This section includes a survey of the statistics and developments relevant to the global expansion of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements and demonstrates a shift from North American factions to global influence. The expansion of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements in the Developing World and the Global South is explored. The literature in this section demonstrates a functional and practical appropriation of the Pentecostal-Charismatic message that relates to daily concerns and needs of the Developing World.
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According to the World Christian Database, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Pentecostalism was the second-fastest growing religious movement in the world,30 following the Roman Catholic Church. However, the rapid growth of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements in the Global South31 has caused concern among Roman Catholic leaders, including the papacy. In May 2007, during a trip to Brazil, Pope Benedict XVI described Pentecostal churches as “sects” and argued that they used aggressive tactics to proselytize. In Brazil, Roman Catholics accounted for about 90 percent of the population in the 1960s; by 2005 Roman Catholics accounted for only 67 percent of the population.32 The Vatican has been increasingly lamenting the rise of Pentecostal communities in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, and the resulting flight of Catholics from the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Walter Kasper, who serves as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, noted however, that the Roman Catholic Church “must not ask first what is wrong with the Pentecostals but ask what our pastoral failings are and come to a spiritual renewal.” 33 Nevertheless, the rapid growth of the movements caused entrenched interests with Roman Catholicism and mainline Protestantism to take notice. The movement that commenced in otherwise marginalized North American Wesleyan pietism became a worldwide phenomenon by the end of the twentieth century.
During the twentieth century, Christianity enjoyed explosive growth in the Global South: in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Jenkins (2002) predicted that by the year 2020, Christianity would be overwhelmingly a non-European, non-white
30 Growth rates over the period from 2000 to 2005; all figures from the nondenominational World Christian Database, a project of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (www.worldchristiandatabase.org).
31 The “Global South” is characterized by Philip Jenkins (2002) in The Next Christendom: the
coming of global Christianity, and includes: Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
32 The Christian Post, Rise of Pentecostalism Spurs Call for Catholic “Self-Examination”, online resource: http: //www.christianpost.com/article/20071126/30226.htm
33 According to the Agence France Presse.
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religion. Jenkins argued that the explosive growth of worldwide Pentecostalism was “nothing less than the creation of a new Christendom”, which, for better or worse, would play a major role in world affairs. The Pentecostal-Charismatic movements that triumphed all over the Global South were viewed as primarily fundamentalist and even reactionary by the standards of economically advanced nations, and their message tended to be charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. Because Islam expanded in the same areas as the militant Pentecostal-Charismatic movements, Jenkins argued that renewed religious rivalry would emerge. The resulting confrontations gave rise to deadly conflicts in places such as Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia. According to Jenkins, an unprecedented and potentially dangerous global change was underway. The influence of the Pentecostal- Charismatic movements would arguably continue to penetrate all aspects of society, thereby affecting not only small religious communities, but ultimately global politics.
The Pentecostal-Charismatic movements have experienced astounding growth by fostering a pragmatic spirit focused on teaching its adherents to do whatever is necessary to achieve the goal of winning converts through preaching the Pentecostal message and demonstrating the Pentecostal experience (McClung 2002:620). Sociological insight, however, informs the observation of religious movements, noting that as they matured, the pragmatic, entrepreneurial emphases were stifled by the inevitabilities of organization, administration, and bureaucratization. The Assemblies of God in the United States was among the first of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements to have experienced formalization. The long-term growth rate of Pentecostalism under denominational structures remains to be seen.
According to Christianity Today (2000), Pentecostalism is intrinsically a religion of the disinherited. Pentecostalism, even from its earliest roots among Holiness factions, was “a vibrant faith among the poor; it reaches into the daily lives of believers, offering not only hope but a new way of living”. In the infancy of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements, sociologist John Holt (1946) noted that Pentecostalism attracted most of its adherents from society’s dispossessed, rural
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poor. The success of Pentecostalism as a response to social crisis was a natural byproduct of social disorganization. Holt (1940:740-741) posited that, “migration and concomitant urbanization of an intensely rural and religiously fundamentalist population” initiated the emergence of holiness sects which attempted to “recapture their sense of security” in the midst of social disorder. Pentecostalism flourished in its infancy as a religion of the disinherited and was greeted with broad support as it expanded into the Developing World. A movement that once channeled its social protest and alienation into the “harmless backwaters of religious ideology” (Andersen 1979:239) grew in the twentieth century to become a global force of influence, shaping the very identity of the worldwide Christian religion.
According to observations by David Barrett (as reported by McClung 1994:11), international Pentecostals and Charismatics of the late twentieth century were “more urban than rural, more female than male, more Third World (66%) than Western world, more impoverished (87%) than affluent, more family-oriented than individualistic, and on average, younger than eighteen”. In this context, the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements, especially in the Developing World, have accomplished something that no other religious movement, even liberation theology, has done thus far: it has found a way of overcoming the “hazards” of being poor. Pentecostal-Charismatic adherents remained economically poor, but they discovered in Pentecostalism a means by which they no longer had to live in a culture of poverty. Similarly, African Christians34 rejected both an intellectualized Western view of orthodoxy, which to most African Pentecostals and Charismatics “left Christians helpless in real life, and therefore, an alternative pneumatology [was] needed that [could] relate to needs other than those of a spiritual nature alone” (as reported by Kärkkäinen 2002:172). In Africa, even churches that did not identify themselves as specifically Pentecostal or
34 Kärkkäinen references Derek B. Mutungu, “A Response to M.L. Daneel” in All Together in
One Place, 127-131.
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Charismatic demonstrated a spirituality similar to that which characterized the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements;35 they proclaimed a “holistic gospel of salvation that includes deliverance from all types of oppression, such as sickness, sorcery, evil spirits, and poverty” (Kärkkäinen 2002:172).
However, the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements were changing in the West by the late twentieth century. Mega-churches and wealthy congregations were no longer found only in upper-class mainline Protestant churches. In the United States, for example, there was little emphasis on premillennial eschatology among affluent Pentecostals (Shaull 2000), where the movement was much more diverse and did not attract only the disinherited; an alternative worldview to deal with social ills was no longer necessary for suburban, upper-class Pentecostals and Charismatics. As the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements expanded globally, it was arguable that complacency and cultural conformity prevailed in the West.