Dennis Bennett

Dennis Joseph Bennett was born in Hampstead, London, on October 28, 1917, the son of a Congregational minister. The family emigrated to the United States during the Great Depression; Bennett grew up in California, graduated from San Jose State College, served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and trained for the Congregational ministry at the Chicago Theological Seminary, graduating in 1949. After a year in Congregational ministry he was confirmed into the Episcopal Church and ordained in 1951. By 1953 he was rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. The parish grew under his ministry from approximately 500 to 2,500 members in seven years — a thriving postwar suburban Episcopal church with three Sunday services and a substantial staff.

In the autumn of 1959 Bennett heard from a fellow Episcopal priest about Pentecostal-style experiences of Spirit baptism occurring in his parish. Bennett was skeptical but pastorally responsible; he visited the priest, met some of the people involved, and at length sought the experience himself. He was prayed for by John and Joan Baker in November 1959 and received what he came to describe as the baptism in the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues. For four months he kept the experience private. By the spring of 1960 — with several dozen parishioners similarly affected and the parish staff divided — Bennett judged that he had no choice but to speak openly.

On Passion Sunday, April 3, 1960, Bennett told the congregation of St. Mark's at three successive services what had happened. His second assistant resigned at the altar during the second service, removing his vestments and declaring that he would have no part in the new teaching. The senior warden demanded Bennett's resignation. Bennett delivered it that afternoon, both to spare the parish further conflict and because his bishop, Francis Bloy of Los Angeles, was unwilling to support him. The story made Newsweek on July 4, 1960 ("Rector and a Rumpus") and Time on August 15, 1960 ("Speaking in Tongues"). Within weeks, Pentecostal experience in mainline denominations had become a national religious story.

Bishop William Lewis of Olympia (Washington) — informed of the controversy — invited Bennett to take St. Luke's, Ballard, a struggling parish of approximately 70 active members in a working-class Seattle neighborhood. Bennett accepted, arrived in July 1960, and led St. Luke's for the next eighteen years. The congregation grew to approximately 2,500 in regular attendance and became one of the principal centers of Anglican charismatic life in North America. Bennett established Christian Renewal Centers conferences from St. Luke's beginning in 1962, ordained or trained dozens of priests who carried the renewal into other Episcopal dioceses, and through his preaching and writing became — alongside Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens on the Catholic side — the principal pastoral voice of the Charismatic Renewal in mainline Christianity.

His 1970 memoir Nine O'Clock in the Morning — the title taken from Peter's defense at Pentecost in Acts 2:15 ("these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day") — became the standard narrative of how the renewal had crossed into the historic denominations. He followed it with The Holy Spirit and You (1971), co-authored with his wife Rita, which sold over a million copies and gave a generation of mainline Protestants and Catholics a practical theology of Spirit baptism that did not require leaving their churches. Bennett retired from St. Luke's in 1981 and continued to teach and write in conjunction with Rita's Christian Renewal Association until his death from a heart attack on November 1, 1991, in Seattle, at the age of seventy-four. His insistence that Pentecostal experience could be received without leaving the historic denominations — and that it should be received within Anglican sacramental life rather than against it — shaped the theological identity of mainline Charismatic Christianity for the next half-century.