Charismatic and Mainline

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3325

[Religion Online] 13 Apr 2007--On Passion Sunday in 1960, the Episcopal pastor of a growing parish in suburban Los Angeles revealed his covert spiritual experiences of recent months. Unknown to most parishioners, he and 70 other members had been "speaking in tongues" -- making utterances that most mainline churches equated with overheated Pentecostalism and Holy Roller tent revivals.

Dennis Bennett got through the 7:30 service without causing a commotion at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, which had 2,500 people on its rolls. At the end of the second service, however, an assistant priest pulled off his vestments, put them on the altar and stalked out, saying, "I can no longer work with this man!"

Tumult reigned in the patio. One man stood on a chair, shouting, "Throw out the damn tongue speakers!" according to Bennett.

The parish treasurer at the time, M. Scott Pruyn, in a letter to this writer years later, said that he and the senior warden confronted Bennett in the sacristy and told him he had broken a "solemn promise" that he would not preach on tongues --speaking "without first discussing the matter in executive session with the officers and vestry." Bennett promptly agreed to resign.

Episcopal Bishop Francis Bloy of Los Angeles quickly forbade group meetings "under any semblance of parish auspices to be held where speaking in tongues is encouraged or actually engaged in." Indeed, most tongues-speaking members stopped going to St. Mark’s.

The crisis at St. Mark’s escaped public notice until Jean Stone, a laywoman active in St. Mark’s tongues-speaking group, contacted Newsweek and Time. Both magazines carried stories about St. Mark’s that summer. Stone kept up her nationwide publicity campaign with letters, pamphlets and a quarterly magazine. Bennett accepted a post as rector of a struggling urban parish in Seattle that quickly flourished, lifting up Bennett and his wife, Rita, as leaders in a burgeoning neo-Pentecostal movement.