» 2. Growth

Allan Anderson has a new book out: Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism.

My copy is still on the way but I have read a summary article. Here are some highlights . . .

According to Anderson, Pentecostalism is probably the fastest expanding religious movement ever. Here are five of the main features of Pentecostalism [...]

Allan Anderson provides four more reasons behind 100 years of Pentecostal advance:

4. Contextualization of Leadership
The overwhelming majority of Pentecostal missionaries have been national people “sent by the Spirit,” often without formal training. In Pentecostal practice, the Holy Spirit is given to every believer without preconditions.

One of the results of this was, as Saayman observes, that [...]

We’re in the month that celebrates 100 years since the Asuza Street revival that launched Pentecostalism as a movement. Towards a Pentecostal Missiology for the Majority World by Allan Anderson does a great job of unpacking what it is about Pentecostalism that makes it such a dynamic Christian movement. Perhaps the 20th Century’s most [...]

Missionary and church planting movements that have made, and are making, history.
Read the case studies.Distill the learning.Follow their example.Change the world.Or at least make a mess.
“How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History)” (Thomas Cahill)

“Wesley and the People Called Methodists” (Richard P. Heitzenrater)

“A Cambridge movement” (John Charles Pollock) If there are no copies on Amazon [...]

The latest addition to the WorldChanger’s Library: How the West was won: Methodists and Baptists on the American Frontier.

Plenty of lessons for students of church planting movements.

Happy Australia Day!

Forecast: 40ºC (105ºF) in Melbourne.

Australia v Sri Lanka in the cricket. Australian Open Tennis finals. I’ll be cranking up the aircon and staying indoors. Unless Michelle has [...]

In 1771 there were just 300 Methodists in the American colonies led by four ministers. By the time of Francis Asbury’s death in 1816, Methodism could claim 2,000 ministers and over 200,000 members in a well-coordinated movement.
This is the second in a series of case studies through the movement lifecycle. The first was on St [...]

Here’s just three of the reasons for the expansion of the early church.

1. The Legacy of Judaism
The Judaism of the Hellenistic world was an evangelising faith. At the dawn of the Christian era there were significant Jewish communities to the east of the Roman Empire in Armenia, Iraq, Iran and Arabia and throughout the Mediterranean [...]

I’ve been neglecting my blog. Had a great but demanding week. First of all our CRM leadership conference. Then the Forge Summit. Ready for some down time chipping away at a dry stone wall I’m building in our backyard.

At the Forge Summit, Ruth Powell from the Australian National Church Life Survey updated us on the [...]

Pre-existing relationships are the key to any exponential growth of a movement.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the decline of mainline churches and it causes. Some excellent work has been done by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark two sociologists who dabble in history.

Finke and Stark have examined denominational statistics on the US church between 1776 and 1850. They concluded that “the so-called [...]