The Revd Dr Andrew Atherstone writes:
DAVID PYTCHES, founder of the New Wine network, was one of the Church of England’s leading pioneers of Charismatic renewal and church-planting.
Born in Suffolk in 1931, the ninth of ten children, Pytches was part of a clerical dynasty. His father was an Evangelical clergyman, his mother was the daughter of a clergyman, and two of his brothers were later ordained. His great-uncle was the former Bishop of Calcutta and Dean of Durham James Welldon. After Framlingham College and National Service in the army, Pytches trained at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, and was ordained deacon in 1955 to a curacy at St Ebbe’s, Oxford, a conservative Evangelical parish.
In 1959, Pytches and his wife, Mary, sailed for Chile with the South American Missionary Society (SAMS) to pioneer Anglican church-planting in Valparaíso. There, he made two discoveries that profoundly shaped his future ministry. First, he embraced missional flexibility even when it disrupted traditional Anglican ecclesiology.
Next, he embraced the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as miraculous healings, which Pytches previously believed to have died out with the apostles, but which were common among South American Pentecostals in the 1960s. Mary began to pray in tongues, after seeking to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Her husband was initially alarmed, but was soon persuaded to follow suit. In his autobiography, Living at the Edge (2002), he recalled: “It’s quite a shock to suddenly wake up in bed with a Charismatic! I had been so opposed to all this for so long, and a loyal Bible-loving, card-carrying evangelical all my life.”
In 1970, aged just 39, Pytches was consecrated bishop for the suffragan see of Valparaíso. Three years later, Archbishop Michael Ramsey, as Metropolitan of the Southern Cone, promoted Pytches to be Bishop of Chile, Bolivia and Peru, a vast diocese covering 1.2 million square miles, 24 times the size of England.
It was a period of rapid church growth but deep political crisis, as Chile descended into paramilitary violence and civil unrest; and, during this time, the Pytches family feared for their lives. The Marxist government of Salvador Allende was toppled in September 1973 in a coup by General Augusto Pinochet, placing the churches in an invidious position. The politics were difficult to navigate, and Pytches found himself criticised on all sides.
In 1977, Pytches swapped the poverty of Chile for the leafy lanes of Hertfordshire, as Vicar of St Andrew’s, Chorleywood. There, he sought to embed lessons from South American Anglicanism into the Church of England, with an added Californian twist. One of Pytches’s friends and fellow Chilean church-planters, Eddie Gibbs, introduced him to John Wimber, the Vineyard evangelist and former rock musician. Wimber’s first visit to Chorleywood, with a team of American young people at Pentecost 1981, resulted in “holy chaos” and impromptu anointings, but was transformative for the congregation. Wimber’s emphasis on miraculous “signs and wonders” in evangelism generated widespread excitement among Anglican Charismatics, and Pytches was one of his chief promoters in England.
Pytches visited the Vineyard in California on numerous occasions, and his book Come, Holy Spirit: Learning how to minister in power (1985) repackaged Wimber’s teaching for a wider audience. It was translated into Spanish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Arabic, Chinese, and Korean.
Next, Wimber introduced Pytches in 1988 to the so-called “Kansas City Prophets”, a group who claimed dramatic encounters with God and special prophetic knowledge. Pytches visited them in Missouri, prior to their bursting upon the scene in England, and wrote up the story as Some Said It Thundered (1990), though the book received poor reviews for its uncritical tone.
Wimber also encouraged Pytches to expand his teaching ministry and contributed £3000 as seed money for the Kingdom Power Trust, which began by hosting leadership conferences and distributing Charismatic cassette tapes. In 1989, it launched New Wine, a Charismatic jamboree which soon grew into a massive annual event and gave birth to a vibrant renewal network. The parallel youth festival, Soul Survivor, ran from 1993 to 2019, but its leader, Mike Pilavachi, a former youth worker at St Andrew’s, Chorleywood, later resigned after allegations of abuse.
New Wine was pioneered by Pytches until 2001 and continues to attract thousands of people each year across numerous denominations, though its centre of gravity remains Anglican.
Another of Pytches’s lifelong passions, honed in Chile, was church-planting. He advocated the formation of Charismatic congregations across parish boundaries, in defiance of the Canons of the Church of England. In 1992, with his friend Bishop Brian Skinner, Pytches launched the Federation of Independent Anglican Churches (FIAC), to link congregations outside parish structures, to the chagrin of Archbishop George Carey. It was a forerunner of fresh expressions of English Anglicanism, sitting loosely to diocesan authority, but was outpaced by the church-planting methodology of Holy Trinity, Brompton, which aimed instead to revitalise redundant churches with episcopal blessing.
Pytches retired from St Andrew’s, Chorleywood, in 1996, but continued his worldwide peripatetic ministry. He was unafraid of controversy and, in 2000, participated in the consecration in Singapore of two bishops for the Anglican Mission in America, a conservative breakaway from the US Episcopal Church.
The Rt Revd George Edward David Pytches died on 21 November, aged 92. He is survived by Mary, to whom he was married for 65 years, their four daughters, and their families.