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{"id":1408,"date":"2006-10-18T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tmatt\/2006\/10\/18\/pentecostal-power-2006\/"},"modified":"2013-01-30T16:47:39","modified_gmt":"2013-01-30T21:47:39","slug":"pentecostal-power-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/tmatt\/2006\/10\/pentecostal-power-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentecostal power 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Church historian Vinson Synan has made 20 trips to Latin America while studying the explosive growth of Pentecostal<\/a> Christianity and he believes that it\u2019s time to state the obvious.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the point where you\u2019re not going to be able to get along very well with many believers in the Third World unless you embrace the gifts of the Holy Spirit,\u201d said Synan, who teaches at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cYou just can\u2019t have a closed mind when it comes to healing and prophecy and speaking in tongues<\/a> if you want to talk to people in places like Latin America, Africa and Asia. We?re talking about the whole church there \u2014 almost all of the Protestants and many of the Catholics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Synan has been saying this for decades in books like \u201cThe Old-Time Power\u201d and \u201cThe Century of the Holy Spirit,\u201d and he isn\u2019t alone. Now, researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (www.pewforum.org) in Washington, D.C., have released a wave of data from 10 nations documenting that the diverse 100-year-old movement called Pentecostalism<\/a> has touched the lives of one in four Christians around the world.<\/p>\n\n

The Pew team defined \u201cPentecostals\u201d as members of older bodies such as the Assemblies of God<\/a>, the Church of God in Christ and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. Then there are \u201ccharismatics\u201d who are Catholics, Anglicans and mainline Protestants who embrace healing, prophecy and other spiritual gifts, yet remain in their own churches. <\/p>\n\n

Together, these groups form what many now call the \u201crenewalists.\u201d According to this study, these believers \u2014 to cite four eyebrow-raising examples \u2014 make up 60 percent of the population in Guatemala, 56 percent in Kenya, 49 percent in Brazil and 44 percent in the Philippines.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cRenewalists, as a group ? tended to have a very high view of the authority of scripture. They tended to be very regular in worship attendance. They tended to uniformly believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation,\u201d said John C. Green, senior fellow at the Pew Center in religion and American politics. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cThey tended to be quite conservative or traditional on moral beliefs such as sexual behavior, the consumption of alcohol, divorce and so forth. \u2026 But even in those countries where majorities of the population hold very traditional beliefs, renewalists tend to hold those beliefs more intensely and more extensively.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Another interesting part of this study, said Synan, indicated that \u201cglossolalia,\u201d or \u201cspeaking in tongues,\u201d may no longer be the spiritual gift that defines charismatics and even many Pentecostals. Within the Assemblies of God, for example, there has long been a gap between an \u201cold guard\u201d that believes this experience of ecstatic speech is always the initial sign that someone has been \u201cbaptized in the Holy Spirit\u201d and a \u201cthird wave\u201d of younger believers who see it as a gift that some experience and some do not.<\/p>\n\n

What truly unites \u201crenewalists\u201d is their belief that miracles and other signs of God\u2019s power, especially acts of healing, are real and can be seen in modern life. There is no question that this emphasis on the supernatural causes tension in some churches touched by Pentecostalism, especially tensions between Protestant and Catholic leaders in America and Europe and their Third World counterparts.<\/p>\n\n

Meanwhile, there are conservative Protestants \u2014 especially Calvinists and Baptists \u2014 who reject Pentecostalism and its emphasis on prophecy and \u201cglossolalia.\u201d Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, have decided to ban all foreign missionary candidates who confess that they practice a \u201cprivate prayer language,\u201d another phrase often used to describe \u201cspeaking in unknown tongues.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Nevertheless, said Pew Forum Director Luis Lugo, \u201cit is getting harder and harder to find non-charismatic Protestants in Latin America, Africa and many other parts of the world.\u201d Meanwhile, top Catholic leaders appear to have accepted the need for theological dialogue with the charismatics in their global flock.<\/p>\n\n

At least, said Lugo, it\u2019s clear that some clerics in Rome can do the math.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cThe Vatican knows that it will have to deal with this new reality and the trend there is definitely toward accommodation,\u201d he said. \u201cThe U.S. Catholic bishops have not been as open. But the growth of Catholicism in this country is among charismatic Catholics, especially among Hispanics and people moving here from Africa and overseas. There is simply no way to ignore that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"