What Was the Latter Rain Movement?

Question 4163.

The Latter Rain movement was a revival that broke out in 1948 in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and although it was formally disowned by the main Pentecostal denominations within a few years, its ideas have proved remarkably durable and lie behind a great deal of what we see in charismatic circles today. To understand modern teaching on restored apostles, impartation, and the church seizing dominion, you have to understand the Latter Rain.

The name comes from a reading of Joel’s prophecy about the early and latter rain, taken to mean a final, great outpouring of the Spirit in the last days before the return of Jesus. The movement believed it was the beginning of that outpouring, and that conviction shaped everything it taught.

Where the Latter Rain movement came from

In February 1948 a Bible school in North Battleford became the centre of an intense revival marked by prophecy, healing, fasting, and the laying on of hands. Those involved believed God was restoring something lost, and that a new era of the Spirit had dawned. News spread rapidly through Pentecostal networks, and for a few years the Latter Rain swept through many congregations.

The established Pentecostal denominations, chiefly the Assemblies of God, examined the Latter Rain movement and rejected it in 1949, judging several of its teachings to be unbiblical. That official rejection did not kill it. The movement went underground, its leaders kept teaching, and its distinctive ideas seeded themselves into the streams that would later become the charismatic renewal and the movements that followed it.

What the Latter Rain movement taught

Several teachings marked the Latter Rain. There was the restoration of the offices of apostle and prophet as governing ministries for the church today. There was impartation of spiritual gifts through the laying on of hands by these recognised leaders. There was an emphasis on personal, directive prophecy spoken over individuals to set their course.

Alongside these ran a larger expectation, that the church would rise to a place of victory, maturity, and dominion before the return of Jesus, sometimes tied to the idea of a manifested company of perfected believers who would lead the way. The Spirit was being poured out, so the reasoning went, to bring the church to this triumphant condition. These threads explain why the Latter Rain matters so much for tracing later movements.

Why I cannot accept the Latter Rain framework

My concerns with the Latter Rain movement are not about its hunger for God, which was real, but about its framework. Take the restoration of apostles. The New Testament treats the apostles, in the foundational sense, as a closed group who saw the risen Lord and laid the foundation of the church once for all. Paul speaks of the household of God being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus as the cornerstone, and you do not keep relaying a foundation. I deal with this directly in my answer on whether apostles and prophets are still given today.

Then there is the impartation of gifts through anointed leaders, which sets up exactly the dependence on special men that the New Testament works against, since every believer already has the Spirit. And the dominion expectation, that the church will reach a triumphant maturity and take the kingdom before Jesus returns, cuts across the plain teaching that the present age runs to suffering and apostasy before the Lord Himself returns to set up His kingdom.

The long shadow of the Latter Rain

The reason the Latter Rain movement deserves attention is its influence rather than its size. Its teachings on restored apostles and prophets, on impartation, and on dominion did not disappear when the denominations rejected them. They resurfaced, reworked and renamed, in later movements, including the prophetic and apostolic networks that are prominent today.

So when you hear a ministry speak of modern apostles governing the church, of imparting an anointing by the laying on of hands, or of the church taking dominion before the return of Jesus, you are usually hearing the Latter Rain in modern dress. Recognising the source helps you weigh the claim, which is why a little church history is worth the effort. The same lineage runs into Bethel Church and the wider renewal streams.

What was genuine in the Latter Rain

I do not want to paint the whole thing black. Many caught up in the Latter Rain movement were earnest believers reacting against a Pentecostalism they felt had grown cold and institutional. Their longing for a fresh experience of the Spirit, their willingness to fast and pray, and their expectation that God would act were not in themselves wrong.

The tragedy is that a good hunger was fed a faulty diet. The desire for more of God is healthy. The framework of restored apostolic government, transferable anointings, and present dominion was not, and it carried the movement and its heirs away from the plain shape of New Testament expectation.

Reading our own moment by this history

There is a lesson here for us. A revival can be marked by genuine zeal and still carry serious error, and the two can be hard to separate in the heat of the moment. The safeguard is the same now as it was in 1948, the steady measuring of every teaching against the whole of Scripture, especially when the teaching arrives wrapped in the excitement of a fresh move of the Spirit.

The Pentecostal leaders who examined the Latter Rain and rejected its errors, while still believing in the gifts, modelled exactly the balance I commend. They did not quench the Spirit, and they did not swallow every claim made in His name. That is the path between a dead formalism and an undiscerning enthusiasm, and it is still the path to walk.

Why a closed foundation matters

The point about the apostolic foundation being closed is worth dwelling on, because so much hangs on it. A foundation is laid once. You do not keep digging up a building and relaying its base every generation, and the picture Paul chooses is deliberate. The apostles and prophets who saw the risen Lord and received His revelation did their foundational work in the first century, and the church has been building on it ever since.

When a movement reopens that office and installs living men as governing apostles with fresh authority, it does something the New Testament does not permit. It places men beside the Scriptures as a continuing source of binding direction, and history shows where that leads, to the elevation of personalities, the silencing of dissent, and the slow drift of a group around its leaders rather than around the word. The closed foundation is a mercy, a guard against exactly that drift.

This is not to deny that God still gifts leaders, teachers, and even those who carry a genuine gift of prophecy in the lesser, congregational sense I have written about elsewhere. It is to say that none of them carries the foundational authority of the original apostles, and that any movement claiming otherwise has misunderstood the architecture of the church.

Discernment is not unbelief

I am conscious that to weigh a revival critically can sound like the cold scepticism that quenches the Spirit, and I want to guard against that impression. Testing is not unbelief. Paul commends the Bereans for examining even his own preaching against the Scriptures to see whether it was so, and he calls them noble for it. To weigh a movement is to take both God and truth seriously.

The believers who examined this movement in its early years and parted the genuine zeal from the faulty framework were not enemies of the Spirit. They were friends of the truth, and they left the church a service by their care. We honour their example not by swallowing every fresh claim nor by dismissing every fresh stirring, but by doing the patient work of holding it all up to the light of Scripture and keeping what passes the test.

Knowing the family tree of a teaching

I find it steadying to know the family tree of an idea, because so many teachings that present themselves as fresh and Spirit-given turn out to have a long and traceable history. Once you can see where a claim came from, who first made it, and why the wider church examined and set it aside, you are far less likely to be swept off your feet when it arrives at your own door wearing new clothes. History will not settle a doctrine on its own, but it asks the right questions and slows down the rush.

So, now what?

If you find yourself in a setting shaped by Latter Rain ideas, with its modern apostles, its impartations, and its talk of the church taking dominion, do not be swept along by the energy in the room. Ask where these teachings came from and whether they stand up to the New Testament. History is not the final test, but knowing the history helps you ask the right questions.

The Spirit who was poured out at Pentecost is the same Spirit at work now, and He has not changed His methods or His message. Hunger for Him, by all means. Just make sure the framework you receive Him through is built on the foundation the apostles actually laid, and not on one that men keep trying to lay again. What are you building on?

built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

Ephesians 2:20