The Global South: Africa, Asia, Latin America¶

In 1900 the typical Christian in the world was a European or a North American. By the end of the century that sentence was false. The largest transfer of Christian population since the conversion of the Roman Empire has happened within living memory, mostly in churches that pray for the sick and expect an answer.

That fact does not settle the doctrinal question; it changes who answers it.

The claim¶

The settled doctrine that the gifts have ceased is a minority report in the world church, and the churches that report the gifts most are the ones that have grown fastest. Cessationism is the considered position of serious, Bible-believing communities, and this casebook takes it seriously. But as a description of what the whole church believes, it is provincial. The "we" in "we do not see them today" is a small and unrepresentative pronoun.

The demographic shift¶

Philip Jenkins argued in The Next Christendom (Oxford University Press, 2002) that the centre of gravity of Christianity was moving south and east. The forecast has been debated; the trend has not. David Martin's Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Blackwell, 2001) made the sociological point: the movement was not an American export but a vernacular Christianity that took root wherever uprooted people needed a God who acts. Allan Anderson's An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2014) insists that it is polycentric, with indigenous origins in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The Pew Forum's Spirit and Power (2006) surveyed Pentecostals in ten countries across four continents and found healings and tongues to be reported elements of ordinary religious life. These churches are not a curiosity. They are the future.

Nigeria and West Africa¶

Nigeria is the clearest case. Its Christian population is roughly half the country, and its public life is saturated with Pentecostal language and media. The Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded by Josiah Akindayomi in 1952 and led by Enoch Adeboye, has planted congregations across the country and the diaspora; David Oyedepo's Living Faith Church, known as Winners' Chapel, built one of the largest auditoriums in the world outside Lagos. In both, prayer for the sick, deliverance, and prophecy are not optional extras; they are what people come for.

Brazil and Latin America¶

Brazil may have more Pentecostals than any country in the world. The Assemblies of God arrived in Belém do Pará in 1911 with two Swedish immigrants, Gunnar Vingren and Daniel Berg, and grew into a body far larger than its North American parent; the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1977 by Edir Macedo, carried a more aggressive prosperity message into the cities and then abroad. Pentecostalism advances where the old religious order is weak and migration has broken the village's hold; Martin's phrase for this is the "world parish," and its typical member is poor, mobile, and unsentimental about what religion is for.

South Korea¶

South Korea is the exception that tests the rule. David Yonggi Cho founded Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul in 1958 with a handful of people; by the 1990s it was regularly described as the largest congregation in the world, with thousands of cell groups and a mountain prayer retreat at Osan where members prayed through the night.

But Korea is not a Pentecostal nation. Its modern growth was largely Presbyterian and Methodist, and Pentecostals remain a minority. Yoido is one enormous congregation, not the shape of the whole church. And Cho was convicted in 2014 of embezzling church funds — a scandal that belongs in any honest account. A large church is not a true church, and a gifted preacher is not a safe one.

China's house churches¶

The Chinese house churches are the least documented and most contested case. Estimates of Chinese Christians vary wildly — the government's figures run in the tens of millions, outside estimates higher, and no one knows. What is clear is that the unregistered churches grew rapidly through the 1980s and 1990s under varying pressure, and that healing, deliverance, and prophetic utterance are normal in many of them, especially in the rural networks of Henan and Anhui. Some are Reformed, some intensely Pentecostal; most are trying to survive and to pray for the sick without a doctor's fee. Western Christians should resist romanticising the persecuted church, or using it as a screen for their own arguments.

The Philippines and the independent churches¶

The Philippines shows the same pattern inside a Catholic country. El Shaddai, founded by Mike Velarde in 1984, became a mass lay movement of healing and prosperity teaching; Eddie Villanueva's Jesus Is Lord Church became a Pentecostal denomination with political ambitions. Filipino workers carried both to the Gulf, Hong Kong, and California.

Africa's independent churches are often left out of the Pentecostal story. In Nigeria the Aladura churches — Cherubim and Seraphim, Christ Apostolic Church — were healing and prophesying a generation before the megachurches. The Zion Christian Church in South Africa, founded in the 1920s by Engenas Lekganyane, gathers millions at Moria each Easter; Simon Kimbangu's movement in the Belgian Congo became a church with its own prophet, hymns, and martyrs. These prophet-healing movements read the Bible through the experience of sickness, sorcery, and political humiliation. They are also, by any honest measure, syncretistic: ancestral veneration and folk healing have been absorbed into Christian practice in ways a Reformed theologian will find troubling, and should.

The honest limits¶

Growth is not proof of truth. Islam grew faster than Christianity in the twentieth century; so did Mormonism; liberal Protestantism declined. None of that settles a metaphysical question: a movement can grow because it offers community, dignity, health, and hope to people who have none, and its central claims can still be false.

Some are prosperity-preaching in a way that turns the gospel into a transaction — the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God has faced fraud investigations and accusations of exploiting the poor, which its founder denies. Some are corrupt and authoritarian — Cho's conviction is the most public example, not the only one. Some reports are exaggerated, some fraudulent; volume is not quality. The strongest evidence is the documented case, graded carefully, which is why the academy and the source library matter more than the statistics.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the demographic centre of Christianity has moved outside the West; that settled cessation is a minority position in the world church; that the churches reporting healings, prophecy, and tongues are, in the aggregate, growing fastest; and that Western absence is not representative.

It does not prove: that any particular healing occurred, that growth validates theology, or that a Nigerian or Brazilian report should be believed on the strength of its passport. It removes a premise — that the church's future belongs to the cessationist — and makes the Western debate a provincial argument in a global church.

The movement that began on Azusa Street is now the largest family in world Christianity, and its weight lies here. What it says is the subject of the global church speaks; the Western argument from absence, of we do not see them today.