Resourcing American Pentecostalism

Born in the American heartland at the turn of the twentieth century, by 1980 the Pentecostal revival had grown so large that the historian Peter W. Williams could describe it as "the popular religious movement" of the twentieth century. Fifteen years later the main Pentecostal sects claimed at least ten million members, and if we add the number of persons in the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches who embraced Pentecostal or Pentecostal-like beliefs and practices—commonly called Charismatics--that number mushroomed to twenty or perhaps thirty million. Add to the mix a half a billion recent adherents throughout the world, largely in the Third World, and we encounter the second largest Christian group on the planet, trailing only the Roman Catholic Church. While these numbers may have been exaggerated through ambitious reporting, a variety of studies suggest that Pentecostals and Charistmatics today make up an enormous constellation within the Christian galaxy, both in the United States and beyond.

Sometimes it seems that the only phenomena growing faster than Pentecostalism are the resources for studying it. For one guide to that material, one might well begin with the two articles on bibliography in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, edited by Stanley M. Burgess and others, Zondervan, 2002: “Bibliography and Historiography of Pentecostalism in the United States,” by Augustus Cerillo Jr. and Grant Wacker, pp. 382-405, and “Bibliography and Historiography of Pentecostalism Outside North America,” by D. D. Bundy, pp. 405-416.

Nonetheless, though the resources are plentiful, they remain unsystematized, sometimes inaccessible--especially to non-specialists who do not know where to look. Also they include virtually no attention to methods and models for effective teaching about Pentecostalism. This web site represents an effort to help repair those deficiencies.

We begin by noting some of the main problems that sch olars and teachers of the subject encounter with current materials. Here are a few of the pitfalls to watch for.

A second broad range of questions merit attention: how do different institutional settings in which teachers find themselves call for different methods and models?

This web site represents a first step. It originated with a grant from the Lilly Endowment to the Center for Teaching and Learning in Religion at Wabash College. In it, we present a variety of papers, designed as teaching tools, that were given at a small conference hosted by the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri, in April 2004. The immediate aim of the meeting was to honor Wayne E. Warner, the longtime director of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center on the occasion of his forthcoming retirement. The larger aim was to bring together men and women from a variety of professional lines with a request that each present suggestions, from their perspective, on ways to access the Pentecostal tradition in the classroom. The participants represented historians, theologians, administrators, archivists, editors, and media experts. Their contributions sometimes overlap or fall into multiple categories, but for working purposes they might be divided as follows:

-Archival guidelines (Lee, Pavia)
-Bibliographies (Mittlestadt)
-Course syllabi (Butler, Cavaness, McGee, and Roebuck)
-Lecture outlines (Blumhofer, Wacker)
-Research dilemmas (Cole, Jacobsen, Klaus)
-Research guidelines (Gohr, Robeck, Warner)
-Writers’ guidelines (Ellard)

We present these materials with the hope that they will be not simply read but also used. Though the materials are not copyrighted, they should be treated accorded to customary rules of fair use, that is, properly cited and quotations longer than a sentence should receive the author’s permission. We invite users to supply their own contributions to the web site, with a preface explaining how they may be prove useful. May it grow!

Edith Blumhofer, Wheaton College
Grant Wacker, Duke University
August 2004

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