10 years ago I was singing God’s praises at Ashburnham Retreat Centre in Southern England. I was with around 70 charismatic church leaders from the HTB network associated with Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), the home of the Alpha Course. 

The visiting Vineyard USA speaker had brought a ministry support person with him who was asked to come and give prophetic words to the gathering. I was new, unknown in the network and sitting at the back. But when he singled me out and said God would “greatly use my mind for the network” my ears pricked up because I had just signed up to do the DThM (Doctorate in Theology in Ministry) at Durham University, where I was hoping to do something useful that might help keep leaders going in the long-run. 

It was also ironic. Ironic, because I was hoping to look at the revivalist George Whitefield (1714-1770) as a model for such ministry, but I had not yet realised that Whitefield exhausted his ministry flame in his mid-50s. Rather than keep going for the long run Whitefield fulfilled his ambition to ‘wear out not rust out’ in 1770. He had been preaching up to 40 hours a week when he died and had little non-public life. He ‘went to glory’ a full thirty two years younger than his fellow revivalist and contemporary John Wesley would in 1791.

Despite this clear lack of pedigree in my thinking I started the degree in 2014, which I found harder than I had expected. I’d been ordained for 10 years and involved in growing churches in my training post (curacy), research and development post (pioneer minister), advisory post (for a diocese on church plants/fresh expressions) and early days of my first incumbency (vicar). I had gotten used to being my own worst critic, as others were generally kind enough not to tell me all my flaws. So to submit work again as a student and get a mark out of 100 was a great leveler for me.

One introductory course was particularly helpful and gave me the opportunity to do some field work into the contemporary charismatic church to be written up as a 5000 word essay – part of a process of honing our skills.

I sought out three pairs of well-known church planters from the HTB network and interviewed them. The first pair were pioneer planters in the early 1980s, another pair planted in the 1990/2000s, and finally a younger pair of contemporaries whose relatively new churches had exploded into 500+ people (which in UK church terms is massive). I was looking for what sustained them in ministry but I chanced upon a question that opened up an avalanche of work. This became central to my final thesis.  

How would you define success in church planting?
a) To what extent has success galvanised your work?
b) When (if) you have had to, how do you cope with failure? 

Their answers ranged from the honest, to the cathartic, to the harrowing. 

It got me thinking how much the movement I was enjoying being part of was fuelled by a need to succeed. 

It got me thinking where that need to succeed may have come from, where that need to succeed could be good and godly, and where that need might massively undermine leaders. 

How could they/we keep going if they couldn’t keep pace with the success narrative?

So with two years and a total of 35,000 words under my belt, I began the original research phase of the DThM course using the HTB network as a window into the wider world of contemporary charismatic christianity. 

It was a four year journey through a personal spiritual wilderness that has taken me seven years to complete. I’ve come out of it with a sense of God speaking to the contemporary charismatic church on some key issues and this summer have a strong conviction to try and write these out in a shorter format than a thesis allows. 

A year into that project two key things happened:

Firstly, I was invited into the leadership of the New Wine England movement, with responsibilities across about seven dioceses in the South-East and a chance to observe and sometimes contribute to national decision making. 

The second was a need to pause. The four year project of research from afar was a lonelier task than the structured first two years of long essay writing, and I was back from sabbatical with three church buildings, a lively staff team and about 16,000 people coming though our Meeting Place project at Christ Church W4 every year. 

I just needed a break. 

This proved to be the making of my research as Sandy Millar kindly set me up to revisit his predecessor as vicar of HTB, John Collins, and my 2017-2018 year was punctuated by regular trips to visit a man who had been a key person from the beginning of the renewal movement in the Anglican church in England in the early 1960s right up to when I was speaking to him. 

Collins had been senior curate at All Souls Langham Place when it exploded into life in the 1950s, at St Mark’s Gillingham as vicar firstly seeing rapid church growth with David Watson and David MacInnes as his curates, and then after they had left, stewarding a mini-revival in 1963, that left him persona non grata with Anglican Evangelicals and Bishops alike. He eventually moved to rural Dorset and saw another explosion of spiritual life at Canford parish leading to the planting of the lantern and John and Eli Mumford (later of Vineyard UK) coming into charismatic christianity. His HTB story will be told later, but in brief he was head hunted back to London, led an exceptional team, and had the exceptional good sense to know when to get out of the way and hand on to Sandy Millar. Millar was yet another outstanding Christian leader that John Collins was only too happy to release. After leaving HTB in 1989 Collins then continued to mentor people, and he started each day with an hour and a half devotions with a Greek New Testament and a commentary right into his 90s. He finally went to glory in late 2022. 

I had first visited John Collins in my sabbatical back in 2015 when I had sensed God say ‘I want you to me more like John Collins’ as I was sorting out my overgrown vicarage garden. The next day I chanced upon his old University friend Professor Sir Eldryd Parry and his wife Helen at the early service of St Paul’s Hammersmith, a HTB church plant near us that I was visiting. Learning they had been at HTB I asked if they knew John and before long I became their chauffeur for an overdue visit to their dear friend. 

Once we arrived I was struck by their incredible love for each other, their humility and their humour. I also learnt a lot quickly. One key thing was the connection back to All Souls Langham Place, and John Stott who Collins had served 1951-1957 as ‘senior curate’ during the rapid growth phase of the church that became London’ s ‘evangelical cathedral’. (Stott, I was told, had turned down about 17 bishop jobs, including one as Bishop of Winchester). 

This deep love was wonderful to see. It was evident again when I met with John at David and Clare MacInnes’ house with teams of his fellow ministers from Canford and St Mark’s Gillingham who came to share their stories, and when I spoke to his curates and key lay ministers from HTB. It was a love grounded in years of praying and reading the bible together, often on a daily basis, and by shared experience and respect for one another. 

So I already had a window into what the charismatic movement had been in the 1960s, 70s and 80s when the Wimber years fanned into flame gifts already given and added many more. Then in 2020 I was invited to apply for a role as National Director of SOMA UK, which when formed had been sometimes known as ‘Sending Our Michael Abroad’ after it’s founder Michael Harper, another one of John Stott’s curates, who had embraced renewal in the 1960s and founded the all important Fountain Trust. 

SOMA is the New Testament Greek word for ‘body’, and really stands for ‘Sharing of Ministry Abroad’. It has a particular call to ‘join the Holy Spirit tending to the nervous system of the body of Christ’. It came out of a 1978 pre-lambeth conference gathering of international charismatic/renewed bishops, and owed much to men like Michael Harper, David Pytches and David Watson. But it has a source of power beyond the celebrity. 

As you review the SOMA minutes of the pre-meetings to the pre-meetings you realise that more than half of their planning time was prayer together. It was a movement grounded in intercession. Small wonder that the Spirit broke out in the run up to that Lambeth Conference. Small wonder that Global Majority bishops found their voice a week later to steer Anglicanism at what could have been one of its rockiest points. 

A year after being recruited I began as National Director. As Covid restrictions eased I got to travel and hear some of the fruit around the world of early 1960s-1980s renewal. The deliverances, the healings, and then the acceleration that came with Wimber. I pieced that together with my own childhood experiences of the Spirit (having been brought up initially in a revivalist sect called the North Fellowships) and then teenage conversion in Romania at the height of the Toronto Blessing era (1995), and the passion that I came back with, and took up again a year later when I made it to University still just about spiritually intact. I’ve mapped out underground rivers of spiritual life that still flow under this nation. Like many others, I’ve longed for them to burst to the surface again. 

Early renewal cost John and Diana Collins ‘preferment’ (promotion) and possibility.

In 2023 charismatic Christianity (renewal) has become an accepted norm. 

It is a sanitized version with little challenge to power. 

It is in power. 

Church members can access a base level of charismatic experience before conversion (and sometimes instead of conversion) and those in power use charismatic jargon to justify all kinds of developments. What is generally lacking is actual spiritual power. 

We see that when we take our ‘apostolic’ SOMA teams abroad and learn from our contacts around the world. For years teams have been going out saying they learnt more than they gave. Now we are going out almost in desperation, praying that we can bring back olive branches of hope to the church in the UK. 

And we do. 

The demons flee. 

The sick are healed. 

The teams are accelerated in their spiritual life. 

SOMA is necessary because the nervous system of the body of Christ has a purpose. It wakes up the sleeping parts of the body when there is pain elsewhere. We see that also through the work of all sorts of bigger charities like IJM and Open Doors. When people hear of the hurt in the world and the persecution the church faces they arise from their slumber, that is, unless they are comatose by creature comforts. 

So this little book comes from this experience and these stories. New Wine, HTB, and SOMA, our local church, my reading on Wesley, Whitefield, Wimber and Stott, running seminars and teaching around the country and nation. It’s not much but it may be a short start. 

There are pairs of chapters on themes such as remembering our story, the problems of success, minding the gap that has emerged between our private and public theology, using history and the world-wide church as mirrors to our movement, our need for spiritual power, worship as warfare not just therapy, and a pair of prophetic chapters on the ‘swamp’ that comes from a stagnant river and the ‘meat market’ approach to consumer christianity where the consumer can easily become the consumed. 

As I write I am acutely aware that the past 12 months have been some of the worst and most horrific for charismatic christianity in the UK I can remember. 

This is not because of persecution or opposition from without. 

In fact we are in a time of unprecedented apparent favor within denominations and other groupings, with the central Church of England financing millions of pounds a year of culturally charismatic initiatives. 

The tragedies of this year have been the exposing of some of our champions as being less than they ought to be. 

Whether that is those in ecclesiastical power bending their knee to hidden spiritual powers, moral failings around abuse/power of headline platform speakers from our own ranks compounding those previously disclosed from partner agencies, or a spirit of timidity, exhaustion or fear of failure that makes leaders into voluntarily caged birds when we need the generals to rise up it has been a shocking year for the charismatic church. 

Despite this a genuinely humble awakening among Gen-Z students in Ashbury, Kentucky has stirred many hearts. Could it be that churches, intercessors and leaders who have become charismatic in name only now hear the call to holiness and prayer and help awaken us once again? 

Next Post: Chapter One: The Baby In the Bathwater: Looks at our story so far, the cost and the prize of the Charismatic Movement over the past 65 years. [coming soon].