The Jesus People Movement and The Charismatic Movement

Abstract

This article proposes that the Jesus People Movement should be considered part of the Charismatic Movement and that the taken-for-granted Third Wave as a historical paradigm stands as an obstacle to its inclusion. Although commonly interpreted throughout the 1970s as a third synchronic cousin with the Roman Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Protestant Charismatic Renewal, Pentecostal and Charismatic scholarship’s paucity on the Jesus People Movement has resulted in its omission from the historiography of twentieth century American Pentecostalism. This exclusion was not an intentional decision, but the consequence of a lack in synchronic links to Pentecostal and Charismatic scholarship during the 1970s and the adoption of Peter Wagner’s Third Wave in the 1980s. Now that a decade has passed since the close of the century, time affords scholarship the necessary distance to reflect and reconsider how the twentieth century Pentecostal and Charismatic story might reconstructed.