This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
What began at the Toronto Airport Vineyard church in January 1994 was, by most accounts, an ordinary charismatic prayer meeting until it visibly was not. Attendees reported being overcome, some falling, some laughing uncontrollably for extended periods, some shaking, and church leaders read those responses as physical evidence that the Holy Spirit was moving through the room with unusual intensity. Word spread fast enough that the meetings kept running nightly for years, and visitors who traveled to Toronto specifically to experience it often reported the same manifestations breaking out once they returned to their own congregations.
That spread is exactly what made the phenomenon controversial rather than simply notable. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has a long theological vocabulary for physical signs of spiritual experience, but the Toronto meetings pushed further into manifestations, including reports of people making animal sounds, that even sympathetic observers found hard to place within that vocabulary. The Association of Vineyard Churches, the denominational family the original congregation belonged to, formally distanced itself from the Toronto congregation in 1995 over exactly this question, while stopping short of declaring the whole phenomenon false.
The disagreement that followed was never about whether something happened in that room, night after night, for years. Video and written testimony from the period are abundant. What divided charismatic Christians, and still does, is whether what happened was the Spirit doing something genuinely new or a crowd, primed by expectation, doing what large emotional crowds have always been capable of doing to each other.