What Is Third Wave Charismatic?

Question 04117.

Third wave charismatic is the name usually given to a movement that emerged among evangelical, non-Pentecostal churches in the 1980s, most closely associated with John Wimber and the Vineyard movement, which taught that signs and wonders such as healing and prophecy should accompany ordinary evangelism and church life without requiring the believer to adopt classic Pentecostal doctrine such as tongues as the necessary evidence of Spirit baptism.

If you have spent any time in charismatic circles you have probably heard the language of successive waves of the Spirit moving across the twentieth century, each one supposedly building on the last. I want to explain where that third wave charismatic language came from, what the teaching actually claimed, and where I think it needs careful, Bible-shaped correction before anyone adopts it wholesale.

The Three Waves, Briefly

The first wave refers to classical Pentecostalism, born out of the Azusa Street revival in 1906 and the earlier holiness movement, which held that tongues is the necessary initial evidence of Spirit baptism, understood as a second, subsequent work of grace after conversion. The second wave is the charismatic renewal of the 1960s and 1970s, in which believers within mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches embraced Pentecostal-style gifts while generally remaining within their existing denominations rather than forming new Pentecostal bodies of their own.

The third wave, a term coined by the missiologist C. Peter Wagner to describe Wimber’s ministry (see my fuller discussion of whether spiritual gifts remain active today), differed from both earlier waves in claiming that ordinary evangelical Christians, without any distinct baptism in the Spirit experience, could and should exercise gifts of healing and prophecy as part of power evangelism, the idea that supernatural demonstrations of God’s power open the way for the gospel to be received by a sceptical hearer.

What Third Wave Teaching Got Right

I think third wave charismatic teaching correctly recognised something that a cautious, cessationist-leaning evangelicalism had often lost sight of: that the New Testament expects ordinary, non-apostolic believers to pray for healing and to exercise spiritual gifts as part of normal church life, not as a specialist Pentecostal category reserved for a subculture with its own separate churches. James 5:14-15 addresses the elders of the local church, not a separate class of professional miracle worker, when it comes to praying for the sick and anointing them with oil.

It also rightly pushed back against a purely intellectual, word-only model of ministry that can, at its worst, leave little room for the Spirit’s active presence at all, treating Him as a doctrine to be affirmed on a Sunday rather than a Person who genuinely acts in the life of the church.

Where It Needs Careful Correction

My concern with third wave teaching, and with the power evangelism framework in particular, is a tendency toward pragmatism, where the apparent success of a healing or a prophetic word becomes the test of whether God is at work, rather than fidelity to Scripture being the test applied first. That is a subtle but serious shift. Scripture nowhere makes results the standard for discerning truth; Deuteronomy 13:1-3 warns explicitly that even a fulfilled sign does not validate a message that contradicts God’s already revealed word, a principle third wave enthusiasm has sometimes forgotten in the excitement of the moment.

The third wave emphasis on power demonstrations also proved to be a seedbed, whether Wimber himself intended it or not, for the excesses that followed in the 1990s, including the Toronto Blessing, and later for the far more troubling claims of the New Apostolic Reformation. A movement’s fruit sometimes only becomes visible a generation after its planting, and third wave charismatic teaching planted seeds whose later harvest was decidedly mixed.

Third Wave Charismatic Teaching Today

The Vineyard movement itself has, in many of its congregations, settled into a calmer, more measured expression than its more excitable offshoots, and plenty of churches shaped by third wave charismatic instincts practise a genuinely careful, Scripture-tested approach to healing prayer and spiritual gifts. The label has also, unfortunately, become a stepping stone for some toward far less careful movements, which is exactly why I think it deserves a fair but cautious hearing rather than either wholesale rejection or uncritical adoption.

Third Wave Charismatic Teaching and the Wider Church

It is worth saying plainly that third wave charismatic teaching did not stay confined to the Vineyard movement itself. Its influence spread widely through evangelical worship music, conference culture, and the general expectation in many non-denominational churches that healing prayer and words of encouragement described as prophetic are a normal part of church life, even where the wider congregation would never call itself charismatic or Pentecostal in any formal sense. That diffuse influence is, I think, part of why the label ‘third wave charismatic’ is less commonly used today than it once was; the emphasis on power evangelism it introduced has simply become background assumption in large sections of evangelicalism, for better and for worse.

My own advice to a church member who encounters third wave charismatic teaching, whether through a conference, a book, or a visiting speaker, is the same advice I would give about any other charismatic stream: hold what is genuinely biblical, that ordinary believers may pray for healing and exercise spiritual gifts, and test everything else, especially any claim about guaranteed results, against the settled teaching of 1 Corinthians 14 and the wider testimony of Scripture.

John Wimber’s Own Later Caution

It is worth knowing that Wimber himself grew increasingly cautious about certain excesses that developed within circles influenced by his teaching, distancing the Vineyard movement from some of the more extreme manifestations that later became associated with the ‘Kansas City Prophets’ and, still later, with the Toronto Blessing. That a founding figure of third wave charismatic teaching felt the need to draw firmer boundaries around his own movement tells its own story about how quickly power evangelism’s emphasis on demonstrable results can slide into territory the biblical text does not support.

I mention this not to score a point but because it illustrates something important: even sympathetic insiders to third wave charismatic teaching recognised the need for correction. That should encourage the rest of us to hold the movement’s genuine insights, and its real excesses, with equal honesty rather than defending or dismissing the whole package uncritically.

How This Fits a Dispensational, Continuationist Framework

Reading third wave charismatic teaching from a dispensational, continuationist standpoint means neither adopting the cessationism that would deny any of this territory outright, nor granting power evangelism’s pragmatic instincts more authority than Scripture itself carries. Paul’s instruction to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21) remains the standard, whatever wave of teaching a particular practice happens to have emerged from. Third wave charismatic teaching does not get a pass simply because it avoided some of classic Pentecostalism’s more rigid doctrinal claims, and it does not deserve blanket condemnation simply because some of its later fruit proved troubling.

My own settled view is that the healthiest response treats third wave charismatic teaching the way I would treat any other stream of church history: learn what it got right, name what it got wrong, and keep Scripture, rather than any movement’s own self-description, as the final court of appeal.

A Closing Historical Footnote

It is worth remembering that third wave charismatic teaching did not appear in a vacuum. It emerged in a specific decade, shaped by a specific set of evangelical concerns about spiritual dryness and cultural relevance, and it will not be the last such movement to promise a fresh recovery of the Spirit’s power. Every generation of the church seems to produce its own version of this longing, and every generation needs the same settled answer: test the new movement against the old, unchanging text of Scripture, not against how urgently it promises to solve the felt needs of the present moment.

Talking to Someone Drawn Into This Movement

If a member of your own family or congregation has become deeply drawn into third wave charismatic teaching, I would encourage patience over confrontation as the first response. Ask what specifically has been meaningful to them, whether that is a renewed sense of the Spirit’s presence, a recovery of expectant prayer, or a particular experience they found powerful, before moving to critique. Much of what draws people toward third wave charismatic teaching is a genuine, legitimate hunger for a more vivid experience of God, and that hunger deserves a sympathetic hearing even where particular practices need careful, gentle correction from Scripture.

None of this needs to become a source of division within a healthy congregation. Third wave charismatic teaching, understood in its historical context and tested patiently against Scripture, is simply one more chapter in the church’s long history of learning, and sometimes relearning, how to honour the Spirit’s present work without losing sight of His Word

So, now what?

So third wave charismatic teaching is best understood as a genuine, if imperfect, attempt to recover the New Testament’s expectation that ordinary believers exercise spiritual gifts, wrapped in a pragmatic framework that needed and still needs firmer biblical guardrails. I would encourage anyone drawn to this stream of teaching to hold its positive instincts about the Spirit’s present activity while testing every practice and every claim against Scripture rather than against results, however impressive those results might appear on the surface.

“Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.”

1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 (ESV)