Search Results

This chapter details the growth of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in Northern Ireland (and its international expansion) and its development of schools, missionary work, and theological training. It considers whether success and increasing public acceptance has moderated the Church's distinctive separatism and its puritanism, and concludes that growth has not resulted in much change yet.

The Philadelphia Church of Christ, a congregation associated with a movement called the International Churches of Christ, put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of rapid church growth. The congregation was a place where people were taught that it is a mistake for Christians to pour too much energy into resisting the power of nation‐states or corporations. At the Philadelphia Church of Christ, people were taught that it is natural for women to defer to men and for homosexuals to defer to heterosexuals. People were taught, too, that it is imperative for Christians to unhesitatingly follow directions given to them by ministers and by other church authorities.

This chapter discusses Edwards’s relevance to issues today. It argues that Chapter 3 on revival calls into question some of the church’s strategies for growth today; Chapter 11 on literature demonstrates an alternative to much contemporary preaching; Chapter 15 on world religions suggests other ways of thinking about rival faiths. This chapter also argues that Edwards was neither fundamentalist nor liberal, and explores how his thought contributes to thinking about conversion and spiritual formation, the history of missions; renewal in church and society; the Reformed tradition; ethics and community; politics, pluralism and religious violence.

Divine healing and liberación (liberation or deliverance) became the primary tool for evangelization and church growth in Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant churches in Argentina between 1985 and 1990. Key leaders are Carlos Annacondia, Omar Cabrera, Hector Giménez, and Claudio Freidzon. Pentecostal missionaries who founded churches in Argentina since the 1940s did not promote healing. Annacondia supplanted the old missionary gospel with a new, culturally resonant repertoire of practices appropriate to the Argentine popular sector. Divine healing, by providing an alternative to visiting expensive curanderos (traditional healers), was a primary attraction. Evangelicals united behind Annacondia’s crusades and imitated his pentecostal methods and style of casting out demons, divine healing, testimonies, and popular music. Freidzon’s “new anointing” brought pentecostal practices to sectors of the historically Protestant churches that had previously not participated in the movement. The ecumenical Charismatic movement may further break down barriers between Protestants and Catholics.

This study examines whether Asian megachurches hold any theological and conceptual dissenting elements, historically shaped in Europe. The Yoido Full Gospel Church is used as a case study due to its mega size and the deep impact of its experience of church growth on wider global Christianity. Placing the life of the church and its founder David Yonggi Cho in their social context of Korea, the study identifies key motivations for the theological and practical processes and the outcome of church growth. Based on this assessment, it then probes whether the megachurch movement in Asia expresses any social and theological aspect of the dissenting movement. Even if there is no direct historical connection, there are important theological and social motivations that are found both in the megachurch movement and the dissenting traditions.

The great growth in the Chinese church and what this might mean for a future China has been the source of much recent media debate as the world has begun to catch up with the development of Chinese Christianities over the past three decades. Chapter 8 assesses how state regulation has attempted to channel and control that growth and analyzes the three broad categories of writing that have emerged out of that attempt, in the form of official church, unofficial church, and academic writings. While “theology” proper designates the output of the state seminaries in an official Chinese construct of categories, the chapter also addresses the burgeoning theological writings in academia and outside the state church.

This chapter assesses the powerful role of healing in the lives of marginalized, lower working-class pentecostal believers in the barrio of Nuevo Progreso, on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1990s. Divine healing practices, because they are accessible to the poor and serve practical and emotional purposes, provided a strategy for coping with a social context of poverty, insecurity, and violence, and counteracting impersonal processes of globalization that both created jobs and kept wages low and working conditions substandard. Healing rituals fueled and sustained church growth by drawing nonbelievers to church services and motivating conversion, and held a paramount role throughout the lives of believers, offering the salve of physical and emotional healing experiences. The Pentecostal worldview contrasted with that of nominal Catholicism and offered an alternative to seeking supernatural help from brujería, or witchcraft. Pentecostalism was not an import from foreign missionaries but expressed an indigenous faith.

This chapter focuses on a series of massive evangelistic campaigns that took place in the South between 1953 and 1988. Korean evangelicalism underwent remarkable growth during this period. In 1950 it claimed at most 600,000 adherents (2.9 percent of the total population). By 1960 that figure had increased to 1,257,000 (5 percent); by 1970, to 2,197,000 (7 percent); and by 1985 the number of evangelical adherents had risen to 6,489,000 (16 percent). This means that from 1950 to 1980 the number of Protestants in Korea roughly doubled just about every decade, and from 1950 to 1985 the growth was more than tenfold. Moreover, by the middle of the 1980s, Korean evangelicalism had become a record holder in a number of categories of church growth. Such development naturally gives rise to the question of how it all came about. Having learned how evangelicalism contributed to both Korean nationalism and South Korean anticommunism in the preceding chapters, the chapter now examines more directly the political, socioeconomic, and especially religious factors pertinent to evangelicalism's rise in post-1953 Korea.

This chapter is a broad introduction to the work of SIL International, formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization with over five thousand members working in hundreds of different language communities around the globe. The SIL’s work usually centers on translating the New Testament into local vernacular languages. SIL evangelistic goals and methods are contextualized through the lens of another major movement in mid-twentieth century missionary evangelism, the Church Growth movement. SIL theorists of translation, especially Eugene Nida, tried to create a translation methodology (called “dynamic equivalence translation”) that would at once domesticate biblical language in receptor communities while also sparking Holy Spirit–inspired critical reflections on local traditions that would produce conversions. Accessing the linguistically defined subjectivity of speakers was key to the model.

This introductory chapter outlines the specific points of study to be undergone in further detail in the latter parts of this book, which can be more broadly termed as the urban impact within church histories and congregations. Urban expansion influenced religious experience, and these variables can help determine how the city's churches responded to these changes: how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city, and how changes in the city affected the way they perceived and received religion in these years. The study of congregations reveals dynamics that larger and more general studies might miss. Moreover, church histories provide the institutional development of the church. These factors and more will be examined in further detail against the bustling, commercial backdrop of New York—an urban metropolis that, despite the growth of its churches, maintains a secular reputation.

The 1970s witnessed the explosive growth of conservative churches, culminating with 1976 being named “The Year of the Evangelical.” Evangelicalism’s vibrancy and visibility also exposed divisions within the movement as evangelicals wrestled over biblical inerrancy and worried about the burgeoning charismatic movement. The decade’s social and political changes, especially regarding gender and sexuality, alarmed religious conservatives. Evangelicals decried the growth of “secular humanism” and began to join Catholics in fighting abortion. Mormons took the lead in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, but they largely refrained from working with fellow conservatives and still avoided anti-abortion politics. By the end of the decade, Mormon, Catholic, and evangelical leaders were all urging greater political involvement from their followers in order to turn the nation back to a conservative path. Sensing a growing tide, Jerry Falwell organized the Moral Majority to rally religious conservatives behind Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency.

This chapter offers a specific example of the globalization of Protestantism by examining missionary efforts in Korea beginning in the nineteenth century, as well as the state of Protestantism there in recent decades. Although many countries in Asia have been receptive to Protestantism, Korea stands out from a demographic perspective, even if some evidence suggest that church growth has tapered off in recent years. One is even tempted to speak of “Korean exceptionalism,” in light of this country’s early embrace and indigenization of various forms of Protestantism. Considering the Korean example makes clear that Protestant ideas can be transferred into a non-Western culture while it also suggests how these ideas might be modified in the process.

This chapter starts by questioning any account that would see the Vineyards mere epiphenomenon. It then asks whether, despite its constituent heterogeneity, the Vineyard is held together by either the governing structure of institutions, by an ethic of responsibility, by church growth and management techniques, or by a shared aesthetic. This chapter shows that these forces, sensibilities, and techniques do have effects; in particular the Vineyard is shaped by it being in effect a ‘trust’ for an absent owner (a structure similar to that found in publicly held corporations). However, neither this force, not any other discussed in this chapter, have either the flexibility or the capacity to scale necessary to account for the Vineyard.

This chapter summarizes what is known about religious allegiance and churchgoing during the long eighteenth century and the early Victorian era, with reference to statistics (noting methodological difficulties, especially affecting the 1851 religious census). There are separate analyses for England and Wales and Scotland. The dominant trend in religious allegiance was towards voluntaryism and pluralism, the established Churches of England and Scotland losing their near-monopoly of religious affiliation in the face of Dissent’s rapid advance. The nineteenth century witnessed sustained church growth, absolute and relative, in members and Sunday scholars. Despite the continued existence of legislation requiring churchgoing, its enforcement was infrequent and often ineffective. Absenteeism was a growing problem from the eighteenth century. It remains unclear whether there was any general rise in attendance during the early nineteenth century. By 1851, two-fifths of Britons may have worshipped, Wales being the most devout of the home nations, but churchgoing declined thereafter.

Chapter 3 explores how people become members at each of these congregations. We examine both the process through which prospective members join and clergy ideas regarding the appropriate content, format, and objectives of the “new member” process. The amount of time it takes to move through this process varies enormously—from a simple affirmation of faith or “letter of transfer” for those coming from the same tradition, to a Saturday morning orientation on programs and basic beliefs, a couple of weekend seminars, or months of study and practice for those new to the faith. The duration of the process fits the depth of doctrine, teaching, and practice clergy ask new members to embrace and in which they hope all members will continue to grow.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a “New South” of industry, cities, and commerce promised to modernize the American South. Amid much regional change, southern evangelicals commonly comprehended and universally lamented a spiritual crisis. Despite growing churches, rising salaries, enhanced public prestige, and expanding congregations, southern white Protestant ministers perceived only a landscape of empty churches, disrespected preachers, indolent congregants, and a hostile public. Within their insular denominational worlds, southern religious leaders such as Baylor president William Carey Crane outlined the contours of their anxieties. But if a deep-seated sense of widespread crisis confronted religious Texans, a new generation of emerging leaders such as J. B. Cranfill promised a way out: they could fight in the public sphere. Senator Morris Sheppard and others increasingly imagined that the politics of prohibition could free religious southerners from their perceived crisis and reclaim an imagined golden age for American religion.