“Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community” is about one of the most gifted leaders of the charismatic movement and the newspaper reporter who unwittingly unearthed his secret.

Millions of evangelical Christians who lived through the Jesus movement and the charismatic renewal of the 1970s and 1980s wish to process what happened them in the early days of their faith. Some even moved into covenant community households to replicate the pattern of the early church in Acts 2. Many are seeking to regain the spiritual power and assurance they felt during those days. Still others have watched how this Pentecostal subset of American life has gone mainstream in the 21st century, starting with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a vice presidential candidate in 2008. This continued with the rise of the Rev. Paula White, a Pentecostal leader who amassed evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

“Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community” is the story of God, sex and power, how a huge 20th century religious experiment in the life of one cleric led to the rise and fall of many. The book traces the journey of Graham Pulkingham, an Episcopal priest who led Church of the Redeemer, one of the nation’s fastest growing and most vibrant churches in a Houston slum and left a legacy that lasts to this day. At its height, Church of the Redeemer was a place afire. It was a megachurch before places like Bethel and Hillsong came into vogue. It had an international reputation, fabulous music and joyous worship. It was not only a vibrant center for the Jesus movement that was transfixing the country in the early ’70s, but it was the energy center for the charismatic movement, a type of Christianity straight from the exciting miracles of the New Testament book of Acts. Christians who were being “baptized in the Holy Spirit” within this movement felt they were witnessing the waking of a 2,000-year-old giant and experiencing a renaissance of the glory days of Christianity’s beginning.

As for Pulkingham, he held thousands spellbound with his Gospel preaching and influenced millions with his daring vision of a compelling, charismatic Christianity made visible by a system of worldwide communities. Yet, Pulkingham hid from his followers a dark double life that he at first resisted, then secretly pursued and finally allowed to twist his personal theology into a gordian knot of accommodation and self-deceit and finally death.

Thirty years ago, Julia Duin, then a Houston Chronicle reporter, set out to do a laudatory account of events at Redeemer, only to discover the hidden sins not only of one Houston church but of an entire movement. Lurking in the shadows of Church of the Redeemer were dark secrets that in time made the church a living symbol of the charismatic movement’s rise and decline; of a time when people’s desire for God’s love and power was shot through with pride, obsession with control and twisted sexuality. It all began in 1964 when Graham Pulkingham, a burned-out Houston clergyman, traveled to New York and found himself transformed by the experience of being “baptized in the Spirit” through the prayers of David Wilkerson, author of “The Cross and the Switchblade” and today one of the world’s best-known pentecostal preachers. Returning to Houston, the on-fire priest helped lay the groundwork for the Jesus movement. Under his leadership, the church catapulted itself into the communal living movement, creating dozens of extended Christian households encompassing more than 400 people in low-income neighborhoods. Through the books and magazine articles describing this remarkable church, thousands of curious babyboomer Christians visited Houston. Artists and musicians from around the world drifted in, creating a new genre of Christian music.

Things began to unravel in the mid 1970s after CBS’s laudatory hour-long special in 1972 drew overflow crowds, overwhelming the church and its households. Pulkingham traveled to England to extend his influence by planting communities there but left a cadre of authoritarian elders ruling the church in his absence. These elders began implementing the principles of a ruinous “discipleship movement” that was also sweeping contemporary Christianity – and devastating lives. The top elder at Redeemer was caught in adultery and the unrelated Jim Jones Guyana tragedy cast a pall over the notion of communal living. The household communities rapidly split up and even though Pulkingham moved back into 1980 to fix up the place, it was too late.

Not that Pulkingham was the best one to go around cleaning up anyone’s reputation. A husband with six children, he had struggled with a lifetime of homosexual urges. Believing himself rid of them forever after his spiritual transformation in New York, he let himself be enticed back into the lifestyle several years later and began to act on these urges in England where he began propositioning male followers for sexual favors. In Houston, other followers noticed his theology had taken a decidedly left-hand turn. As more sex scandals – again involving elders – rocked the church, he was forced out just two years after his return. The charismatic movement had reached every corner of the globe by this time, but many of its American originators had turned on each other.

By the mid-1980s, both Pulkingham and the charismatic movement had run out of steam as disappointed followers penned books such as “Power Religion,” “Churches That Abuse” and “Disappointment With God.” Insiders who tried to reform the movement – and Pulkingham’s church – were largely ignored. Then the PTL and Jimmy Swaggart scandals became double black eyes for Christianity while the 1988 presidential run of the first openly charismatic Christian candidate Pat Robertson politicized the movement. The monastic trio of poverty, chastity and obedience in the lives of early charismatics that had propelled their movement to such heady successes became the three-way trap of sex, money and power. God’s love and power, which had transformed Church of the Redeemer, had been perverted to become raw power and sexual desire. Rocketing way beyond its biblical basis, the charismatic Christian movement in the 1990s became fertile ground for bizarre spiritual manifestations, such as a movement based on “holy laughter.”

The book climaxes with Pulkingham’s betrayal at the hands of the wife of a former lover and the collapse of a new community he founded north of Pittsburgh. By the time he was stricken with a fatal heart attack while caught in the midst of a 1993 supermarket shootout, Pulkingham was disgraced by a decades-long string of homosexual flings, under investigation by his bishop for propositioning some of the troubled men he counseled and on the verge of being defrocked by the very denomination he helped energize for three decades.

Julia Duin’s investigation of Graham Pulkingham was the final straw that leads to his downfall and ultimately his death. “Days of Fire and Glory” required 182 face-to-face interviews. It reveals how sex and religion, unhappily tangled, are still the stuff of headlines. The amazing characters, who were gifted people with the best intentions, failed miserably when they allow their faith in God to succumb to the desires of their bodies. Theirs is a cautionary tale that would well be heeded by all for whom the Gospel has become the foundation of their earthly success. Intentional community movements are becoming popular again and some of the worst excesses of religious authoritarian movements of several decades ago are popping up under new names.

However, the book is an inspiration that shows what God once did among an unlikely group of people in Houston and what He can do again with a people who understand where the dangers lie and where the blessings are.