Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 76

Pentecostalism is a young movement and its history is short, but that history is also complex and far from fully understood. It is now clear that Pentecostalism had many sites of origin. One of the birthplaces of Pentecostalism was the Mukti Mission in Pune, India where Pandita Ramabai, an internationally known Hindu feminist convert to Christianity, oversaw a Pentecostal‐like religious revival during the years 1906 and 1907. Around the same time, Isaiah Shembe was forming his new independent amaNazaretha church in South Africa that was both anticolonial and decidedly charismatic in orientation. Willis Hoover began preaching a Spirit‐centered message within the Methodist Church of Chile during these same years, and comparable events took place in Europe and East Asia. Unlike the other three Christian mega‐traditions, Pentecostalism has been multicentered and global from the very beginning.

The Azusa Street Revival that began in Los Angeles in 1906 gathered up all the various global expressions of spiritual fervor and turned them into a self‐conscious Pentecostal movement. The meetings at the Azusa Street Mission were directed by an African American preacher named William J. Seymour (introduced in Voices of World Christianity 4.1). He was an unassuming leader who, rather than preach, would sometimes just sit in the front of the meeting and pray in silence, and miracles would occur. News of the revival quickly spread around the world. People came from everywhere to see what was going on, and the result was the creation of a network of Spirit‐filled Christians who saw themselves as part of a new people of God being called into existence.

Ever since the Azusa Street Revival, the Pentecostal movement has been growing the same way that it started, by word of mouth, by serendipitous encounter, and by men and women who go wherever in the world they feel God is leading them to spread the Pentecostal message. Much of the movement’s growth has taken place outside the recordkeeping cultures of western society, and Pentecostalism has tended to flourish among the poor and illiterate rather than among the rich and powerful. Accordingly, its growth was initially overlooked, and its history has been under‐documented. In most of the world, the Pentecostal movement of the twentieth century was like a forest fire burning underground and out of sight. It was only in the 1960s with the rise of the Charismatic Movement that Pentecostalism began to break into mainstream culture and to receive academic attention. During the last half century Pentecostalism has much more visibly exploded around the world.

Figure 4.5 International Church of the Grace of God, located on a pedestrian shopping street in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded in 1980, the International Church of the Grace of God is a Pentecostal denomination with more than 2,000 congregations in Latin America.

Photo by author.

Large Pentecostal churches now exist in many different parts of the world (see Figure 4.5). In the 1990s, the movement was growing so fast that some scholars were predicting that the Pentecostal movement would convert all of Latin America within twenty‐five years, replacing Catholicism as the region’s dominant faith. That did not happen, and the trend lines of Pentecostal growth now seem to be leveling out in many regions. Still, it is unlikely that Pentecostalism has reached its peak. A hundred years ago, there were only a handful of Pentecostals in the world. Today there are almost half a billion. However the movement is assessed, no one can doubt that the emergence and growth of Pentecostalism is one of the most dramatic developments in all of Christian history.