Michael Harper

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This article is about the Anglican priest. For the African-American poet, see Michael S. Harper.

Michael Claude Harper (b. 1931) is a former Anglican priest in the Church of England, now ordained a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church. He was a key leader of the British charismatic movement of the 1960s-1980s.

Harper was a curate at All Souls Church, Langham Place (London), when he received what Pentecostals and charismatics refer to as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, a religious experience accompanied by speaking in tongues. This put him at odds with the church's evangelical rector, John Stott, and Harper left All Souls in 1964 to found the Fountain Trust, an organization dedicated to spreading the charismatic message.

In his days as an Anglican charismatic leader, he wrote several books, including As at the Beginning (1965), a narrative of the growth of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement in the twentieth century.

He left the Anglican Church in 1995 because of what he saw as the Church of England's increasing doctrinal laxity, particularly with regard to the ordination of women. He and his wife, Jeanne, joined the Orthodox Church, and Harper was ordained and made dean of the newly established Antiochian Orthodox Deanery of the United Kingdom and Ireland. He wrote about his views on female ordination in the 1994 book Equal and Different, and related his journey to Orthodoxy in The True Light (1994).

[edit] Sources

P.D. Hocken, "Michael Harper" in Stanley M. Burgess & Eduard van der Maas, New International Dictionary of Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements, revised edition, (Zondervan, 2003)
P.D. Hocken, Streams of Renewal, 2nd edition, (Paternoster Press, 1997)