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Walter Jacob Hollenweger (June 1, 1927 – August 10, 2016) was a scholar of global Pentecostalism and interdisciplinary Reformed theologian. Growing up in a Pentecostal church in Zurich, Switzerland, he became well acquainted with the various facets of revivalist Christianity. He was active as youth leader, evangelist, author of articles, and interpreter at large events. He was ordained by the Swiss Pentecostal Mission and worked in that denomination until 1958. Personal tensions with the local c…

Tommy Lee Osborn (December 23, 1923–February 14, 2013) was an American independent itinerant Pentecostal evangelist. He held hundreds of open-air “mass-miracle-crusades” with healing ministry to millions for six decades, especially in the global south. He and his wife Daisy Washburn established the headquarters of Osborn Ministries International in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1949. They were married for 53 years and engaged in evangelistic ministry together until Daisy passed away in 1995. Osborn continu…

Healing is a major theme in, and explanation for, the global expansion of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (or “Pentecostalism”) over the course of the twentieth century. During the famed Azusa Street Revival of 1906 that, in conjunction with similar revivals scattered across the world, spread Pentecostalism globally, claims of divine healing through prayer drew outsiders and inspired missionary zeal. Despite the emphasis that many observers of Pentecostalism give to glossolalia and fina…

Opoku Onyinah (1954–)  is a distinguished African missiologist and former Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, Ghana. He was born on July 22, 1954 in Kumasi, the capital city of the Ashanti Kingdom. His parents, Opanin Kwame Onyinah and Maame Akosua Addai, were peasant farmers. As Catholics, they sent their son to be baptized into the Catholic Church in Yamfo. Onyinah remained a staunch Catholic throughout his childhood. He attended a Presbyterian primary school and a Catholic Middle school in Ya…

Human migration is certainly not a new phenomenon. From the earliest times, humans have been on the move from different places of origin to wide-ranging destinations. The nature, causes, and processes of such movements have been explained by various migration theories stemming from different disciplines. The earliest known, the push-pull models and neo-classical perspectives, explain migration in terms economic, demographic, and environmental factors which ‘push’ people out of unfavorable condit…

As a pioneer in the Italian Pentecostal movement, Louis Francescon’s (1866–1964) mission has transcended ethnic and national boundaries. Today, several denominations and local churches, especially the Christian Congregation in Brazil, the Assemblies of God in Italy, the International Fellowship of Christian Assemblies, the Christian Assemblies in Argentina, and the Canadian Assemblies of God trace their origins to his activities.His parents Pietro and Maria Lovisa Francescon were peasants from Cavasso Nuovo, a village in the hesitant borderlands of Ita…

Hillsong is a contemporary church that originated in Sydney, Australia but is now comprised of congregations in twenty-two nations across the world. It was founded by Global Senior Pastors Brian (son of Frank Houston) and Bobbie Houston in 1983. At the time of writing, the church had a global attendance of over 130,000. Hillsong campuses are located mostly in urban centres including Sydney, London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen, and Cape Town. However, the church is also streamed onli…

Maria Woodworth-Etter was an evangelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who bridged the spaces between the Holiness and Healing movements and Pentecostalism. By the time she embraced Pentecostalism, she had been preaching for over 30 years. Her revivals and mass meetings held in churches, auditoriums, and a tent with a capacity for 8,000 people, were marked by physical manifestations including trances, visions, dreams, and healing miracles. By 1885 she had gained national at…

Writers use the terms “revival” and “revivalism” in various ways.  Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines the term “revival” as “a period of religious awakening: renewed interest in religion” with “meetings often characterized by emotional excitement....” “Revivalism” is “the spirit or kind of religion or the methods characteristic of religious revivals.” Some authors, and especially Calvinists, define revival as an unplanned event that reflects God's initiative, and revivalism as a humanly orch…

Kim Ik-du (1874–1950) was a representative revivalist; a powerful praying person who performed miraculous healings; a passionate evangelical preacher with a ministry empowered by the Holy Spirit; and a martyr who had to endure the persecution of Japanese colonialism and the communists. After the Revival Movement led by Kil Seon-ju in 1907, Kim Ik-du became an outstanding revivalist who led the movement in the 1920s and 1930s, when people needed much comfort and hope in the oppressed and miserable time of Japanese oppression.After his marriage at the age of eighteen, Kim squan…

African Pentecostalisms (rather than African Pentecostalism) consist of complexities and diversities of categorizations and serve as a genre of Christianity distinctive because of its emphasis on the experience of repentance, a personal relationship with God through Christ, baptism in the Spirit, and the resultant transformation of lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.Available estimates indicate Pentecostals in Africa to number about 202.9 million in 2015, or 35.3 percent of the continent’s Christian population of 574.5 million and 17 perce…

Glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues,” has long constituted a prominent feature of global Pentecostalism. Similar phenomenon occur in a number of ancient and modern non-Christian religions (e.g., Oracle of Delphi, African indigenous religions, Mormons), though the degree of commonality is debated. In Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, the experience usually signifies the “baptism in the Holy Spirit”—understood variously as a second or third work of grace subsequent to conversion. For some within the classical Pentecostal tradition, including (…

The history of Pentecostalism in Chad is as follows. Pentecostalism came to Chad through the missionary work of Albert Burkhardt who initally worked with a Baptist mission. He then joined l'Eglise de la Coopération Evangélique au Tchad (ECET) around 1965. Burkhardt was recommended by the “Mission porte ouverte de Châlons sur Saône.” Burkhardt first settled in Sarh in southern Chad for his missionary work that developed over time. Churches in the Apostolic or Pentecostal tradition from other regi…

The beginning of the Pentecostal movement in Europe occurred at the start of the twentieth century when vast areas of the continent had enjoyed a long period of peace, technological progress and prosperity. In northern Europe established churches were Lutheran or Anglican, and where they existed, religious tolerance extended to other forms of Protestantism.After the 1906 revivalistic outpouring of the Spirit took place in Oslo under the ministry of T.B. Barratt (1862–1940) a Norwegian-British Methodist, there were similar scenes in Britain in the …

Tommy Hicks (1909–1973) developed a two-month ministry in Argentina (April–June, 1954) and produced one of the greatest spiritual impacts affecting the church and the nation.Being the son of a Texas farmer in the Baptist tradition, he was ordained to the ministry in 1936 by the International Foursquare Church. A year earlier, 1935, he had graduated from Life Bible College, an evening theological school of the Foursquare Church, where he had Aimee Semple McPherson as one of his teachers. At this church he was a pastor, evangelist, and District Superintendent.He had some painful expe…

Four external and four internal features characterized the beginning of German Pentecostalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. From abroad, reports of the revivals in Topeka, Kansas, USA (1901), Wales, UK (1904/5), Azusa Street, California, USA (1906), and Oslo, Norway (1906/7) sparked a desire within the believers to experience something similar in Germany. Internally, the four Holiness fundamentals (salvation, sanctification, healing, millenarianism), were already deeply engrained within the German Gemeinschaftsbewegung (Pietistic movement). As in many oth…

Though conversion is a common theme, there is not one unifying understanding of what signifies Pentecostal conversion. Recent scholarship has addressed Pentecostal conversion from a variety of theological, anthropological, and sociological perspectives, trying to define the phenomenon within a larger context of spirituality and religious conversion. Historically and theologically, Pentecostal conversion is linked to initiation-theologies of various waves of Pentecostalism with a key distinction b…

Pyongyang (or P’yŏngyang) Revival refers to the charismatic Protestant movement that originated in Changdaehyŏn Presbyterian church at Pyongyang in January, 1907, the current capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and spread throughout the Korean Peninsula. During its Bible classes and revivals, members of Pyongyang’s Presbyterian and Methodist churches repeatedly repented of all their wrongs while praying aloud, and openly confessed their own awakenings. Such Pentecostal e…

The New Testament bears witness to a church that pulsated with a diversity of spiritual gifts. The term most often used to depict these gifts is charisma (pl. charismata). This term can have a more generalized meaning, referring to the gift of salvation or its universally accessible benefits (Romans 5:15–16; 6:23; 11:29). But this term is more often used in the New Testament of the diversely gifted congregation through which the Holy Spirit is present and active to build up its members in the lo…

Jun Murai  (村井 ; 1897–1970) was born to a Methodist family in Kagoshima on June 27, 1897. His father Kisou Murai was a Methodist minister and Jun was baptized in April 1913. Murai attended the Theological Department of Aoyama Gakuin, a Methodist school, in Tokyo from 1914. In 1918, suffering from depression and attempting to commit suicide, Murai visited his cousin, Makoto Miyoshi, a Bible woman who was working with William and Mary Taylor. The Taylors were British missionaries in Japan who had been sent by the Pentecostal Missionary Union in 1913, but later transferred to the Assemblies of…