Browsing by Subject "Pentecostalism"

Since the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.

Since the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.

This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian identity. The history that is told in this work is that of a century-long struggle by American Indian Pentecostals for autonomy, leadership, and recognition within the Assemblies of God. I argue that the AG's efforts to establish indigenous churches in its home missions work to American Indians bore two important and largely unanticipated consequences. The first was that it prompted American Indian Pentecostals to forge a new identity: fully Indian and fully Pentecostal. The second was that it forced white Pentecostals to own up to their belief in the indigenous principle: that God's Spirit fell equally on peoples, without regard to ethnicity or social standing. I focus mainly on giving voice to the Pentecostal Indian actors in this history, in order to fill in the gaps on a group of modern Pentecostal believers that were almost never written about in the histories of the movement.

I have rooted this work in the history of American religious history, as well as Native American history and the history of American Pentecostalism. The majority of the sources come from the Assemblies of God's archives, chiefly, ministerial files, Pentecostal periodicals, letters, tracts, meeting minutes, and self-published autobiographies.

There is a growing number of people going through deconstructive faith experiences in Latin American Pentecostal churches. Factors like globalization, individualism, high educational rates, the post-colonial experience of the Latin American church, fundamentalism, connectivity, and others contribute to accelerate this trend and shape the environment of faith communities that find themselves amongst increasingly postmodern tendencies. Most pastors are either ignoring the situation, rejecting deconstruction all together, or embracing it blindly. I propose a pastoral response from a distinctively Pentecostal perspective that engages deconstruction of faith critically, while staying open to conceive it as a tool for Spirit-led discipleship that can produce a more mature faith.I examine six affirmations made by Jacques Derrida that explain deconstruction as something that happens, happens from the inside, is not a method, is call, is a yes to the other, and is affirmative of institutions. Each of these is contrasted with specific examples of cultural changes in Costa Rica, Peter’s experience at the house of Cornelius, and a Latin American Pentecostal perspective. By exploring a variety of authors, I have identified different tools that can help Latin American Pentecostal pastors to better engage in discipleship practices that can produce mature believers in a postmodern era.

This dissertation examines the recent influx of Pentecostal-charismatic churches into the Northern Region of Ghana, a rural, underdeveloped region whose predominantly Muslim population has increasingly become the target of evangelistic efforts undertaken by Christians from the south. Based on ethnographic and archival research, my study considers the locus of this incursion as a densely layered zone of anxieties and emergences, desires and contestations, in which the elaboration of novel horizons of sensibility and experience is refracted through the vicissitudes of the region's social, economic, religious, and political history. I argue that the churches' impassioned campaign to "take back the north for the Lord" - a campaign whose exemplary medium is the evangelistic crusade in which "signs and wonders" are mobilized as particularly potent technologies of conversion - demarcates a complex field of intervention animated by a plurality of forces irreducible to those of strictly religious provenance. An ethos of progress and success fostered by the country's development apparatus; the longstanding prejudices surrounding northerners and "the north" in the Ghanaian national imaginary; the specter of a Muslim threat that surfaces in a post-9/11 world and perpetuates amidst a global war on terror - these are among the contingencies that have come together to render this encounter possible. Yet, far from simply overlaying these historical-political logics with the veneer of Christian discourse, my work charts the dissemination of a faith whereby, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, converts are anointed with a power to conceive themselves and, by extension, the world as nothing less than a totally "new creation." I contend that such practices of salvation, so characteristic of Pentecostalism's proliferation across the continent as a whole, are being recast in ways both subtle and sensational by their transposition into the allegedly pathological space of northern Ghana - as are, I suggest, the lives of the men and women who inhabit it.

This paper seeks to locate the church as a role player in the ongoing discussion around reconciliation within the South African context. Seeing as reconciliation is understood and applied in different ways by different sectors of society, the paper starts by establishing a Biblical understanding on the subject. This is done by identifying central New Testament texts which it sees as primarily occurring in the Pauline corpus (2 Corinthians 5:17-21, Romans 5:8-11, Ephesians 2:13-16, and Colossians 1:15-23). The paper then turns to consider the possible contributions Pentecostal theology makes available to this discussion, focusing on eschatology, the empowerment of the Spirit, and social concern. The paper then contextualizes the conversation by considering the South African context, with focus given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996. These thoughts are then brought together in a discussion on the Church, and how through the Spirit, it finds itself uniquely positioned as a witness to inclusivity and reconciliation. The Biblical understanding of reconciliation is affirmed, as is the centrality of the Church, but that this still needs to be realized in local congregational gatherings is noted. As the paper takes a Pentecostal approach to reconciliation, the inclusivity of the community that emerged from the outpouring of the Spirit in Acts is considered, and parallels drawn to similar occurrences in the origins of Pentecostalism. It is therefore the premise of this paper that the Spirit empowers the Church, positioning it uniquely as an inclusive and reconciling community.