Moved by the Spirit: Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in the Global South

Nick Street reports on new trends in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. The report includes information on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative and photographs by Nick Street and Donald Miller.

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In 2008 the John Templeton Foundation gave a grant to the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC to study Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the world. In conversations with Kimon Sargeant, vice-president for human sciences at the Templeton Foundation, we decided to exclude the United States and Europe from this initiative, and instead to focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America, where much of the growth was occurring.

The goal was to fund five research centers with grants up to $500,000 and 15 individual scholars with grants not exceeding $100,000. These two-year grants were to explore answers to one of three questions: 1) What is the religious experience of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians? 2) Why is Pentecostalism growing and where? And 3) what impact is this expression of Christianity having on society and culture, including politics?

In response to our request for proposals, we received nearly 500 letters of interest to apply for funding. With the assistance of judges from the fields of sociology, anthropology, economics, political science and religious studies, we invited 100 scholars and research centers to submit full proposals. Several months later, we sat for two days with our judges and rated each submission, which was an agonizing process since there were many excellent proposals. But eventually we decided to fund research centers in Brazil, El Salvador, Nigeria, Indonesia and Russia. The selection of individual scholars was equally difficult, but finally we gave 16 smaller grants, which sometimes included several researchers.

In total, research was conducted in 25 different countries. Several of the projects had a comparative focus. For example, we gave a grant to study the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement that involved research in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. In Nigeria we had three different projects, including a research center in Jos that involved dozens of research assistants. And in Brazil we funded a research center as well as a graduate student’s research on the growth of Pentecostalism in prisons. All together, there were several hundred people involved in research that was funded by the John Templeton Foundation’s grant to USC.

All of the projects employed social science methods, ranging from surveys to in-depth interviews and case studies of congregations. We specifically excluded theological inquiries regarding the truth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity; our interest was in documenting the ways in which this expression of religion was transforming Christianity, especially in the global South—although we did fund a project in St. Petersburg, Russia, which involved a team of 17 anthropologists who were studying small Pentecostal congregations throughout the northern regions of that vast country.

In addition, we funded two other projects. Because of our location in Southern California, and the fact that the 1906 Azusa Street Revival was one of the starting points for the spread of Pentecostalism, we were interested in how Pentecostalism had transformed Christianity in the intervening century in L.A.’s multiethnic communities. We also funded a number of efforts to digitize archives on the history of Pentecostalism that were located in libraries in various European countries and the U.S. These documents are now available through the USC Digital Library (digitallibrary.usc.edu).

After the first year of research, we convened representatives of our projects in Quito, Ecuador, for a week of conversation. This was the first time that these scholars had met one another, and a number of collaborations were born as individuals shared insights from their initial findings. A year later, as scholars were wrapping up their projects, we again gathered everyone, this time in Nairobi, Kenya. Scholars shared survey results, findings from their interviews and case studies, and video and photos from their projects.

At both of these consultations, we invited a journalist, Nick Street, to observe the meetings, and with our communications director, Tim Sato, the two of them interviewed each scholar who was present. They were interested in cross-cutting themes as well as differences in various geographical areas related to our three initial research questions. After returning from Nairobi we sat down together and seized on the idea of producing this magazine-style report that would pull together findings across different projects. As one might expect, Nick was not satisfied with relying simply on interviews with scholars; he wanted to see and experience what they had been studying. So we sent him traveling—to Brazil, El Salvador, Nigeria, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and India. I also shared with him notes that I had taken on trips to China, Malaysia, South Korea and Singapore.

The various sections of this report are Nick’s attempt to identify themes that cut across the research projects funded by the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI). The nuance and detail of findings—and very possibly disagreements with Nick’s observations—will be forthcoming in scholarly books and journal articles. I am serving as the editor for a series of books on Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity that will be published by Oxford University Press. I will also be writing an overview book for this series with Tetsunao Yamamori that will draw on our travel together in over 25 countries where we have been examining the growth and impact of Pentecostalism.

Hence, this report is simply a “teaser” for what is to come. But it also identifies some issues related to the origins, evolutions, adaptations and engagement of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. The Pentecostal movement, in all of its various forms and expressions, is transforming Christianity. Mainline Protestantism as well as Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity are being “Pentecostalized.” Indeed, the boundaries separating Pentecostals from other Christian groups is blurring, especially with reference to evangelical Christianity. And some Pentecostal denominations have been around long enough that they have begun to routinize, struggling with too many layers of bureaucracy and control. In contrast, some of the most dynamic and innovative groups do not care about labels or denominational affiliation—they are simply “Moved by the Spirit” to transform their communities and the lives of the individuals who associate with them.

Renewal Movements in Campinas, Brazil
reflecting trends playing out across the global South

“You said you’re part of a project researching Pentecostalism,” said Renata Strohmenger. “But I’m not sure that’s who we are. What do you mean by Pentecostal?”

A perfectly reasonable question. Strohmenger is a pastor with Igreja Renacer em Cristo (Rebirth in Christ Church)—an indigenous, three-decade-old Protestant denomination with about two million members, mainly in Brazil but also in the U.S. and a few other countries in the global North. Strohmenger’s church in a prosperous neighborhood of Campinas, a booming industrial city about an hour’s drive from São Paulo, occupies a lofty glass, steel and stone commercial space that previously housed a luxury car dealership.

Igreja Renacer’s sunrise logo adorns the pulpit on a stage that also includes a drum kit and guitar stands. But apart from a pair of menorah-esque candleholders, there’s no other religious iconography in a room that could just as easily be the home of a generously endowed community theater.

“Well,” said her interviewer, “by ‘Pentecostal’ I mean someone who seeks the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit, and who believes that experience manifests in the form of speaking in tongues, healing, prophesy. Worship and preaching style also figure into it. But that’s the main thing.”

Strohmenger smiled brightly. In her fashionably faded jeans and lace-trimmed blouse, she would not have looked out of place in an upscale mall in Singapore, Orange County, Dubai or Jakarta.

“Yes,” she said. “We’re definitely Pentecostal.” Outside of town, on the highway to Viracopos Airport, the flank of a church is emblazoned with the name of an early 20th century Pentecostal denomination, marking the edge of a large favela. The rising tide of global free-market capitalism is clearly not lifting all boats.

“Urbanization is the main factor connecting Pentecostalism with the spread of neoliberal economics in the developing world,” said Flavio Munhoz Sofiati, a sociologist of religion at Universidade Federal de Goiás. “Humanity spent thousands of years being agrarian, and this shift to the cities has taken place in less than 200 years. We have yet to fully adapt to this dramatic change—that’s why we have so much disease, both physical and psychological. Pentecostalism explicitly offers a direct, personal experience of healing for individuals and a kind of collective therapeutic process as well.”

For this reason, human suffering in the expanding slums on the outskirts of globalizing cities has long attracted Protestant renewal groups like the Assemblies of God, whose promise of the healing power of the Holy Spirit holds strong appeal for people with few other resources to address sicknesses of body and soul. The persistence of poverty in Campinas and other parts of Latin America has also shaped the Catholic Church, which has seen the eclipse of social-minded liberation theology by the Charismatic Renewal movement—essentially Catholic Pentecostalism—with its focus on individual experience and devotion.

“The very poor on the edge of cities are attracted to renewal,” said Father José Antonio Boareto, rector of a local seminary and a professor of theology at Pontificia Universidade Católica de Campinas. “That’s a complete turn from the late 1970s, when promoting social consciousness seemed like the answer. Now people on the margins are disenchanted with that. They believe social engagement brings no practical results, so they turn to the idea of healing.”

This shift within the Church comes at a time when the Catholic portion of Brazil’s population is declining—from 85 percent to about 60 percent
over the last two decades. And this decline has not happened painlessly. In fact, the drama has played out most vividly through a conflict between two ministries to youth—the bellwether of global Catholicism’s future. The Youth Shepherd movement, shaped by the folksy ethos of ’60s-era socially engaged Catholicism, has lost ground to Jesus Youth, a product of Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

“Just like many of the marginal groups we want them to try to help, our young people criticize social engagement for just talking and not changing anything,” said Boareto. “Charismatic Renewal is changing their realities, but the question is whether that experience inside the church will really change the social reality.”

“True” Christians

The wave of religious renewal that has swept through Campinas and the rest of the developing world over the past quarter-century has likewise brought upheaval to established Protestant institutions like the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession, which claims about 1 million members in Brazil. During her tenure as a minister and parish administrator, Rev. Neusa Tezner witnessed the long arc of the event first-hand.

She said that the appropriation of charismatic music and worship styles by some pastors and their congregations was acceptable to her and other members of the denominational hierarchy. But the very ecumenism that allowed Brazil’s Lutheran establishment to absorb some of the energy of the Pentecostal movement also put it at odds with another of that movement’s common features: the notion that believers who have experienced the gifts of the Holy Spirit must be re-baptized as a sign that they have become “true” Christians.

Tezner’s denomination acknowledges baptisms from all Christian traditions as valid, and she said that pastors who practiced re-baptism were considered “contaminated.” During this period of polarization, which culminated in an administrative housecleaning in 2002, about 15,000 people left
the fold.

“I’m happy that era is over,” Tezner said. “It was a painful process. But it strengthened the core of the Lutheran church.”

That, in a sense, is what religious renewal is all about.

Renewal Movements and Christianity’s Southward Shift

How are these trends shaping the religious landscape in other parts of the global South? For about 10 years the headlines have read something like this: Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity is the fastest-growing religious movement on the planet, and it is flourishing most vigorously in rapidly urbanizing, non-Western countries that are bestirred by the equally potent force of free-market capitalism. This southward shift in the center of religious gravity means that formerly “un-churched” peoples now play a bigger role in shaping Christian belief and practice than do their co-religionists in the late-colonial powers that first missionized them.

Closer to the ground, a number of more recent developments become apparent. Neo-Pentecostal or “next generation” churches like Igreja Renacer are now outpacing the growth of traditional Pentecostal churches, particularly among the emerging middle classes. Unlike older denominations, many of which have opened Bible colleges and seminaries to train pastors, these newer expressions of the Pentecostal movement tend to be highly organized without being tied to orthodox ideas about liturgy or theology— in fact, they tend to eschew most formal theological and denominational labels. Thus they have been able to attract highly capable, mission-minded leaders like Renata Strohmenger, a successful graphic designer, who considers her profound experience of calling to ministry as her primary qualification for holding the pulpit.

The Catholic Charismatic movement, by contrast, has been largely absorbed by the organizational structure of its two-millennia-old parent institution. Charismatic retreat centers in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia now host thousands of mostly lower-class retreatants as well as priests and nuns, who are regularly dispatched to them for periods of spiritual renewal.
But if established Protestant and Catholic communities have begun to find their equilibrium after the tumult of what might eventually be considered the First Global Great Awakening, Pentecostal and charismatic missionizing of non-Christian religious groups is sending even broader ripples through developing societies that are already in a state of flux. The cell-group strategies of renewalist “church-planters” in India, China and tribal regions of Indonesia and Brazil often disturb deeply established structures of kinship and belief—a process that exposes tensions between the values of religious freedom and social stability.

The following pages explore these issues in greater depth and detail, looking frequently at how the interplay between Christian renewal movements and the particular elements of a given cultural landscape influence developments in politics, economic equality, gender relations or sexuality. With any luck, the reader will have acquired, by the end, a clearer sense for what believers mean by “Pentecostal”—and for the consequences of the increasing dominance of that form of belief in parts of the world that are changing at a breakneck pace.

When dramatic social change upends conventional forms of belief, the seeds of renewalist religion begin to stir.

The Los Angeles Times was not pleased by events unfolding at the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission. Under the headline “Women With Men Embrace” in the newspaper’s edition for September 3, 1906, the writer for the Times catalogued several “disgusting scenes”:

Muttering a jargon of unintelligible sounds which no man can interpret, the worshipers in the barn-like negro church on Azusa street worked themselves into paroxysms of religious fervor last night… Men and women embraced each other in an apparent agony of emotion. Whites and negroes clasped hands and sang together. The surprise is that any respectable white person would attend such meetings as are being conducted on Azusa street.

Even apart from the overt Caucasian male chauvinism apparent in the article, the L.A. of that time was very different from the relatively stable, suburbanized metropolis of today. Racial unrest, violent labor protests and the threat of epidemic—cholera, typhus and even bubonic plague—roiled Southern California and other parts of the country. L.A. itself was undergoing difficult growing pains—the city had tripled in size during the first decade of the 20th century, the plan to establish a steady water supply for the arid region was still just “Mulholland’s Dream” and a boom-and-bust economy had created a huge, restive underclass.

Iconoclastic Religion

In the midst of this turmoil an unorthodox black preacher named William J. Seymour appeared. Seymour’s testimony about the spiritual transformation that followed the believer’s personal experience of the Holy Spirit connected a radically individualist form of Christianity to the event at Pentecost—an account in the New Testament that serves as a touchstone for both Pentecostals and their Catholic counterparts, Charismatic Renewalists. During the Pentecost event, which is supposed to have occurred 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection, his key disciples and scores of other followers were visited by the Holy Spirit, an ecstatic encounter that bestowed abilities like healing, prophesy and supernatural speech—or “speaking in tongues.”

Seymour’s church on Azusa Street drew motley throngs that alarmed members of a civic and religious establishment who saw little to like in an African-American preacher leading an interracial flock that engaged in a noisily emotional form of worship. But along with the promise of direct access to divine power through the Holy Spirit, the emphasis on emotion in Pentecostalism was, arguably, the primary reason it proved so attractive. Traditional Protestant and Catholic movements of that era defined themselves largely through creeds, liturgical orthodoxies and conventions of biblical interpretation—they were, in short, religions more of the head than the heart. At a time when rapid urbanization and social upheaval were the order of the day, Pentecostalism’s promise of supernatural power and healing made it a popular remedy for the forms of soul-sickness that afflicted many people in early 20th-century L.A. and in parts of the world connected to the city through a growing missionary network.

Competing Mythologies

At this point the story becomes more complicated. Among many American scholars, the standard narrative about Pentecostalism is that contemporary global expressions of the movement trace their roots to Los Angeles and the Azusa Street Revival. But the charismatic impulse in American Christianity has a much older lineage—including the camp meetings at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in the early 19th century and other events associated with the First and Second Great Awakenings. Members of renewalist movements often locate the source of their theology and practice even farther in the past, identifying their cultivation of ecstatic experiences with the spiritual fervor of Christianity’s earliest apostolic age. And many Pentecostal and charismatic communities in Korea, Fiji, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere nurture origin stories that offer a counter-narrative to the assumptions that underlie the Azusa Street mythology.

For example, the Mukti revival in India occurred concurrently with events in Los Angeles. And in West Africa, indigenous evangelists William Wade Harris and Garrick Sokari Braide sparked Pentecost-inspired revival movements in the early 20th century that had only the most tenuous relationships to Pentecostalism in the global North.

Networks and Empowerment

But if there were near-simultaneous eruptions of renewalist fervor during what might be called the First Global Great Awakening, the missionary and media networks that were established and expanded by Azusa Street evangelists unquestionably enabled the spread of the spiritual fire. In an article titled “‘Tongues’ Go Into Africa” (May 18, 1907), the Los Angeles Times offered a glimpse of this ongoing dispatch of missionaries into “un-churched” lands:

The “Gift of Tongues” fellowship transferred itself bodily last evening from the Azusa-street church to the Salt Lake Depot, and a “Pentecostal farewell” was given to the Cummings family, as it started in its initial journey, the end of which is planned to be Monrovia, Liberia, Africa.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Pentecostal missionizing of the era was the role it afforded single white women, who embarked on one-way journeys to parts of the globe that were largely unknown to most of them. These women felt themselves directly called by God to minister to non-Christianized populations—and they also found a way to experience a powerful sense of purpose at a time when women in the United States were largely excluded from leadership positions in other denominations and had not yet won the right to vote.

Similar impulses—and opportunities—now stoke the fervor of women in Pentecostal and charismatic religious movements in parts of the world where constraints on women’s power, both secular and religious, are often the last forms of institutional oppression to succumb to the forces of modernity. In Latin America, for example, the traditional exclusion of women from positions of authority in politics as well as in traditional Catholic hierarchies has made renewalist religion a key source of women’s empowerment in the countries where it is growing most rapidly.

Charisma and Expansion

This willingness to challenge hierarchical limits on laity’s access to divine power was also a central feature of the modern Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) movement. In the late 1960s, a small group of lay leaders in the Midwest, inspired by the Pentecostal forms of spiritual practice recounted in books like The Cross and the Switchblade and They Speak With Other Tongues, began to hold retreats that included prayers requesting baptism in the Holy Spirit. Though it has faced opposition from Church leaders who see the movement as a challenge to priestly authority—or as an opening for Pentecostal “sheep stealing”—CCR is now firmly entrenched in contemporary Catholicism.

In broad terms, what has become of the multiplex Christian renewal movement and its heady mixture of race, religion and gender in the century since it began? A recent Pew Research Center report on global Christianity provided comprehensive data to support a conclusion that many social scientists have drawn from piecemeal studies over the past decade: the Christian communities that are growing most rapidly are found primarily in the global South and East. And in countries like Nigeria and China—which had tiny Christian populations in the early 20th century and now each boast more Protestants than either Germany or the United Kingdom—much of the energy for that growth has come from groups associated with Pentecostal and charismatic religion.

According to survey data from Pew and other sources, Pentecostals and charismatics currently account for roughly a quarter of the world’s two billion Christians. And if present trends continue, by 2015 well over two-thirds of the world’s Christians will live in the global South, where the concentration of renewal movements is greatest.

More remarkably, a fine-grained examination of the locations where Christian renewalism is most dramatically flourishing reveals that it is thriving where dislocation, inequality and religious as well as political turmoil are often most acute—parts of the world, in other words, that are now experiencing the kind of tumultuous change that L.A. endured a century ago.

Crisis and Opportunity

Visits to Pentecostal congregations in rapidly urbanizing places like Brazil, Nigeria, India and Indonesia reveal similar concerns and yearnings— whatever its merits, the globalization of American-style capitalism has also dramatically altered cultural landscapes in a way that often produces instability and even a form of collective trauma. In El Salvador, which has made the transition from bloody civil war to shiny shopping malls in barely 20 years, gang violence and dramatic income disparity belie a veneer of social stability. A Pentecostal pastor in San Salvador remarked that the relationship between a believer’s experience of encounter with the Holy Spirit and the easing of the kind of “emotional commotion” that pervades his society is the heart of Pentecostalism’s appeal.

Other factors that may account for the “extremophile” character of Pentecostal and charismatic religion include renewalism’s fluid authority structures, which allow leadership opportunities for women and other traditionally marginalized people in places where rigid institutionalism impairs social mobility; an exuberant form of worship, often employing contemporary musical forms, which is particularly attractive to younger worshipers; and, finally, the notion that individual believers can have a direct line of communication with the Creator of the cosmos, which is a profound proposition for those who are disempowered politically, economically or within traditional religious hierarchies.

Syncretism and “Reverse Mission”

The missionary impulse in Pentecostal and charismatic religion has taken on a number of remarkable characteristics as renewal movements have begun to reflect the southward shift in Christianity’s center of gravity. In Fiji and other parts of Oceania, local mythologies trace the roots of biblical revelation to the South Pacific, and indigenous missionaries set out for countries with their own distinct narratives of Christian proselytism. Similar instances of “reverse mission” are playing out within Latin American and sub-Saharan renewalist communities, which dispatch spiritual emissaries to carry the light of the Gospel to “spiritually dark” regions of Western Europe and North America.

This development has transformed religious networks as well. Renewalist laborers migrating from poorer nations in the global South to find work in more prosperous economies create transnational infrastructures that sustain not only the flow of remittances to families back home but also the transmission of worship cultures from their communities of origin to their host countries.

Perhaps the most important system of transnational relationships for renewalism involves the dissemination of musical forms through social networks and electronic media. For example, the tunes of Hillsong Music—a praise-song production company affiliated with a Pentecostal megachurch in Australia—are played and adapted to local worship cultures in renewalist communities across Latin America, Africa and East Asia. The frequent syncretism between local musical forms and the performance component of renewalist religious experience also means that local innovations of praise music are readily transmitted through the same transnational networks.

Pentecostalization and Routinization

A number of additional trends have emerged in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For example, many mainline communities have become Pentecostalized—meaning that emotional worship styles and an emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit are now common features in churches that formally identify themselves with established denominations like Methodism or Anglicanism. Which highlights the fact that the boundaries separating evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic and even mainline churches are blurring, making traditional distinctions somewhat outmoded. Conversely, many older Pentecostal denominations have begun to prize professionalized clergy and a more rationalistic worship culture—processes of routinization that have diminished their capacity to innovate and grow. The leading edges of the Christian renewal movement are now the province of post-denominational groups that are beginning to engage with other religious movements in order to transform weak and often corrupt civil societies.

Los Angeles, formerly the point of departure for missionaries dispatched to the global South, is now home to dozens of outposts established by Protestant renewal groups like the India Pentecostal Church, Nigeria’s Redeemed Christian Church of God and Misión Cristiana Elim, a particularly dynamic next-generation movement based in Central America. What are the characteristics of the renewal movements on the southern ends of these networks? How are they interacting with—and even shaping—the cultures where they flourish? And what seeds are they planting in the well-turned spiritual turf of the City of Angels?

Movements associated with the first wave of global Christian renewal have become institutionalized, sparking new renewalist impulses in the developing world.

Glory Moses, a pastor’s daughter, is no spiritual slacker. Other 20-year-olds in her native Kerala may be counting the days until the opening of Kochi’s mammoth Lulu Mall—billed as the largest shopping center in India outside Mumbai. But Moses, a student at a girls’ school affiliated with Doulos Bible College, is up before dawn every morning for about two hours of prayer. Her school day, punctuated by periods of Bible study and meditation, officially ends at 6 p.m. with more prayer. But she prays on her own for another hour before midnight and again between 1 and 2 a.m.

“That’s when it’s easiest to get authority over the evil spirit,” she said.

An improbable mixture of religious fervor, socialist politics and centuries-old cosmopolitanism constitutes Kerala’s heady cultural brew. Indians commonly refer to the state, which has a population of about 35 million, as their country’s Bible Belt. To wit, Doulos (the word means “servant” in New Testament Greek) is one of about a dozen training centers for pastors and lay evangelists within an hour’s drive of Kochi. And in a country dominated by Hindus, Christians constitute slim majorities in several towns on the edge of Kochi’s urban sprawl.

Yet interspersed among the gleaming commercial developments and mushrooming churches that line the state’s well-maintained highways are rows of red flags emblazoned with the Communist movement’s hammer and sickle. As the Indian writer Akash Kapur noted in “Poor But Prosperous,” his seminal essay on Kerala, a long history of international trade and a general openness to outsiders have made the state fertile ground for political as well as religious practices that are distinct from the more insular social ethos that prevails in other parts of India.

Abraham and Molly Pothen, Fuller Theological Seminary graduates who returned to India to found Doulos in the 1990s, are senior leaders in the Sharon Fellowship Church, a second-generation Pentecostal movement with over 2,000 small congregations, mostly in Kerala and other southern states. They supervise about 250 students in the campuses affiliated with the school. The primary purpose of the institution, according to Abraham Pothen, is to nurture the growth of their religious network.

“Ninety-five percent of our graduates will be pioneer ministers,” Pothen said. “They’ll go into new areas where there is no church.”

Glory Moses’ religious ardor and the Pothens’ commitment to cell group-style evangelism are typical of the growing edges of Protestant renewalist movements in southern India. On the other hand, long-established denominations like the India Pentecostal Church (IPC) often cling to orthodoxies—a prohibition against jewelry, for example—that diminish their appeal to younger believers. A heavier reliance on organizational and pastoral authority also makes their rate of growth sluggish in comparison to upstart churches like Heavenly Feast and the Blessing Centre. These “post-denominational” or “next-generation” movements train lay people to seed most of their new churches (degrees in business or engineering are more common among young leaders than formal theological certification). But a strong emphasis on “gifts of the Holy Spirit”—particularly supernatural healing—still places them within the renewalist stream of global Christianity.

Fine-Tuning the Storyline on Pentecostal Growth

Catholicism and Protestantism claim roughly equal portions of India’s 24 million Christians. According to the Pew Research Center’s survey of global Christianity in 2006, India is one of two countries (along with Nigeria) where a majority of worshipers in non-renewalist congregations—Methodist, Baptist and traditional Catholic churches, for example—have begun to report experiencing or witnessing miraculous cures and other supernatural events. This fact speaks to the degree to which the process of Pentecostalization entails not just the appropriation of lively preaching and worship styles but also a shift toward the individual believer’s personal experience of encounter with the Holy Spirit.

An even more striking trend revealed in the Pew report is that renewal movements in six of the ten countries surveyed now account for solid majorities of the Protestant population. Which means that in places ranging from Brazil and Guatemala to Kenya and the Philippines, Christian renewalists—including traditional and “next generation” Pentecostals and Pentecostalized mainline Protestants as well as charismatic Catholics—now dominate the religious landscape.

Still, seven years after the publication of the Pew report, a number of developments suggest that many of the older, first-generation Protestant renewal movements have reached the peak of their potential for growth. This slowing expansion has to do, in part, with the natural limits on the appeal of any given movement within the religious marketplace. In other words, in places like Chile, Brazil and El Salvador, most of the Catholics who might be attracted to charismatic forms of worship have either already left the Catholic flock or joined a Charismatic Renewal group supported by the local hierarchy of the Church. Similarly, the worship cultures of traditional Protestant denominations in Nigeria, Indonesia, South Korea and other parts of the developing world are by now largely Pentecostalized, which means there is less incentive for believers to look beyond their own communities for the kind of spiritual exuberance that was once the distinctive offering of Pentecostalism.

“The only difference between Christian churches in Nigeria,” said Yusufu Turaki, director of the Centre for the Study of Religion at Jos Theological Seminary, “is who’s in the pulpit. The congregations are all the same.”

The Next Generation— Renewing Renewal Movements

Within the ranks of Protestant renewal movements, the experience of encountering what might be called a “spiritual saturation point” in the wider religious culture has redirected the energy of the evangelizing impulse in a pair of important ways. First, pastors increasingly tend to identify themselves and their ministries with networks rather than their own denominational leadership. In other words, for inspiration and innovation they rely more heavily on global relationships cultivated through social media and the flow of migrant labor than on their denomination’s hierarchy. And second, the institutions that preserve denominational identity among older Pentecostal movements have become more routinized and inward looking as millions of latter-day evangelists find themselves much more tightly constrained than their predecessors in where and how they can evangelize.

The 90-year-old India Pentecostal Church is a case in point. IPC is the largest Pentecostal denomination in India, with over 7,000 churches there and in countries where Indians have migrated for work and study. During a visit to an IPC seminary in Kerala, about a dozen faculty members made formal, conference-style presentations that uniformly placed great emphasis on the denomination’s centralized structure and careful control of worship culture. This establishmentarianism starkly contrasted with the lively, almost ad hoc spiritual ethos of Heavenly Feast and the Blessing Centre, next generation movements that are bursting the seams of their industrial-warehouse style worship spaces and attracting younger, more demographically and economically diverse believers.

“If you are willing to take God out of his theological box,” said Damien Anthony, founder of the Blessing Centre, “he will start working in your life.”

Anthony, who grew up in a Catholic family, joined a Protestant renewal group in the 1990s during a period of personal spiritual crisis. He describes his first experience with denominational culture—in a small, second-generation movement similar in theological outlook to IPC—as a “negative example” of how to run a church. The leadership strictly enforced clean-shaven faces for men and modest dress for women as well as a closed-minded perspective on religious “others.”

“This was not what Jesus intended,” Anthony said.

The worship experience at the headquarters of the Blessing Centre movement—there are currently 14 centers in India and a handful in the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa—is loose and vibrant compared to the more conservative style that prevails in Kerala’s first-generation Pentecostal churches. Women significantly outnumbered men at a recent Sunday service, and many of them wore the colorful saris and jewelry typical of southern India’s dominant Hindu culture. While supernatural healing has a prominent place in the movement, Anthony is indifferent to using the label Pentecostal to describe his beliefs and practices. He even eschews the word “church” as too narrow to accommodate the breadth of his vision for ministry in a religiously pluralistic country, which points toward another characteristic of next-generation movements—an openness to a degree of ecumenism that would have been unimaginable, even abhorrent, to earlier generations of Pentecostals.

Finding a Place for Charismatics in the Church

If, compared to next-generation movements, traditional Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God and IPC are beginning to resemble the hidebound Protestant establishment that the first Pentecostals in the U.S. rebelled against, the charismatic movement in the Catholic Church has managed to establish a congenial niche within the Church’s larger ecclesial culture. This comfortable assimilation is particularly apparent in India, where the Church has a long history—St. Thomas is supposed to have brought Christianity from Rome to Kerala in 52 CE—and charismatic retreat centers attract thousands of participants each week. In fact, Kerala’s enormous Divine Retreat Centre offers twice-yearly spiritual renewal programs for both priests and nuns.

But the relative comity between the Catholic Charismatic movement and traditionalists within the Church has not been achieved without some difficulty. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which established the Divine Retreat Centre in the 1950s, runs other centers in Nigeria and Kenya. In Nairobi, where women often lead charismatic cell groups at the Vincentian House of Prayer, the hierarchy of the local diocese banned charismatic ministries for several months in 2009. But the Vincentian House of Prayer also conducts healing services that attract thousands of participants from the nearby Kawangware slum, which undoubtedly figured into the Vatican’s decision to order the lifting of the ban.

A similar appreciation for the value of the charismatic movement as the Church’s engine of evangelism is apparent in Brazil, which still has the largest number of Catholics in the world even though Catholicism now claims less than 60 percent of the population —down from 85 percent just two decades ago.

Pentecostal “sheep stealing” is largely responsible for this decline, which inspired Fr. Edward J. Dougherty, SJ—founder of TV Século 21 (21st Century TV), a Catholic media network—to produce online educational programs to train Catholic laymen and laywomen as evangelists, essentially taking a page from the Pentecostal playbook and updating it for the digital age. And along with shows devoted to youth culture, cooking, news and sports, Dougherty and his development team have also created fare like the immensely popular “Charismatic Nights” that responds to the needs of viewers who are eager for Catholic programming with a Pentecostal flavor.

“Jesus Christ would be on the air,” Dougherty said. Indeed he will be. Século 21 plans to produce the four Gospels in telenovela format and dub the HD programming into dozens of languages. Thus the network’s TV viewership of 20 million in Brazil will likely soon become a relatively small fraction of a much larger global online audience.

Prosperity Loses Its Luster

The prominence of the prosperity gospel among Protestant renewalists is a key difference between the Catholic Charismatic movement in the global South and the Pentecostal movements whose worship styles and evangelism strategies charismatics have begun to emulate. As next-generation Pentecostals begin to attract upwardly mobile, well educated worshipers from emerging middle classes, many of the pastors who promote a sense of divinely ordained entitlement among their parishioners have become embroiled in scandal or have been called out for their profligacy by their coreligionists.

Asked about the followers of Silas Malafaia, one of Brazil’s wealthiest megachurch pastors, a 20-something member of a second-generation Pentecostal church in Rio de Janeiro remarked, “They think God is like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp.”

That kind of grassroots disdain for the excesses of Pentecostalism’s prosperity-focused subculture is becoming widespread in the developing world—and not without reason. Believer’s Church in India, City Harvest in Singapore and, perhaps not surprisingly, Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea—the largest Pentecostal megachurch in the world, with nearly half a million members—have all been tainted by money-related scandal in recent years.

But even in the absence of overt financial misconduct, many proponents of the prosperity gospel have become objects of scorn in the eyes of their next-generation peers. Tony Rapu, pastor of This Present House and several
other ministries in Lagos, recently published an op-ed piece in a Nigerian newspaper in which he criticized fellow pastor Ayo Oritsejafor for accepting a private jet as a gift from a wealthy benefactor. In Rapu’s widely discussed opinion, the acquisition by Oritsejafor, the first Pentecostal president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the first person to serve as the leader of both CAN and the Pentecostal Federation of Nigeria, was “technically legal but spiritually inappropriate” in a country hobbled by rampant corruption and where tens of millions of people live on less than $1 a day.

Crisis and Innovation

Glory Moses, the ardent Bible college student in Kerala, spoke of what she took to be a prophetic dream in which she is called upon to pull “huge, fat people, even people who call themselves Christians” from the bottom of a dry well. This kind of vision-inspired prophecy falls squarely within a scriptural tradition that includes figures like Amos and Jeremiah, who preached to (and chided) not just spiritual outsiders but also degenerate coreligionists. Moses’ description of her sense of vocation also reflects the broader tension between reformation and orthodoxy in all religions. Thus as some of the movements driven by the impulse of spiritual renewal in global Christianity begin to develop the traits of institutionalism—or begin to allow the distinctive individualism of Pentecostal experience to devolve into uninspired self-centeredness—new renewalist movements will inevitably arise. Fresh sparks of spiritual innovation are emerging now, as they have before, under the kinds of acute social pressure that are especially congenial to extremophile forms of religious belief.

Just as Christian renewal movements are shaping the cultures where they are growing, they are also shaped by the imperative to find common values in pluralistic societies.

“Joy is in the house!” declared Sister Florence Aviso, a worship leader at Kings Revival Church International in Dubai.

Aviso kept a crowd of roughly 800 on its feet singing praise songs for over an hour at the start of KRCI’s Sunday evening English-language service. The church’s Filipino band took the stage that night, but African, Indian and Middle Eastern musicians have their turn over the course of a weekly roster that averages a couple of services a day in half a dozen languages.

KRCI rents a fellowship hall at Holy Trinity, an Anglican compound near Oud Metha and Karama, neighborhoods that are populated by some of the millions of mostly working-class expats who enable Dubai’s bigger-taller-faster ethos to thrive. Accordingly, the English-language service was as ethnically eclectic as a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly—the packed hall included sub-Saharan Africans, South and East Asians and surprisingly robust contingents of Anglos and Arabs.

“It’s mostly a transient population,” Rev. V. Dilkumar, KRCI’s senior pastor, said the next day. “We have about 9,000 members in Dubai, but no one stays permanently. They return to their own countries sooner or later.”

Dilkumar is both a reflection of and an exception to the particular regional dynamic behind the phenomenon he sketched. In 1983 he came to Dubai from his native Sri Lanka as an engineer with a British multinational and was soon making plenty of money. But what he described as the dispiriting isolation of Dubai—like most expats, he left his family back home—began to wear on him. A textbook tale of a soul’s dark night drove him first to drink, then to a nondenominational church that became the model for his own ministry, which he started in 1991. Unlike most people who end up in Dubai, Dilkumar eventually brought his family to the UAE and put down roots.

Or at least he has become as deeply rooted in the Emirates as an expat can hope to be. More than 80 percent of the population of the UAE is composed of non-citizens—a remarkable statistic that accounts, at least in part, for why the restiveness of the Arab Spring made barely a ripple there. Bringing to mind American mill villages of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of those millions of itinerant workers live in company-owned labor colonies, like the sprawling cinderblock housing units opposite Dubai’s huge landfill.

Without the rights that come with citizenship, and under the governance of a tribal sheikdom keenly focused on the preservation of its own hegemony, the Russian plutocrat with a flat in the Burj Khalifa is ultimately no more secure in the UAE than the Pakistani workers who clean the Burj’s windows after one of Dubai’s epic dust storms.

Still, the relative tolerance of the UAE’s governing regime makes for some fascinating contradictions. Non-Muslim religious movements like King’s Revival Church are tightly constrained in where and how they conduct their activities—for example, land may be allotted but not sold to church organizations, and proselytism apart from Islam is illegal. But if they play by the rules, groups that cater to the spiritual needs of the Emirates’ vast expat population can easily flourish. The Holy Trinity compound rents worship halls to more than a dozen renewalist groups, including Assemblies of God and India Pentecostal Church congregations. And St. Mary’s, also in Oud Metha, is the anchor for a growing Catholic Charismatic community in the Gulf Region.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the main attraction at KRCI is “signs, wonders and miracles”—weekly, revival-style spiritual healings that have helped the movement to grow not just in Dubai but also in many of the countries to which its expat congregants have returned. The economic nodes of the globalized age attract and disperse not just cargo containers but also religious phenomena that, for many, serve as the best available medicine for some of the spiritual ailments peculiar to our unsettled times.

Notes from the Formerly Underground

John, the leader of a small house-church movement based in Shanghai, is familiar with such forms of disease.

“In the urban areas,” he said, “people are stressed, they are depressed. In the rural areas the issues tend to be physical sickness and family problems. So the rural people need miracles and experiences of the supernatural. In urban churches, they want fellowship and to know the principles of Christianity.”

There are roughly 1,000 churches in Shanghai, but fewer than a dozen are registered with the State Administration for Religious Affairs. This handful of “official” churches is part of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which began in the 1950s to promote “self-governance, self-support and self-propagation” among Chinese Christians in order to insulate them from foreign influence and ensure their loyalty to the communist regime.

According to John (who chose not to use his full name to avoid running afoul of the authorities), the rest of the churches in Shanghai vary in size from 30 to several hundred members. Though unregistered churches faced persecution in the recent past, they are no longer “underground” and in fact don’t like this terminology since they now operate very much above ground, in full sight of religious regulators, who know they exist.

They are very decentralized, which allows them to operate without encroaching on the prerogatives of China’s single-party political apparatus. Were they to coalesce into a formal movement in order to evangelize and to engage in social outreach, the government could potentially perceive them as a threat and drive them back into the shadows.

House churches, most of which tend to exhibit some of the traits of Pentecostalism, refuse to register with the Three-Self Movement because that would mean that they are “under the Community Party,” which would violate the nature of authority that they perceive in the Bible. Exact numbers are difficult to ascertain, but reasonable sources suggest that there are probably about 50 million Protestants in China—half of whom are scattered among various house-church movements— and about 15 million Catholics.

Jason, another leader of a house-church in Shanghai, said that while rural churches are disappearing as more people move to China’s booming cities, urban churches are beginning to attract professionals from the country’s expanding middle class.

“They have been influenced by the Western world,” he said. “We have a ‘seekers’ group where we discuss topics like ‘who is God,’ ‘who is Jesus’ and ‘is there ultimate truth?’”

Women constitute a large majority of Jason’s congregation, which is a common phenomenon within newer Pentecostal and charismatic groups in other parts of the developing world. But for fear of attracting unwanted attention, worshipers in most Chinese house-churches shun the lively music and overt emotionalism that are often the main attractions of Pentecostalism elsewhere.

Still, quieter manifestations of the presence of the Holy Spirit—healing and prophecy, for example—are common, and several house-church members said they often pray in tongues on their own.

Whether by accident or design, China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs has developed what could be called a policy of containment for Christian renewal movements, which are neither officially recognized nor actively suppressed by the government. This has had the effect of dampening fervor without triggering the sense of martyrdom that is deeply encoded in the lived mythology of apostolic Christianity.

From Margins to Pulpit

Ironically, the mythological roles are reversed in Brazil, where politically empowered mainstream Pentecostals—most notably Silas Milafaia, the jet-setting pastor of one of Brazil’s largest megachurches—have vowed to undo the Brazilian judiciary’s recent legalization of same-sex marriage. That step in the direction of social inclusivity as well as the conservative reaction against it are both closely related to the emergence and surprising growth of a handful of LGBT-inclusive next-generation Pentecostal churches.

In the fall of 2012, Marcio Retamero, the pastor of Betel Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) in Rio de Janeiro, was invited to testify before members of the Brazilian Congress, where he talked about human rights generally and the rights of sexual minorities in particular.

“At one point I said that if theocracy were to be imposed in Brazil,” Retamero recalled, “I would take up arms. Silas Malafaia twisted my words to make me look like the biggest gay terrorist in the world. Now he wants to sue me, and I have to go to court to defend myself.”

Malafaia, who has come to embody the increasing influence of Pentecostalism in Brazil, has stridently opposed the advance of LGBT rights. Indeed, his bullying of Retamero has inspired similar behavior among other conservative Pentecostals—the pastor of an LGBT-inclusive congregation in one of Rio’s working-class neighborhoods remarked that the only locals who have ever harassed his parishioners were members of a nearby Assemblies of God church. But while many conservative Pentecostal leaders in Malafaia’s mold boast about their “men in Congress,” the social and political tides in the country are generally running against them.

The same trends have also created a space for Betel and other LGBT-inclusive Pentecostal groups—a religious phenomenon that is flourishing in very few other places in the developing world.

MCC—a second-generation movement that was started by a former pastor with the Church of God of Prophecy in the U.S.—has been in Brazil for about a decade. There are now 8 churches with roughly 3,000 members.

Retamero describes Betel’s worship culture as “Presbycostal.”

“We believe in the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the gifts that come with that,” he said. “It’s a Pentecostal spiritual life, but not a Pentecostal way of life. We don’t have a list of cans and can’ts.”

That reluctance to impose rules on congregants is similar to the anti-orthodox impulse that attracts younger worshipers to next-generation renewalist churches in India and elsewhere. But in Brazil’s LGBT-inclusive Pentecostal culture, the trend is reversed. Like the India Pentecostal Church and Assemblies of God, MCC’s “Presbycostalism” places a high value on rationalism and theological training for its clergy. But unlike those traditional institutions, MCC doesn’t discourage members from drinking, smoking or having premarital sex. By contrast, next-generation LGBT-inclusive movements such as Igreja Contemporanea (Contemporary Church) and Cidade de Refúgio (City of Refuge) push youthful worshipers to find partners and refrain from many of the activities that tend to attract young gays and lesbians in Brazil’s increasingly cosmopolitan cities.

“My friends ask me if I’m straight now,” said Silas Moraru, a 21-year-old singer in the praise band at City of Refuge. Pointing to the ring on his left hand, he said, “But I have a boyfriend!”

Moraru grew up Pentecostal—his father is an Assemblies of God pastor—and said he has never chafed at the expectations that Lanna Holder and Rosania Rocha, the married co-founders of Cidade de Refúgio, have of their members.

“There aren’t too many rules,” Moraru said. “I think they make me a better person. They help me feel closer to God.”

Marcus Gladstone, the senior pastor of Igreja Contemporanea, echoed that belief. He left MCC in 2006 because he felt it “needed to be more Brazilian”—both more overtly spirit-filled and more traditional in its approach to personal mores. Thus a Saturday evening service at his headquarters church included both speaking in tongues and a request for a show of hands from congregants who were married.

The overwhelming majority of the roughly 300 people in the church responded affirmatively.

When asked to explain why social conventions most often associated with heterosexual religious conservatives were so important to the life of his community, Gladstone, who has adopted two sons with his partner, was at once earnest and mindful of the need to find a way toward conciliation with the likes of Silas Malafaia.

“We are an evangelical church,” he said. “And we have more credibility if we live our lives by these rules.”

The Good (Religious) Minority

That imperative to find common values in a pluralistic society has also shaped Christian renewal movements in Indonesia, where Christianity is a minority religion tolerated by the Muslim majority and protected by a secular government committed to religious freedom.

Which is to say that, like LGBT-inclusive Pentecostals in Brazil, mainstream Indonesian renewalists have learned to highlight the ways they are like the more numerous “others” that dominate the surrounding religious landscape.

Indonesia is officially 87 percent Muslim and about 10 percent Christian. But observers on the ground have suggested that Islam’s portion of the population has dropped to 80 percent or below in recent years—a controversial trend in a country where Catholics, mainline Protestants and Muslims all commonly view Pentecostals as sheep-stealers.

On the other hand, in parts of Indonesia where moderate interpretations of sharia law govern aspects of local life, many Pentecostals have readily assented to prohibitions against alcohol, pornography and immodest dress.

That point of contact provides an opening for the social outreach programs of Representative of Christ’s Kingdom (ROCK), a next-generation church in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city.

Like most next-generation leaders, Daniel Tanudjaja obtained a professional degree and started a career—in his case, a B.A. in psychology, which led to work in human resources—before he co-founded ROCK with senior pastor Timotius Arifin in 2004. They affirm healing, speaking in tongues and prophesying as gifts of the Holy Spirit, but ROCK’s worship culture is also strongly influenced by Tanudjaja’s experience in the corporate world.

The headquarters congregation meets in a large ballroom in a mall on the edge of a prosperous neighborhood, and church literature features “Successories”-style affirmations. For example, the church’s value-statement is summarized in the acronym LIGHT—loyalty, integrity, generosity, humility and truth.

“We try to be less exclusive and more open,” Tanudjaja said. “Our goal is to equip people with practical values and send them into the marketplace to be a blessing to others.”

That notion of “kingdom values” shares some rhetorical similarities with factions of right-wing Pentecostalism in the United States. Market-Place Apostles, the New Apostolic Reformation, Kingdom Theology and Christian Reconstructionism are all expressions of a worldview shared by a loosely allied group that includes religious conservatives like Rick Perry, Peter Wagner and Johnny Enlow.

But in shaping the idea of “kingdom values” to work in the Indonesian context, Tanudjaja has undertaken a project that is fundamentally distinct from the kind of Christian triumphalism promoted by Enlow, Wagner and their fellow travelers. Most of those activists envision an American national polity shaped by a conservative interpretation of the Bible rather than a pluralist, at least nominally secular government that does its best to protect individual rights in a way that both empowers and delimits groups with conflicting points of view.

The difference between the two iterations of “kingdom values” is most apparent in the broad-minded ecumenism that frames Tanudjaja’s vision of national transformation.

“The role of Christians is to be a blessing to all people,” he said. “This means we work with Muslims—with everyone—toward the goal of making Indonesia a better place. We pray for the best president, not a Christian president.”

This remarkable expression of Kingdom Theology as an imperative for cooperative social engagement is perhaps not surprising where Pentecostals are a relatively small minority in a fairly tolerant country. But similarly humane movements are emerging in places where Pentecostalism exerts a powerful influence on culture—and where the effects of that influence are potentially far-reaching.

In dysfunctional societies, some renewal movements are beginning to engage civic institutions and religious “others” to effect positive social change.

A fleet of rented minivans from God Bless Nigeria Church pulled up to the edge of Isolo landfill, an especially blighted section of a city not known for its beauty.

Tony Rapu, senior pastor of This Present House, a prosperous next-generation church in Lagos, led a team of volunteers up a steep path of packed dirt to the top of the landfill, which is home to hundreds destitute people who have scavenged plastic sheeting, cardboard and corrugated metal to make shelters for themselves.

“The failure of the system, of the society, has become a leverage for us,” said Pastor Orhonor, the coordinator for God Bless Nigeria, one of several social-outreach ministries of This Present House. “In this darkness we have decided to be light. We’re providing education, we’re providing healthcare, we’re providing empowerment—all of that.”

Rapu, Orhonor and a handful of volunteers fanned out through the shanties and led anyone who would follow them to a small clearing. As a sweaty, glassy-eyed man argued with his demons and a one-legged boy hopped nimbly around small piles of scrap metal, Rapu stood on a recumbent refrigerator and told a crowd of roughly 50 onlookers that they were welcome to come to God Bless Nigeria, where they could get a shower, a meal, a haircut and fresh clothes as well as help with medical needs, education and job training.

“We go to about 200 neighborhoods in total,” Orhonor said. “And all these areas we go to, we never leave. We become a part of the area. This is the only way I know Christianity right now. ”

Signs and Wonders

In the Lagos region—far from the sectarian strife that plagues Nigeria’s central and northeastern regions—the problem that impairs social development is primarily poverty deepened by economic and political corruption. Homegrown Pentecostal denominations like This Present House, Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, Living Faith Church and the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) have flourished in the relative stability of Yorubaland, where Christianity is the majority religion and ethnic Yoruba families often have both Muslim and Christian members.

Many of these renewal movements emphasize personal prosperity and supernatural healing, which are powerful enticements for the poor residents who constitute the overwhelming majority in a metropolis that has swollen from about 1 million to over 20 million in four decades. But this narrow focus on the welfare of the individual believer has also tended to create congregations that are disengaged from the structural problems of Nigerian society. In fact, the contrast between churchgoers whose average yearly income is often less than $500 and millionaire pastors like Ayo Oritsejafor —the current president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria—is a fairly accurate reflection of the disparities between Nigeria’s tiny elite and its enormous underclass.

All of these elements were on display at the RCCG’s annual Holy Ghost Congress, a weeklong event in December that drew several million believers to the denomination’s mammoth Redemption Camp about 30 miles north of Lagos. The theme of this year’s congress—“Signs and Wonders”—threaded through sermons, healing services, ecstatic prayer sessions and an altar call that stretched to half an hour to allow time for would-be converts to cover the kilometer from the back of the Redemption Camp structure to the stage. The tune to the hymn “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand” was repurposed for the congress, including a chorus that began “God will give us signs and wonders” and lines like “Rejoice the sick you’ll soon be healed” and “Rejoice the poor you’ll soon be rich.”

As he did in 2010, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan delivered a homily on the last night of the congress and, afterward, knelt for a blessing from Enoch Adeboye, general overseer of RCCG.

A casual observer at the Holy Ghost Congress might reasonably conclude that by encouraging multitudes to pray for riches and anointing a politician who embodies Nigeria’s status quo, RCCG’s administration tacitly accepts Nigeria’s dysfunctions. But behind the scenes, the situation proved more complex and pointed toward a growing commitment to social engagement among some Pentecostal leaders in the Lagos region.

“Our most important task is winning the lost for Christ,” said Yemi Osinbajo, a pastor with RCCG and supervisor for the denomination’s social responsibility projects. Osinbajo, who teaches law at the University of Lagos, is also a former special advisor to the attorney general of Nigeria and served as attorney general and commissioner for justice of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007. As he described it, the RCCG’s idea of “winning the lost” takes shape as something other than conventional evangelism.

“This means reaching out to the poorest members of our communities,” he said, “even if they are not Christians. The point is trying to touch those in need in real and positive ways.”

Projects sponsored by Osinbajo’s organization include insurance schemes to provide healthcare for poor children and the “Excel” reading program, which has instituted and underwritten new teaching strategies for promoting literacy in 40 public schools in the Lagos area.

This shift in the notion of what constitutes the core imperative of the gospel—from simply amassing converts to promoting primary social goods like healthcare and education regardless of the religious affiliation of beneficiaries—marks a subtle but important evolution in Nigeria’s Pentecostal culture.

The primary vector for transmitting this new thinking is a Lagos-based network called Apostles in the Market Place (AIMP), on whose board of advisors Osinbajo serves.

John Enelemah, the president of AIMP, said that the deep structural problems in Nigerian society, coupled with some earnest soul-searching, prompted the founding of his organization in 2003.

“How can Nigeria be so religious,” he asked, “and at the same time so violent and corrupt? The answer is that sometimes people use faith as a substitute for industry. We have to accept responsibility and stop saying our problems are all the fault of bad government.”

Perhaps more importantly in the Nigerian context, the projects of the AIMP network—including workshops in business ethics and leadership skills, poverty alleviation and education reform—are oriented toward both Christians and non-Christians.

Enelemah said, “We focus on values like honesty, integrity, transparency and fairness that are equally important to our Muslim brethren.”

This broad-minded perspective on the promotion of national transformation characterizes the points of view of several prominent Pentecostal pastors in Lagos—including Tony Rapu of This Present House, Sam Adeyemi of the Daystar Christian Centre, Paul Adefarasin of House on the Rock and Wale Adefarasin of Guiding Light Assembly. In addition to NGO-style poverty abatement projects like Rapu’s God Bless Nigeria Church, all of them have developed marketplace-oriented training programs to foster ethical business practices as well as organizations to revitalize public education within their spheres of influence. And each has expressed a commitment to social values and forms of civic engagement that invite the participation of all Nigerians.

“In their emphasis on creating material wealth, many pastors are not mature in their thinking,” said Daystar’s Sam Adeyemi. “They should model sacrifice, service and tolerance. You can’t lead the whole country with prejudice. Every citizen should want to live in a developed country—Christian, Muslim, animist, atheist. This message will appeal if we’re not antagonistic.”

In a surprising departure from the otherworldly ethos of traditional Pentecostalism, which usually fosters a disdain for politics among adherents, many next-generation leaders in Lagos have begun to discuss political activism as a logical next step in the project of national transformation. As with their imperatives for economic reform, they acknowledge the importance of tolerance and inclusivity in a country evenly divided between Christianity and Islam.

“There should be no exclusive Christian [political] parties,” said AIMP’s John Enelemah. “The point is to promote values that include Muslims.”

Vanguard of a New Movement?

The progressive turn among Pentecostals in the Lagos region is rooted in Nigeria’s second wave of renewalist fervor, which swept the country’s university campuses during the first few decades of Nigerian independence. Like many other next-generation leaders, most of the key figures in this movement pursued professional degrees before heeding a call to ministry, and significant portions of their congregations are drawn from equally well-educated members of an emerging middle class.

According to the latest data from Pew, next-generation or “post-denominational” Pentecostals currently account for 53 percent of the world’s half-billion Christian rewewalists—a figure that dwarfs the number of traditional Pentecostals or Catholic Charismatics. This means the leading edge of a movement that has historically shunned engagement with either civil society or adherents of other religions is beginning to pursue both the transformation of dysfunctional societies and cooperation with religious “others.”

“Our work is to disciple people away from traditionalism toward a church that is more responsive to the needs of society today,” said Adonaldo Arias, a twenty-something on-air host and youth programing producer for CCT-TV, the media-production ministry of Misión Cristiana Elim in El Salvador. “This is what it means to help people know the full gospel.”

The Elim headquarters church—with 80,000 members—is one of the largest next-generation Pentecostal communities in the world. And in a country where Christian renewal movements claim over half of the population, CCT-TV exerts a powerful influence on both religious and mainstream culture.

Like the progressive Pentecostals in the Lagos region, Arias and other thought-leaders at Elim are leveraging their cultural sway in a country with relatively weak civic institutions in order to effect transformation that benefits not just themselves but all stakeholders in their society.

“We made a decision to unlearn what we had learned from Pentecostalism regarding the Scriptures,” Arias said. “Our emphasis is now more on reformation and openness. We are planting the seeds of enlightenment.”
This theological shift is intimately related to the particulars of the Salvadoran context—barely 20 years after the end of a bloody civil war, poverty and instability persist as both causes and consequences of rampant gang violence—as well as to the broader effects of globalization.

Luis Mixco, coordinator of the Culture and Religion program for El Salvador’s Secretary of Culture, said that as recently as the 1980s, “Pentecostalism was for the ignorant. Now there are a growing number of professionals attracted to next-generation churches. Pentecostalism is now associated with social ascendance.”

But as in other parts of the world, the expanding demographic base of newer Pentecostal movements isn’t simply an indication that the spread of economic liberalism has enriched people who were once poor. Rather, this phenomenon suggests that Pentecostalism offers a balm for those whose prosperous lives have lost meaning, just as it offers healing for those whose economic marginalization causes suffering.

In El Salvador, “Pentecostalism has become a refuge for people searching for identity in a time of anomie,” Mixco said.

None of which is to say that all Salvadoran renewalists are following Elim’s lead. Many next-generation churches in San Salvador’s wealthier enclaves are shaped by the self-interested ethos of the prosperity gospel. And traditional Pentecostal communities, which dominate the countryside, are still deeply conservative on matters related to biblical interpretation and interreligious relations.

Tolerance and Collaboration

Perhaps no other issue has exposed the sectarian fault-lines in El Salvador as starkly as the issue of gang violence. Since the end of the civil war in 1992, successive center-right administrations have attempted to suppress the gangs that dominate poorer urban neighborhoods through “Mano Dura” (“strong hand”) strategies that involved the deployment of heavily armed paramilitary units and the imprisonment of thousands of youth convicted of gang-related activity. This approach continued under the current administration of Mauricio Funes, the first president to represent the party that emerged from El Salvador’s leftist guerilla movement, until early 2012, when a gang truce orchestrated by the Catholic Church and a former leftist legislator produced a dramatic decline in the number of homicides.

Behind the scenes, numerous actors—the Church and divisions of Funes’ socialist government as well as Protestant denominations and NGOs—have engaged in concerted, grass-roots efforts to ensure that this relative peace endures. It might seem obvious to an outsider that disciples of the Prince of Peace would want to be a part of such a coalition. Yet the underlying assumptions about the nature of morality and the role of Christians in a pluralistic society have polarized El Salvador’s Pentecostals.

“They’re dealing with the devil,” said the leader of a next-generation church based in a neighborhood dotted with leafy embassy compounds and upscale shopping malls. “Gang violence isn’t a social problem—it’s a spiritual problem.”

Mario Vega, senior pastor of Elim, offered a different perspective.

“The origin of gangs is the struggle of youth to overcome the shame of marginalization,” he said. “They’re not looking to become drug dealers, they’re looking for respect.”

Through its vast network of churches and cell groups—Elim has thousands of cells in El Salvador alone—Vega and other leaders in his movement pursue a strategy that they describe as “integral mission.” This means that, on the one hand, they preserve Pentecostalism’s core belief in the importance of the individual’s direct experience of the Holy Spirit.

“The element of Pentecostalism that we keep is the living aspect of a profound spirituality that touches the emotions of people,” Vega said, adding, “Programs with gang members wouldn’t work unless we addressed their emotional commotion.”

And on the other hand, they assert that the healing power of that experience should extend into the broader society beyond the individual.

“Jesus was a model of integral mission,” said Vega. “He demonstrated deep spirituality, healed and fed those who were sick and hungry. And he integrated people who were socially excluded into his mission.”

Pedro Landaverde—pastor of Elim district 8, zone 5—is also, arguably, a model of integral mission. To get to Iberia, the poor neighborhood on the edge of San Salvador where he started his current ministry, one must pass through a military checkpoint and trust in the good graces of the local gang leaders. But the goodwill of all of the residents is palpable; since 2009, Landaverde has established three community centers, a preschool and small businesses to provide employment to young men and women.

“I requested to be transferred to the worst zone to start working on this kind of strategy,” he said.

Like the progressive Pentecostals in Lagos, Landaverde’s work in Iberia depends on the promotion of what he calls “kingdom values”—honesty, tolerance, discipline and transparency, for example—in a way that invites the participation of people who frame the importance of those values in different ways. This openness to engagement with those who share his values but not necessarily his beliefs has enabled Landaverde to network with Protestant, Catholic and municipal organizations as well as secular and religious NGOs in order to transform Iberia’s social landscape and quell the violence that hinders development.

Mario Vega connected this expansive ecumenism to what he described as one of the foundational theological innovations of the Protestant Reformation.

“God works not just through the church but through the whole universe,” he said. “This means that God can make his kingdom through the church and beyond the church.”

Planting Seeds

The essential node in Pedro Landaverde’s network is an NGO called Semillas de Nueva Creación (Seeds of a New Creation), which was created in 2001 to serve as a conduit linking a wide array of social stakeholders for the purpose of realizing the goal of integral mission.

Semillas, like Nigeria’s Apostles in the Marketplace, is the present-day expression of Pentecostal activism on university campuses from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In the context of El Salvador, this religious ferment included an admixture of liberation theology, which has all but disappeared as a strand of living Catholicism.

“Liberation theology opted for the poor,” said Eliberto Juarez, the program coordinator for Semillas. “But the poor opted for Pentecostalism.”

Still, the Pentecostal encounter with liberation theology’s emphasis on social transformation produced scholar-preachers like Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar who have inspired a number of next-generation leaders to alter Pentecostalism’s relationship to the world.

“Many Pentecostals are developing a deeper commitment to society,” Juarez said. In a practical sense—and, again, mirroring the strategies of Nigeria’s progressive next-generation leaders—this commitment entails potential forms of political engagement that could dramatically extend the social capital generated through networks like Seeds of a New Creation.

“There’s early talk of new political parties,” Juarez said. “This would leverage the emergence of new voting blocs like the middle class and intelligentsia that aren’t committed to either the right or the left.”

As a passionately spiritual but traditionally insular religious movement comes of age, progressive next-generation Pentecostals in El Salvador, Nigeria and elsewhere may herald a broader turn toward tolerance and positive social transformation in parts of the world where both are often in short supply.

“Semillas has became a point of encounter for a variety of people—a sort of ecumenical brotherhood,” said Juarez. “For us, the kingdom of God on earth means peace, justice, love and living in harmony.”