In the same year [1906] an itinerant black preacher arrived in Los Angeles. William J. Seymour was "disheveled in appearance", blind in one eye and scarred by smallpox. He was also on fire with a vision—that Jesus would soon return and God would send a new Pentecost if only people would pray hard enough. He began to preach from a makeshift church in Azusa Street, in a run-down part of town. Soon thousands joined him. People spoke in tongues, floated six feet in the air, or so we are told, and fell to the floor in trances, "slain by the Lord". The faithful prayed day after day for three years on the trot, and dispatched dozens of missionaries abroad.
This was the beginning of Pentecostalism, which makes Mr. Seymour a good candidate for most influential individual in a century or two.
The great secular ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries—from Marxism to Freudianism—have faded while Seymour's spirit-filled version of Christianity has flourished. Pentecostal denominations have prospered, and Pentecostalism has infused traditional denominations through the wildly popular charismatic movement.
The report touches on something I've noticed.
And in Latin America Pentecostalism has shattered the Roman Catholic Church's monopoly. In Brazil—the world's largest Catholic country and one whose national identity is intertwined with the church—about a seventh of the population is now Pentecostal and a third is "charismatic". In Guatemala Pentecostalism is sweeping all before it.
I've raised the issue of the rise of these new denominations at my parish and archdiocese and while on mission in Guatemala. The response has been consistently complacent, as if the Church were a secure monopoly.
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