The outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2 changed the church and they changed the world. The same has happened since the renewal of Pentecostal experience 100 years ago. 614 million people or over 30% of all adherents to Christianity are now Spirit Empowered (Charismatic/Pentecostal) according to the most recent Pew Forum survey. Growth rates in this Empowered movement between 1910 and 2010 were nearly four times the growth rate of Christianity and the world’s population. Harvey Cox, a Harvard University professor, says of Spirit Empowered Christianity that it is “the fastest growing Christian movement on earth.”
The rapid increase in urbanization and the socio-political oppression of Black South Africans between 1960 and 1990 may be one reason for the remarkable growth of Pentecostalism during this time. The insecurities inherent in rapid urbanization provide strong incentives for people separated from their roots to seek new, culturally and socially meaningful religious expressions, especially in a society where there was no access to the instruments of social and political power. The increasing disillusionment experienced by Black people in South Africa's political matrix resulted in a rejection of European values and religious expressions such as those found in ‘mainline’ churches. As Jean Comaroff has demonstrated, the Zionist churches were ‘a more radical expression of cultural resistance’ for those dispossessed by colonialism than that of the more orthodox Protestant churches. She sees the symbols of Zionist ritual as an enduring form of resistance to White hegemony, ‘returning to the displaced a tangible identity and the power to impose coherence upon a disarticulated world’. Comaroff’s study suggests that the forms of socio-political protest exhibited by this ‘cultural resistance’ are implicit rather than explicit, but are nevertheless all-pervasive. This is true of all kinds of African Pentecostalism, which have not yet adjusted to the new political freedom, but this preoccupation with ‘cultural resistance’ may be one of the reasons why the ZCC could not contribute much more than to protest about violence to the TRC. The prolongation of this ‘cultural resistance’ mindset, although not as escapist as the ‘evil forces’ mindset of the White Pentecostals, nevertheless may be out of touch with the new political realities.
Practically speaking, the peoples of the earth are a reality that we dare not ignore, even if we want to. They are a God-created reality that will be with us until the end. Every ministry, strategy, or methodology that ignores the reality of people group dynamics and the need for an indigenous church- planting movement within each people will do so at the cost of wasted time, money and manpower.
The equipment of small native congregations of Christians with full power and authority as local Churches would remove most, if not all, of the present causes of trouble. We should cease to talk of a native church as something to be attained after long years, or generations of probation. There would be native Churches at once which all men would recognize as native. There would be ample opportunity for the ablest and strongest native minds to exercise all their powers in the direction and advancement of the churches. Without further words we should have proved to all men that we do not preach Christ in order to extend our dominion as our enemies assert: we should have proved that we really mean the words which we now too often use without any demonstration that we really know their meaning--that we desire to be helpers, not lords over other men's souls.
Though it is true that this mission demands great generosity on our part, it would be wrong to see it as a heroic individual undertaking, for it is first and foremost the Lord’s work, surpassing anything which we can see and understand. Jesus is “the first and greatest evangelizer”. In every activity of evangelization, the primacy always belongs to God, who has called us to cooperate with Him and who leads us on by the power of His Spirit. The real newness is the newness which God Himself mysteriously brings about and inspires, provokes, guides and accompanies in a thousand ways. The life of the Church should always reveal clearly that God takes the initiative, that “he has loved us first” (1 Jn 4:19) and that He alone “gives the growth” (1 Cor 3:7). This conviction enables us to maintain a spirit of joy in the midst of a task so demanding and challenging that it engages our entire life. God asks everything of us, yet at the same time He offers everything to us.
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