Latter Rain movement (New Order of the Latter Rain)

The Latter Rain began as a reaction against perceived institutional dryness in post-war Pentecostalism. At Sharon Orphanage and Schools in February 1948, students and teachers under George Hawtin, Percy Hunt, and Herrick Holt reported an outpouring marked by prophecy, healing, and the directed impartation of gifts through laying on of hands — a practice departure from classical Pentecostalism, where gifts were understood to be sovereignly given.

The revival spread through camp meetings and independent congregations across North America. Its core doctrinal innovations were three. First, restorationism: God was restoring the offices of apostle and prophet to the end-times church, making living men the carriers of governmental spiritual authority. Second, impartation: spiritual power and callings could be transferred person-to-person, with prophetic presbyteries pronouncing destinies over individuals. Third, the 'manifest sons of God' teaching: an overcoming company would attain unprecedented spiritual stature — in its strongest forms, victory over death itself — before Christ's return.

The Assemblies of God rejected these teachings by resolution in 1949, and the movement never formed a denomination. Precisely because it remained a doctrine-stream rather than an organisation, the Latter Rain scores modestly on operational control: there was no central membership, no financial capture, no exit apparatus.

Its significance for this catalogue is genealogical. The doctrinal package — living apostles with governmental authority, personal prophecy as guidance, impartation hierarchies — is inherently high-leverage: it concentrates unaccountable authority in charismatic individuals and makes members' decisions subject to prophetic direction. Later movements operationalised that leverage: the shepherding/discipleship stream of the 1970s and today's apostolic-prophetic networks (documented at the New Apostolic Reformation profile) trace their governing concepts directly to Latter Rain restorationism. The movement is thus scored here as a moderate-band historical stream whose ideas, in tighter organisational containers, produced substantially higher-control outcomes.