History
The Toronto blessing began at the Airport church when pastors John and Carol Arnott were inspired by a revival in Argentina led by Claudio Freidzen and in South Africa. They invited Randy Clark of St. Louis, Missouri to minister at the church in January 1994. Randy Clark had been influenced by the ministry of Rodney Howard-Browne, a South African preacher, founder of the Rodney Howard-Browne Evangelistic Association in Louisville, Kentucky, and the earliest known proponent of the "holy laughter" revival phenomenon. Clark preached at the Airport church for two months starting January 20 and introduced some of Howard-Browne's approach into TACF practice.
In that first revival service, there were about 120 people in attendance. Arnott recalled that most members fell on the floor "laughing, rolling, and carrying on". During that first year, the church's size tripled to 1,000 members and meetings were held every night except on Mondays as the revival's influence spread. Reports of similar revivals emerged from Atlanta, Anaheim, Saint Louis, several Canadian sites, Cambodia, and Albania. It was common for visitors to carry the influence of the revival back to their home congregations – two notable British cases in point being Holy Trinity, Brompton and Holy Trinity, Cheltenham. Areas that have become known for Toronto Blessing type revivals worldwide include Pensacola, Florida, home of the Brownsville Revival, and Bath, England.
In 1995, the Airport church was released from affiliation with the Vineyard movement. The reasons for the disaffiliation were for growing tension over the church's emphasis on extraordinary manifestations of the Holy Spirit and the Vineyard leadership's inability to exercise oversight over the revival.
The peak of the Toronto blessing's prominence in the Christian community occurred in the mid to late 1990s. Since that time it has faded from public view, although the proponents of Discernment Ministries would suggest that these kinds of events are simply part of a wider theological cycle that has existed continually throughout modern era Charismatism.
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