Towards a Pentecostal Missiology for the Majority World

Abstract

"Pentecostals have been around for only a hundred years,2 but today are main role players in world missions, representing perhaps a quarter of the world’s Christians and perhaps three quarters of them are in the Majority World. 3 According to Barrett and Johnson’s statistics, there were 1,227 million Christians in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania in 2004, 62% of the world’s Christians, while those of the two northern continents (including Russia) constituted only 38%, dramatic evidence of how rapidly the western share of world Christianity has decreased in the twentieth century. If present trends continue, by 2025 69% of the world’s Christians will live in the South, with only 31% in the North.4 But it is not only in terms of numbers that there have been fundamental changes. Christianity is growing most often in Pentecostal and Charismatic forms, and many of these are independent of western “mainline” Protestant and “classical Pentecostal” denominations and missions."