Toronto- Blessing or Curse?
The title suggests how a move of God’s Spirit in a Church near Toronto airport in the mid 1990’s became a hot button issue for Christians and thirty years later, still divides opinion. Although today, perspectives are more measured.
At the time, reactions to and concerns about what was going on, not only influenced the global Church, but were significant enough for John Wimber, who pioneered the Vineyard group of Churches to which Toronto Vineyard belonged, to remove the Airport fellowship, led by John Arnott, from the wider Vineyard movement.
Most of its more eye-catching features had already appeared in 20th century Christianity but found new expressions through the Toronto Blessing (TB).
Many churches from all denominations across the UK, including Lansdowne were impacted. Although among us, it was a relatively minor, light touch.
So it happened that from January 1994, Christians flew into the Airport Vineyard from all directions, hoping to “Catch the Fire”. That phrase became the brand name for a group of Churches who trace their source to that era, including one here in Bournemouth. They will mark their tenth anniversary soon having recently moved into and renovated a former Anglican building (St Stephen’s Hall) in the town centre, St Stephen’s Way.
All of these groups wanted to sustain the emphasis of the ministry and mission of the founding fathers of Toronto Airport Vineyard, among whom were Randy Clarke, John Arnott and Guy Chevreau.
In the early months of the initial break out, the Airport Vineyard became a centre for a kind of Christian tourism. For some it carried more the significance of a pilgrimage than a window-shopping trip. People travelled, some genuinely drawn to what was happening, others perhaps were curious, yet others cynical.
In the same way that the “revival” in Asbury, a US College Campus became the focus of intense media coverage, last year, so back then Toronto captured the Christian and public imagination. Although fascination about TB lasted for a considerably longer time than Asbury and was more immediately significant.
As people brought the fire back to the UK, leaders of other Christian Streams and movements (Terry Virgo, New Frontiers International; Roger Forster, Icthus; Nicky Gumbel, HTB; Clive Calver, EA) guided debate on the issues which were quickly polarising opinion. At stake was the unity and identity of evangelical charismatics in particular.
The church groupings of these key influencers were, to a greater or lesser extent shaped and influenced by manifestations of the movement, including some of the more unusual and controversial signs and wonders- “holy laughter”, “falling under the power”, “animal noises”.
Inevitably these more dramatic features, described by someone at the time as “ecstasy without drugs”, were picked up by the secular press. In fact, it was the religious commentator of the Times, Ruth Gledhill, who first coined the term, the Toronto Blessing. As news gathered traction that hundreds of posh, English worshippers in Knightsbridge were lying on the floor and behaving as if drunk and disorderly, the press made sensational headlines out of it.
Within two years, thousands of congregations across the UK had apparently embraced this move of God. However not everyone welcomed the movement. It was regarded by some as at best a distraction from the primary mission of the Church and at a worst a satanic deception.
John Arnot, writing an article in December 1999, began by saying, “People ask me what led to the outpouring of the Spirit known as the "Toronto Blessing." They want to know why Toronto, and why our church. I'd like to know too. Obviously it's a sovereign work of God. We take no credit for this and don't deserve it in any way.“
Others were more sceptical. Such as Andrew Strom in his introduction to an article - The Toronto Controversy- disturbing new facts from history.
“Why does this movement seem literally identical to many counterfeit movements which have destroyed genuine Revivals down through church history? And why are the manifestations seemingly identical to the Chinese occultic 'Qigong' movement, as well as Franz Mesmer's occultic healing practice and the manifestations found throughout the "Kundalini" cults of Rajneesh, Ramakrishna, etc? Why are such manifestations found throughout the New Age movement worldwide, and yet nowhere in the Bible?”
Like so much else in our contemporary world, where the Toronto Blessing is concerned, it’s relatively easy to choose an echo chamber of opinion that inclines to the view you already hold about it and remain deaf to other points of view.
But Christians who have the Word of God and the mind of the Spirit can surely do better than that! So, in this year, when we have made Revival a major theme of our Church life, how do we apply spiritual discernment to the Toronto Blessing movement? The Apostle John gives this directive in chapter 4 of his first letter.
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.“
The Three waves of the global Pentecostal movement.
A claimed move of the Spirit of God always has a context and backstory. To understand where the Toronto Blessing came from, we need to plot it as part of what is known as the “third wave” of 20th Century charismatic Christianity.
Many would identify the first wave as beginning in Asuza Street, downtown Los Angeles, in 1906.
William Seymour, an African American preacher, influenced by the teaching of the Kansas Bible School’s Charles Fox Parnham, convened the Apostolic Faith Mission. For over three years he conducted three services a day, seven days a week. Thousands of seekers received a baptism of tongues speaking. Word spread and that was to trigger the development of Pentecostalism.
In its various subsequent forms and faces, Pentecostalism is, arguably, Christianity’s driving and majority non-Catholic force. Even within the Roman Church, expressions of such charismatic Christianity flourish.
Part of the reason why Azuza Street was so influential is similar to the way in which the impact of the Toronto Blessing’s spread. There were shared relationships and networks between William Seymour and leaders of the “higher life“ teaching of the Keswick Holiness, such as Jesse Penn Lewis. She was also an influencer of Evan Roberts in the Welsh Revival. These connections meant that within a decade the Pentecostal movement birthed church expressions such as the Apostolic Church and Elim.
Even much later in the 20th Century, the Bethel and Hillsong networks trace elements of their DNA back to the Azuza Street event. Those two global “brands”, along with others like HTB, were part of the Second and Third Waves. Pentecostal-charismatic renewal emphases were either absorbed into mainline churches or became points of departure for the creation of new denominations.
In the UK during the 1960’s and 70’s, the second wave really began to build momentum. Anglican and Baptist denominations in particular came into a new season of spiritual life as both congregational worship and individual spirituality took on the flavours and colours of the second wave of the Spirit.
But this soon morphed into and was followed by the Third Wave. The timelines and distinctives between these two waves overlapped and remain blurred.
But what became clear was the way in which second and third wave churches and church expressions like New Frontiers, New Wine, Holy Trinity Brompton, Vineyard, Catch the Fire, even Hill Song and Bethel, while borrowing extensively from first wave Pentecostalism, did not base their entire movement on the doctrine of “baptism in the Spirit and tongues speaking”. This was regarded by classic Pentecostals, as the definitive sign and necessary second work of God’s Spirit after conversion for every believer in Christ.
Some third wave churches still maintained their older, distinctive traditions and disciplines and didn’t abandon ship. Those new, separate, non-denominational groupings which evolved, like New Frontiers, placed their emphasis on different aspects of Christian spirituality, while still embracing many of the more ecstatic, Pentecostal manifestations.
The Vineyard and John Wimber were a Third Wave expression and it was from there Toronto emerged. Wimber, just as other network leaders, emphasised not one baptism of the Spirit experience but multiple fillings of the Spirit, post conversion. He tended to place the focus on what became known as “signs and wonders”, such as healing and deliverance and so the Vineyard style meetings of the 1980’s, holy laughter, trembling, weeping and falling over were present.
Many of those features can be found in church settings going back centuries before. The more obvious examples are the Shakers of the 18th Century, some of the unusual signs of the Great Awakening, again in 18th Century US but also the UK, and the “revival camp meetings“ of 19th Century America.
So as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, with Third Wave Pentecostalism, right up to the present day, there is nothing new under the sun!
Nonetheless, in the 1990’s a number of the pastor/leaders in the Vineyard movement began seeking a fresh “anointing“. Among them John Arnott.
He had been drawn previously to the ministry of the healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman and the Israeli-born preacher, Benny Hinn. He and his friends went to visit the Argentinian revival centred in the Buenos Aires in 1993. Another Vineyard leader, Randy Clark, came under the influence of Rodney Howard-Browne. The latter, a classic Pentecostal, had himself been influenced by Word of Faith prosperity gospel ministries. It was during one of Howard-Browne’s meetings that Clark ended up on the floor laughing hysterically.
It was that experience of “falling under the power” that persuaded Clark to encourage John Arnott to check it out for himself. Arnott invited Clark to take a meeting in Toronto Airport Vineyard and the balloon went up - people started shaking, collapsing and claiming healing. The world came to watch, investigate and then pass on the experience.
Here are some tentative conclusions.
Discernment is always vital but so is an openness to the Spirit of God.
Jesus issues a very severe warning to those who evaluate the work of the Spirit in his ministry of signs and wonders and conclude that it is demonic as opposed to divine (Mark 3:29).
The first disciples were accused of being drunk on the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit fell on them and they began to speak in known languages.
There will often be aspects of the Spirit’s work that appear to us unusual, incomprehensible and even bizarre.
This does not mean that we suspend our critical faculties, including our judgment. Gullibility and naivete are not Christian virtues. But openness to God is. As is the willingness to embrace the work of God, when He sovereignly and surprisingly chooses to move among His people in unexpected ways.
Those who believe in the Sovereignty of God need to avoid telling God when and how He can be sovereign, based upon our cultural or personal likes and dislikes.
My sense is that the dust has largely settled now on the Toronto Blessing. Since its inception, new leaders have emerged in all the church groupings, and those groupings seem respectful of each other. They recognise their differences and rejoice over them in the main. Overlapping friendships and networks have found a way to live together and keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
The Vineyard movement itself has developed in different directions, as has Catch the Fire. The denominational and non-denominational groupings that were impacted by the Third Wave charismatic energy have absorbed into their church life some features of “the Blessing”. It’s worthwhile remembering that most, if not all of those, were characteristics of second if not first wave Pentecostalism, long before TB arrived.
The benefits as well as the risks of such emphases I think are now better understood. Undoubtedly there were some very confused Christians and divided Churches at the time. Some individuals, sadly, have never returned to the institutional Church, while some Churches split to create new congregations. It is ever thus.
But many more, right across the pan evangelical charismatic world, testified to their own individual and corporate spiritual lives being enriched and enhanced as a result of Toronto Airport Vineyard.
Keeping the balance is always a challenge.
Inevitably the more controversial aspects of the Toronto Blessing (the hysterical laughing, the making of animal noises) became too often the focus of attention and criticism.
It’s important to recognise that the leaders of the movement were not as obsessed by those features as their critics or the press. And actually sceptics at the time exaggerated the scale of the emphasis on these more bizarre manifestations.
I am though with those who find no support in the Biblical record for any perspective which suggests that for human beings, made in the image of God, making animal noises is a good thing. Balaam’s talking donkey (Numbers 22) is not in my view an argument for that!
I think another valid criticism of the TB as a whole was an overemphasis on experience. But again this tendency to imbalance is a danger for Christians and Churches throughout history, irrespective of special seasons of the Spirit.
Perhaps more significant was the reported lack of preaching on the cross and the need for repentance in the standard TB menu of those high-water mark days.
For the sake of balance (!) however, such criticism was anecdotal. It came from sceptical sources predisposed, perhaps, to finding that absence in the ministry of Arnott and others, simply because they were uncomfortable with what they saw as the excesses and the over emphasis on experience,
More important in my view, and this would apply to every alleged move of God, is the extent to which the term “revival“ can be attached to what happened in the Airport Vineyard and subsequently. The usefulness of the term itself is widely debated among Church historians and theologians.
For me “renewal”, or even “revitalisation” of the Church are more helpful terms to describe what went on in the 1990’s and for a few years after. This would be so for all seasons of unusual blessing. But there are exceptional seasons, more akin to true revival, which are best understood as “awakenings”. Such we might call the extraordinary move of God in 18th Century in America under Jonathan Edwards, and in England, under George Whitfield and John Wesley.
Revival for me has to produce a lasting impact on the wider society and not just be a season of refreshing for the Church. It’s a sustained period in which God brings the world into the Church (in the best sense!) and takes the church into the world.
So by that definition revival should always result in a movement of a very large number of people to faith in Christ and into global mission. Large enough for it to move the dial. When the tide comes in, everything in the harbour is raised – Church and Society.
In this regard the research work done by Peter Brierley over the decades, as he has plotted the graphs of Church growth and health, reveals that between 1989 and 1998, regular Church attendance in England dropped from 10% to 7.5%.
That is not to suggest that the Toronto Blessing was responsible for the decline but that it didn’t, along with the other Church groupings, stop the rot. A revival worthy of the name would in my view have seen a measurable uptick in Church numbers and conversions.
I have no similar data on an increase in applications to global mission societies. But I would expect an equivalent outcome.
There will always be in a work of God of this kind a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. So that we will always find the counterfeit, the tares, growing alongside the genuine wheat. Human nature introduces into everything it touches a tendency to exaggerate and manipulate, as well as to positively benefit from and celebrate what God by His Spirit brings about. The flesh and the Spirit are constantly at war.
But let’s finish on a positive note.
The charismatic evangelical Church in the UK, though initially dragged into something of an identity crisis, enjoyed ultimately a new Pentecostal expression of Church. The Third Wave and the Vineyard movement itself, while not a product of Toronto, certainly because of Toronto, blessed those kinds of churches with a season of renewal from which they continue to be drawing.
Also this. I am always a cheerleader for any move of God where people grow deeper in their relationship to God and His Word. Any season of blessing, which drives people onto the streets and into their places of work to live with greater distinctiveness as a Christian, has my vote.
Knowing and loving Jesus more and wanting His power in our experience is something which is always a hallmark of the Spirit’s presence.
It’s not that we ever lose our spiritual discernment in all this. We keep applying the wisdom of God’s Word and the truth of the cross and resurrection of Christ to any claim that the Spirit is at work. But as we live with such a renewed mind we also cry out to God for more. More grace, more love, more power, more of Jesus.
Peter Baker
Senior Minister
