The study of Pentecostalism in post-colonial countries such as Australia and New Zealand is really the study of moving frames. On the one hand, post-colonial cultures are dependent for their self-definition on their previous colonial experiences – and in distant places like the Tasman region, that means looking outward towards a former global power. So, Australians and New Zealanders are, for instance, rather less cocky about their culture and their achievements than, say, their American cousins.
Culture-centrism is in one sense to be found in proportion to the time since a post-colonial culture’s disconnection from its founding culture. For the Tasman countries, that experience is less than 200 years – and it shows. On the other hand, Pentecostalism is first a global culture, and only then a local one. So, Australian Pentecostalism is different to American Pentecostalism not so much because of its Australian-ness, but because of the admixture of English, Welsh, Irish and Canadian influences, via such world-wide networks as the Keswick Convention, and the missionary and the Bible Society movements. As I note in my own contribution here, ‘Goes without Saying’, the essays in this edition of Australasian Pentecostal Studies reflect this ‘study of shifting frames’ in a variety of settings.
As Brett Knowles has shown in his study of the New Life churches in New Zealand, the rejection of the Latter Rain movement in North America ensured its export out to the distant isles of the sea. In his article in this edition, he shows how the Empire strikes back, with the export of Scripture in Song providing a neutral ‘space’ for spirituality which impacts on evangelical and Pentecostal churches around the world. It reaffirms the old saw in history – out of sight does not mean out of mind for historical influences. Just as the early Constantinian empire’s expulsion of the Nestorian heresy beyond its borders was a short term fix which came back to bite it in the form of resurgent Islam, so we are treated today to the historical irony of evangelical and Pentecostal churches around the world being influenced by Latter Rain culture in a way that 1950s ecclesial bureaucrats in North America could never have foreseen. And ironically, just as the liberal churches were swept away by an evangelical resurgence re-emerging from the ignored mission fields, so evangelical churches now look to the despised margins as the sources for their cultural revitalization.
As Alan Jamieson points out, however, there are dangers in self-comforting triumphalism, a not infrequent by-product of the very ‘vision casting’ which has marked growth in many churches. His book A Churchless Faith has achieved the status of a minor cultural revolution in New Zealand, not only describing the steady flight of people out of evangelical and charismatic churches in that country, but for some people actually acting as a manifesto encouraging it. (His studies, incidentally, are well-supported by the most recent figures emerging from Australia’s National Church Life Survey, which has also had a not insignificant impact on the nature of ‘doing church’ in that country). This is the third shifting frame. There are no detached observers in a global world – everyone watches everyone, everything is available through an internet search engine or a TV news channel. Consequently, scholarship does not merely describe but acts to influence the outcomes of the situations described. Jamieson has not only a warning for complacent church leaders and burnt out activists – his writing points us towards the need for new paradigms in the study of dynamic agencies such as Pentecostalism. Wonsuk Ma’s engagement with the issues raised around the Pacific Rim in Korea demonstrate similar issues – success is not bought without a price, a lesson that no doubt Korean church leaders will take to heart as they read his analysis of the literature and practice of Korean pentecostalism. Ma unravels the issues which arise from churches which become denominations – both internally, in terms of their structural changes, and externally, as they rise above the ‘event horizon’ in their host culture, and their numbers begin to provoke reaction. The ‘warm reception’ of this year’s Hillsong Conference in the Sydney press is typical of this process, indicating the need for Pentecostal churches to engage in the sort of reflection which enables them to continue to grow as their host cultures become resistant to their presence.
This is the sort of reflection seen in our final two papers, that by Jacqui Grey on women in the ministry of the Assemblies of God in Australia, and by William Atkinson on ‘The Prior Work of the Spirit in Luke’s Portrayal’. Grey, who lectures in Old Testament at Southern Cross College in Sydney, is one of a number of rising young Pentecostal scholars in the region of whom the world will hear more in the coming years. Her observation that one can in fact see some of the same trends in Australian Pentecostalism as were observed by Margaret Poloma in her groundbreaking work The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads (1989) points out problems for a movement which has deliberately modeled itself to avoid what it thought of as the subtle seduction of (read ‘American’) bureaucratic centralism. It may well turn out that a more finessed understanding of church dynamics is needed by church leaders, as they recognize that the very things they feared have come upon them. For movements which have had little time for what has been considered ‘ivory tower scholarship’, some of the most penetrating insights may in fact emerge from those they have ignored. Remember, you read it here first!
The Editor.