How the Holy Spirt Marked a Movement

Bridges to the Evangelical World

If C.M. Ward and others thought the national headquarters leadership of a past generation were more bureaucratic than spiritual, there’s at least one underreported story of how they ministered to an evangelical journalist in a way that flamed what became the charismatic movement.

In the early 1950s, Robert Walker was the influential publisher of Christian Life magazine and an early supporter and confidant of Billy Graham. Walker was among the first evangelical to move his headquarters to Wheaton, Illinois, which became the “evangelical Vatican.” During those years, he developed a relationship with some Assemblies of God leaders through the NAE and was intrigued by their infectious enthusiasm, which stood in stark contrast to the stiff formality of many evangelicals of the day.

In his journalistic travels he ended up at Assemblies of God headquarters in Springfield in 1954, where several of the executive presbyters laid hands on him and prayed for him. Walker received the baptism in the Holy Spirit with evidence of speaking in tongues. Though he remained a longtime member of the Evangelical Covenant Church in Wheaton, still he never denied this experience and loved to tell others like me about it, though he was discreet about whom he told. For the rest of his life the evangelical community considered him one of their own, even though he was one of the first denominational people in that era to receive the Pentecostal experience.

This resulted in Christian Life publishing an article aimed at evangelicals about the Pentecostals headlined, “Are We Missing Something?” It may have been the first article written about what was later called the charismatic movement. Though Walker was low-key about his experience, he fanned the flames of renewal whenever he could, writing in Christian Life the very first article about a young broadcaster named Pat Robertson when he founded CBN and later ghostwriting Pat Boone’s testimony of how he received the infilling of the Holy Spirit in A New Song, which sold more than 2 million copies after it was published in 1972.

Walker also embraced the Pentecostal experience so much years later he turned over his publishing enterprise to a young Pentecostal editor—me. And in 1987 Charisma magazine merged with Christian Life.