Brill's Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism Online
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Subject: Religious Studies
Executive Editor: Michael Wilkinson
Associate Editors: Connie Au, Jörg Haustein, Todd M. Johnson
Brill’s Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism Online (BEGP) provides a comprehensive overview of worldwide Pentecostalism from a range of disciplinary perspectives. It offers analysis at the level of specific countries and regions, historical figures, movements and organizations, and particular topics and themes. Pentecostal Studies draws upon areas of research such as anthropology, biblical studies, economics, gender studies, global studies, history, political science, sociology, theological studies, and other areas of related interest. The BEGP emphasizes this multi-disciplinary approach and includes scholarship from a range of disciplines, methods, and theoretical perspectives. Moreover, the BEGP is cross-cultural and transnational, including contributors from around the world to represent key insights on Pentecostalism from a range of countries and regions.
Providing summaries of the key literature, the BEGP will be the standard reference for Pentecostal Studies. All articles are fully text searchable and cross-referenced, with bibliographic information on scholarly work and recommendations for further reading.
For more information: see Brill.com
Associate Editors: Connie Au, Jörg Haustein, Todd M. Johnson
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Brill’s Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism Online (BEGP) provides a comprehensive overview of worldwide Pentecostalism from a range of disciplinary perspectives. It offers analysis at the level of specific countries and regions, historical figures, movements and organizations, and particular topics and themes. Pentecostal Studies draws upon areas of research such as anthropology, biblical studies, economics, gender studies, global studies, history, political science, sociology, theological studies, and other areas of related interest. The BEGP emphasizes this multi-disciplinary approach and includes scholarship from a range of disciplines, methods, and theoretical perspectives. Moreover, the BEGP is cross-cultural and transnational, including contributors from around the world to represent key insights on Pentecostalism from a range of countries and regions.
Providing summaries of the key literature, the BEGP will be the standard reference for Pentecostal Studies. All articles are fully text searchable and cross-referenced, with bibliographic information on scholarly work and recommendations for further reading.
For more information: see Brill.com
Macedo, Edir
(947 words)
Edir Macedo Bezerra is the presiding bishop of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God; UCKG) and the CEO of the Universal Holding Companies.When he was 32 years old, Macedo’s father left his poor home in northeast Brazil, looking for a better life in the more prosperous south, where he met his wife, Eugênia Macedo Bezerra. Living in a small rural town, Macedo’s parents were nominal Catholics with some Spiritualist incursions before they moved to Rio de Janeiro. Some years later, Macedo …
Date:
2021-08-17
Malaysia
(1,026 words)
Malaysia sits between West and East Asia geographically, and straddles the region culturally and religiously. Unsurprisingly, denominational/institutional Pentecostalism and independent charismatic figures/movements have also come from both areas.Institutionally, in West Malaysia, the Ceylon Pentecostal Mission (CPM)arrived first, missionizing Indian and Ceylonese migrants in the 1930s. American Assemblies of God (AG) missionaries later followed in 1934, evangelizing Chinese urban migrants. The AG’s impact became more sig…
Date:
2021-07-16
Mason, Charles Harrison
(883 words)
Charles Harrison Mason (1864–1961), an African American, was the founder and first senior bishop of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in the world. He was also a well-known Pentecostal evangelist, a supporter of world missions, an ally of education, a champion of pacifism, and an advocate of civil rights. During Mason’s fifty-four year tenure as senior bishop, the COGIC grew from 10 congregations to 4,000 congregations, approximately two thousand members to 400,000 members, and churches within the U.S. and on five continents. Born on…
Date:
2021-07-16
Mathews, Thomas
(875 words)
Thomas Mathews (1944–2005) was one of the most effective Indian Pentecostal leaders. He was a missionary, teacher, preacher, and writer. Due to his courage to take the Christian message to Rajasthan, the desert state of India, he is known as “the Apostle of the Desert.” Mathews was born in Punaloor, Kerala to Pentecostal parents. As they considered him as an answer to their prayers for having children after four years of their marriage, they dedicated him to the service of the Lord. While doing …
Date:
2021-07-16
McAlister, R.E.
(919 words)
Robert Edward McAlister was born into a large Presbyterian farming family in Renfrew County, Ontario, in 1880. The family moved to Cobden, Ontario, in 1891, where McAlister had an important conversion experience in the holiness congregation led by Ralph Cecil Horner—an important Canadian radical holiness evangelist and founder of the Holiness Movement Church and the Standard Church of America. McAlister studied at God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio, during 1900–1902, before returning home du…
Date:
2021-07-16
McKeown, James and Sophia
(848 words)
James McKeown was the founder of the Church of Pentecost, which is the largest Protestant Church in Ghana. He was born on 12 September 1900 in Glenboig, near Glasgow. His parents were from Ballymena in Northern Ireland, but they lived temporarily in Scotland. His father, John William Mckeown, earned enough money to buy a farm in Tullynahinion, near Portglenone, County Antrim (Thomas 2016). James dropped out of school at the age of eleven to help his father in the farm. His parents were strict Pr…
Date:
2021-07-16
McPherson, Aimee Semple
(979 words)
Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), founder of the Foursquare Church, was born near Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada to Mildred (Minnie) Pearce, a Salvation Army worker, and James Kennedy, a Methodist farmer. As a precocious teenager, Aimee Kennedy grappled with difficult questions including the relationship between faith and science, but she also enjoyed popular culture and practiced her skills of performance and dramatic reading. In 1907 she attended a series of Pentecostal meetings conducted by evangelist Robert Semple, where she experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit and…
Date:
2021-07-16
Mebius, Frederick E.
(676 words)
Although Frederick Mebius (1879–1944) is usually considered to be the founding missionary of the Pentecostal movement in El Salvador, his role cannot be fully understood apart from the history of Protestant evangelicalism in the area. Moreover, what is known about him is largely dependent on oral histories passed down in interviews with missionaries. Among the earliest Protestants to enter El Salvador from the north were the missionaries from the fundamentalist and non-denominational Central American Mission (CAM), founded by C.I. Scofield in 18…
Date:
2021-07-16
Media
(1,458 words)
Since its early beginnings, the spread of Pentecostal Christianity has depended to a great extent on the distribution of media forms such as booklets, radio tapes, flyers, but also music, dance and other performances that transport the Holy Spirit. “Media” here are understood to be carriers of divine messages and of spiritual energies.Many of the Pentecostal media initially originated in the United States, which has ever since remained a global center of Christian media production. Gradually, throughout the twentieth century, Pentecostal media ce…
Date:
2021-08-17
Megachurches
(1,214 words)
Large churches have always existed in the history of the Christian church, from the early church in Antioch in the first century and its basilica, through the cathedrals of Europe, to Charles Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle in London (late 1800s) and Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple in Los Angeles (early twentieth century). But advancements in amplification technology, architecture, and the advent of the automobile and its accompanying asphalt infrastructure have led to the proliferati…
Date:
2021-07-16
Mexico
(1,922 words)
The Pentecostal movement in Mexico traces its origins to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, 1906–1909. Genaro and Romana Carbajal de Valenzuela attended the Azusa Street Revival and brought Pentecostalism to Mexico between 1911 and 1915, around the same time that George and Carrie Judd Montgomery, Clarissa Nuzum, Francisca Blaisdell, Chonita Morgan Howard, and others did. It is also highly probable that other Mexicans from the Azusa Street revival like Abundio López, Juan Navarro Martinez,…
Date:
2021-07-16