Pentecostal History From Below Should Be Fair To Missionaries Also

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Roundtable

Pentecostal History from Below Should be

Fair to Missionaries Also

Joseph L. Castleberry

Writing as a “former Pentecostal minister and leading authority of global Pentecostalism,”1 Allan Anderson has taken on a daunting task of attempting, in 300 pages, to do justice to a movement that is not only immense in size, but sometimes bewildering in its diversity. While Anderson does make a stab at comprehensiveness in the book, he leaves his sub- ject wounded in the effort. As a current missionary to Latin America who is also an academic, this reviewer appreciated the detailed analysis of the African contexts of Pentecostalism that Anderson offered on the basis of his thorough scholarship related to his former commitments. Unfortunately, Anderson’s survey of other regions is sometimes based on superficial and inaccurate readings of the literature on global Pentecostalism and an ide- ological agenda that distorts history in its effort to correct it.

An example of such readings is Anderson’s treatment of Melvin Hodges, the first major Pentecostal missiologist. He states: “Hodges, in spite of his remarkable insights, could not escape the concept of ‘missionaries’ (‘us’) being expatriate, white people who had left ‘home’ for ‘abroad,’ in contrast to the ‘nationals’ (‘them’) who must (eventually) take over the missionaries’ work when the ideal of an ‘indigenous’ church is reached.” He proceeds to assert that “in these and similar writings, the great majority of Pentecostals in the world remain ‘objects’ of mission and are margin- alized.” Such a conclusion is not only unfair, but simply inaccurate. Had Anderson bothered to study Pentecostalism’s most eminent early missio- logist in detail rather than stretching him out on the procrustean bed of his thesis that Pentecostals were “racist,” “colonialist,” “parochialist,” and

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Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). viii + 302 pp. $65.00 hardback; $22.99 paper. The quote is from the back cover.

© 2006 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden pp. 271–274

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“paternalist” (p. 215), he would have seen a different picture. Hodges was hugely instrumental in encouraging the first Salvadoran missionaries to go beyond the borders of El Salvador to all of the other Central American countries within the first two decades of the existence of the Assemblies of God (AG) in El Salvador. The hymns that Hodges composed in the 1930s and ’40s, which continue to influence the spirituality of the Salvadoran AG, called on the church to engage mission in the whole world.

Furthermore, in the late 1960s Hodges was one of the first voices to begin to call the Latin American church to task for not taking up the call to foreign missions and to push for the development of the two-thirds world mission enterprise. While Anderson’s commitment to “new history” that is history “from below” (p. 182) is laudable, it must not be done by unfairly denigrating the work of early Pentecostal missionaries, most of whom were humble people who did not consider themselves superior to the people they worked with. The whole point of Hodges’ work The Indigenous Church (1953) was to emphasize that “nationals” were not inferior and were perfectly capable of self-governance, self-propagation, and self-financing.

Not only is Anderson’s analysis sometimes too superficial and theory- driven, his attention to detail is sometimes lacking. Examples range from many small errors such as the substitution of the word monasticism for “Montanism” (p. 19), to larger errors such as the false assertion that the Apostles and Prophets church in El Salvador is a Oneness denomination. He uncritically accepts the patently inaccurate and outdated prediction originating from David Stoll that some Latin American countries could have Pentecostal majorities by the year 2010. He incorrectly asserts that the Assemblies of God of Peru has “a distinction of producing scholars, particularly historians and theologians.” Perhaps he meant to say Church of God. In service to his theory that American missionaries unjustly took credit for everything that national believers did, he asserts the following about Ralph Williams, the first superintendent of the AG in El Salvador: “His role was primarily motivational and he worked with Arbizú.”

To this mind-boggling slight to the work of a heroic missionary, two things must be said. First, the work of Francisco Arbizú is wonderfully documented in Assemblies of God missions history, as is the work of many other national heroes in the three-volume Siembra y Cosecha(1991) compiled by pioneer missionary Louise Jeter Walker—not cited in Ander- son’s bibliography since it strongly contradicts his belief that national pioneers were ignored in Pentecostal missions histories (p. 216). Second, Ralph Williams was a brilliant leader who not only founded the first

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Pentecostal Bible institute in El Salvador and taught arduously in it to prepare national workers academically for ministry, but also provided significant organizational skill to the work, serving as national superin- tendent for several years before he stepped aside to allow Arbizú to take over the reins of self-governance in the church.

Another aspect of Anderson’s book is his cursory and misleading treat- ment of the church in China. While recognizing that China probably has “the largest number of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians in Asia and perhaps the world” (p. 133), he devotes a mere four pages to his descrip- tion of Chinese Pentecostals. Anderson begins his discussion with a dis- claimer that “Christianity in China cannot be easily labeled Pentecostal,” and ends it with the statement that “although there are several churches that can rightly be called ‘Pentecostal’ . . . it would be misleading to describe them all as ‘Pentecostal’or ‘Charismatic’ before more is known about them.” This reticence to affirm the clear Pentecostal identity of the majority of Chinese Christians is puzzling, since his own “inclusive definition” of the term Pentecostalstates that “it is appropriate for describ- ing globally all churches and movements that emphasize the working of the gifts of the Spirit.” While there is now conclusive evidence to demon- strate the Pentecostal quality of most Chinese churches (especially the house churches), there was sufficient data available on the Chinese church before the publication of this book to have discussed it in much more detail. Perhaps some time in research on the ground in China would have been warranted for a book whose scope involved an introduction to global Charismatic Christianity.

In the scarce four pages dedicated to what may very well be the most important emerging sector of Pentecostalism in the world, Anderson gives the impression that most Pentecostals in China are of the Oneness type. He states three times in the book (inaccurately, unless the house churches do not count) that the largest Pentecostal church in China is Oneness in doctrine. While he does not overtly state that most Pentecostals in China are Oneness, he greatly overestimates the importance of Oneness doctrine in China. Readers of the book who want a more balanced perspective on China will want to consult the thorough field research provided in Luke Wesley’s authoritative new book, The Church in China: Persecuted, Pente- costal, and Powerful (Baguio, Philippines: APTS Press, 2005).

In fairness, some of the strengths of Anderson’s work should be noted. Despite the presence of some errors, the book does put together an ency- clopedic wealth of historical data on world Pentecostalism in one place and in a narrative format that offers a meaning to the whole. Especially

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helpful is Anderson’s analysis of the role of the shepherding controversy in destroying the unity and contributing to the decline of the Charismatic movement in the late 1970s. The book provides a generally helpful intro- duction to the theological issues with which Pentecostals have tradition- ally struggled, especially doctrines related to the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

In the end, it is probable that the field of world Pentecostalism has now grown too large for any one person ever to master it again as a whole. There is no question that the book is thought-provoking, and it will un- doubtedly receive wide attention from scholars of the movement, but the several dictionaries of Pentecostal movements currently on the market provide a better place to find information on particular churches around the world than what Anderson provides. While Anderson’s knowledge of global Pentecostalism is impressive, the inaccurate and superficial treat- ment of Latin America and China, combined with an unfair, consistent, and irritating bias against missionaries, suggests that the book may be equally flawed in dealing with Pentecostalism in other areas. Given this likelihood, and despite the virtues of the book, this reviewer can- not recommend it as an introductory textbook for the study of global Pentecostalism.

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