Baptist Revival and Renewal in the 1960s

According to Callum Brown in The Death of Christian Britain, from 1963 Christianity in Britain went on a downward spiral. More generally, Brown sees the 1960s as the decade in which the Christian-centred culture that had conferred identity on Britain was rejected. This claim, however, which has received much attention, needs to be set alongside David Bebbington’s analysis of British Christianity in the 1960s. In Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington notes that in 1963 charismatic renewal came to an Anglican parish in Beckenham, Kent, when the vicar, George Forester, and some parishioners received the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ and began to speak in tongues. During the next quarter of a century, Bebbington continues, the charismatic movement became a powerful force in British Christianity. Both Brown and Bebbington view the 1960s as a decade of significant cultural change. Out of that period of upheaval came the decline of cultural Christianity but also the emergence of a new expression of Christian spirituality – charismatic renewal. Within the evangelical section of the Church this new movement was an illustration of the ability of evangelicalism to engage in adaptation. To a large extent evangelical Anglicans were at the forefront of charismatic renewal in England. The Baptist denomination in England was, however, deeply affected from the mid-1960s onwards and it is this which will be examined here.