Related articles and links |  1 of 6

Two decades later, the 300 Italian members of an immigrant church on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, still talk about the visit of the "Brazilian brothers." In 1975, in the midst of rapid evangelical and Pentecostal growth in Brazil, Luigi Schilro, a powerful preacher who came out of charismatic Methodism, and Mario Lindstrum, an engaging Assemblies of God singer and musician, received a prophecy from an Armenian woman in Brazil that they were to go to Asia, but on the way, they were to pass through Australia. So they began their journey.

Arriving in Sydney, they lodged in the central-city YMCA , where they prayed for guidance. Looking through the phone book they found a pastor named Anthony Foti at a church under the listing "Assemblies of God—Italian." They took a train out to the suburb of Yagoona in hopes of visiting the church. As Lindstrum tells the story: "We sat down on the footpath under a tree. People were walking past and looking at us. Then there arrived a man in a car. While still at a distance, I called out, 'Are you Pastor Foti?' 'Yes!' he replied. And thus we went into the garden, where he asked us questions and took us into his house to eat together."

Foti, an American by birth, invited Luigi and Mario to preach in his Italian church. But first he took them to visit a Slavic Pentecostal church in the area, where Schilro preached in Portuguese (his native tongue), Lindstrum translated into English, and the Slavic pastor translated into Russian. The visit to Foti's church sparked four months of intense evangelism and spiritual blessing that the members remember to this day.

Consider the mix of labels in this one small story—Methodist, Assemblies of God; Brazilian, Italian, Armenian, American; English, Portuguese, Russian. In a small way, it illustrates how evangelical Christianity has moved out of its traditional nationalist and ethnic boxes to engage the world in a more global and universal way. It also illustrates the much-heralded shift in the center of evangelicalism and evangelical activity away from white, middle-class, North Atlantic believers in developed countries to believers in the Third World.

While this shift is not news for anyone who has paid any attention to religious demographics in the last couple of decades, what is less well understood is how this "globalization" of our movement affects who we are (identity) and how we do church (ecclesiology). Before exploring the effects of a shrinking globe upon our movement, however, we should keep in mind where evangelicalism fits in terms of world population and geography (also see the map on p. 50).

About one-third of the world's population has some allegiance to Christianity, and about 700 million of these are what researcher David Barrett calls "Great Commission" Christians. These are Christians who believe in the centrality of the Cross, in Jesus Christ as Savior, the Bible as God's Word, and in the mandate to spread the gospel. It is to these Christian believers I am referring when I speak of evangelical Christians. Of these evangelical Christians, more than half are charismatic or Pentecostal.

Pentecostalism is the largest and most dynamic movement within evangelicalism. The explosive numerical growth and geographical expansion of Pentecostals in the last 30 years has given a new look to the religious make-up of the Third World—or the Two Thirds World, as it is more accurately and positively called. "Two Thirds" has become descriptive of not only non-First World countries (such as Germany or the United States) but also of where evangelicals are located around the world. Two-thirds of Pentecostal and charismatic members, says Barrett, are to be found in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

next page... |  1 of 6

share this page

November 16 1998, Vol. 42, No. 13