Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

Pentecostalism, which emphasizes direct experience of the Holy Spirit, glossolalia, and divine healing, has grown from a marginal early-twentieth-century movement into one of the most numerically significant expressions of global Christianity, with particular force across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. Scholars studying it work at the intersection of theology, history, and anthropology, asking how communities read scripture, organize their churches, and negotiate the relationship between faith and social life under conditions shaped by colonialism, migration, and rapid urbanization. Among the most actively debated questions are how African Pentecostal traditions construct their own hermeneutical frameworks independent of Western missionary theology, and how the global spread of the movement reshapes ecclesiology — the understanding of what the church is and how it should be structured — across very different cultural contexts.

Works

150,374

Total citations

102,237

Keywords

PentecostalismBiblical InterpretationAfrican ChristianitySpiritualityHermeneuticsChurch History