Pentecostalism & Global Christianity

In April 1906, in a run-down former Methodist church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, something broke loose that would remake world Christianity. Led by William J. Seymour, the one-eyed son of former slaves, a crowd of Black, white, Latino, and Asian worshippers prayed, wept, sang, fell to the floor, and — most astonishingly to onlookers — spoke in tongues, uttering syllables they believed the Holy Spirit was giving them directly. The revival ran day and night for three years and sent missionaries around the globe. From that stable-like mission grew the fastest-growing religious movement of the modern age.

The third force

Pentecostalism is often called the "third force" in Christianity, standing alongside Catholicism and Protestantism as a distinct stream — and today the most dynamic of the three. Born at the very start of the 20th century, it has grown from almost nothing to some 600 million adherents (counting the wider charismatic movement), and it is the leading edge of the single greatest shift in modern religion: the movement of Christianity's center of gravity from the West to the Global South.

The fire falls

Pentecostalism grew out of the 19th-century Holiness movement, itself rooted in John Wesley's teaching of a "second blessing" of sanctification after conversion. The Holiness preacher Charles Fox Parham, at his Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, taught that there was a further, "third" experience — a baptism in the Holy Spirit — and that its biblical evidence was speaking in tongues. His student William J. Seymour carried the teaching to Los Angeles, where in 1906 the Azusa Street Revival ignited. What made Azusa historic was not only the ecstatic experience but its interracial character — extraordinary for its time (a Black pastor leading whites and Blacks together, though the interracial unity soon fractured under the pressures of a segregated society) — and its missionary energy, which broadcast the movement worldwide within a few years. Seymour chronicled it in a periodical, The Apostolic Faith.

The baptism in the Spirit

The heart of Pentecostalism is the conviction that the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament — the charismata of 1 Corinthians 12 — are available to believers today, not confined to the apostolic past. Central is the baptism in the Holy Spirit, a direct, overwhelming experience of God typically evidenced by glossolalia (speaking in tongues), modeled on the first Pentecost in Acts 2, when the Spirit descended on the disciples as tongues of fire and they spoke in other languages. With it come the other gifts: prophecy, divine healing, miracles, and the discernment and casting-out of spirits. Pentecostalism is, above all, a religion of direct, felt, ecstatic experience of the divine — not primarily creed, sacrament, or institution, but the living presence of the Spirit, now.

Three waves

The movement spread in three great waves. Classical Pentecostalism built new denominations — the Assemblies of God, the largely African-American Church of God in Christ, and many more. Then, from the 1960s, the Charismatic movement carried the gifts into the existing churches: Spirit baptism, tongues, and healing appeared among mainline Protestants and, remarkably, within the Roman Catholic Church (the Catholic Charismatic Renewal). Finally the neo-charismatic wave — the vast and still-growing world of independent, non-denominational, and African-initiated churches — carried the fire into every corner of the globe, often outside any traditional structure.

The southern shift

The deepest significance of Pentecostalism is demographic and global. In 1900, Christianity was overwhelmingly a religion of Europe and North America; today the majority of the world's Christians live in the Global South — Africa, Latin America, and Asia — a proportion that continues to climb. And the Pentecostal-charismatic stream is the fastest-growing engine of that shift: from fewer than a million adherents in 1900 toward perhaps a billion by mid-century. In Latin America it swept the poor and marginalized, reshaping the religious landscape of Brazil and Central America; in Africa it fused with the deep local sense of a living spirit-world (ch33, ch40) and produced some of the world's largest churches; in South Korea fervent prayer built vast megachurches and a great missionary movement; and in China it grew in the house churches. Wherever it went, it offered direct spiritual power, healing, tight community, and dignity to the poor.

The prosperity gospel

One controversial offshoot deserves note: the prosperity gospel — the teaching that God rewards faith (and giving) with health and wealth. Enormously influential in West Africa, Brazil, and the American televangelist world, it promises material blessing as the believer's right, and it is sharply criticized within Christianity, including by many Pentecostals, as a distortion of the gospel. It is a genuine and widespread strand of modern global Christianity, and the archive reports it as such, neither endorsing nor caricaturing it.

Worship and practice

Pentecostal worship is participatory, emotional, and embodied: exuberant music, raised hands, dancing, weeping, and shouting; healing services with the laying-on of hands; and deliverance (exorcism) and "spiritual warfare" against demonic powers. It tends to be sparing of traditional liturgy, imagery, and hierarchy — Spirit- and Bible-centered rather than sacramental — and it has opened wide space for lay leadership and, in many settings, for women as preachers and founders, from Aimee Semple McPherson to countless African and Latin American church-planters.

The believer's lens

For Pentecostals, the Holy Spirit who came upon the apostles at Pentecost has come again, in power, in their own time. At the Azusa Street revival of 1906, led by William J. Seymour, worshippers of every race spoke in tongues and felt the barriers between them fall. Every believer can receive the baptism in the Spirit, often shown by speaking in tongues, and the gifts of the early church (prophecy, healing, discernment) are available now. Worship is expectant and embodied: raised hands, loud praise, prayer for the sick, spiritual warfare against the powers of evil. The movement's rapid spread, to Latin America, Africa and Asia, is to believers the Spirit's work, a new Pentecost for a world church whose centre is now in the Global South. Some preachers add the prosperity gospel, the promise that faith brings health and wealth, a teaching that is contested within the movement and outside it.

The skeptical lens

The historian traces the movement's origins to Charles Parham's teaching in Topeka (1901) and the Azusa Street revival (1906), with its remarkable interracial character and global missionary reach, and follows its "three waves": classical Pentecostal denominations, the Charismatic movement of the 1960s (including Catholic Charismatic Renewal) and independent neo-charismatic churches. The demographer documents its explosive growth and the shift of the Christian majority to the Global South. The claims of faith are not historical findings: that tongues are evidence of Spirit baptism, that healings occur as claimed, that demons are real. Linguists who have studied glossolalia generally find that it is not a natural human language, though it is a genuine and meaningful religious practice. The prosperity gospel is a contested teaching whose promises this archive does not endorse. How far local Pentecostalisms absorb earlier Indigenous religious worlds is still being studied.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Tongues of fire. The master-symbol is glossolalia itself and the tongues of fire of Acts 2 — sacred, Spirit-given speech that encodes the direct descent of God upon the believer, the sign that the Pentecost has come again.
• The raised, open hands. Lifted, open palms encode both surrender to and reception of the Spirit — the body itself made a posture of openness to the divine.
• The laying on of hands. Touch encodes the transmission of the Spirit and of healing — power flowing person to person, as in the New Testament.
• The near-absence of images. Unlike the icon-rich traditions (ch60), Pentecostalism locates the sacred not in object or image but in experience and in the Word — an aniconic Christianity whose "sacred art" is music and testimony, encoding the conviction that God is met directly, not through mediation.

Connections

Pentecostalism is the newest great turning of Christianity (ch16), a child of the Protestant Reformation's emphasis on Scripture and direct access to God (ch31) yet a distinct third stream beside it and Eastern Orthodoxy (ch60). Its recovery of ecstatic religion — tongues, prophecy, trance — echoes the ancient charismatic Montanists and the ecstasy of the mystery cults (ch18), and its stress on the direct experience of the divine parallels Sufism (ch27) and Bhakti (ch30). In Africa and the diaspora it engages the living spirit-world of African traditional and diaspora religion (ch33, ch40). And as the leading force in the southern shift of Christianity, it is one of the defining religious phenomena of the modern age (ch35).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch64.html · a comparative library of the sacred.