Pentecostalization

Spellcheck doesn't know that word, but it will.

The church is not dying. The church is thriving. You just have to know where to look. One place you might look is under a carport outside Havana where a small congregation gathers each week to offer praise and thanksgiving to God. They sing and dance, lay hands on one another, pray for healing, and speak prophetic words. The spiritual world is an ever-present reality for them.

I was in Cuba with a team recently and we were privileged to worship with this congregation. Some of the children performed a skit about Christmas, and then we sang together over pre-recorded background music. Cuban Christians like their music really, really loud. The neighbors a block away could have sung along had they been so inclined. A member of our group preached with the help of a translator.

After the service we were asked to pray for a man who had come to the church for the first time and had been involved for years in Santeria. He wanted to become a Christian and asked for prayers for healing. With some of my team I held his hand and led him through accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Following the practices of the Cuban pastors, I asked him to renounce Santeria. At that point things went bonkers. The words stuck in his throat. His left arm began to seize. He squeezed my hand so tightly that his fingernails dug into my flesh and I began to bleed. His eyes clamped shut and he fell to the floor. We continued to pray for him, but he would need more than we could provide that night. He would need ongoing prayer and inner healing, perhaps over weeks or months. The pastora, the female pastor of this congregation, served us some coffee consisting mostly of sugar, and then we returned to our home base in central Havana.

It’s not the first time I’ve encountered something like this. Both in the U.S. and in other countries, I’ve seen people struggle with, and receive freedom from, evil spirits. I know some people will scoff at me for saying such a thing. There was a point in my career when I suppose that might have bothered me, but I’m too old and I’ve seen too much to worry about it anymore. The vast majority of people who have ever lived, as well as the vast majority of people in the world today, believe in a spiritual realm that we cannot normally see, but which nevertheless comes to bear on their lives. Moreover, this kind of worldview is more common in the West than we might imagine. The Western world really isn’t secular. It’s more pagan than it used to be, but it isn’t secular.

Over the years I’ve noticed an emerging openness to the supernatural among my students. They are by and large very receptive to talk of miracles, the spiritual realm, and other aspects of the faith that classical liberalism deemed superstitious and attempted to relegate to the dustbin of history. Underscoring this point, I recently polled my New Testament class on how many of them had heard of Marcus Borg, a biblical scholar who wrote numerous popular works attempting to describe a “mature” form of Christianity for the present day. Borg’s vision of the faith had no space for miracles, including miracles of healing, the resurrection of the body, or deliverance from evil spirits. Not a single student was familiar with him. I was stupefied. Twenty-five years ago one would find his books in the library of any self-respecting mainline church. The kind of skepticism toward the supernatural he represented seems to have run out of gas. Of course, had I polled another class, the answer might well have been different, but probably not that much different. Things have changed. People are increasingly open to a spiritual realm that comes to bear on their lives in concrete ways.

Last year I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, and I learned a new word: Pentecostalization. What does this mean? It’s a term that generally refers to the transformation of much of Christianity across the globe. Where we see the spread of Christianity, particularly in the Global South, it tends to involve speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, deliverance, and sanctification. In other words, there is a strong sense of divine agency and spiritual agency. These Christians believe that God will speak and heal through them. They believe God will change their hearts in keeping with his will. They believe in a spiritual world in which demons oppress the spiritually vulnerable. What’s more, they believe that by calling on the name of Jesus, we can exert authority over these demons and free people from their influence. The word they use for deliverance in Cuba is liberación.

Certainly in Cuba the effects of Pentecostalization are apparent. One also finds it in African Christianity, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, where the faith is spreading faster than anywhere else on earth. I’ve seen Pentecostalization in Brazil and India as well. It is a global phenomenon. If you’ve traveled to these parts of the globe and worshiped with the Christians there, you’ve probably seen it for yourself. If you haven’t, and you have the opportunity, I’d encourage you to do so.

What about in the U.S., though? Are we being Pentecostalized? Biola University professor Brad Christerson believes we are. I think he’s right. It won’t happen everywhere. Cessationist churches and some mainline liberal churches will remain, but we should expect to see more and more Spirit-filled Christian communities arise across the U.S. Remember, the West is no longer the center of world Christianity. As Philip Jenkins told us over two decades ago in his classic work The Next Christendom, the center of gravity has shifted southward. I expect the church in the U.S. will increasingly reflect the trends we see across the globe.