Pentecostalism is growing by leaps and bounds — with nearly 20 million new members a year and 410 million adherents worldwide. It has become the religion of choice for the urban poor in cities such as San Paulo, Seoul, and Lusaka. Pentecostal congregations are springing up every day in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Harvey Cox sheds light on this amazing phenomenon. The author, who is the Victor Thomas Professor of Religion at Harvard University, spent five years assessing what he calls "this complex and fascinating spiritual child of our time." He studied Pentecostal history and visited churches on four continents.
From its humble origins in a small San Francisco church in 1906 to its present status as the fastest growing Christian movement on earth, Pentecostalism has always stressed the importance of experience over dogma and doctrine. Worship services are high-energy happenings with prayer, speaking in tongues, healings, exorcisms, and other miraculous signs. Pentecostals celebrate in their hearts the dawning of a new age of the Spirit.
Cox is critical of some of the excesses of American Pentecostal religion, including its superpatriotism, its satanic conspiracies, and its right-wing political emphasis, but he believes that more attention must be paid to this Christian movement. By adopting folk healing in Brazil, ancestor veneration in Africa, shamanic trance in Korea, and spirit possession in the Caribbean, Pentecostal churches have found ways to survive in constantly changing environments. Cox concludes that to survive in the twenty-first century, many more churches will have to blend what he calls the old and the new, the pagan and the Christian, the pious and the pragmatic. The adaptability and flexibility of Pentecostal spirituality may be a harbinger of things to come.