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El Salvador has experienced a dramatic religious transformation over the past half-century. In what was once an almost exclusively Catholic nation, more than 35 percent of the people are now evangelical Protestants, mostly identified as charismatic or Pentecostal. While having some roots in Protestant missions from North America and Europe, the religious renaissance overtaking El Salvador is both homegrown and closely related to the nation's social, cultural, and economic upheavals. Since the end of the Salvadoran Civil War, the traditional social order--which was established in colonial times, ruled by elites, enforced by the military, and supported by the Church--has been overturned. Once a world of haciendas, plantations, and old merchant firms, El Salvador is now home to new factories, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and call centers. Modernization has brought new ideas too--about asserting individual rights and making choices, forming communities, voting in elections, consuming material goods, employing technology, and engaging with global culture. The Rise of Pentecostalism in Modern El Salvador explores how this vast social transformation has opened the gates to runaway religious creativity and competition. In weaving together the lively and complex story, author Timothy Wadkins employs the scholarly tools of historical reconstruction, theological analysis, and ethnographic interviews, as well as the results of a pioneering national religious survey. The outcome is a comprehensive and detailed picture of El Salvador's religious renaissance against the backdrop of El Salvador's fitful path toward modernization and democratization.
In Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments from the Margins, Rocha, Hutchinson and Openshaw argue that Australia has made and still makes important contributions to how Pentecostal and charismatic Christianities have developed worldwide. This edited volume fills a critical gap in two important scholarly literatures. The first is the Australian literature on religion, in which the absence of the charismatic and Pentecostal element tends to reinforce now widely debunked notions of Australia as lacking the religious tendencies of old Europe. The second is the emerging transnational literature on Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. This book enriches our understanding not only of how these movements spread worldwide but also how they are indigenised and grow new shoots in very diverse contexts.
Pentecostal theology is burgeoning in the academy, and a vast body of literature continues to grow. With precision and ease, Stephenson carefully leads readers through an array of theological topics, texts, and figures. Combining original analysis and constructive contributions, he classifies diverse and complex ideas in pentecostal biblical studies, systematic theology, and theological ethics. Whether they are beginning students seeking an accessible initiation into an area that newly piques their interests or established scholars who need a sophisticated crash course in a yet unexplored field of inquiry, readers will find Stephenson's accounts to be a reliable guide through this daunting topic.
In The Spirit, Indigenous Peoples and Social Change Michael Frost explores a pentecostal theology of social engagement in relation to Māori in New Zealand. Pentecostalism has had an ambiguous relationship with Māori and, in particular, lacks a robust and coherent theological framework for engaging in issues of social concern. Drawing on a number of interviews with Māori pentecostal leaders and ministers, Frost explores the transformative role of pentecostal experience for Māori cultural identity, a holistic theology of mission, an indigenous prophetic emphasis, and consequent connections between pentecostalism and liberation. He thus contributes a way forward for pentecostal theologies of social change in relation to Māori, with implications for pentecostalism and indigenous peoples in the West.
This book offers an analysis of the historical, theological, and social conditions that give rise to the growth of pentecostalism among contemporary Vietnamese evangelicals. Emerging from the analysis is an understanding of how underprivileged evangelicals have utilized the pentecostal emphasis on divine intervention in their pursuit of the betterment of life amid religious and ethnic marginalization. Within the context of the global growth of pentecostalism, Vietnamese Evangelicals and Pentecostalism shows how people at the grassroots marry the deeply local-based meaning dictated by the particularity of living context and the profoundly universal truth claims made by a religion aspiring to reach all four corners of the earth to enhance life.
With his latest book, The Holy Spirit before Christianity, John R. Levison again changes the face and foundation of Christian belief in the Holy Spirit. The categories Christians have used, the boundaries they have created, the proprietary claims they have made--all of these evaporate, now that Levison has looked afresh at Scripture. In a study that is both poignant and provocative, Levison takes readers back five hundred years before Jesus, where he discovers history?s first grasp of the Holy Spirit as a personal agent. The prophet Haggai and the author of Isaiah 56-66, in their search for ways to grapple with the tragic events of exile and to articulate hope for the future, took up old exodus traditions of divine agents--pillars of fire, an angel, God?s own presence--and fused them with belief in God?s Spirit. Since it was the Spirit of God who led Israel up from Egypt and formed them into a holy nation, now, the prophets assured their hearers, the Spirit of God would lead and renew those returning from exile. Taking this point of origin as our guide, Christian pneumatology--belief in the Holy Spirit--is less about an exclusively Christian experience or doctrine and more about the presence of God in the grand scheme of Israel's history, in which Christianity is ancient Israel's heir. This explosive observation traces the essence of Christian pneumatology deep into the heart of the Hebrew Scriptures. The implications are fierce: the priority of Israelite tradition at the headwaters of pneumatology means that Christians can no longer hold stubbornly to the Holy Spirit as an exclusively Christian belief. But the implications are hopeful as well, offering Christians a richer history, a renewed vocabulary, a shared path with Judaism, and the promise of a more expansive and authentic experience of the Holy Spirit.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among generations of Kenya's Christian communities. Exploring the movements' religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya highlights antecedent movements set against their historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their translation of the gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new expressions of faith from elements of their historical and contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically charts the remarkable journey of innovation, curation, and revision that attends to the process of translation and conversion in Christian history. While outlining a century of successive renewal movements in Kenya between 1920 and 2020, the study also delves into features of recent urban Pentecostal churches. Readers will find a thorough historical treatment of themes such as church structures, corporate vision, Christian formation, and theological education. The longitudinal and comparative analysis shows how these Pentecostal approaches to orality, kinship, and integrated spirituality inform Kenyans' reimagination of Christianity.
In nineteenth-century Ghana, regional warfare rooted in profound social and economic transformations led thousands of displaced people to seek refuge in the small mountain kingdom of Akuapem. There they encountered missionaries from Germany whose message of sin and forgiveness struck many of these newcomers as irrelevant to their needs. However, together with Akuapem?s natives, these newcomers began reformulating Christianity as a ritual tool for social and physical healing, as well as power, in a dangerous spiritual and human world. The result was Ghana?s oldest African-initiated variant of Christianity: a homegrown expression of unbroken moral, political, and religious priorities. Focusing on the southeastern Gold Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century, Healing and Power in Ghana identifies patterns of indigenous reception, rejection, and reformulation of what had initially arrived, centuries earlier, as a European trade religion. Paul Grant draws on a mixture of European and indigenous sources in several languages, building on recent scholarship in world Christianity to address the question of conversion through the lens of the indigenous moral imagination. This approach considers, among other things, the conditions in which Akuapem locals and newly arrived displaced persons might find Christianity useful or applicable to their needs. This is no traditional history of the European-African religious encounter. Ghanaian Christians identified the missionaries according to preexisting political and religious categories--as a new class of shrine priests. They resolved their own social crises in ways the missionaries were unable to understand. In effect, Christianity became an indigenous religion years before indigenous people converted in any appreciable numbers. By foregrounding the sacrificial idiom shared by locals, missionaries, and native thinkers, Healing and Power in Ghana presents a new model of scholarship for both West African history and world Christianity.
In Transatlantic Charismatic Renewal, c.1950-2000, Andrew Atherstone, Mark Hutchinson and John Maiden bring together leading researchers to examine one of the globally most important religious movements of the twentieth century. Variously referred to as the charismatic 'renewal' or 'revival', it was a key Christian response to globalization, modernity and secularization. Unlike other accounts (which focus either on denominational pentecostalism or charismatic phenomena outside the West), this volume describes transatlantic Christianity drawing deeply on its pneumatic roots to bring about renewal. New research in archives and overlooked journals illuminate key figures from David du Plessis to John Wimber, providing insights which challenge the standard interpretations of the charismatic movement's origins and influence.
Using the concept of a "religious market", this volume explores how African Traditional Religions and churches within Prophetic Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe seek to attract and retain members and clients. Chapters provide extensive coverage of two of the leading churches, namely, Emmanuel Makandiwa's United Family International Church (UFIC) and Walter Magaya's Prophetic Healing and Deliverance Ministries (PHD). Contributors also explore the strategies adopted by Pentecostalism in general, while others focus on African Traditional Religions. They show that although Prophetic Pentecostalism has gained a significant share of the market in Zimbabwe and in Southern Africa in general, it is not without controversy. In particular, it has been associated with the abuse of women and exploiting members and clients for financial gain. Innovation and Competition in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism is an important contribution to understanding the marketization of religion.
David Bebbington is well known for his characterization of the Evangelical movement in terms of the four leading emphases of Bible, cross, conversion, and activism. This quadrilateral was expounded in his classic 1989 book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Bebbington developed many of the themes in that book in articles published from the 1980s to the present, but until now most of those articles have remained little known. The present collection of thirty-two essays makes readily available these important explorations of key aspects in the history of Evangelicalism. The Evangelical movement arose in the eighteenth century in Britain and America as a revitalization of Protestantism. Sharing much with the Puritans who preceded them, the Evangelicals nevertheless adopted a fresh stance by making revival rather than reformation their priority. Coming from diverse denominations, they formed a zealous united front. Over subsequent centuries they grew in number and carried their message throughout the world, giving rise to many of the churches in the global South that have come to the forefront in world Christianity. The essays in this work deal chiefly with Britain, though a few place the British movement in a world setting. Because Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic interacted, reading much of the same literature and visiting each other, there was a great deal of common ground between the British and American movements. Hence many of the topics covered here relate to developments mirrored in the American churches over the last three centuries. The two volumes of The Evangelical Quadrilateral address different aspects of the Evangelical movement. The first volume deals with issues in the movement as a whole, and the second volume examines features of particular denominational bodies within Evangelicalism. Each volume contains an introductory essay reviewing recent literature in the field, and then a series of related essays. Volume 1, Characterizing the British Gospel Movement, begins with an overview of the nature of the movement. The essays cover such representative areas as the affinity of early Evangelicalism with the Enlightenment, the impact of Americans Jonathan Edwards and Dwight L. Moody, the advent hope and the experience of conversion as key doctrines of Evangelicalism, the growth of academic historical studies of and by Evangelicals, Evangelical attitudes to science, and widespread trends in the movement and its shifting patterns of public worship in the twenty-first century. The first volume also provides detail on many of the main features that British Evangelicals displayed in common.
David Bebbington is well known for his characterization of the Evangelical movement in terms of the four leading emphases of Bible, cross, conversion, and activism. This quadrilateral was expounded in his classic 1989 book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Bebbington developed many of the themes in that book in articles published from the 1980s to the present, but until now most of those articles have remained little known. The present collection of thirty-two essays makes readily available these important explorations of key aspects in the history of Evangelicalism. The Evangelical movement arose in the eighteenth century in Britain and America as a revitalization of Protestantism. Sharing much with the Puritans who preceded them, the Evangelicals nevertheless adopted a fresh stance by making revival rather than reformation their priority. Coming from diverse denominations, they formed a zealous united front. Over subsequent centuries they grew in number and carried their message throughout the world, giving rise to many of the churches in the global South that have come to the forefront in world Christianity. The essays in this work deal chiefly with Britain, though a few place the British movement in a world setting. Because Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic interacted, reading much of the same literature and visiting each other, there was a great deal of common ground between the British and American movements. Hence many of the topics covered here relate to developments mirrored in the American churches over the last three centuries. The two volumes of The Evangelical Quadrilateral address different aspects of the Evangelical movement. The first volume deals with issues in the movement as a whole, and the second volume examines features of particular denominational bodies within Evangelicalism. Each volume contains an introductory essay reviewing recent literature in the field, and then a series of related essays. Volume 2, The Denominational Mosaic of the British Gospel Movement, turns to the movement's component parts. The essays cover such representative areas as the Islington Conference's influence in setting out the public stance of Anglican Evangelicals, the doctrine and spirituality of the Methodists, the Baptists in Britain in light of Nathan Hatch's thesis about the democratization of American Christianity, the role of the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren in world Evangelicalism, and the charismatic renewal that transformed church life in the postwar world. This second volume therefore brings out the wide range of denominations in the Evangelical mosaic.
