Global Trends and Visitors

AC recently welcomed well-known religious historian Prof. Michael McClymond of St Louis University, Missouri, to the College, in part as a speaker at the AC-Western Sydney University sponsored conference on Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianities in Oceania. Prof. McClymond shared his research into why the vast spread of Christianity in the majority world has taken a pentecostal/ charismatic form. He suggested that the historiographic implications of the Irvingite-Dowieite movement should be considered as an alternate lineage for contemporary Spirit-filled Christianity. His argument is that the early-twentieth-century Pentecostal revivals were ensconced between charismatic revivals on both sides—an Irvingite-Dowietie movement that stretched from the 1830s to the early 1900s, and a Latter Rain movement that significantly reshaped the trajectory of global Charismatic Christianity from the 1950s to the present.  The most startling conclusion one might derive from this is that classical Pentecostalism is best described not as a “first wave” but rather as a “second wave” movement.  Moreover, the commonly described “second wave” of the Spirit in mainline Charismatic Christianity might better be described as a “third wave.”  This extended period of preparation for later 'waves' and the resultant indigenization of Christianity through charismatic encounters in scattered and mobile realities, provides a new wave of looking at the dynamism of the twentieth century.  As CFS staff work with the tens of thousands of Christian schools and churches in Africa and Asia, this dynamism remains a remarkable part of the story.