Dennis Bennett Sparks the Charismatic Movement at St. Mark's, Van Nuys

Two years after David Yonggi Cho and Choi Ja-shil founded Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul in 1958, already recorded here, and twenty nine years before the World Pentecostal Assemblies of God Fellowship formed in Indianapolis in 1989, also recorded here, Pentecostal spiritual experience reached decisively beyond the classical Pentecostal denominations that had carried it for half a century. On 3 April 1960, Dennis Bennett, rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, announced to his roughly twenty six hundred member congregation that he had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues, an experience until then associated almost entirely with the Pentecostal churches the Azusa Street revival had produced. Rather than divide his parish, Bennett resigned and relocated to St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington; national coverage in Newsweek and Time carried word of an Episcopal priest speaking in tongues to a wide public. Bennett and his wife Rita went on to found the Christian Renewal Association and, in 1973, what became Episcopal Renewal Ministries, carrying charismatic spirituality across the Anglican Communion and into other mainline Protestant and eventually Catholic churches for two decades. Vinson Synan's academic history of Pentecostal and charismatic renewal names Bennett's 1960 announcement as the event historians mark as the beginning of the charismatic movement, the spread of Pentecostal spiritual gifts into churches with no institutional connection to Pentecostal denominations. The Charismatic Movement already stands on this map in its own right; this entry marks the specific dated event historians point to as its beginning.