyterian, Baptist or Methodist who had had the baptism, only to have him say, “Now, you understand that this is all off the record.”
Here and there, an article would appear on the subject, but never very personal, never naming names. The Episcopalian journal, Living Church, for example, ran an editorial on July 17, 1960, that said, in part:
Speaking in tongues is no longer a phenomenon of some odd sect across the street. It is in our midst, and it is being practiced by clergy and laity who have stature and good reputation in the Church. Its widespread introduction would jar against our esthetic sense and some of our most strongly entrenched preconceptions. But we know that we are members of a Church which definitely needs jarring—if God had chosen this time to dynamite what Bishop Sterling of Montana has called “Episcopalian respectabilianism” we know of no more terrifyingly effective explosive.
And then the explosive went off. An event occurred that suddenly thrust tongues into the headlines and ripped the curtain of secrecy away. It happened in a large Episcopal church in Van Nuys, California.
Father Dennis Bennett was a successful man. Born in London, educated at the University of Chicago and Chicago Theological Seminary, Father Bennett took over struggling St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys in 1953. Under his leadership the church grew steadily until it had a membership of 2,600 and a staff of four clergymen.
But there was something missing, Father Bennett felt, in his own personal religious life. When he was eleven years old, he had had a conversion experience that had left him with a memory of warmth and love he had rarely been able to approach again.
Then, one day in the summer of 1959, Father Bennett received a call from a fellow priest, Frank Maguire, of Monterey Park, California. Father Maguire had become quite puzzled by events that were taking place in his church: two of his parishioners—recently dropped from the church’s lists as inactive—had reappeared on the scene and were showing remarkable signs of an extremely vigorous faith.
Father Maguire was impressed. Nevertheless, he felt vaguely uneasy about certain phrases that kept coming into their conversation, such as “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and “speaking in tongues.”
“I think these people have some kind of extra dividend that they are overemphasizing,” Frank Maguire told Dennis Bennett. “But I’d like you to come visit them with me and help me evaluate what’s going on.” Thus began a three-month-long investigation of the experience by the two priests. By mid-November 1959, both men were being drawn toward the experience themselves.
“There’s only one thing,” said Father Bennett. “I’d like the baptism without the tongues.”
“Sorry, Father,” he was told, “but the tongues come with the package. This is how it happened to us, and we don’t know of any other way.”
Dennis Bennett was prayed for and received the baptism on November 14, and Frank Maguire on November 17.
As people in Bennett’s church asked him about a change they noticed in him, he told them what had happened. Over a period of months some seventy members of his parish asked for and received the baptism. They were key people in the church: the junior warden, the president of the women’s guild, the curate. And those who had been so baptized were enthusiastic about the experience.
Others, however, felt differently. Of the four priests in the parish, two had now received the baptism and two had not. The two who had not were deeply opposed to the idea and soon had a following of others who felt the same. A serious rift was being created in the church, and Father Bennett saw that something would have to be done. On April 3, 1960, Father Bennett preached a sermon on his experience. So that there would be no part of the church “out of the know,” he told the whole story, including the fact that he had spoken in a language that he could not understand. This was too much for many. One of the associate priests in the middle of the service took off his vestments and announced that under the circumstances he had no choice but to resign. After the service the church treasurer suggested to Father Bennett that it might be more appropriate for him to resign. He did.
Newspapers carried the story the next day. The wire services picked it up. Overnight the story swept the country: speaking in tongues had appeared in a decent, ordinary church and had caused strife, division and dissension. Time carried the story. So did Newsweek.
My first reaction was that this confirmed, in 1960, what the history of the Pentecostals had already made me suspect. Tongues made people fight. Bishop Francis Eric Bloy of Los Angeles issued a pastoral letter banning the use of tongues under church auspices. Father Bennett was shunted off to Seattle, where he was put in charge of a tiny mission church. It looked to me like a pretty clear effort to get a troublemaker out of the way. I wrote Father Bennett at his new address, told him about the book I was writing and asked for his version of what had happened at Van Nuys.
Back came a reply, written without the aid of a secretary. “Please excuse typing errors,” he began, “I am doing this myself, and I am a very poor and erratic typist!” I scanned the letter quickly, expecting to find in it the clue to the personality that had caused strife, division and dissension in Van Nuys. I found none. Father Bennett made only passing reference to Van Nuys: his whole attention was on the job to be done in Seattle.
The response of the Episcopal Church in this area to my witness re the Holy Spirit and Tongues has been tremendous, and I have been kept busy night and day. Not less thrilling has been the coming back to life of the little St. Luke’s Church which I took over last July. Fifty now have the Baptism in the Holy Spirit in this little Mission. Some fourteen Priests of this Diocese have now received the Gift of Tongues. So Praise the Lord!
Nowhere—not once—in the long correspondence that developed between me and Father Bennett did he complain about any ill-treatment he had received, nor lash out at people who disagreed with him. Much later I met him in New York and found the same true of him in person. He was quiet and composed in spite of an aura about him of immense energy, a man so filled with the significance of today that he had no time to rehash the events of yesterday. In his only reference to past events, he said once:
I have, of course, tried to figure out just why we at Van Nuys were singled out for all this sensational publicity when hundreds of other churches across the country are having the Baptism appear in their midst with no trouble at all.
The only conclusion I have reached is that God wanted people to speak up about their experience with the Holy Spirit. We’d all been pretty quiet before Van Nuys. Now, I think, people are going to begin to share their stories.
It was true. Suddenly I could scarcely keep up with the flood of mail from people who wanted to tell me their experiences and signed their names to them. They wrote from everywhere. The entire ministerial staff of a sedate Presbyterian church in suburban New Jersey received the baptism. Eighty-five percent of the membership of a Baptist church in the same state received the baptism. In Wheaton, Illinois, members of Trinity Episcopal Church received the baptism.
Students at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, UCLA, Stanford, Wheaton, began to hold prayer meetings where the baptism was sought and received. At Yale, for example, twenty men including a faculty member, five deacons of the university chapel, a Phi Beta Kappa and a Summa Cum Laude graduate student received the baptism and began to practice Spirit-filled prayer.
My research had indicated that in the early days the Pentecostal movement tended to draw most heavily on semi-educated or unskilled people. Now, just glancing over a part of my correspondence file, I noted this interesting breakdown of occupations:
mathematician
psychiatrist
doctor
police captain
dentist
real estate agent
housewife
minister
dairyman
tool and die manufacturer
FBI agent
registered nurse
automobile agency owner
psychologist
Hollywood photographer
actor
airplane manufacturer’s wife
engineer
professor
salesman
attorney
porter
State Department official
oil magnate
Jewish rabbi
restaurateur
surveyor
biologist
headmaster
More and more church leaders were coming out with statements on the Pentecostal movement within their own denominations:
Overseas, the Church of England was taking notice too:
With the election of Pope John to the papacy, a new emphasis on Pentecost began to be evident with the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John constantly referred to the Vatican Council as a new Pentecost. And by the term he meant a Pentecost with the same charismatic manifestations of the Spirit long displayed in the Pentecostal churches, including speaking in tongues. The Catholic Messenger, discussing news coming out of the Council in 1963, defined this word “charism” that was popping up with such increased frequency in Catholic circles:
So it looks like we’ll have to add charism to our vocabulary, because the news out of Rome right now is that it’s one of the biggest stories of the Council.
Charism comes from a Greek word, meaning literally a gift of love. As used by theologians, it describes a special talent freely bestowed by the Holy Spirit on an individual for the benefit of others rather than for his personal benefit. . . . In this vein, Cardinal Suenens of Belgium told his fellow Fathers that we must today recognize the existence of charisms for a balanced view of the Church, seeing them not as accidental additions, but as part of its nature.
Father Daniel J. O’Hanlon, professor of theology at Alma College, Los Gatos, California, wrote an article for America, the national Catholic weekly, in which he said:
Few Catholics regard Pentecostals with more than amusement, if they take notice of their existence at all. Even most Protestants keep their distance from these unconventional Christians and find it difficult to say anything good about them. Nevertheless, the rapid growth of the Pentecostal movement all over the world and the extraordinary appeal it has for the kind of people to whom our Lord especially addressed himself, the poor and dispossessed, should warn us to put aside our squeamish bourgeois prejudices and take a long, hard look at it.
How are Catholics to get this look? Father O’Hanlon makes a suggestion unusual in his church.
The best, if not the only, way of getting to know what the Pentecostals are like is to visit their services, even though for most Catholics this means crossing over to visit a strange new world. Those who do come to know them at first hand will find much to admire and possibly even a few things to imitate.
The reports on my desk pile up.
News comes that an Episcopal bishop, the Rt. Rev. Chandler W. Sterling, has received the baptism. Students at Oregon State University are holding Spirit-filled prayer meetings. So are members of Holy Innocents’ Parish, Corte Madera, California. Ivan S. Gamble, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, tells his congregation that he has received the Holy Spirit and that his life has been transformed. David du Plessis accepts an invitation to preach from the pulpit of the Episcopal Cathedral in Detroit.
Dr. John Peters, Methodist minister and president of World Neighbors, receives the baptism when a Baptist minister prays for him. Every Saturday a Spirit-filled prayer group meets in a room at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia. The Pentecostal experience comes to Zion Lutheran Church, Glendive, Montana, and to Trinity Lutheran Church, San Pedro, California. The editor of the American Baptist Convention publication, Frontier, is filled with the Spirit. The Lutheran Standard and the Christian Advocate, official publications of the Lutheran and Methodist churches, cover the news of the Pentecostal movement within their denominations; in tone the articles are cautious, but not hostile. The experience comes to the Casa Linda Methodist Church in the big city of Dallas, Texas, and to the Episcopal Church of the Advent in little Alice, Texas. It comes to Presbyterians of coal-region towns, like Alpine, Tennessee, and of the inner city, like the Hillside Presbyterian Church of Jamaica, Long Island, New York.
On and on. The tide swells. After some sixty-five years, the Pentecostal revolution is at the gates.