Charismatic and neo-charismatic networks

Heritage

The charismatic renewal carried Pentecostal experience into every tradition after 1960, when Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett told his Van Nuys parish he had been baptized in the Spirit; the Jesus People movement met that current on the California coast. Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel (Costa Mesa, from 1965) and John Wimber's Vineyard (from the early 1980s) grew into movements of hundreds of congregations; later networks — Acts 29, Sovereign Grace, the Association of Related Churches — organized church planting on the same relational pattern. Several of these bodies decline the word denomination; this taxonomy respects the refusal while noting that census-style sources count some of them as groups anyway.

Theological family

Evangelical throughout, with the charismatic dimension ranging from expressly practiced (Vineyard) to Reformed and restrained (Acts 29): Bible teaching central, sacramental definition light, doctrinal statements short by design.

Who decides what

The defining feature: networks, not denominations. Local elders govern; affiliation is relational, doctrinally aligned, often carries a shared style and sometimes a shared name — and is revocable from either side.

What a first-time visitor would find

This family built the contemporary-worship template most visitors now consider simply "church": worship band, extended singing, verse-by-verse or series teaching, casual dress, coffee. Vineyard-stream congregations typically add ministry time — prayer teams and expectation of the Spirit's work.

What it has always cared about

Church planting as the core discipline; contemporary worship music — Calvary Chapel's Maranatha! Music and Vineyard Music seeded the modern worship repertoire; evangelism aimed at the unchurched; and kingdom theology in the Wimber stream.

Its gift to the wider church

The soundtrack: songs from these networks are now sung across essentially every Protestant tradition and many Catholic parishes — the most widely shared worship repertoire since the hymnal. And the "come as you are" church door, which a generation of the unchurched actually walked through.

Commonly confused with

With classical Pentecostal denominations — older, doctrinally codified, a separate family; with independent nondenominational churches, since network affiliation is often invisible from outside; and network names collide with unrelated "Chapel" and "Vineyard" congregations.

Range of views inside it

From Reformed, cessationist-leaning Acts 29 congregations to expressly charismatic Vineyards; network discipline runs from tight to nominal; a congregation can hold more than one affiliation at once.

Where Charismatic and neo-charismatic networks churches are on the map

1,395 Charismatic and neo-charismatic networks congregations appear on The Church Map, across 50 states.

• California — 310
• Texas — 94
• Florida — 92
• Ohio — 57
• Colorado — 50
• Washington — 48
• Arizona — 47
• Oregon — 40
• Illinois — 39
• New York — 35

Bodies and networks in this family

• Vineyard USA — network — 499 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• Calvary Chapel Association / Global Network — network — 243 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• Every Nation Churches & Ministries — network
• DOVE International — network
• Word of Faith / independent charismatic congregations — none
• Antioch International Movement of Churches — network
• Harvest International Ministry (HIM) — network
• Global Awakening — network
• Newfrontiers (US spheres) — network
• Acts 29 Network — network
• Soma Family of Churches — network
• Association of Covenant Churches and Ministries — network
• Association of Related Churches (ARC) — network
• Assembly of Christian Churches — network
• Bethel Leaders Network (formerly Global Legacy) — network

Moments that formed this family

• 1960–1977 — The charismatic renewal crosses every border

  When Episcopal rector Dennis Bennett told his Van Nuys congregation in 1960 that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal experience jumped the denominational fence — into Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and, from the 1967 Duquesne weekend, Catholic life. The 1977 Kansas City conference drew some fifty thousand charismatics, roughly half of them Catholic, worshiping in one stadium.

  A renewal that began at a segregated-out revival in 1906 ended up praying in every tradition's sanctuary — the most border-crossing spiritual movement in American history.

• 1960 — Youth With A Mission and the deregulation of missions

  Loren Cunningham, the son of two ordained Assemblies of God ministers, saw waves breaking over the continents in 1956 and read them as young people carrying the gospel. His own denomination offered to fund the idea if he would start with ten or twenty young people a year; convinced the vision was larger, he left its structures and founded Youth With A Mission at Lausanne in 1960, working alongside his wife Darlene. YWAM took anyone, from any denomination, for short terms, self-funded — a shape of mission that barely existed before. The Discipleship Training School followed in 1974, a university in Hawaii in 1977, and Mercy Ships in 1979.

  YWAM belongs to no church and asks no one which church they came from — which is why staff from nearly every tradition on this map have served in it, and why the short-term mission trip it invented is now common property, run by congregations that agree on little else.

• 1967–1990 — Michigan becomes a centre of Catholic charismatic life

  The Catholic charismatic renewal began at a student retreat outside Pittsburgh in February 1967, and it reached Michigan almost at once: Ralph Martin and Steve Clark, then working out of the Cursillo office in Lansing, carried it to Ann Arbor and gathered the prayer meeting that became the Word of God community that same year. Its magazine, New Covenant, claimed 12,000 subscribers in 87 countries by 1972, and for two decades Ann Arbor was one of the places the worldwide renewal was organised from. The community itself divided in the early 1990s as its founders parted ways.

  A renewal that began in a Los Angeles livery stable in 1906, and that most Catholics of 1950 would have called someone else's religion entirely, was being taught to the world from a college town in Michigan within sixty years.

• 1967–1975 — The Jesus Movement

  A revival among the counterculture — hippies baptized by the thousands in the Pacific — filled Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa and birthed both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard families, contemporary worship music through Maranatha! Music, and a casual, come-as-you-are church culture that reshaped Protestant worship far beyond California.

• 1971 — The common songbook

  From Maranatha! Music in the Jesus Movement, through the hymns of Keith and Kristyn Getty, to the catalogs of Hillsong, Bethel and Elevation: American congregations of nearly every tradition now draw Sunday music from one shared, living repertoire. A Baptist church, a Catholic youth group, a Pentecostal storefront and a Methodist chapel can all sing the same three songs in the same week without anyone planning it.

  The traditions never merged their pulpits — but they have very nearly merged their singing, and singing is how most people carry their faith through the week.

• 1982 — The network era of church planting

  From the 1980s onward the energy of American church founding moved into relational networks: Vineyard organized under John Wimber from 1982, Acts 29 formed in 1998 to plant churches across denominational lines, and city after city saw congregations of different traditions fund and coach one another's plants. Networks ask a different question than denominations did — not "whose are you?" but "who are you helping start?"

  Church planting became the ecumenism of practice: a Baptist church coaching a Presbyterian plant sharing a building with a Pentecostal congregation is now ordinary.

• 1990–1997 — Promise Keepers fills the stadiums

  Football coach Bill McCartney's men's movement filled stadiums through the 1990s — over a million men at "Stand in the Gap" on the National Mall in 1997 — drawing Baptists, Pentecostals, Catholics and mainliners to the same field, with racial reconciliation preached as a core promise rather than a side theme.

  For one decade, the most visible gatherings of American Christian men were deliberately cross-denominational and deliberately cross-racial.

• 2000 — The Association of Related Churches (ARC)

  A group of pastors including Billy Hornsby, Chris Hodges and Greg Surratt founded ARC in 2000 out of Birmingham, Alabama, with a simple engine: healthy churches fund and coach new launches, and the launched churches give back into the next generation of plants. ARC reports having helped start well over a thousand churches across many denominations and streams.

  ARC's model is structural generosity — churches exist to start churches, and the network's only claim on a plant is that it someday helps another.

• 2006–2021 — Global Legacy becomes the Bethel Leaders Network

  Bethel Church in Redding, California — an Assemblies of God congregation until it became independent in 2006 — grew a worldwide relational web of leaders and congregations through its Global Legacy network, renamed the Bethel Leaders Network in 2021. Alongside it, Bethel Music's songs entered the weekly worship of congregations across nearly every Protestant tradition.

  Whatever a tradition makes of Bethel's distinctives, on any given Sunday its songs are sung in thousands of churches that share nothing else with Redding — worship as the era's common currency.

• 2018–2019 — CHARIS: the renewal's two services become one

  For decades the Catholic charismatic renewal was served internationally by two separate bodies — ICCRS and the Catholic Fraternity. At Pope Francis's direction, statutes for a single service were promulgated in December 2018, and on Pentecost Sunday, 9 June 2019, CHARIS began work; the same day, both predecessor organisations ceased to exist. CHARIS carries an explicit ecumenical mandate alongside its Catholic one.

  Two international organisations dissolved themselves on the same morning so that the movement they served would have one table instead of two — a merger of the kind this story usually has to wait a century for.