The Fastest Growing Religion in the World is Under the Radar
Pentecostalism has been called “fastest growing movement in the history of religion”.
When I was growing up in a middle of the road evangelical baptist church people around me spoke with suspicion of “the charismatics”. Those ecstatic weirdos who eschewed proper teaching, had chaotic church services full of healings and tongues (generally viewed as bogus and gibberish), a church certainly not suitable to the kind of middle class polite, hand-shaking but no hugs environment I was a part of.
Yet the most extreme end of this kind of charismatic church, Pentecostalism, is now the fastest growing religion in the world. Across the Americas, Africa, Asia, even in Europe this kind of Christianity is having huge under-the-radar growth at a scale that has been called “the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history”(1). In 2015 the Pulitzer centre estimated 35,000 people a day were converting(2), a scale that utterly upturns the trend of widespread decline across almost every other denomination of Christianity.
How to describe pentecostalism to the uninitiated into the ins and outs of church denominations and practices? Pentecostalism takes its name from the day of Pentecost, a story in the New Testament in which the Holy Spirit…
