Andy Stanton-Henry’s “All the Way Back to George Fox” looks at the lega­cy of John Wim­ber, a rock musi­cian turned Quak­er pas­tor turned charis­mat­ic church founder. Yes, that’s a lot of turns. Yes, it’s quite a story. 

One of the impuls­es that drove Wim­ber’s min­istry was a desire to “do the stuff” he read about in the Bible, not just talk and sing about it. This is not so very dif­fer­ent from ear­ly Friends. Founder George Fox brought peo­ple back to life, his mir­a­cles edit­ed out of most accounts until Hen­ry Cad­bury col­lect­ed them back togeth­er in the 1940s. James Nayler, anoth­er Quak­er co-founder, devel­oped a full-on mes­si­ah com­plex, even­tu­al­ly re-enacting Jesus’s Palm Sun­day entry into Jerusalem. Wim­ber’s wife talked about their reac­tion when they final­ly got around to read­ing Fox’s Jour­nal:

Read­ing it lat­er, we won­dered what our con­tem­po­raries were so upset about! A move­ment of the Spir­it hap­pened in our group — for which gen­er­a­tions of Quak­ers had prayed for years, but had no idea how it would look when it came — and when it did hap­pen, it didn’t real­ly fit with Quak­er the­ol­o­gy at that time.

Wim­ber’s min­istries got too enthu­si­as­tic for even Cal­i­for­nia Evan­gel­i­cal Friends and he left to co-found the Vine­yard Church­es. In our author chat, Andy and I dis­cuss some of the lessons we might learn from these rel­a­tive­ly modern-day seek­ers want­i­ng to “do the stuff.” 

Also of inter­est: the 2018 post from an anony­mous mem­ber of the Friend­ly Fire Col­lec­tive: The Mak­ing of a Charis­mat­ic Quak­er.