What is Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity?

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

The global Pentecostal-Charismatic (P-C) movement continues to surge on the world’s stage. As of 2020 the count was around 650 million with projections of hitting 1 billion or one-third of global Christianity by 2050. In this new global movement, Brazil, the United States, and Nigeria have the most P-C Christians with Brazil outpacing the other two by over 40 million. If this trajectory holds, by the middle of the 21st century the two dominant forms of Christianity will be Roman Catholic and P-C, with significant overlap between the two in the Catholic Charismatic movement. Christianity will account for just over one-third of the global population, and over two-thirds of Christians will be P-C and Roman Catholic. This is the next Christendom. 

How to define P-C Christianity has been a problem since the 1960s and 1970s as the shape of the global movement began to be visible to historians and sociologists. Part of the challenge here is how to situate the Azusa Street Revival in the global context. Can one speak of a single origin through Azusa, or must one speak of multiple origins in different parts of the world? Closely related is the question of classification. Older taxonomies proposed “waves” as a metaphor, but more recently Todd Johnson has preferred types because “waves” obscures what is happening as the movement unfolds. 

While I cannot resolve these debates here, I want to chart a way forward by outlining a core that I hope explains the rich diversity of the movement. I will begin with origins and then describe three common features that together make up P-C Christianity. This will allow me to talk about the diversity of the movement as an expression of a common core identity. 

Origins

P-C Christianity emerged between 1900 and 1910 within the radical stream of the holiness movement. We can situate the final expression of the radical stream of the holiness movement at the end of the nineteenth century during the Progressive Era (1890-1920), or what the French called La Belle Époque. There are several features that took the holiness movement in a radical direction, but central to them was 1) a critique of Methodism as having become rich and religiously nominal, and 2) a move to come out of these denominations and build new structures. 

A quick perusal of key leaders in the early days of the P-C movement places it firmly in the outworking of Wesleyanism through Methodist, holiness, and radical holiness trajectories. Most early Pentecostal leaders became Pentecostal by first going through Methodism or one of the new holiness groups, some of which became denominations. To give some prominent examples: Aimee Semple McPherson grew up in the Salvation Army in Canada; the West African prophet William Wade Harris came out of Liberian Methodism; Minnie Abrams in India had been part of the Methodist deaconess movement; Sarah Jane Lancaster in Australia came out of Methodism; and Charles H. Mason joined the holiness movement before he turned Pentecostal. Grounded in Methodism, the global Wesleyan movement with its expression in the radical holiness of the Progressive Era (1890-1920) became the soil within which early Pentecostalism took root.

While P-C Christianity emerged from radical holiness, it constituted a global network akin to a global airline network in which planes intersect at a hub and then go out to other regional locations. It built on the networks that the British Empire allowed Methodism—and then holiness leaders like Catherine Booth or A. B. Simpson—to erect across the globe. The Azusa Street Revival functioned as the hub of the movement since so many early members intersected with this revival center. While I would locate the overall formation of the global network in the entire decade between 1900 and 1910, William J. Seymour holds primacy among early leaders insofar as he became a sort of air traffic controller directing traffic in and out of the hub of Azusa and, in important ways, setting a theological agenda for the whole through his supervision of the Azusa Street Mission. Nevertheless, one can plot other centers that function like smaller airports within a larger network. In addition, one can see various partnerships among denominations, smaller networks of churches, and independent congregations within this global network. 

To be clear, revival centers functioned as hubs in the network while denominations, associations, or congregations functioned as partner airlines that filled out the network. Azusa was the central hub in the first ten years of the global movement alongside other revival centers. Yet, Azusa faded, requiring other revival centers that continue to this day. For example, Toronto and Brownsville functioned as major hubs for a period of time. Modern P-C megachurches like Hillsong function as both hubs and networks. Today, the largest example of partnerships within a global network with multiple hubs is the Pentecostal World Fellowship.  

The Core of P-C Christianity 

Understanding these historical origins reveals three major features of the global movement that together form a common core. P-C Christianity is a non-conformist tradition, a spiritual tradition, and a renewal and missionary tradition. One might summarize P-C Christianity as a non-conformist spiritual tradition that seeks to transform cultures by renewing the church and missionizing the world. 

A Non-Conformist Tradition

As a non-conformist tradition, P-C Christianity represents an extension of John Wesley’s mobilization of the laity to renew the structures of church and society. By the emergence of the Progressive Era, this mobilization had taken on the form of anti-institutionalization and anti-elitism in favor of the charismatic power of the Spirit at work in the people of God. For this reason, populism and anti-institutionalization are part of the movement’s DNA. 

Second, as a non-conformist tradition, P-C Christianity inhabits and transforms folk cultures, best explained through its global contributions to music from early blues, jazz, and gospel (black and southern) to early rock, and finally to the entire explosion of praise and worship music. 

Third, non-conformity reinforces the quest to maintain an encounter-driven understanding of salvation to avoid any hint of religiosity or liturgical formalism. This emphasis takes several forms but always pushes toward the encounter with God as a charismatic and sanctifying experience informed by personal revelation and illumination. The entire emphasis on prophecy in more contemporary expressions of P-C Christianity allows for non-conformity through the apostle and the prophet as leaders governed by personal revelation guiding networks or independent congregations.

Ultimately, non-conformity makes P-C Christianity a form of Christian mysticism that resists establishment Christianity in favor of the empowering work of the Spirit among the people of God. 

A Spiritual Tradition

P-C Christianity expresses its soteriology through spirituality rather than confessions of faith. The two major features of this tradition are journey and narrative.

Salvation is a journey that unfolds through the Spirit’s operations from the new birth to baptism in the Spirit to final glorification. One can theologize about this journey as the birth, maturation, and perfection of love because the Spirit conforms the person to the pattern of Christ. Alternatively, this journey is about the deliverance from sin, death, and the devil. Thus, there is a positive pole in being formed into Christ and a negative pole in being cured of or purified from sin. In P-C Christianity, there is always a sense in which the sanctifying and the charismatic dimensions (purity and power) reinforce one another so that the fruit and gifts of the Spirit conform the individual to the character and mission of Christ, which, in turn, delivers the person from slavery to sin’s corrupting condition. 

Because this journey is about formation to Christ and deliverance from sin and the devil, P-C Christians have a strong emphasis on the demonic. The language of warfare and overcoming strongholds takes on meaning at the intersection of sin as a disease and the demonic as an oppressive force seeking further to enslave. P-C Christians move easily from talking about a “spirit of lust” to greed as a psychological disposition because they see a continuum from the demonic to the disease of sin. It’s akin to the continuum between the demonic planting of thoughts, the seven deadly sins as vices, and the disease of sin we see in the theology of Evagrius of Pontus, John Cassian, or Gregory the Great. This drives the language of deliverance in all forms of P-C Christianity, but particularly in African expressions.

Salvation as a journey is not simply about the eschaton, but the here and now. Early Pentecostals understood the healing of the body as part of the sanctifying work of the Spirit to make persons whole and holy. Yet the emphasis on divine healing also reinforced that salvation was about human bodies as well as souls, which spilled over into emphases on divine blessing and prosperity. The fusion of the language of purity and power around Spirit-filled and Spirit-healed bodies constantly pushes P-C Christians toward an optimism of grace that leads to the language of victory and blessing in all areas.

Believers testify to this journey by telling their own stories, which means that theology is primarily about storytelling. Theology is a narrative enterprise that fuses charismatic revelation (the personal story) with scriptural revelation (the Biblical story) and Christian tradition (the church’s story). Theology begins with the Biblical story as a history of salvation that can be divided into dispensations or subplots (creation, Israel, Christ, the Spirit, and the End). 

Yet the historical narrative has a personal counterpart. For example, the story of Exodus is both a historical and a spiritual reality. As a spiritual reality, the exodus event is replicated in the life of every believer who leaves slavery to sin through the new birth. The feasts of the church constantly reenact the story of Passover recapitulated in Christ and replicated by the Spirit in each believer. There is a historical Passover (Israel’s and Christ’s), an ecclesial Passover (the feast of Easter), and a personal Passover (the new birth). Likewise, there is a historical Pentecost (the Day of Pentecost), an ecclesial Pentecost (the feast of Pentecost), and a personal Pentecost (the baptism in the Spirit). 

This also means that scripture must be understood historically/ literally and spiritually/ allegorically. While most P-C Christians do not describe their approach to scripture as a movement from the literal to the allegorical, this is in fact how they continuously find deeper meanings to or novel interpretations of various passages. It is the fusion of the spiritual interpretation of scripture with personal revelation that is behind the language of receiving a “fresh word” or “fresh revelation” or “new insight” into the scriptures. 

A Renewal and Missionary Tradition

Since theology is about storytelling, P-C Christianity functions as a renewal and missionary movement that enlivens confessional traditions and creates new structures and denominations. 

In early P-C Christianity, several holiness denominations became Pentecostal, such as the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) or the Church of God in Christ. Thus, denominations were renewed and transformed by the spirituality of the movement. Behind this emphasis on renewal was the historical paradigm of restorationism. P-C Christians sought to restore what they saw as forgotten elements of first-century Christianity, which was apostolic. One can see how restorationism informs many branches of the movement—even the New Apostolic Reformation. 

When P-C Christianity burst into mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic traditions, it did so as a form of renewal. Renewal was really about the recovery and transmission of the charismatic dimension of the early church through the language of Spirit-empowered Christianity. A former Quaker like John Wimber might describe the charismatic in terms of “power evangelism,” but in doing so he was echoing a central tenet of the movement that Allan Anderson has connected to African Spirit-churches. 

The entire thrust to renew European and American Christianity by African forms of P-C Christianity like The Church of Pentecost (Ghana) or The Redeemed Christian Church of God (Nigeria) is an extension of this dimension of the movement. 

Alongside the renewal emphasis was a drive toward missions. The missionary impulse was simply the other side of the charismatic dimension, which reinforced the idea that Christians renewed church and society through spreading holiness and mobilizing the laity. There is an eschatological element to this missionary impulse in the idea that the Spirit has brought the last days into the present. This is what drives the P-C desire to transform culture, causing some persons like Bill Johnson to talk about “heaven on earth” in the way Charles Wesley talked about “heaven below.” 

Diversity in the Movement

To claim that there is a core to P-C identity does not mean that there is no diversity. Since the core is rooted in non-conformity, spirituality, renewal, and missions, it remains highly flexible and adaptable. The so-called “types” of P-C Christianity from Pentecostal to Charismatic to Independent Charismatic may best be understood as different emphases and institutional expressions of the core. 

To take but one example, the non-conformist nature of P-C Christianity means that new denominations and networks continue to be generated. Every Spirit-endowed leader will seek to establish a new ministerial association or network that may form a denominational structure or may be used to inform multiple denominations. We see this happening over and over in the history of the movement from the early leaders who formed the Assemblies of God out of existing ministerial networks to the rise of independent healing ministries in the 1950s and 1960s that gave birth to additional networks, even to the emergence of the Vineyard and new apostolic networks. A Nigerian example would be David Oyedepo’s Living Faith Church, which combines prosperity and charismatic power within an independent megachurch to change Nigerian society. This is both a strength and a weakness of P-C Christianity and why leaders in mainline Protestantism or in the Catholic Church remain suspicious of its efforts at renewal. 

To understand the breadth of the diversity, one needs to consider its three institutional expressions. First, one must examine denominational expressions of the movement. These expressions are of three types: 1) denominations formed by the movement; 2) denominations renewed by the movement, some of which are so transformed that they redescribe themselves in the language of P-C Christianity; and 3) denominations that have recovered a more experientially driven charismatic emphasis through their intersection with P-C Christianity. 

Second, one must examine ministerial associations and networks that have always been part of the movement. William Seymour’s Apostolic Faith was first a network that Seymour turned into a small denomination, which ultimately did not survive. Healing evangelists like Oral Roberts created ministerial networks. In fact, the 1970s saw the proliferation of ministerial networks and associations as the global movement exploded. Catholic Charismatics contributed to the networks by creating ecumenical bodies like People of Praise, to which Amy Coney Barrett’s parents belonged. Some sociologists have described Neo-Charismatic Christianity as the rise of network Christianity, but, in fact, it’s just a feature of the movement that goes back to holiness associations. 

Finally, there remain independent congregations, some of which morph into networks or come out of existing denominations to form new networks through daughter congregations. Bethel Church in Redding, California, and Hillsong in Australia both came out of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship to form their own independent congregations and start a new expression of P-C Christianity. The entire Word of Faith element in P-C Christianity is essentially a series of independent congregations linked by a ministerial network. 

I hope that I have sufficiently described how P-C Christianity functions with a highly flexible core that allows for ongoing diversity in the movement and encourages novel manifestations. Once one understands the contours of this global movement, one can begin to see where the pressure points are and what kinds of challenges those pressure points reveal for the different possible futures of the global movement. 

Dr. Dale M. Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He also serves on the Editorial Board for Firebrand.