David Wilkerson’s Concerns about the Charismatic Movement

Following my last post on the Charismatic movement, I was intrigued by the following extract I read today in David Wilkerson’s biography.

This is particularly interesting because David himself has been widely documented as being one of the catalysts of the charismatic movement. His book ‘The Cross and the Switchblade’ was influential amongst the Catholic charismatic renewal.

Yet despite his influence on the movement, David’s relationship to the charismatic movement was complex.

This extract shows some of the distinctions between Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movements.

Extract

“More and more he (David) found himself critiquing the charismatic movement. He saw a growing excess when “demonstrations” of the Spirit became the focal point rather than Jesus. “He was as thoroughly Pentecostal as anybody I’ve ever known, but he always seemed to have questions about what was going on in the charismatic movement,” David Patterson says. “He didn’t like a lot of things he saw. But leaders would keep reaching out to him as a spokesperson. He had some reservations about them, and they didn’t quite know how to take him either.”