The Global Church Speaks¶

The Western argument about the gifts has a peculiar feature: it is conducted almost entirely by people who do not expect the gifts, about a church that mostly does. The centre of gravity of Christianity has moved south and east, and the churches there are not, by and large, cessationist. They pray for the sick as a matter of course. They expect God to speak. To them, the question "did the gifts cease?" is not a live option but a strange one — like being asked whether the sun still rises.

This page is not a tourist's report. It is an argument about whose experience counts, and about what the Western reader owes the majority church: attention, not romanticism.

The claim¶

The claim is demographic and theological at once. Demographically, the Pentecostal and charismatic family is one of the largest and fastest-growing in world Christianity, and the churches growing fastest are often the ones most likely to pray for healing and to expect prophecy. Theologically, a doctrine of cessation is a claim about the whole church's experience. It cannot be settled by the experience of one province of it.

The numbers¶

The Pew Research Center's Spirit and Power (2006) surveyed Pentecostals in ten countries and found that in most of them a majority said they had personally witnessed or experienced divine healing. Pew's Global Christianity report (2011) put the Pentecostal and charismatic family at roughly a quarter of the world's Christians — hundreds of millions of people. These are surveys of report, not of occurrence; they tell you what people say happened, not what a doctor would conclude. But they establish the scale.

Philip Jenkins made the historical case in The Next Christendom (2002) and The New Faces of Christianity (2006). His point is not that the global South is right. It is that the Christianity of the coming century will be read through a supernatural worldview, because that is where the church is, and that Western theology's naturalistic habits are a local accent rather than the norm. Jenkins is a historian, not a Pentecostal apologist, which is what makes him useful here.

The theological challenge¶

The challenge is not "the global church has more faith." It is that the burden of proof looks different from Lagos or Manila than from London.

A church that prays for the sick every week, and sometimes sees them recover, does not need a doctrine of continuation to explain its practice. It needs a doctrine of cessation to stop. The cessationist's case, in that setting, has to be argued uphill: why would God withdraw what he is evidently giving? The Western argument, by contrast, often begins with the absence and reasons back to a decree — the move we do not see them today examines.

There is a further challenge, and it is uncomfortable. The global church reads the Bible as a book about a world it recognises: spirits, sickness, poverty, power. That is not naivety but a hermeneutical location closer to the New Testament's own than the seminar room's. The Western reader who finds the demonic embarrassing and the miraculous archaic is the one with the cultural adjustment to make.

But the challenge cuts both ways. A church can be close to the text's world and still read it badly, and the global church's confidence is not always a gift.

The dangers¶

The prosperity gospel. The most serious corruption of the movement is the claim that health and wealth are the reward of faith. It turns the gospel into a transaction, makes sickness a symptom of unbelief, and extracts money from the poor in the name of seed faith. In some regions it is the dominant public face of Pentecostalism.

Syncretism. Where the church grows among traditional religions, the line between prayer and amulet, between deliverance and the old protection, can blur: a Christianity that names Jesus and still fears the ancestors.

Lack of accountability. Independent churches and prophets can be answerable to no one: founders become authorities, finances become opaque, and the gift becomes a business. The New Testament's safeguards — testing, weighing, order, a plurality of elders — are exactly what is missing.

None of this disproves the gifts. All of it shows why the global church needs the whole church's discernment, and why the Western tools of testing and safeguarding are a shared inheritance rather than a colonial imposition.

Listening without romanticising¶

The Western reader should listen, and resist two temptations.

The first is dismissal: to treat the reports as superstition and the churches as confused. That is empirically careless and spiritually arrogant. The academy, at its best, has stopped making that mistake, and so should the church.

The second is romanticism: to treat the global church as a repository of untroubled faith, whose every claim rebukes the sceptical West. That is its own condescension, and it is false. The majority church is not unanimous — there are cessationists in Nigeria and Korea, and Pentecostal leaders as critical of prosperity teaching as any Western pastor. Nor is it a monolith: "the global South" is a phrase of convenience for hundreds of churches in dozens of languages.

What the Western reader can receive is specific: an expectation of God's action, a readiness to pray for the body as well as the soul, a theology of the powers that takes the New Testament's language seriously, and a church centred on community rather than the individual. What the Western reader can give is equally specific: the disciplines of testing, order, safeguarding, and the refusal to let a gift become a business.

The exchange is not between the enlightened and the benighted. It is between members of one body, of which "the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable" (1 Corinthians 12:22). The global South page sets out the history and evidence in more detail.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that a very large part of the world church is not cessationist; that the Western debate is parochial in a way it rarely notices; and that the global church's practice raises the theological question in its sharpest form.

It does not prove: that every claim from Africa, Asia, or Latin America is true, that the global church's theology is healthier than the West's, or that numbers settle a question of exegesis. A majority can be wrong. What the majority does is shift the burden — and the burden was always the point. This page makes no claim beyond that, and the site's limits are stated in what this site does and does not claim.