Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements : Arguments from the Margins [1 ed.] 9789004425798, 9789004425781

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Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements

Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies Edited by William K. Kay (Glyndŵr University) Mark Cartledge (Regent University) Editorial Board Kimberly E. Alexander (Regent University) Allan Anderson (University of Birmingham) Jacqueline Grey (Alphacrucis College, Sydney) Byron D. Klaus (Assemblies of God Theological Seminary, Springfield, MO) Wonsuk Ma (Oxford Centre for Mission Studies) Jean-Daniel Plüss (European Pentecostal/Charismatic Research Association) Cecil M. Robeck Jr. (Fuller Theological Seminary) Calvin Smith (King’s Evangelical Divinity School)

volume 36

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/gpcs

Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements Arguments from the Margins Edited by

Cristina Rocha Mark P. Hutchinson Kathleen Openshaw

leiden | boston

Cover illustrations: left: Assemblies of God Biennial Conference 11–18th August 1937, 1937, CHA2019.199 (Courtesy: Barry Chant Collection II: Early Pentecostal Pictures, Australasian Pentecostal Studies Centre, Alphacrucis College, Parramatta, Australia). Right: Hillsong conference 2016 (Courtesy: Cristina Rocha). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rocha, Cristina, editor. | Hutchinson, Mark, 1958- editor. | Openshaw, Kathleen, editor. Title: Australian pentecostal and charismatic movements : arguments from the margins / edited by Cristina Rocha, Mark P. Hutchinson, Kathleen Openshaw. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2020. | Series: Global pentecostal and charismatic studies, 1876-2247 ; volume 36 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020002047 (print) | LCCN 2020002048 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004425781 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004425798 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pentecostalism--Australia--History. | Australia--Church history. Classification: LCC BR1644.5.A8 A87 2020 (print) | LCC BR1644.5.A8 (ebook) | DDC 279.4/082--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002047 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002048

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1876-2247 ISBN 978-90-04-42578-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-42579-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Foreword  VII Paul Freston Acknowledgements  XI List of Figures and Tables  XII Notes on Contributors  XIII

Introduction: Australian Charismatic Movements as a Space of Flows  1 Mark Hutchinson, Cristina Rocha and Kathleen Openshaw

Part 1 Situating Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities in Australia 1

Reframing Howard Carter: Alternative “Routes” for the Emergence of the Australasian Charismatic Renewal  25 Mark P. Hutchinson

2

Australian Proto-Pentecostals: The Contribution of the Catholic Apostolic Church  53 Peter Elliott

3

City, Portal and Hub: Brisbane and Catholic Charismatic Renewal  69 John Maiden

4

Strong Church or Niche Market? The Demography of the Pentecostal Church in Australia  88 Andrew Singleton

Part 2 Home-grown Australian PCMs 5

A Match Made in Heaven: Why Popular Music is Central to the Growth in Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities  109 Daniel Thornton

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6

Marketing and Branding Practices in Australian Pentecostal Suburban Megachurches for Supporting International Growth  126 Mairead Shanahan

7

Andrew Evans: The Making of an Australian Pentecostal Politician  148 Denise A. Austin

8

“The Work of the Spirit”: Hillsong Church and a Spiritual Formation for the Marketplace  171 Tanya Riches

9

The Wacky, the Frightening and the Spectacular: Hearing God’s Voice in Australian Pentecostal Churches  194 Tania Harris

Part 3 A Meeting between Pentecostalism from the Global South and North 10

“Living the Dream”: Post-Millennial Brazilians at Hillsong College  217 Cristina Rocha

11

Extraordinary Sacrifice and Transnational Spiritual Capital in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God  236 Kathleen Openshaw

12

“The demon is growing with sins, but there are angels around”: Bundjalung Pentecostalism as Faith and Paradox  257 Mahnaz Alimardanian

Epilogue  274 Allan H. Anderson Index  287

Foreword A few years ago, a famous sociologist of religion wrote these glowing words about pentecostals globally: Their religious premise… is that human beings have no power to help themselves when it comes to the one thing necessary… The poor… are especially open to this truth… The experience of being personally delivered in the core of your being… provides empowerment… For people to be addressed in evangelical language as persons is to be spoken to in terms that truly speak to their condition, confirming their dignity, worth and significance… A direct address of this kind in the Western middle classes is resented as an attempt to colonize intimate space… but to those who have never heard their name spoken before, it is like the first touch wakening them from centuries-long sleep… Unless one understands the way that divine validation literally and psychically turns people around, you cannot understand what is going on at all. In contrast, another famous sociologist of religion once growled, as soon as the topic of pentecostals came up: “wherever there are pentecostals, there is trouble!” Clearly, these two eminent scholars had very different takes on pentecostalism as a global phenomenon! The first may be seen as overly rosy (I commented as much in my review of the book), but the second is problematic in a different way. There was no adverse reaction to his comment from the fifteen or so scholars present; but one can imagine the protests there would have been if, instead of “pentecostals”, he had made the same complaint about “Muslims” or “Jews”! The lack of reaction to his extremely negative characterisation of pentecostals is strange, considering they constitute a global community comprised disproportionately of people who are poor, non-white and female. Some putdowns of pentecostalism are indeed somewhat classist, racist or sexist. Nevertheless, and however positive or negative our evaluations (and they will certainly be more solidly grounded for reading this book), there have been few more striking global transformations in the last half century than the growth of pentecostalism. One in seven Latin Americans are now Protestant pentecostals and another large percentage are Catholic charismatics. Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia have also been heavily influenced. What about Australia in all this? Despite Australian pentecostalism’s youthful age profile and growing importance within the Christian field, there is no

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similarity to the aforementioned regions of the Global South in terms of overall percentage of the population (a little over one per cent in Australia; nearing twenty per cent in Brazil). Nor in the fact that, in Australia, immigrants and their descendants have grown massively in importance within the pentecostal community; more than a third were overseas-born by 2016. Doubtless a demerit in the eyes of some, and certainly a factor in marginalisation; but it gives pentecostal Christianity a degree of cultural and ethnic diversity which many other religious currents can only dream of. This presence of global southern pentecostalism in a global northern country such as Australia may be through pentecostals migrating or through migrants converting. Either way, it seems to illustrate what we might call an elective affinity between pentecostalism and migration. Pentecostalism is in many ways an ideal religion for transnational migrants, doctrinally (a discourse valuing social mobility and a break with tradition), organisationally (being non-territorial, non-clerical and offering localised supply), ethically (with its combination of social control and self-control; its stress on agency rather than victimization, on economic anti-fatalism rather than resignation) and practically (inculcation of new skills which are transferable to the workplace; construction of strong networks). Pentecostal churches are famously good at helping to overcome the difficulties of immigrant life: through their teaching, their psychological reinforcement of the dislocated self, their stress on personal agency and initiative, and their incessant networking. But Australian pentecostalism, this book shows us, is far from being all about immigrants; after all, the current Prime Minister is a pentecostal! It is also about far more than being on the receiving end of global processes. As this book shows, Australia’s past contribution to the global phenomenon through individual charismatic healers is now re-edited by the transnational expansion and cultural influence of its mega-church networks. In addition, these two dimensions, the political and the ecclesiastical, illustrate two problems with how Australian pentecostalism has often been portrayed: as a basically American import, and as exhibit A in moral panics regarding the fragility of Australian secularity. In other words, as foreign and dangerous. “Wherever there are pentecostals, there is trouble”! Which brings us to the Brazil connection, which looms fairly large in this volume. Brazil, as perhaps the world capital of pentecostalism, fulfils several functions here: it gives a sense of the global importance of this type of religiosity, notwithstanding its relatively limited Australian expression; it helps us avoid an overly American-centric focus; it vividly illustrates the multi-directional global flows of pentecostalism, less and less dependent on the Anglophone world; and it gives us parameters for de-parochialising some interpretations

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of the local phenomenon in its social and political dimensions. Strikingly, we read here of Brazilian missionary initiatives in Australia and Australian missionary initiatives in Brazil. Like ships passing in the night, the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus and Hillsong cross somewhere in mid-ocean. But they are very different types of vessels; or, to mix metaphors, they are planes flying at very different altitudes. The Brazilian church, known in the English-speaking world as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), like several other Brazilian pentecostal denominations has built up an impressive global presence, and its installation in Australia in 2006 completed its representation in every continent. In some countries, especially in Latin America and Africa, it operates among the local majority population; in others such as in Europe, it attracts a mix of ethnic minorities, supplemented by Brazilian migrants. But in Australia, the Brazilian migrants are more middle-class, whereas its social composition in Brazil, and even more so its public image, are heavily lower-class. The Australian UCKG is of assorted immigrants, especially Pacific Islanders and Africans. On the other hand, middle-class Brazilians flock to an Australian pentecostal church which offers them a lot of the things that the UCKG and the other major Brazilian pentecostal churches do not. At first sight, that might seem strange; Hillsong has been parodied in Australian secular media just as the UCKG has been in Brazil. But in reality these are quite different beasts, in terms of social class, organisation, liturgy and ethos, not to mention the attraction to Brazilians of Hillsong’s Anglophone cosmopolitanism. Two other aspects of this book which far transcend the Australian context are the political and the indigenous. The story of the Family First party has many parallels elsewhere: in its link to a pastoral dynasty; in the transference of organisational and leadership skills from the religious to the political fields; in mobilisation through a particular issue, and especially one affecting education and sexuality; in the lobbying methods copied from South Korea; and in what one might call the ecumenism of political necessity, in which religious leaders previously looked down on and even demonised come to be courted for support. And the party’s ultimate fate shows once again how politically divided pentecostals really are, and how electoral systems constrain religio-political activity across countries in ways that are often not taken into account. The attraction of pentecostalism for Indigenous peoples who have become minorities (or still socially oppressed majorities) in independent countries dominated by white or mestizo elites is well-documented elsewhere. The heavily indigenous areas of Latin America tend to be, as a rule of thumb, twice as pentecostal as their national average. This seems to reflect a vision of autonomy in a globalising world, rejecting both assimilation into national society on

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the unsatisfactory terms usually offered, and the illusion that Indigenous cultures can be sealed off. As for the future of global pentecostalism, as a religion disproportionately of the young it will presumably be challenged by aging populations. On the other hand, it may be favoured by the global demographic shift in favour of sub-Saharan Africa and a growing African diaspora, and the likelihood that inadequate action over climate change may fuel environmental crises and radical religious responses in various regions. As for Australia specifically, future policies on immigration may heavily influence the future of pentecostalism in the country. After all, pentecostalism seems to do best globally where, firstly, it is politically permitted (i.e. there is effective religious freedom, both at the legal and social levels), and secondly, where there prevails what one might call tranquil religiosity (i.e. in societies which are neither highly secularised nor defensively religious in a non-Christian mode). More new arrivals who are tranquilly religious may significantly increase the space for this type of Christianity, making it reflect slightly more one of the early names for what was imagined as the great southern continent: Terra Australis del Espíritu Santo. Paul Freston (Wilfred Laurier University, Canada)

Acknowledgements Cristina Rocha would like to thank the Australian Research Council for funding the 2017 symposium that originated this book through a Future Fellowship grant. She also is grateful to the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University and Alphacrucis College for supporting and funding what has become an annual joint symposium on Global Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianities. Many thanks to Brill editorial team for the support and guidance in producing this book. Finally, she thanks George Morgan for his support and love over the years. Mark Hutchinson would like to thank all of those who have contributed to the deep and growing scholarship on Pentecostalism(s) around the world, particularly to Professors Freston and Anderson (represented herein) but also to colleagues such as Edith Blumhofer, Larry Eskridge, Mark Noll, Tim Larsen, Barry Chant, Tim Grass, Stuart Piggin, and others who were bold enough to consider this a proper subject of inquiry before this was common. He would like also to thank his colleagues at the Australasian Pentecostal Studies Centre at Alphacrucis College, which has created a much needed ‘base’ for this sort of study, collecting ephemera and the memories of the quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) and marginal explorers of various dis-located spiritual borderlands. Finally, to Alfonsa – non bastano le parole. Kathleen Openshaw wishes to extend her gratitude to Western Sydney University for its financial support of her PhD research. She would also like to thank Cristina Rocha and Mark Hutchinson, her co-editors, for their generous mentorship and friendship. Kathleen acknowledges all the authors, herein, for their thoughtful contributions and their enthusiasm for this project. In particular, she would also like to thank Professors Freston and Anderson (also herein) — their own works provided her with the intellectual inspiration to pursue scholarship in Pentecostal worlds. Finally, and most importantly, Kathleen would like to thank her husband, whose love and support is infinite. Marc, tá mo chroí istigh ionat.

Figures, Pictures and Tables Figures 1 Australian Population: religious identification by census collection year  95 2 Australian Population 2011: age groups by religious tradition  98 3 Religious Identification by Place of Birth by Year  100 4 Peruvian-Based Pentecostal Church in West Footscray, Victoria (Courtesy: Andrew Singleton)  101 5 Nigerian-Founded Redeemed Christian Church in Kensington, Victoria (Courtesy: Andrew Singleton)  102

Pictures 1

Andrew Evans, 2001 (Courtesy: Andrew Evans’ private collection)  154

Tables 1 Australians (Ages 15+): Importance of Religion in Life by Denomination  97 2 Chapter 2 Appendix: Occurrences of Australian Charismata from the Angels’ Record Books  65 3 Chapter 5 Appendix: Song titles and song writers by year  122

Notes on Contributors Allan H. Anderson DTh, is Emeritus Professor of Mission and Pentecostal Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, where he has been since 1995. Born in London but raised in Zimbabwe, he worked for 23 years in South Africa as a Pentecostal minister while completing four degrees at the University of South Africa. He specialises on African Christianity and Pentecostalism outside the western world. He is author of many articles and books on global Pentecostalism, including An Introduction to Pentecostalism (2004, 2014), Spreading Fires (2007), To the Ends of the Earth (2013) and Spirit-Filled World (2018). Mahnaz Alimardanian PhD, is an Honorary Associate with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, and a Consultant Anthropologist at PiiR Consulting. She holds a PhD (La Trobe University) and two Master’s degrees in Anthropology (Australian National University and University of Tehran). Her research and publications are situated in the intersection of social and philosophical anthropology. They engage with ethnography of belief and knowledge systems and lived experience. Denise A. Austin PhD, is Deputy Vice President Research and Standards and Associate Professor of History at Alphacrucis College. She is also Director of the Australasian Pentecostal Studies Centre in Sydney and has received numerous grants from the National Library of Australia and the Australian Research Theology Foundation. Denise has published widely in the areas of Pentecostal history, Chinese Christian history and oral history. She is an ordained minister with Australian Christian Churches and also Chair of the Theological Commission of Asia Pacific Theological Association. Peter Elliott is a sixth-generation Mormon. Peter converted to Christianity in his mid-twenties. Beginning in 1975, Peter’s publications have included newspaper and magazine articles, poetry and biography. His Master’s thesis focused on the separatism of Katherine Chidley in mid-seventeenth century England. His doctorate examined Romanticism and religion in nineteenth-century England, as seen through the ministry of Edward Irving, and was published as Edward Irving: Romantic Theology in Crisis (2013). He has lectured in Bible Colleges for more

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than 20 years and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. Paul Freston PhD, Chair in Religion and Politics in Global Context at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He is also professor colaborador on the post-graduate programme in sociology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil. He has worked mainly on religion and politics, the growth of popular forms of Protestantism in Latin America, and questions of religion and globalization. His books include Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and (co-edited) The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Tania Harris is a pastor, speaker, author and the founder of God Conversations (www.god conversations.com), a global ministry that equips people to recognise and respond to God’s voice. Currently Tania is completing her PhD researching peoples’ experiences hearing God’s voice and has recently published her first book, God Conversations: Stories of how God speaks and what happens when we listen. Tania is an ordained minister with the Australian Christian Churches. Hillsong is her church home in Sydney, Australia. Mark Hutchinson PhD, is an intellectual historian resident in Sydney, Australia, currently Professor of History and Dean of Education, Arts and Social Sciences at Alphacrucis College. He works in the history of Australian higher education (Liberality of Opportunity, 1992; and A University of the People, 2012), and the history of global evangelicalism (Cambridge Short History of Global Evangelicalism, 2012; Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions, vol. V, 2018). The author/editor of 15 books and over 100 research papers, he is a Core Member of the Religion and Society Research Cluster at Western Sydney University. John Maiden PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. He has worked extensively on twentieth-century religious history, specifically charismatic and evangelical movements in various national and transnational contexts. He is author of National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–28 (2011), co-editor of Evangelicals and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal (2013) and contributor to a ­recent

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special edition of Journal of American Studies on the global history of American evangelicalism. His current research is on post-1945 charismatic renewal in the Anglophone world. Kathleen Openshaw holds a PhD from Western Sydney University (Australia), and a Master’s degree in Anthropology and Development Studies (Maynooth University, Ireland). Her main research interests are Pentecostalisms from the Global South, locally lived migrant religious expressions of globalised Pentecostalisms, and material religion. Her PhD research was an ethnography of the Brazilian megachurch The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in Australia. She is the Managing Editor of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA). Tanya Riches PhD, is Senior Lecturer in theology/anthropology and coordinates the Masters programs at Hillsong College. She also co-leads the Research and Innovation pillar at the Centre for Disability Studies, University of Sydney. Since 2010 she has published peer-reviewed and media pieces on Australian Pentecostalism including the co-edited volume The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters (2017, Palgrave McMillan). This book is an interdisciplinary collaboration of insider and outsider scholars and includes an official response from the church. Her PhD monograph Worship and Social Engagement in Urban Aboriginal-led Australian Pentecostal Congregations (2019, Brill) outlines the ritual connections between worship and social engagement practices in Aboriginal-led urban Australian Pentecostal churches. Cristina Rocha PhD, is Professor in Anthropology and Director of the Religion and Society Research Cluster, Western Sydney University, Australia. She is President of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion and co-edits the Journal of Global Buddhism and the Religion in the Americas series, Brill. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalisation, migration and religion. Her latest book, John of God: The Globalisation of Brazilian Faith Healing (Oxford UP, 2017), was awarded the Geertz Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, American Anthropological Association. Mairead Shanahan PhD, is an adjunct lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Victoria University Wellington, NZ. Her main research interests include sociology of religion, religion in modernity, and Pentecostal studies. Her PhD thesis examines

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the ways in which Australian Pentecostal suburban megachurches incorporate elements of modernity into theology and organisational operations. Andrew Singleton PhD, is a sociologist in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Deakin University, Australia. His research interests include religious change, secularization, youth religion, personal belief and alternative religions. Singleton has published extensively in these areas both nationally and internationally. He is author of Religion, Culture and Society: A Global Approach, and co-author (with Michael Mason and Ruth Webber) of The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia. Daniel Thornton PhD, is the Head of Arts at Alphacrucis College. His recent scholarly work appears in Congregational Music Making and Community in a Mediated Age (Ashgate 2015), and the journals Perfect Beat, and Australasian Pentecostal Studies. As an ordained minister in the Australian Christian Churches, Daniel also works with local congregations nationally as well as training worship teams around the globe. He is also engaged as a professional composer and performer, recording and producing albums such as Christmas Presence (2013), For Worshipers, From Worshipers (2013), and Worship Classics Vol. 2 (2012).

Introduction: Australian Charismatic Movements as a Space of Flows Mark Hutchinson, Cristina Rocha and Kathleen Openshaw In late August 2018, for reasons that only the Westminster system can explain, the conservative party in power in Australia toppled the then Prime Minister and elected another one. The country’s media and voters had many criticisms of the newly-elected Prime Minister, Scott Morrison; among them, the fact that he was Pentecostal. Morrison worshiped at Horizon Church, located in Sutherland – a largely white, aspirational suburb, thirty kilometres south of the ­Sydney cbd. Morrison had a track record of consistently voting according to conservative social values: he had voted with the 40% minority of the Australian electorate against same-sex marriage, had criticised support programs for trans – and diverse-gender children, and, confronted with one of the worst droughts in Australian history, asked Australians to pray for rain while supporting the coal industry. The election of a Pentecostal Prime Minister seemed to many media commentators a stunning turn of events for a country that since the 1960s had prided itself on its secularism. Furthermore, Pentecostalism itself has been historically regarded in the country as marginal to Christianity, although it has been growing steadily since the late 1970s, while mainstream Christianity has been in steady decline.1 Much of the burgeoning literature on Pentecostal and 1 There have been significant changes in the religious field over the past fifty years due to immigration and globalisation. According to the 2016 census, Australia now has comparatively larger communities of Muslims (2.6%), Buddhists (2.4%), Hindus (1.9%), and Sikhs (0.5%), than Presbyterians (2.3%), Baptists (1.5%), Lutherans (1.2%) and Pentecostals (1.1%). Furthermore, there is a growing trend in non-religious affiliation. Those ticking “no-religion” in the census increased from 19% in 2006 to 30% in 2016, making it the largest “religious” category in the country. While Christianity remains the most common religion (52% of the population), it has seen a considerable decline in the past five decades (88% in 1966). Such decline has affected mostly mainline denominations. For instance, in 2016 only 13% of the population identified as Anglicans, down from 24% in 1986, and 41% in 1921. The only Christian groups that have kept steady numbers against population growth are Catholics and Pentecostals. While Catholics were 26% of the population in 1986, they are now 22.6% – its slower decline is due to migration from Catholic countries. As for Pentecostalism, although its numbers have not changed in the past two censuses (1.1%), the “Other Protestant” category has grown 80% since the 2011 census. This growth, together with that of “Christian not further defined” (from 2.2% to 2.6%), shows a decline in the significance of denominational labels

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004425798_002

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charismatic studies in Australia operates out of a somewhat similar sense of surprise. Where did that large church come from, or this or that political voting trend? In both popular and scholarly literature there is a profound ignorance of the charismatic factor in Australian history. Given its history of colonisation, Australia is also thought of as having received unilateral flows of Christian beliefs and practices from the metropole. This edited volume aims to complicate this picture with regard to Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities, a movement that has grown significantly worldwide. It argues that Australia has made and still makes important contributions to the ways in which charismatic Christianities have developed around the world. Indeed, while there has been widespread recognition, for example, that Australian Aboriginal religion contributed significantly to the rise of the social sciences (particularly, but not solely, through the work of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss on the foundational forms of religion) (Prentis, 1998), there has been little work done on the critical role Australians have played in the rise of healing, prophetic and experiential forms of Christianity, many of which have been propelled out of this first post-Christian country (O’Farrell, 1989). This book thus aims to fill a critical gap in two important scholarly literatures. The first is the Australian literature on religion, in which the absence of the charismatic and Pentecostal element tends to reinforce now widely debunked notions of Australia as a sort of Benthamite utilitarian paradise, stripped of the religious tendencies of old Europe. The second is the emerging transnational literature on pcms (Pentecostal and Charismatic movements), which has (in the application of the work of Castells, Anderson and others) moved beyond national frameworks into more sophisticated local modelling of emergent religious revitalisations (Casanova, 2001; Anderson, 2014). These latter are essential elements of the contemporary world. One cannot understand the emergence of Korean democracy, or Chinese modernisation, or South American transnationalism without also paying attention to the most significant religious phenomena of the twentieth century – the emergence of Christian Pentecostal and Charismatic movements within and between modernising nation states. These movements are an essential factor in African and Asian diasporas, in Pacific Island cultures, and in Latin American politics (Adogame, 2013; Anderson and Tang, 2005; Freston, 2001; Robbins, 2004; Rocha and Vasquez, 2013; Wilkinson, 2012). Along with Islam, this fissiparous c­ ommunity

and indicate the rising numbers of people who prefer to just identify as “Christians” and who may be part of unaffiliated congregations and Pentecostal megachurches.

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3

of 650 million people has both dissolved and reinvented the 19th century religious identities of Christianity, now the most widely spread form of religion in the contemporary world. To know that Australians have played and still play an important part in the emergence and strengthening of these new formations is a significant contribution to the global field. While there exist accounts of the emergence of pcms, most (as noted in Anderson, 2014, p. 206) are shaped by a sort of American Pentecostal Whig history, which seeks for a specific start point (often identified with the Azusa Street Revival, 1906). Even Dayton’s critical response (Dayton, 2001) is, it might be argued, bent by such factors as the migration dynamics of transatlantic evangelicalism. Differential patterns of migration made the longer lasting Australian frontier, which received both the flow and the overflow of those streams which built the American melting pot, a catalytic variant of other European settler societies. Though Anderson (see Anderson and Tang, 2005) has attempted a critique of the historical “orthodoxy” about Azusa Street, by proposing a “many Jerusalems” model, its demographic and political coverage is not exhaustive, being largely based on accounts from Africa and Asia. The accounts of Australian Pentecostalism (e.g. Chant, 2011) only cover denominational classical Pentecostalism, and there is no parallel coverage of Charismatic movements. Furthermore, there is relatively little coverage of healing movements originating in Australia, and no parallel treatment at all of Pentecostalism in Australian politics. The chapters in this volume thus show that it was not coincidental that Australia produced both the continuing connection between early twentieth century pcms and the Irvingite movement of the 1830s (Elliott), and two of the most globally important exponents of charismatic healing practices (J.A. Dowie and J.M. Hickson), as we show in the following section. It has produced both important indigenisations of Charismatic Christianity, included here with coverage of the Bundjalung people of northern nsw (Alimardanian), and significant contributions to charismatic politics (Austin), popular culture (Thornton), and transnational Catholic covenant communities (Maiden). Nor is it coincidental that, at the time of writing, three of the largest charismatic megachurch networks in the world (Hillsong, C3, and inc) have Australian roots, with significant consequences for traditional religious settlements in the Global North and South (Riches, Rocha). Indeed, although Australia is perceived as a peripheral country in a global cartography of religion, it has always been entangled in global flows of pcms. This is more evident now not only because of globalisation processes and the high profile these churches enjoy overseas (as their intense use of digital technologies attracts foreigners to their churches and Bible Colleges in the country), but also by the increasing numbers of

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­ igrants from the Pacific, Asia, and Latin America and refugees from Africa – m regions with considerable numbers of followers of pcms (Openshaw, Rocha). 1

Framing Australasia’s Charismatic Past

All ideas have histories: where one fixes the “starting point” or how one characterises the sources of a movement always (and sometimes not so subtly) impacts on how we interpret it. To commence the Australian story in the 1920s, with the sort of newspaper coverage so easily now accessible through the Trove digitised newspapers database and other sources, immediately links Australian developments as a post-Azusa Street American import, traceable through public events and denominational formation. If we start in 1909, it becomes a story about imperial Methodist and Anglican links, connected in particular through the Keswick movement and Alexander Boddy’s Confidence magazine. This, however, is to ignore the fact that the charismatic is a consistent element in all Christian movements since the first century, usually at the popular (i.e., extra-denominational) level, and that it tends to work in rhizomatic ways through grass roots flows. The literature developed by Barry Chant (1975, 2000), Mark Hutchinson (2017a), Peter Elliott (Elliott, 2018), Damon Adams (2017) and a growing number of others, has progressively pushed the “starting point” ever backwards: from 1926, to 1909, to 1870, and now to perhaps 1853 with Elliott’s chapter on Catholic Apostolics in this volume. But is that the point? After all, we are only able to come to conclusions about the things for which we have records, and records are precisely what rhizomatic grass roots flows tend not to leave. One solution to this diachronic approach is to try and tease apart the constituent elements and then re-contextualise them in particular streams, some of which tend to be lost in the emphasis on chronology. By adapting the fourpart taxonomy first developed by Donald Dayton (1987) in his explanation for the emergence of Pentecostalism in the usa, this introduction will point to the deeply rooted, though often little noted, charismatic trends in Australasian religious history. By providing a broader context within which the religious history of Australasia – as a space intrinsically caught up in globalising flows – can be seen, we seek to provide tools by which scholars can avoid a number of the subtle but pervasive reductionist tendencies which, as noted above, may be observed in recent literatures. Unlike Dayton, our aim is not to provide the basis for further theologising about Pentecostalism, so much as to propose a richer view of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements as normal, even

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­ ormative, events in Australian history. Stuart Piggin has already done this sort n of work with regard to revivalism in Australian history, with works such as Spirit, Word and World (1996) and The Firestorm of the Lord (2000), providing sufficient evidence that, just because the Australian national narrative may be written in post-Christian terms, this is not to say that religion has had no role to play in constructing the secular. There is no room in this introduction to replicate the scope of work by people such as Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder (2018), Patrick O’Farrell (1989), Robert Evans (2000), and others. It is useful to note, however, that there is a rich and emerging literature on Protestant experiential religion which suggests deeper waters on which our Pentecostal Charismatic boats might yet set sail. Dayton proposes that the 19th century roots of Pentecostalism in the usa lie in four preceding (and often overlapping) traditions: Methodist experientialism, Holiness perfectionism, divine healing and premillennialist eschatology. These, he suggested, came together in “the triumph of the doctrine of Pentecostal Spirit Baptism” (1987, p. 187). His North American lens is, it might be ­argued, bent by such factors as the migration dynamics of transatlantic evangelicalism. The Australian experience likewise has its own “bent”: one of the rules of thumb among historians of Australian migration has been, for example, the fact that we tended to get both the flow and the overflow of those streams which built the American melting pot. Europe bled tens of millions of migrants throughout the 19th century — over 28 million from Italy (the largest of the countries of origin) alone. When the usa was open for business, these tended not to come to Australia; during times of war, or when Ellis Island restricted its intake, countries such as Australia (and Canada, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand) tended to draw on those who were redirected. These flows of migration, together with the overlays of religious influence which came with them, thus conditioned the Australian experience in ways which differed from the American experience. A smaller, more scattered population, with a much stronger Anglican and Catholic influence (compared to the prominence of Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists in American revivalism), and a relatively smaller influence by Germans, Russians, and other E ­ uropean variants, meant that Australia did not have, for instance, the phenomenon of “inner light” (Quaker or Shaker) or Armenian prophetic movements (Robeck, 2006, p. 153). There was a not inconsiderable Adventist ­movement, but neither this nor the Mormons have had the influence on Australia that they did on American religious history. Where they did have influence was out in the Pacific (Garrett, 1992, p. 174), from whence variant religious teaching and experience returned via missionaries, travellers and merchants.

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Brethren and other travelling evangelists seem, on the other hand, to have had proportionately more influence than they did in the usa, as did Salvationist revivalism (Griffiths, 1977; Piggin and Linder, 2018). As we shall see, Australia’s frontier remained an important place for religious innovation and reticulation, just as it has been argued was the case for the United States and Canada. As one columnist noted in the Adelaide Observer in 1847, “in colonies of modern days, Prophets and Fanatics have sprung up with such a constant succession that one would fancy the breaking up of new soil had something to do with the release or resurrection of perturbed spirits.” The usa had its “Mormon despotism” and Shaker heterodoxy, while Australia had Southcottians, Beardies and individual figures such as John Lo’ Vanberyl who predicted the end of the world in 1848 (Adelaide Observer, 1847). Though Lo’Vanberyl was an old colonist who had the misfortune of outliving his own predictions of the apocalypse in a smallholding in what became Little Adelaide, such prophetic movements were all most active on the frontier, leaving light traces in police records, local papers, and family memories. As a consequence, they do not turn up in standard Australian histories – but, it is clear from the large-scale digitisation of Australian newspapers in Trove that there were a great many such instances, which formed the background out of which charismatic practice emerged through the century. We should not be surprised, therefore, if Australian charismatic/Pentecostal history looks different to the parallel American and even British histories, even if it should include many of the same elements. The consequence of this is that we need to rethink (or at least contextualise) Dayton’s four elements. All the elements resonate with Dayton, but in a slightly different order, with differing emphasis. An Australian view of the roots of Australian Pentecostalism would, it may be suggested, emphasise: primitivism and Liturgical renewal; prophetic/millennialist movements, healing movements, and sanctification/experiential movements. We now turn to each of these. 2

Primitivism and Liturgical Renewal

Primitivism and liturgical renewal are two elements often divorced from one another in the literature. In part, this is because liturgical renewal is considered a “high church” practice, a function of advanced ecclesial hierarchies. This is to forget, however, that Methodist Arminianism was a synthesis which was in part built on “Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor and … the Anglo-Catholic divines” (Armitage, 1988, p. 198). The Tractarian movement, which had influenced Australian Anglicanism from its first Bishop (the “old fashioned High

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Churchman”) William Broughton, onwards, was at its base a claim about the apostolic succession of Anglicanism, and so in theology (if not in form) a primitivist movement. Of course primitivism, the reflex in Christianity to base itself on, and constantly remeasure itself against, the Church described in the New Testament and the Church Fathers, took different shapes at different times and places. At the same time as Primitive Methodists were fuelling local revivals in Cornish mining settlements and rural circuits, the first Catholic Apostolic evangelist sent to Australia, Alfred Wilkinson, was preaching the millennium and celebrating communion from a tent in Melbourne (Hutchinson, 2010b). They were vastly different movements, but both driven by a primitivist impulse to return to the apostolic power of the early church. Primitive Methodists sought a return to Wesley’s apostleship, by adopting revivalist techniques. The Catholic Apostolic Church combined a putative restoration of New Testament offices (Apostle, Prophet, Angel, Evangelist, etc.) with a highly complex liturgy stitched together out of a combination of traditions, in order to claim the restoration of an end-times Church which was truly “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic”. Peter Elliott gives an excellent description of the charismatic practices of the offices in this volume – for the purposes of this introduction, more important is the impact of the liturgy and related materials on other religious innovators of the time. There is good evidence that cac prayers for healing were used outside cac circles (by missionaries in India, for example) to fill in the gaps between mere liturgy and practical need (Flegg, 1992), and it is highly likely that their healing practices at the Carlton Church and other centres influenced practitioners who in turn would later have a powerful impact on the rise of Pentecostalism. This is probably the case with John Alexander Dowie (1847–1907). It is surely not coincidental that along with Dowie, rural Victoria provided a number of other significant figures in the history of global divine healing. The most famous of these was James Moore Hickson (1868–1933), who was perhaps the best known divine healer in the world in the 1920s, but whose name has faded from notice largely because his ecclesial identity was tied to the floreat of the Oxford movement and its successors. Hickson, however, is an essential figure in Australian charismatic history. This is not only because he was resolutely mainstream, but because of his Tractarian connections to Australian champions such as P.D. Micklem (1876–1965) at St James King Street in Sydney, and Jim Glennon (1920–2005), the founder at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, of what would become the world’s largest Cathedral healing service. Micklem went on to influence both John Hope (1926–1964) of Christchurch St Laurence in Sydney, an early Anglo-Catholic voice in the Australian charismatic movement, in whose church another Hickson legatee (Agnes Sanford, 1897–1982) prayed for

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and saw baptised in the Spirit Jim Glennon. Glennon was an early and important shaper of mainstream charismatic expression in Australia, and in Anglican circles, a figure of global importance for the movement (Egan, 2012, pp. 29–34). This was one stream of apostolic primitivism, with distinct roots in the 19th century Australian pre-Pentecostal tinderbox, which is identifiably a preconditioner of 20th century PCMS. 3

Prophetic/Millennialist Movements

“Prophecy” was (and is) a political act, a form of projecting a preferred future which had (and has) consequences in the present. In the Christian tradition it can be a “forth-telling” of the words of God for contemporary society, or it can be a “foretelling” of some desired or divinely predicted future. So, for early Methodists, the energetic preaching of the Gospel was their part in a prophetic forth-telling which would realise the future foretold by the “sacred prophecy” embedded in the Sacred Text, the Bible (The Anon Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 1827). The sources for this were broader than just Protestant spirituality. There were various attempts – including among Catholics – to appropriate out of the de Queirós narrative a myth of Australia as the “Great Southland of the Holy Spirit,” a sort of Columbus-like narrative of biblical/prophetic intent.2 The self-conscious youth of the colonies promoted something of a secular prophetic industry, which sat comfortably within the broader, imported religio-Enlightenment traditions exemplified by Erasmus Darwin. The word “prophecy” thus receives over 80,000 hits on the Trove digitised newspapers database, many of these relating to political projections of what Australia might yet be. In William Wentworth’s Australian newspaper, writers published “prophecies” which foresaw Australia’s great future, often in contradistinction to the future of the Old Country. The 1825 poem “The Prophecy: Favete Linguis” by an author signing themselves “S.D.” declared: Alike with each Monarch’s name disappears, A country shall rear its proud crest to the sky, 2 Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (1565–1614) was a Catholic Portuguese navigator whose 1605– 1606 expedition crossed the Pacific in search of Terra Australis. In 1606 he landed in an island of (what is now) Vanuatu, and named it as “Terra Australis del Espiritu Santu” (“the Great Southland of the Holy Spirit”) as he mistakenly thought it was part of the continent south of it. On this island, today still called Espiritu Santo, he established a small colony which he called the “New Jerusalem.”

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Whose sons shall be valiant, whose daughters refined. When flourishing Britain in ruins shall lie, The Antiquarian from Sydney, in vain shall pry ‘Mongst the ruins of London, the Abbey to find. From Australia, shall wisdom extend her white wand, And shade o’er all nations, serenely, her sway; And the world shall with wonder look up to our land, As supported by wisdom and valour to stand, “The sun of their system, the star of their day.” (The Australian 1825) A religious trope, then, informed a significant part of early political and cultural thinking in the colonies. Not surprisingly, it continued to circulate in its several other forms, which we might typify as the sort of Biblical hermeneutical tradition championed by the historicist revivalist Henry Grattan Guinness, the charismatic form evident among Catholic Apostolics, and a religio-political form advocated by Catholic Archbishop Patrick Moran, which portrayed Australia as the providential outflow of expansionary Catholic culture (a view taught in Catholic schools for many years). Moran even identified the town of Gladstone, in Queensland, as de Queirós’ projected “New Jerusalem,” a claim which local Catholic old timers were happy to support by noting the existence of tobacco and caraway seed plants in the locality (presumed evidence that the Spanish had arrived there before British explorers) (Freeman’s Journal, 1908). The motivation in each case was the sense of great change bringing great challenge to the relationships between Western societies and their religious traditions. The Protestants (including the British Prime Minister’s preacher, Dr Cumming) identified the Papacy as the “Whore of Babylon” as described in the apocalyptic writings of St John. This was while the Catholic journal, The Tablet, identified this most “spiritual of ages” as the fulfilment of the prophecies of St Malachy and other great Catholic saints, as the disobedient Protestants followed a secular apostasy which signalled the end of days (Freeman’s Journal, 1861). As noted above in the case of Lo’ Vanberyl, Australian nineteenth century colonial life was well-supplied with prophetic/millennialist movements. While Seventh Day Adventism separated out under the influence of Ellen G. White (an international prophetic figure who spent time in Australia 1891–1900), there was considerable shared experience among early Australian Pentecostals and Adventists of various types. Their millennialism was often fuelled from the same sources. For instance, they read the same books and journals, and social circles which included Pentecostals often also included various

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types of ­Adventist. The writings of Henry Grattan Guinness, the Scofield Bible’s recirculation of Brethren founder J.N. Darby’s (1800–1882) dispensationalism, the Catholic Apostolic end times preaching, British Israel electionism – all of these were influences absorbed and reprinted in early Pentecostal journals. At the same time, biblical prophecy was a stock in trade of various fundamentalist churches, which attempted to merge the great moments of the day (after the model of the Venerable Bede) into a history continuous with the literaryprophetic statements of the Bible. So, the Crimean War drew out various prognosticators, as did the rise of nationalist movements which sought to overthrow the pope, and the various depressions of the 19th century (South Australian Register, 1855; Colonial Times, 1856). Lecturers such as Mr Marks, reinterpreted the “political and religious aspects of our times” as the “subject of Jewish Prophecy” (Empire, 1859). The newspapers of the day, while projecting themselves as the engines of enlightenment, promoted such public lectures, and provided grist for the prophetic mill by excerpting and reprinting the spectacular events of far away, reinterpreting them as matters of daily concern for Australian citizens. Mr Marks’ ability to connect Ezekiel 38 with events in the London papers, and to land on the restoration of Israel and the emergence of a “new prophetic age” was not atypical for his times. While these sorts of practices were gradually pressed out of the secularising public sphere, they ­remained undercurrents in the privatised religious circles in which proto-­ Pentecostals moved. As late as 1928, however, the Adventist President in Tasmania, George Whittaker, could be taken seriously enough so as to have his eschatological explanation of a lunar rainbow (observed over Hobart) printed in The Mercury (Uttley, 1973; The Mercury, 1928). It was thus not so surprising to see the mainstream of Sydney’s Pentecostal tradition emerge from William Lamb’s Burton-Street Tabernacle. By the time that Lamb resigned in 1926 to follow an international ministry teaching biblical prophecy, his lunch-time meetings at the Sydney Town Hall had grown into the hundreds, and he had developed a national reputation on the topic supported by extensive publication. The Duncan family were stalwarts of Burton Street, who warmed readily to Pentecostal teaching that among the signs of the end times preached by Lamb, was the restoration of healing and tongues. Lamb, it turned out, was less enthusiastic about seeing the restoration of the gifts implied by his teaching: the Duncans were ejected when they helped invite Smith Wigglesworth to preach there in 1922, as an extension of his evangelistic meetings in the Playhouse on Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Wigglesworth’s bold healing practices were a little too confronting for Baptists, who preferred to keep their prophecy within the pages of the Bible (The Sydney Morning Herald, 1922). Philip Duncan went on to establish Pentecostal Churches in the

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S­ ydney suburbs of Redfern and Petersham, and was one of the founders of the Assemblies of God in Australia. 4

Healing Movements

One of the great strengths, and drawbacks, of history, is its commitment to the sources. As noted above, oral movements often leave little in the way of records, making the normal reconstruction of intellectual genealogies very difficult to carry out with precision. This is particularly the case with healing movements, which tended to be private, leaving historical treatment to rely on newspaper coverage, and the use of healing practices in large campaign formats, such as that carried out by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1922. Apart from some scattered biographical reflections — by people such as James Moore Hickson, Sarah Jane Lancaster — the day to day prayer for healing that took place in house visitation, or within families, is almost invisible to us. A number of questions thus arise, possibly without any hope of achieving distinct answers. What, for instance, was the relationship between the rise of charismatic healing practice in Australian rural settings and Indigenous forerunners? The contemporary scene among Australian Aboriginal settings is a very mixed one, with influences from the New Age (Hume, 2000; Mulcock, 2007; Rocha, 2017, pp. 197–221), from global fourth world practices, and from Western medical positions as well as straight Pentecostal practice (AustinBroos, 2012, 2010; Ono, 2012; Riches, 2016, 2018). But what was the relationship between the role of the Hickson family as Aboriginal Protectors on the Broken River, Victoria, and the later emergence of James Moore Hickson as a globally renowned divine healing practitioner? Hickson himself connected his practice to the faith passed on to him by his mother who, with his father Robert Hickson, ran the Acheron Reserve in Victoria’s Western District.3 Whether, as with American evangelical statesman, Clyde Taylor, there was a direct link to a marginal community healing practice (Hutchinson, 2017b), or as with Australian missionary to China, Mary Andrews, it was a spontaneous reaction to being confronted with poor medical provision and an environment in which the 3 “They often prayed for the sick as a family and even as a young man Hickson was moved to intercede for the afflicted. The first time he saw healing was in 1882 (the same year, interestingly enough, in which J.A. Dowie began his healing ministry in Sydney) when Hickson was about 14 years old. He prayed for two of his cousins and they were instantly healed. His mother declared that he had a special gift and encouraged him to follow it. She was ‘a good ­Christian woman with deep spiritual insight and a most loving and affectionate nature,’ and Hickson would repeatedly credit her with all that he would become” (Hutchinson, 2017c).

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spiritual was a daily and confronting reality, we cannot now know. Certainly, in other countries (such as New Zealand) there are identifiable connections between emergent Indigenous charismatic practitioners and their originating cultures (as is the case with T.W. Ratana, see Newman, 2009). It is an interesting question, however, and one of some importance when considering the expansion of healing practices out of rural settings in Victoria, and the rapid expansion of Pentecostalism in the Queensland cane fields. Certainly, there is evidence that British folk traditions had at least some influence on proto-Pentecostalism in Australia. Peter John Lovelock (1859–1926) was a noted Salvation Army evangelist in nsw and South Australia who fell ill about 1890, and surrendered his ministry. Shortly after Peter ceased to be mentioned in the public press as acting for the Army, his wife Elizabeth opened up a herbalist business in Brisbane. She may have been inspired by the presence of “Professor Guscott,” the “renowned American herbalist and chiropodist,” or Frank Weston’s Wizard Oil, operating variously in Newcastle and West Maitland during their stay there. In 1893 she is advertising the fact that “ladies can avoid a lifetime of suffering and physical martyrdom by consulting (personally or by letter) Mrs. E A. Lovelock, the clever and successful lady herbalist.” She is located at “Lovelock’s Herbal Dispensary, George-Street,” where in 1902 “H & L Lovelock” (“a dentist that is always reliable, supplying best of work at moderate prices”) (Brisbane Courier, 1903) were later registered as dentists (Brisbane Courier, 1893). Peter himself was registered as an “experienced” dentist in 1903, operating out of the same address as his wife, daughter (Lizzie) and son (Stephen), under the provisions of the Queensland Dentists Act, 1902. Lovelock is interesting because, while his wife is still actively involved in the complementary medical scene, he re-appears as a healing evangelist, under the auspices of Herbert Booth’s breakaway from the Salvation Army, the Christian Convenanters, and then goes on to open what is perhaps the first formal Pentecostal church in Brisbane. The case provides us with a view “under the hood,” as it were, of the linkage between life on the medical margins, community-based solutions in the face of illness, and the emergence of Pentecostal healing from the Methodist revivalist tradition as a form of materialisation of the gospel in the face of advancing scientism and public control. The link to popularist healing methods is not well attested elsewhere, though the emergence of quackery (by Professor Guscott and Mr Weston) of many types possibly acts as a continuing conduit for this sort of practice. The connection to personal crisis through illness is, however, almost universal. Hickson is confronted by two young cousins and so discovers his gift; Dowie is responding to the death of his daughter and the outbreak of fever among his congregation; James William Wood (who also connects to a Salvation Army breakaway group,

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the Christian Crusaders in Adelaide) was responding to 25 years of “continuous indisposition,” during which he had “consulted doctors without end” and took “enough medicine to sink a ship.” (Hutchinson, 2017d) Wood, interestingly enough, was associated with Dowie, and just as the latter would migrate to the usa and found the “Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion,” Wood returned to Britain to found a short-lived communitarian apostolic group describing itself as “The Army of the Lord” (New Zealand Times, 1894). Hickson’s work found its legacy as a residential care community centred on healing prayer, based in Crowhurst, Sussex, England. 5

Sanctification/Experiential Movements

The prominence of Methodism and its offshoot, the Salvation Army, is one of the great uniting themes of these movements. Most of the first generation of Australian Pentecostals came from this tradition. Though Dowie was ordained a Congregationalist minister, it is likely that he was heavily influenced by Catholic Apostolic Church practices in the movement’s birthplace, lowland Scotland, when he returned there for theological education in 1868.4 The same driving commitment to proclamation out of holiness of life united all these traditions, and connected them through a range of transnational movements. Barry Chant (2011, pp. 131–134) has unpacked some of these connections, through the Methodist “Sounders” in rural Victoria, and the advent of the Keswick movement in Geelong in 1891, where George Grubb preached on “Can we have Apostolic Power today?” Darrell Paproth (2012) has further analysed this in terms of links between Keswick, Northern Ireland, and the rise of the Australian interdenominational missions movement. What has received little attention is the degree to which this sort of revivalism impacted on and was articulated through that vast transnational organisation of the 19th century, the British military. Numbers of those who appear in Good News Hall publications, which are some of the earliest remnants of Australian Pentecostal sources, have connections to Irish and Scots regiments, and to the echoes of the Second Great Awakening which sparked revivals in military establishments around the world (Snape, 2013). These influences were carried by people such as Lydia Starr Carberry (1848–1917) into Pentecostal prayer groups in Sydney, Melbourne, Bendigo and other centres. The Celtic fringe representation in this 4 This is another imaginative leap, but one which is indicated by Dowie’s later liturgical practices, biblical prophetic appropriations, and naming of his denomination “The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion.”

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population was s­ ignificant: Carberry’s roots were in Ireland, as were those of Isabella Hetherington (c.1870–1946), who was led by a vision to volunteer as a nurse and then a teacher among Aboriginal communities in nsw, Victoria, and then finally in Queensland. When Maxwell Armstrong began his meetings in a hall in Sydney, c. 1922–3, his son Norman describes the work as being supported by a family who had been through the Irish Revival (1858–9). As the Apostolic Faith, the journal of Azusa St, reflected, “In the Irish revival of 1859 there is the record of the power of the Spirit in winning souls and the speaking in tongues by Spirit filled men and women” (Hutchinson, 2010a). 6

The Space of Flows

The common vector for all these factors – primitivism and Liturgical renewal; prophetic/ millennialist movements, healing movements, and sanctification/ experiential movements – is that they all travelled. Indeed, they were all elements fitted to make religion travel. Prophetic/millennialist movements were by definition universalising visions which caught up the whole world. When movements such as the Catholic Apostolic Church became organised, one of the first things the Albury Apostles did was draft a “Great Testimony” (Sell et al., 2007, p. 298), calling the Church to repentance, outlining the prophecies relating to the last days, and seeking to lead all the churches of Christendom into a renewed, ecumenical Apostolic Church, one modelled on that which existed at the time of the Council of Jerusalem, in the book of Acts. The point of the gifts was to testify to Christ and his coming throughout the world. Healing movements followed global networks as people encountered want and need: among missionaries launched into unknown settings, among British soldiers sweltering in the unhealthy climes of India, among migrants out on the frontiers of (for Europeans) newly settled lands. Sanctification was, for Methodists, through the Baptism of Fire, which burned sin away and rendered the believer submissive to the command to “Go into all the world…”. Each PCMS precursor emerged from, and invited the believer to participate in, the space of flows which linked the geographical space of new societies to transnational realities. The reader of early Pentecostal journals is rapidly struck by the ease with which local movements – by appropriation (the reprinting of articles from international journals, for instance), by adoption (of existing missionaries in fields around Asia), and by personal mobility – quickly become global, first in their reference, then in their aspirations, and finally in their actuality. This is really not explicable except by understanding that Pentecostalism was born within frames that were already in motion. The colonies of Australia and

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the great migrant cities of the usa were places in flux, defined less by their local cultures, as by their participation in populations on the move. The same might be said of the rural frontiers of the colonies, the gold and cane fields, the rapidly growing suburban edges being thrown up by railway construction and land speculation. In such places, the four founding traditions noted above readily found local synthesis, out of which emerged a truly Australian Pentecostalism. The importance of this observation for the study of Pentecostalism in Australia is that it reorients our starting point. Pentecostalism does not emerge either from American imports, or from the church-state compacts established by the likes of Richard Bourke and Henry Parkes.5 Indeed, it was the tendency of these latter compacts – in the Church Acts, the emergence of first the Denominational, and then the free, secular and compulsory public schooling systems and the Welfare State – to freeze the mainstream churches into bureaucratised relationships with the society, that provoked the Pentecostal transnational ressourcement. Confronted with the rising power of the medical establishment and an increasingly political and respectable Methodist Church, pioneers such as Sarah Jane Lancaster became convinced that the system was powerless to answer key needs and questions (Chant, 1999, Chapter 3). For her, it was the question she was asked by an old, sick man why the Church no longer obeyed the Bible that it taught, specifically the oft-quoted James 5: 14–15: Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he has committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Lancaster will also have made the connection to the verses which followed: 16 Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. 17 Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. 18 And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.

5 Irish-born British Army officer, General Sir Richard Bourke (1777–1855), served as Governor of New South Wales from 1831 to 1837. Sir Henry Parkes (1815–1896) was the Premier of the Colony of New South Wales between 1872 and 1891.

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Here were primitivist liturgical renewal; a prophetic forth and foretelling; an emphasis on the healing of the person and of the land, all wrapped up in the sanctified prayer of “the righteous man” which produces the former and the latter rain and its fruit. Here were all the elements of 19th century protoPentecostalism, wrapped up in four simple verses. The foundations on which Lancaster built Good News Hall in North Melbourne were neither original in their elements, nor unique in its synthesis. When her magazine, Good News, was sent out into Australia, or dropped by a railway line, or handed out on a soup line in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, there were many hands predisposed to accept her message because there were thousands of others who had already asked the same question. It was not unique, but it has been remarkably longlasting and powerful, in ways which have resisted being absorbed into mere social conservatism or a global, McDonaldised spirituality. Such people were already members of transnationalising sacriscapes on the edges of religious traditions that were putting down roots and settling in. Chapters in this book connect directly to this informing tension in the history of Australian religious innovation. The conception of Australian charismatic movements as a space of flows rather than as latter-day denominations is applicable whether one is talking about Good News Hall, the Christian Revival Crusades, the Christian Outreach Centres, C3, or Hillsong. Charismatic movements are deeply rooted in Australian society, and have made a significant impact on global Pentecostalism, precisely because Australia itself was a space through which transnational flows have moved readily. In short, Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments from the Margins aims to decentre the usual narrative of the development of pcms by presenting case studies from a region that until now has been an afterthought in this narrative. We hope this book enriches our understanding not only of how these movements spread worldwide but also how they are indigenised and grow new shoots in very diverse contexts. 7

Book Structure

This book is divided in three parts. The first section provides a historical and social context for pcms in Australia. In the first chapter, Mark Hutchinson seeks to connect Howard Carter to the formational movements which gave rise to his thought and practice, in particular 19th century evangelical missions, the Latter Rain movement of the 1940s, Americanisation, and the Shepherding Movement of the 1970s. He argues that Carter and the Logos Foundation make

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for a helpful window on a period of ecclesial re-formation in response to a period of high change in Australasian society. In his contribution, Peter Elliott argues that the Catholic Apostolic Church was an established denomination in Australia throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century, during which time they taught and practised the charismatic gifts. Thus, he calls for a recognition of its role as a significant precursor to Pentecostalism both in Australia and more generally, a signal contribution to the “origins” debate relating to global Pentecostalism. John Maiden’s chapter discusses the early development and broader significance of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Bardon, Brisbane, not only for Australia but for the Pacific Islands and beyond. Maiden uses this case study to offer broader insights into the function of a Catholic charismatic “service agency” and the relationship between charismatics in Notre Dame/Ann Arbor and other parts of the world as the ccr expanded. Finally, Andrew Singleton’s chapter compares the demographic characteristics of Australian Pentecostals with other major denominations in an effort to better understand their place in Australia’s religious firmament. He suggests that Pentecostals have maintained their proportion of the Christian “market share” not only because of their worship style, politics and philosophies, but because they have connected with particular segments (particularly migration flows) of the changing Australian community. In the second section, chapters focus on pcms autochthonous to Australia. Daniel Thornton analyses the role of music in their growth and argues that contemporary congregational songs represent a vernacular musical expression of worship. He goes on to contend that Pentecostal/Charismatic theologies which foster and promote the use of popular music align with popular/secular music’s somatic, emotive, and metaphysical qualities. Mairead Shanahan uses a neo-Weberian framework to explain how Australian neo-Pentecostalism responds to globalised consumer capitalism. She posits that Australian neoPentecostal churches have adopted forms of marketisation within modern consumer capitalism to curate a branded religious experience. While also analysing the role of the marketplace on Pentecostalism, Tanya Riches rejects the flattening of “prosperities” and “theologies” and instead investigates Hillsong’s “missional economics” initiative. She argues that Hillsong church is developing its understanding of Christian formation for the market, and outworking this in completely new ways. In her contribution, Denise Austin focusses on Rev Dr Andrew Evans, a Pentecostal leader-turned-politician who in the early 1970s found himself in the middle of the sudden growth of Australian Pentecostalism. She contends that his political success was due to his ministry experience, interdenominational networks, team dynamics, stand against injustice, moral

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values, and succession planning. Finally, Tania Harris aims to understand the ways in which experience of the divine is facilitated and regulated in three ­different Pentecostal churches in Australia. She is interested in the role of Pentecostal communities as a context for hearing and regulating God’s voice, and the impact of these experiences for personal and community growth as well as the potential for division and change Part 3 focuses on the ways in which pcms attract minorities in Australia. In her chapter, Cristina Rocha analyses why studying at Hillsong College has become a dream for many post-millennial, middle-class Brazilians. She argues that by making Pentecostalism cool, fun and fashionable on the one hand, and more amenable to middle-class sensibilities (with a focus on love and inclusion rather than on judgement and spiritual battle), Hillsong has been able to attract sectors of the Brazilian Pentecostal population who felt displaced in the very conservative, money-focused, scandal-prone local Pentecostalism. By contrast, Kathleen Openshaw focuses on the Australian branch of the Brazilian megachurch Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (uckg), the congregations of which are comprised of poor migrants and refugees. She investigates the meaning of the 2016 “Mt. Sinai Campaign of Faith,” and argues that through the transnational network of the uckg, congregants are able to imbue their sacrificial offerings with increased spiritual capital to better call the attention of God. In the final chapter, Mahnaz Alimardanian investigates the impact and role of pcms among the Bundjalung Aboriginal people. Drawing on theological accounts of Søren Kierkegaard and Edith Stein in dealing with the concepts of charisma, faith and paradox, Alimardanian explains how sensory motifs frame the divine and dreadful presence, and consequently how such experiences may be perceived as healing events. References Adams, D. (2017). Divine Healing in Australian Protestantism, 1870–1940. Journal of Religious History, 41(3), pp. 346–363. Adelaide Observer (1847). The Latter Day Prophets. 16 October, p.3. Adogame, A. (2013). The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity. London: Bloomsbury. Anderson, A. and Tang, E. (2005). Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia. London: Regnum Books. Anderson, A. (2014). An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Armitage, R. (1988). Doctor Hookwell; or, The Anglo-Catholic family, London: Bentley, Wilson and Fley (original edition, 1842).

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Austin-Broos, D. (2010). Translating Christianity: some keywords, events and sites in Western Arrernte Conversion. The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA), 21, pp. 14–32. Austin-Broos, D. (2012). Keeping Faith with self-determination: cultural difference and economy. Indigenous Law Bulletin 7(29), pp. 19–23. Casanova, J. (2001). Religion, the new millennium, and globalization. (2000 Presidential Address). Sociology of Religion 62(4), pp. 415–441. Chant, B. (1975). Heart of Fire: The Story of Australian Pentecostalism. Adelaide: Luke Publications. Chant, B. (2009). The Spirit of Pentecost. Boston: Emeth Press. Chant, B. (1999). The Spirit of Pentecost: Origins and Development of the Pentecostal movement in Australia, 1870–1939. PhD thesis. Macquarie University. Dayton, D. (1987). The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Dayton, D. ed. (2001). Transforming Power. in Transforming Power: Dimensions of the Gospel. Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press. Egan, P. (2012). The development of, and opposition to, Healing Ministries in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, with special reference to the Healing Ministry at St Andrew’s Cathedral 1960–2010, unpublished PhD Thesis, Macquarie University. Elliott, P. (2018). Four Decades of “Discreet” Charismata: The Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia 1863–1900. Journal of Religious History 42(1), pp. 72–83. Evans, R. (2000). Early evangelical revivals in Australia: a study of surviving published materials about evangelical revivals in Australia up to 1880, Hazelbrook, nsw: for the author. Flegg, G. (1992). Gathered Under Apostles: A Study of the Catholic Apostolic Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freston, P. (2001). Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrett, J. (1992). Footsteps in the sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War ii, Suva & Geneva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific in association with World Council of Churches. Grass, T. (2011). Edward Irving: The Lord’s Watchman, Carlisle, UK: Paternoster. Griffiths, A. (1977). Fire in the islands!: the acts of the Holy Spirit in the Solomons, Wheaton, IL: H. Shaw Publishers. Hume, L. (2000). The Dreaming in Contemporary Aboriginal Australia. In: G. Harvey ed., Indigenous Religions: A Companion. London: Cassell, 125–138. Hutchinson, M. (2010a). Carberry, Lydia Starr (1848–1917). In: Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (ADPCM). Available at: https://sites.google .com/view/adpcm/a-d-top-page/carberry-lydia-starr [Accessed 6.7.2017]. Hutchinson, M. (2010b). Wilkinson, Alfred (1809–1896). In: ADPCM. Available at: https:// sites.google.com/view/adpcm/u-z-top-page/wilkinson-alfred [Accessed 6.7.2017].

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Hutchinson, M. (2017a). The Problem with Waves: Mapping Charismatic potential in Italian Protestantism, 1890–1929. Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 39(1), pp. 34–54. Hutchinson, M. (2017b). Developing Post-War Evangelical “Statecraft”: Clyde W. Taylor and the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies, 1942–1955, delivered at ‘Trajectories: boundaries and diversity in Evangelicalism’. Australian College of Theology Conference, 5 September Hutchinson, M. (2017c). Hickson, James Moore (1868–1933). In: ADPCM. Available at: http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/article/view/9476/9471 [Ac­cessed 6.7.2017]. Hutchinson, M. (2017d). Wood, James William (1830–1916). In: ADPMC. Available at: http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/article/view/233/230 [Accessed 6.7.2017]. Mulcock, J. (2007). Dreaming the Circle: Indigeneity and the Longing for Belonging in White Australia. in Transgressions: Critical Australian Indigenous Histories, edited by I. Macfarlane and M. Hannah. Acton, act: anu Epress. Newman, K. (2009). Ratana: The Prophet. North Shore City: Raupo. O’Farrell, P. (1989). The Cultural Ambivalence of Australian Religion. In: S. Goldberg and F. Smith, eds., Australian Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Farrell, P. (1989). Spurious Divorce: Religion and Australian Culture. Journal of Religious History 15(4) (December), pp. 519–524. Ono, A. (2012). You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: how “culture” is redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in rural New South Wales. Oceania, vol. 82, pp. 74–85. Paproth, D. (2012). The Character of Evangelism in Colonial Melbourne. PhD thesis, Macquarie University. Piggin, S. (1996). Spirit, word and world: evangelical Christianity in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Piggin, S. (2000). Firestorm of the Lord: The History of and Prospects for Revival in the Church and the World. Carlisle; Waynesborough, GA: Paternoster Press. Piggin, S. and Linder, R. (2018). The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian History 1740–1914. Clayton, Vic: Monash University Publishing. Prentis, M. (1998). Science, race & faith: a life of John Mathew, 1849–1929. Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity. Riches, T. (2016). (Re)imagining identity in the spirit: worship and social engagement in urban Aboriginal-led Pentecostal congregations. PhD thesis. Fuller Theological Seminary. Riches, T. (2018). Liturgical Enculturation in Urban Aboriginal Pentecostalism. Liturgy 33(3), pp. 54–62.

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Riches, T. and Wagner, T. eds. (2017). The Hillsong Movement Examined. You Call Me Out Upon the Waters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Robeck, C. (2006). The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement, Nashville: Nelson. Robbins, J. (2004). Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rocha, C. and Vasquez, M. (2013). The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Rocha, C. (2017). John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. New York: Oxford University Press. Sell, Alan P.F., Hall, D.J., Sellers, I., eds. (2007). Protestant Nonconformist Texts, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Snape, M. (2013). The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War. London: Routledge. Uttley, S. (1973). “Life Sketch of Pastor Edwin George Whittaker,” Australasian record and Advent world survey (12 November), p. 11. Wilkinson, M. (2012). Global Pentecostal Movements: Migration, Mission, and Public Religion. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Newspaper References: Anon., “Seventh Anniversary of the Wesleyan Auxiliary Missionary Society of NSW”, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 October 1827, p. 2. Australian, The, 24 November 1825, p. 4. Brisbane Courier, 1 April 1893; 12 Dec 1903, p. 9. Colonial Times 4 January 1856, p. 2. Empire 17 Sep 1859, p. 5. Freeman’s Journal: 6 March 1861, p. 6; 21 May 1908, p. 34. Mercury, The, 3 July 1928, p. 8. Available at: http://documents.adventistarchives.org/ Periodicals/AAR/AAR19731112-V77-46.pdf. [Accessed 6.7.2017]. New Zealand Times (1894), A Scattered Sect, vol. lvi, no. 2367, (24 November), Available at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZTIM18941124.2.48?query =chariot%20of%20fame [Accessed 6.7.2017]. South Australian Register 10 December 1855, p. 2. Sydney Morning Herald, The, 29 Apr 1922, p. 11.

Part 1 Situating Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities in Australia

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Chapter 1

Reframing Howard Carter: Alternative “Routes” for the Emergence of the Australasian Charismatic Renewal Mark P. Hutchinson 1 Introduction In his chapter, “The Logos Foundation: The rise and fall of Christian Reconstructionism in Australia,” John Harrison at the University of Queensland does an estimable job of tracking down the waifs and strays which constitute populist charismatic politicking in Queensland. It is, on the whole, a measured, well-footnoted piece of work. The framing of the argument, however, demonstrates many of the problems which mainstream (meaning largely left-leaning and reformist) academics in Australia have in dealing with the charismatic in Australian religious history. It is after all (in a post-colonial British majority setting) a tale which is non-mainstream and has largely been apolitical. There are no synods, few collections of sources, the churches and meetings are scattered and often based on irregular conventions. As a result, the sort of history which tends to be written about the charismatic impulse in Australian Protestantism (in particular) is usually written in the aftershock of some catastrophic failure – an abuse case (as in Morag Zwartz’s Apostles of Fear, 2008), ecclesial conflict (David Millikan’s Imperfect Company, 1991) – or as part of a moral panic to rally the troops (for example Marion Maddox’s God under Howard, 2005). As Roy Williams notes, academic activism and press reporting in secular Australia has meant that the treatment of religion is often “unfocused, uninformed and ungracious. Not a few of them seem almost hysterical” (Williams, 2015, loc. 244). The “lunging and flailing” by commentators on all sides of various public debates (from public schooling to same sex marriage) demonstrates these tendencies in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular, but seemingly afraid of the fragility of the boundaries established to protect that secularity (Wallace, 2011; Stevenson, 2011). Harrison’s work has few of these shortcomings. He specifically states, for instance, that “despite current media anxiety to the contrary, conservative religion does not have the kind of influence on conservative politics that it does in the United States” (Harrison, n.d., p. ). The relatively small footprint of the Logos

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Foundation, either as a political body or a church movement, however, doesn’t dissuade him from using this fringe group in the broadsheet press as a means of applying his academic work to contemporary issues, such as Queensland’s rural conservative reaction to the Safe Schools program. “There are,” he notes, “two reasons why these right wing fringe organisations have such influence [in Queensland]. First, an incipient religious pietism in the political culture of the state, and secondly a lack of ethnic and cultural diversity in the make-up of the population” (Harrison, 2016, p. 3). Few Australians would complain with the specific analysis of Queensland – things work differently up there. The generalisation of the case teeters dangerously towards untruth, however, when it is applied more generally to the Australian Christian Lobby, is published in the Sydney Morning Herald (which as a nsw paper, is precisely where Harrison suggests this sort of right-wingery is not happening due to the plural nature of the immigrant culture), and attempts to make attachments between the Logos Foundation and that “something in the soil” which seems to happen around Toowoomba. “Come the 1980s and we see the pernicious Logos Foundation emerge in Toowoomba. Founded by a former Baptist minister from NZ, Howard Carter, Logos promulgated an anti-democratic world view known as “Christian Reconstructionism” advocating theocracy not democracy” (Harrison, 2016). Some of this may simply be the problem of academics attempting to compress complex arguments for the popular press. As he re-read it, however, Harrison must have known that there is a great deal in that latter statement which is not true. The Logos Foundation did not “emerge” in the 1980s, and it was not founded in Toowoomba – or, for that matter, even in Australia. When it was founded, indeed, and in a continuing sense for many of those who attended its churches and its functions, it was not theocratic, nor was it Reconstructionist, nor was it anti-democratic. Harrison has only done part of the historian’s job here. Context (in this case southern Queensland) matters, but for most historical events and figures, there are multiple contexts. To choose one without reference to the others, is to detach proximate from ultimate causes, and so to void the argument of any real sense. Finally, in neither long form nor in his short form applications in the press does Harrison do what historians must do: explain what the protagonist thought what they were doing in their own terms, while placing that self-talk within the pull and push of the proper contexts. As Alan Bullock noted of younger historians of Hitler, not having a living connection to the context fundamentally changes the interpretation. “The historian’s vision has to be stereoscopic,” he notes, “combining the perspective of the past with that of the present, not just substituting one for the other” (Bullock, 1980, p. 27).

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For Howard Carter, there are at least four contexts which bear upon his contributions to the so-called “Christian Right” in Australia. The first was family heritage, something without which Carter’s psychology cannot really be understood. The second was high migration Victorian New Zealand, the religio-social mix of which was different enough to that in Australia so as to produce quite different attitudes to the public role of religion in the nation. The third was the global division within evangelical Christianity from World War i onwards, producing multiple responses to modernity which would land in New Zealand and Australia in telling ways. It was quite different to the longer running, slower-burning engagement of Australian indigenous peoples with Christianity. Finally, and often forgotten by historians, is the particular nature of the region: the Māori/pasifika connection in and through New Zealand was essential to the spread of charismatic religion in ways yet really to be explored. Before detailing approaches to these contexts, however, one question might occur to the reader. If, as Harrison notes (counter to Marion Maddox’s position that John Howard’s Christianity led to a “corrosion of the Australian soul,” 2005, pp. 5–6), there is no significant influence by a “Religious Right” in Australia, then why should we bother with Carter and the Logos Foundation at all? The short answer is that the discourse by Australian secular elites about themselves is not the only story to be told. Australasian charismaticism has had a significant impact on global religious trends, and Carter’s story tells the attentive student much about that larger narrative. Secondly, Australian intellectual history has largely managed to delete the charismatic impulse from consideration. As Jill Roe has brilliantly noted with regard to marginal groups such as the Theosophists in Australia, the margins say a lot about a society’s orthodoxies and act as “tells” for how these shift (Roe, 1986, p. xiv). If all Carter demonstrated was that there was a wellspring of Christian conservatism in Australia (which had been repressed but not suppressed), then that would be something. In fact, the longer arc of Carter’s life indicates much more than this. The liberals and reformers of the nineteenth century were in fact the conservatives of the twentieth – not because they had changed their views, but precisely because they hadn’t, though all else around them shifted. Finally, the charismatic movement (along with the Reformed Revival, Vatican ii, the gafcon movement, among others) is a major marker of change in both the West and those religious institutions which have traditionally played a key role in Western intellectual history. The fact that (at least until this volume) there is such sparse treatment of it in broader Australian religious and cultural history does invite reflection on the adequacy of Australian intellectual history and how it is practiced. The purpose of this chapter will, then, be to locate Howard Carter in his

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various contexts, and invite questions as to how this changes the way we see Australia and New Zealand within their respective and interlocked global historiographies. Howard Carter, it will be proposed, is an important figure not so much for what he did, but for the deeper trends towards which his life and career point. 2

Carter’s Family Self

Howard Julian Carter was born on 9 October 1935 (E. Carter, 2000) in Epsom, Auckland, New Zealand, the son of Claud Thomas John Carter (b. 1904, Wellington), a clerk and insurance inspector, and Enid Adeline “Mardi” nee Abel, who, after marrying Claud in 1928, settled in his hometown of Palmerston. When Claud was transferred by the State Fire Insurance Company back to Auckland, they lived with Enid’s parents in Pentland Avenue, Mount Eden. Claud and Enid later bought in Epsom, on Halifax Avenue, where Howard was born. After the War, they bought a larger house on Kakariki Ave, in Mount Eden. The first thing to note is that Carter’s mother, “Mardi,” lived a very long time – she died at the age of 106 in 2006, having outlived her younger son and been a significant mediating influence for family history right throughout his life. As she noted in her autobiographical reflections, Mardi was proud of her family, and Carter no doubt lived among their shadows in the tight world of family and church in Mount Eden and Roskill. They were (like so many New Zealanders) British migrants: Mardi’s grandfather, William Abel, had managed C.E. Mudie’s famous Lending Library in London, and it was here that Carter’s grandfather (Robert Abel) learned book binding and publishing. His daughter remembered Robert telling the family that he had, as a boy, heard Charles Dickens reading a portion of one of his novels in the Mudie building on New Oxford Street. Their family were thus from the high Victorian heartland, and their values of self-reliance, faith in God, social service and good manners reflected this. While many in the extended family were Congregationalist ministers and missionaries, Robert’s family were Spurgeon Baptists (they attended Metropolitan Tabernacle prior to their migration to New Zealand, and Grange Road Baptist when first in Auckland) with a strong sense of public morality and political reformism. The shift to a Baptist identity might have reflected opposition to the general liberalisation of Congregationalism at the time, a drift against which Spurgeon was a great antagonist. Many of the marks of Spurgeon’s thought were also typical of the Abels: Spurgeonites were “the English

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Nonconformists most completely influenced by the Romantic movement. The hallmarks are plainly discernible in [Spurgeon]: a desire for reality, life, and spirituality; an impatience with the merely rational; guidance by moral imperatives issued from an authoritative conscience” (Hopkins, 1991). Service to God was primary, a push which took the Abels from among British Congregationalists to life in the petri dish of New Zealand missionary evangelicalism. In 1890, Robert had helped his brother, Charles William Abel, establish himself as a missionary in New Guinea, a career which led to the establishment of the important Kwato Mission and a lifetime of championing the rights of indigenous Papuans (E. Carter, 2000). Nancy Lutton’s description of C.W. Abel – as “a religious fundamentalist and a strong individualist … [who] created an elite through what his critics saw as aggressive recruitment, strict discipline and paternalism” – is with, only little change, also a pretty good description of the approach taken by his great nephew, Howard, suggesting the strength of the religious subculture mediated through Abel’s brother, Robert, in Auckland. As will be seen below, their community (built around Mount Eden Free Methodist Church and Valley Road Baptist Church and their close connections to the Brethren and Baptist missionary networks which moved through the New Zealand Bible Training Institute, or nzbti) meant that Howard was surrounded by missionary cousins, aunts and uncles through most of his developing years. In the end, he would marry the daughter of China Missionaries, and (when he came to Australia) connect himself to a Church (Christian Faith Centre) which was established primarily as a base for charismatic missions into Asia. Robert Abel’s business life rotated around the company of Abel Dykes, book binders and printers. Carter’s mother, Enid, remembered “catching” the love of books and printing from her father, and a fascination for publishing and printing seemed also to mark his ministry both in New Zealand and in Australia. “Howard” was a name which ran in the family – his uncle, Howard, had worked in the family business, but was killed in World War i. One of his colleagues wrote back to the family of his respect for Howard’s uncle’s spirituality, writing that he “harmonized with God” (E. Carter, 2000, p. 15). Several of his mother’s siblings (Dossie and Claude) trained to be teachers while Enid looked after their mother. When Howard in 1955–56 went to train as a teacher at Auckland Teacher’s College, he was thus moving into something of a family business, one in which many itinerant evangelists (such as Enoch Coppin) had trained. After the family moved to Blockhouse Bay, Robert established (with two local Presbyterians) the Green Bay Mission, later the Blockhouse Bay Baptist Church (E. Carter, 2000). In a sense, Howard grew up in the minor public service community of an emerging Dominion.

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Like all of their generation, two great Wars (marked by personal and family loss) and Depression taught thrift, self-restraint and reliance on prayer. During World War ii, Enid was powerfully impacted by the figure of Churchill. It seems that one man, with a vision, with charisma, and with articulation, can become a leader and sway a nation, committing them to involvement in issues both costly and “horrendous.” I can only pray that the future will produce some men of these qualities, who will be used for good, peace and prosperity, not greed and covetousness of territory. e. carter, 2000, p. 13

Of course, by the time she wrote, Mardi knew both the psychological and religious meanings of the word “charismatic.” The impress of Churchill (who was viewed through the rose coloured glasses of a young housewife who knew little about the great statesman’s private life) was definitive for her idea of “the good public figure.” It was, to some degree, an aspiration too heavy for not just for her son, but for most of the post-War world. Reactions against Carter (and other protagonists of charismaticised “apostolic” leadership), it might be suggested, are often reactions from within the unspoken rejection of “great man” theory in history, and specifically the evil genius of the century’s great nemesis, Adolf Hitler. 3

New Zealand as the “aircraft carrier” for Southern Revivalism

Having lost Howard’s uncle and namesake in World War i, Mardi’s family were now too old or too young to serve in World War ii. Their definitional period was the seeming golden age of post-War peace, before the Cold War touched even these distant isles, and before the social revolutions of the 1960s changed Australasian public life forever. In 1945 a NZ Air Force chaplain, Roland Hart was demobbed, and became the minister of Valley Road Baptist. He brought “a very strong leadership, a good ministry, and a very confident way with young people.” The church was “strong with adults of the calibre of the Deanes, McClymonts, Cookes, and others, the main vigour of the work revolved around the young people” (E. Carter, 2000, p. 14). The Sunday School Anniversary encouraged children to take part, and after one of these, which Claud Carter conducted, Roly Hart suggested that Claud form a Young Peoples’ Choir. This became a focus of all the activities for the young people: “their commitment to this was absolute” (E. Carter, 2000, p. 14). The Youth Group grew year on year, and created a little world of evangelistic fervour, a mini-revival which was the

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heady stuff within which Carter grew. In a sense it set expectations for what “normal Christianity” was like. The post-War Baby Boom, however, meant that the 1960s would be a period where his earlier focus on missions to youth had more opportunity than ever before, but during which the cultural tendencies were increasingly antagonistic to Victorian Christianity. The context of 1950s Valley Road was, as Bryan Gilling has noted, a decade in which New Zealand in particular was subjected to organised mass evangelism on a scale previously unprecedented (Gilling, 1990). With a relatively smaller, and per capita more religious population than Australia, these campaigns created a sense of almost perpetual religious excitement in the country. Roland Hart himself was heavily involved in revival crusading for church growth, both locally and increasingly throughout New Zealand. With a military background, he thought in terms of operations and training. When Ivor Powell came in 1956–1957, Hart took his church into involvement of this “vigorously promoted and eagerly awaited” campaign (Guy, 2006, p. 23). From 1957, he was the ­Canterbury Baptist Association’s President, led its involvement in the Billy Graham Crusade of 1959, and would later become national evangelist for the Baptist Union of NZ. This was the context to which Carter himself would later refer, in saying that “I had grown up in a Christian home. I was saved when I was five, went to a good school and didn’t backslide … I led the Young People’s work, and felt I was the ideal fellow for the Lord to have in His work” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 45). Enid would remember, therefore, that Howard and his older brother John grew up in “the happiest time of our lives.” Attending Valley Road Baptist Church meant that they were – two or three times on a Sunday, and several times during the week – under evangelical preaching delivered from a pulpit over which the words “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” hung in large gothic letters. The family also spent some time in the last remaining Free Methodist church in New Zealand (Mount Eden Free Methodist), run for some years by the broadcaster Kenneth H. Melvin (famous for his “History behind the Headlines” program on national radio) (McKinnon, 2013). This church had long had a relationship with Valley Road Baptist, and so the shift perhaps was not as stark as Carter’s mother suggests in her memoirs (E. Carter, 2000). After Melvin shifted into broadcasting, he was replaced by returned cim Missionary, John Stanley “Jack” Muir who was one of a series of ministers pro tem, until the Muirs returned to China. Muir and his sister, Molly, had trained at New Zealand Bible Institute in Auckland (Yuan, 2013), then under C.J. Rolls, a former Plymouth Brethren missionary to South India. He went out to China with W.A. Saunders in the autumn of 1930 (Saunders, 1992). When they were old enough, the Muirs sent their children back to NZ for schooling, the oldest of which

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(Jim) stayed with the Carters. His sister, Jean, stayed with the McClymont family, but Howard Carter and Jean Eleanor Muir were now closely associated through both family and church. Jack Muir’s successor at Mount Eden, the Egypt missionary Noel Hunt, formalised the link with Valley Road and brought the former into the Baptist Union (E. Carter, 2000). Carter and Jean Muir became engaged in 1957. Her mother (Nettie Waldner) had been sent out as a Canadian cim Missionary in 1931, and so it was in China that her parents met and Jean was born. There, Carter would remember, “she saw God work miraculously in protection and provision while living under Communist rule” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 53). Her parents, after retiring back from China, lived in Lower Hutt (1954–58), with Jack working as a civil servant and as honorary curator of the cim bookstore in Wellington. Jean’s aunt, Ena Mary “Molly” Muir, also trained at nzbti, and served as a missionary in the Solomon Islands (1930–1935) where she married fellow missionary (and future Presbyterian minister) Howard Whitfield Johnston. Part of interpreting Carter’s life, therefore, needs to be the larger network of Brethren and Baptist missionaries – such as the Young and Deck families –who moved back and forth from the Pacific, as well as within the larger “faith missions” world hinging on cities such as Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, London and Singapore. Each of these cities would in the next generation become, perhaps unsurprisingly, key developmental points for the global charismatic movement. Like many Australasian teachers, Carter was aware of educational developments in Canada and claims that he had actually booked a sea passage to teach in schools there. Ironically, then, it was the daughter of a Canadian, Jean, who told him that she could not join him, as she felt called to follow her father Jack’s footsteps to New Zealand Bible Training Institute. Canada would eventually remain on the Carters’ agenda, however, and Vancouver was a natural place to which they might seek to expand the Logos Foundation in 1980. Valley Road Baptists had a close association with Jean’s preferred college, and it would be among the younger students and graduates of nzbti (as Peter Lineham has shown) that charismatic influence would begin to spread after the Scots Brethren evangelist Campbell McAlpine began to preach throughout the country in 1959 (Lineham, 1982). While in South Africa, McAlpine had experienced a personal baptism in the Spirit, and while he did not publicly champion the practice, the impact of his evangelism (most importantly on Open Air Campaigners such as Muri Thompson) was such that the source of his “power” became a matter for debate. Like his missionary educator colleague, C.H. Nash at the Melbourne Bible Institute, Charles Rolls (who was Principal of nzbti in the 1920s when Jack Muir trained there) would again experience an encounter with Pentecostalism among his students as early as 1947, as Dean of Sydney

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Bible Training Institute (Paproth, 1997). The bridge for such Brethren evangelists as McAlpine, Ezra Coppin, Frank Garrett and others, was the long-running influence of the Keswick movement, in which circles individual experiences of baptism in the spirit had not been uncommon since at least the early years of the century (and possibly before, though the language for the experience had not developed sufficiently for the experience to be attached to the term) (Chant, 2011). Suffice to say, then, that the evangelical revivalism in which Howard Carter grew up was already pregnant, if not actually producing, the seeds of charismatic renewal across the networks provided by interdenominational missions, mass evangelism and “gospel chapels” long before the organised charismatic movement began to gain attention in the early 1960s. By this time (1959), the impact of the long-expected Billy Graham Crusade began to roll through New Zealand churches, filling evangelical training institutions and promoting a deeper seriousness about personal conversion (Gilling, 1992, Hutchinson and Wilson, 1959). Underneath the organised city-wide evangelism of “broad evangelicalism,” however, there was already something of a charismatic ferment bubbling up in the smaller rural towns of the South Island and among Māori settlements in the North. As Brett Knowles has pointed out in his masterly work on the New Life Centres in New Zealand, these too had their roots in missions networks. The expulsion of a number of Bethel Temple (Seattle) missionaries from the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia) in the face of the Japanese advance brought Al Edmondson, John Banks and the son of Bethel Temple’s song leader, Ray Jackson, to New Zealand. Knowles notes, “Of these, Jackson was the most significant for the genesis of the New Life Churches. He was a particularly gifted Bible teacher, and had an effective ministry in Auckland throughout 1945 and 1946” (Knowles, 2003, p. 76). The Bethel Temple teachings on “the Name” of Jesus, and other idiosyncrasies, created tensions within the Pentecostal Churches of New Zealand, causing Jackson and his team to separate out and (followed by many of those former Pentecostals who had been affected by their ministry) establish the Indigenous Churches of New Zealand, a movement later renamed the New Life Churches. This was worship-centred, highly “revelational” in its hermeneutic, authoritarian and miraculous in ministry style. As in Indonesia, the Bethel emphasis was spread by tent campaigns and large numbers of short term bible schools, the latter in New Zealand by Rob Wheeler (Tauranga 1959 to 1966), Ron Coady (Nelson, 1963 and 1964), and by Peter Morrow (Christchurch, from 1971), and in Australia by Ray, Dale and later David Jackson in Melbourne (1950), Sydney (1951) and later Brisbane. In 1948, Ray Jackson returned to Bethel Temple, and while there heard of what became known as the Latter Rain Revival in Saskatchewan. He and others brought that back to Australia and New Zealand,

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and instituted it through the “Associated Mission Churches,” which gave rise to the network of churches associated with Melbourne Christian Fellowship and Brisbane Christian Fellowship. There is no room here to recount the whole (sometimes sad, abusive and dysfunctional) story of Jackson’s churches: more fulsome accounts are to be found in Zwartz (2008), in Knowles (2000), and in Kevin Conner’s autobiography (2007). In terms of their effect on Carter and the charismatic movement, however, Knowles makes it clear that the teaching schools, the campaigning of Latter Rain exponents such as Rob Wheeler, Paul Collins, Ron Coady, and others, and the rise of local bible colleges such as Faith Bible College (Tauranga), impacted heavily on the outbreak of charismatic phenomena in mainstream churches in New Zealand. Their teaching approaches were extensively “copied” (with the primitivist but without the idiosyncratic Bethel elements) by mainstream proponents, such as Ray Muller (Anglican), who faced the challenge of having to reconfigure the social conformist functional theology of their mainstream church members in the light of the “restoration” (lower case) of the primitivist gifts of the Spirit. As will be noted below, the openness of Māori to the “full gospel” preaching of Rob Wheeler, Frank Houston, Ray Bloomfield and others also provided a stimulus to the acceptance of charismatic forms in mainstream settings. Connections were initially personal and deinstitutionalised, but the need to create inter-denominational connections led, as it did in England with Michael Harper’s Fountain Trust (1964) and in Australia with Alan Langstaff’s Temple Trust (1973) to the formalisation of networks in organisations. The group which eventually formed Christian Advance Ministries in 1972 (Ken Wright, a Presbyterian elder, the Anglican university chaplain Ray Muller, the Baptist minister Ian Drinkwater, and Ian Hunt) invited David Du Plessis to NZ. This visit was followed by visits from Dennis Bennett (1966–67) and Michael Harper (1967). This interpersonal network founded the magazine Logos in Christchurch in August 1966 to serve their growing number of affiliates, and the New Life Church evangelist and missionary Paul Collins established a related Trust (the Logos Foundation) to legally organise the related seminars and ministry. As Michael Reid (2003) notes, Christchurch was a location rich in Latter Rain influences, with Peter Morrow and Paul Collins both working in the city. Both “Restorationism” (minus the strong Bethel Temple teaching on the perfection of “the Bride, the manchild, etc.”) and “restorationism” thus lived alongside and in cooperation with one another in a revivalistic environment which would produce, over the next two decades, some of the most dynamic TransTasman church movements of the late twentieth century. It was from Christchurch, for example, that Paul Collins came to Sydney and founded Christian Faith ­Centre,

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and in Christchurch that Dennis Barton led a “hippie revival” (first at Sydenham aog and then, after his Church voted him out, at Family Life Church) which produced leaders such as Phil Pringle, Simon McIntyre and other founders of the now global C3 movement (McIntyre, 2003). For the purposes of this paper, however, the key thing is recognising that Logos began on the edges of Latter Rain influence in New Zealand among mainstream charismatics (i.e. not in Toowoomba or the usa), not at its core, and certainly by the time Paul Collins brought it with him to Australia in 1969, it bore few of the markers described by Harrison of the Foundation as it existed in Toowoomba. It was Restorationist, not Reconstructionist, premillennial not post-millennial, and while it had the usual mainstream concerns with morality, it was rather more concerned with battling the impact of liberalism and rationalism in the church than the social revolutions outside the church which would mark the period of change which Australians call “the Whitlam era” (1972–1975).1 In its first edition, indeed, Logos magazine’s aim was represented as to “present aspects of Christian truth, more particularly the person and Work of the Holy Spirit,” and to create sufficient unity for the formalisation of the charismatic movement. It was produced in Christchurch by local Anglican David Balfour (Anglican minister for the Aranui-Wainoni Mission District) and an interdenominational committee including Owen Woodfield (Methodist, who had had an experience of the Spirit in 1955 at a Keswick Convention) (Reid, 2003), David Edmonds (Methodist), Bernard Honders (Presbyterian), Ray Muller (Anglican chaplain at Massey University), and as Secretary, Henry Piers Hanna, principal in the accounting firm HP Hanna & Company Ltd., and an early supporter of Peter Morrow’s Revival Fellowship (Reid, 2003). Their concerns, as Edmonds noted in the first editorial, were to counter with primitivist power the new, compromised theologies of Lloyd Geering and his like: “we hear much today about the ‘Death of God Theology,’” wrote Edmonds, “and the time is right for Christians to be witnessing with bold assurance that God is very much alive. To make such a bold assertion we must have a real encounter with God, to let Him fill our lives with the power of the Holy Spirit, then we will know” (quoted in Reid, 2003, p. 53). The influence at this time, proposes Reid (2003), was in fact not American at all, so much as it was the new church movement which emerged from the Spirit experiences and higher Christian life emphases of Congregationalist Brethren evangelists such as Wallis and McAlpine

1 The election of Edward Gough Whitlam in 1972 as the first Labor Prime Minister in decades was seen as the beginning of a “new age” in Australian politics, fueled in part by newly politicized student, reformist and migrant communities.

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in Britain, and pre-existing mainstream healing groups such as the Order of Saint Luke. This does change markedly when Collins moved to Sydney and started editing the journal from what became Christian Faith Centre. Collins was an evangelist and missionary – a starter and ground breaker rather than someone who could maintain and build. He saw the need in the pre-Temple Trust days to create the sort of network for Australian charismatics which he had seen emerge in Christchurch. The Logos Foundation was his vehicle. Now based in Sydney, the New Zealand material began to decline (though the magazine retained a PO Box address in Auckland), and the focus was increasingly on the teaching and visits of people such as Judson Cornwall and Ralph Mahoney of the World Missionary Assistance Plan. Mahoney, a leader in charismatic renewal in California, was particularly attractive to Collins, and as late as 1974 (after which Carter moved the Logos Foundation to Hazelbrook) Mahoney remained on the masthead of the magazine as one of the Foundation’s Board of Reference. Among others were the expected range for a charismatic service committee, both capital “R” Restorationists such as Kevin Conner and David Jackson (Ray Jackson’s son), and lower case restorationists such as the Anglican Minister of Darlinghurst, Bernard Gook. Paul Collins remained the editor of the Magazine, though increasing exposure to the international charismatic movement meant that they agreed to change its name from Logos to Restore, so as to avoid confusion with The Logos Fellowship (established by Dan Malachuk in Plainfield, New Jersey), which had among its catalogue published Jamie Buckingham’s very widely circulated Run, Baby Run about Nicky Cruz in 1968, and published the Logos Journal to serve the charismatic renewal in the usa. Collins’ idea for Christian Faith Centre was as a church which existed to support missions to Asia, the Pacific and Africa. The Church of the Latter Day, his wife Bunty Collins wrote, was symbolically the “feet” of Christ (B. Collins, 1974, p. 6). Its job was to “go into all the world.” Having themselves been self-defined “faith missionaries” in Thailand, Paul Collins knew the fluctuations of missions funding and sought to reinvent the new church around what he felt was its primary calling, the Great Commission. As Christian Faith Centre grew, dozens of members such as David Young (of the ssem Young lineage), Michael Baré (a New Zealander with Christchurch Revival Centre connections), and Colin Shaw went out into Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, and to the Pacific Islands (Hutchinson, 2012). The missionary origins of the movement and Sydney’s first charismatic megachurch (as Christian Faith Centre is properly so seen) are important for a number of reasons. Due to the fact that he was away so often, Collins needed a solid organiser and a supportive

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“­number two.” This opened the door for Howard Carter’s real influence. Secondly, the charismatic megachurch is essentially what cfc was up until 1975: a conference-driven form for nondenominational experientialism. The two major drives conflicted with each other. Neither Collins nor any of the major leaders of early charismaticised churches thought that the movement was about experience. It was, rather, about participation in (and thereby the proving of) an objective movement of God across the earth. They tended to be impatient with the many former mainstreamers who just came for “the buzz”: indeed, not a few of them had come out of the drug scene in Christchurch precisely because “chasing the buzz” had failed them. The proper response to God’s action was discipline, sacrifice and service. The free flow of the charismatic movement “disorganised” standard approaches to church, and asked the obvious question: how then should the church be structured? The answer, Ern Baxter preached at cfc on 14 March 1974, was through the authority of the Father, articulated through the Holy Spirit, in the instructions of a shepherd (Baxter, 1975). If Harrison and others were looking for a moment of “anti-democratic turn” in the Logos Foundation, it is to be found here, rather than in Toowoomba. The year was 1974, not 1980, and the turn was not against democracy, but as an organisational coping mechanism for churches which were being eviscerated by the social and cultural trends of the 1960s and 1970s. Since 1969, first New Wine magazine, and then Juan Carlos Ortiz and Bob Mumford, had been influencing the global charismatic movement through such books as Ortiz’ Disciple (1975) and Mumford’s The Problem of Doing Your Own Thing (1973). The thrust of the so called Fort Lauderdale Five (in fact it was something of a floating group including Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson, Don Basham, Ern Baxter, and John Poole) was to move churches towards “maturity” through discipleship, in cell groups, as a way of disciplining the “wandering tribes” of charismatic convention goers. Ortiz came to New Zealand in 1974, and was invited to Australia by Hal Oxley in Melbourne, who mobilised a group of pastors including Leo Harris of Adelaide Crusade Centre, Paul Collins in Sydney and Trevor Chandler in Brisbane. Many people, such as Collins, were keen on Ortiz’s winsome preaching (under an authority which came from his association with the Argentinean Revival). Discipleship was not a choice, he wrote in Restore after Ortiz’s appearance at the National Ministers Conference in November that year: it was a command from Jesus himself (P. Collins, 1975). Later that year, Carter went to Perth for a meeting with local ministers. “It was,” he later wrote, “a meeting which had ended unhappily, due to the division between the ministers of Charismatic and Pentecostal churches” (H.  ­Carter, 1981, p. 53). This is something which Harrison’s claim – that the

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a­ nti-democratic nature of the Logos Foundation arose from the “incipient religious pietism” of Queensland – does not explain, i.e. that most of the Pentecostal world in fact rejected the Fort Lauderdale teaching, and would continue to do so when Reconstructionism began to make its mark on the Logos Foundation’s publications in the 1980s. The division Carter found in Perth was replicated around the world. No more advanced liberal than Pat Robertson referred to “shepherding” as “witchcraft,” charging its leaders with manipulative behaviour and with placing “rhema words” (personal revelations) on par with Scripture. As Harold Hunter notes classical Pentecostalism in general rejected the teaching, as did others influential in the global charismatic movement, such as Demos Shakarian, Judson Cornwall, Dennis Bennett, Ken Sumrall, and David Du Plessis (Hunter, 1988). It also, as we shall see, divided Paul Collins’ church and (in spelling the death of cfc) opened Sydney up for the expansion of successor churches. To understand how this came about however, we need to return to Howard Carter’s entry into ministry in New Zealand in the early 1960s, and to a number of consequent experiences which contributed to his reshaping of the Logos Foundation away from its foundational purposes as an evangelistic and charismatic service organisation, toward the political entity that Harrison describes. 4

Evangelicalism and Modernity

After spending two years at the nzbti, the Carters married and in 1960–1961 went down-country in New Zealand to a small school, District High School, Reporoa, about 30 minutes by car south of Rotorua, where they taught together for two years. Carter was clearly feeling the call of ministry, as he enrolled to study extra-murally at Melbourne College of Divinity. In 1961 he reported an even more distinct sense of call to train for the Ministry, and entered the Baptist Theological College (later renamed Carey College) in Auckland.2 He had not stopped studying, taking an LTh by distance with the Melbourne College of Divinity in 1962; and a Diploma in Ministry, Baptist Theological College, Auckland in 1965. The sense in which this was a new “call” thus has to be questioned.

2 I have not been able to discover any particular reason why Carter chose the Baptist College rather than nzbti, apart from the fact that he came from the local Baptist elite in Mount Eden, and perhaps the Baptist movement provided a greater sense of security than the unpredictable world of faith missions.

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Carter would go on to pastor in NZ Baptist churches for six years: first at Manurewa, South Auckland as a student pastor, where they lived in a manse behind the Manurewa Baptist Church. It was even then a relatively depressed part of Auckland, and would increasingly become so over the following decades. Not surprisingly, Carter ran into congregational conflict. In the Baptist and Brethren contexts, traditionalism in local church cultures was often centred on elder- and Board-based governance. The acute stress which this not unusual situation produced in small churches also produced a not terribly unusual response in this student pastor from a prosperous, happy Church in Mount Eden: I had been there only a matter of weeks … [when] I felt the strong pressure of a hand grip my shoulder. When I looked up, there was no one other than my wife present, but the room seemed to fill with the presence of God. Though it was not audible, a voice spoke to my spirit and said, “What are you crying for? This is My work, and I am seeking to clear up something which has been there for twelve years.” h. carter, 1981, p. 79

Harried young ministers such as Carter were attempting to bridge a growing generational gap, often in high mobility and increasingly plural communities. A new source of power for creating alignment and social mission among their congregations was desperately needed. Carter claims that, after this experience, and his turn towards ministry solutions discovered in his increasing exposure to churches elsewhere in the country and overseas, “The church became one of the fastest-growing in the denomination” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 78). That is a large claim, though one often made more generally by the New Life and other Pentecostal churches of the time. Certainly, both before and after Carter’s experience, there was considerable charismatic activity among NZ Baptist churches. Ian Drinkwater’s church at Awapuni was an early centre from September 1964 (after which he became involved in the foundation of Logos magazine), and from December 1968, Murray Robertson would commence a work at Spreydon Baptist which would become something of a benchmark for charismatic growth in the denomination. A similar experience, under the influence of Kiwi itinerants such as Bob Midgely, Rob Wheeler and Frank Houston, would be later be seen in the “apostolic revolution” which broke out in Australian Assemblies of God Churches a decade later. Starting with church governance, ministers in Pentecostal churches increasingly moved the charismatic individual leader to the centre of their operations, and moved from doctrine and sociality towards Spirit ­empowerment and experience. Some of these churches, Harrison will be

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pleased to note, were in Queensland (Calvary Temple in Townsville under David Cartledge, and Garden City Church in Brisbane under Reg Klimionok), but many (such as what became Paradise aog in Adelaide under Andrew Evans, and Christian Life Centre Darlinghurst under Frank Houston) were not (See Clifton, 2009). As I have noted elsewhere, most of the ministers (at least in the Australian context) who became involved in the early charismatic movement did so in difficult churches, having gone through some acute emotional or psychological stress (Hutchinson, 1993). The subsequent Baptism in the Spirit experience that many report was not always a result of such stress, it may be suggested, but rather the stress was a key means by which many ministers in mainstream denominations in the 1960s were prompted to look for alternatives. In this sense, the Charismatic Movement may be seen not so much as an anti-modernist response (a critique often levelled at the movement) but rather as a set of coping mechanisms, a parallel, re-spiritualised modernism which enabled them to engage in the sort of changes which the increasingly globalised, corporate welfare states in New Zealand and Australia were imposing. Charismatic experience is, in Robert Putnam’s terms, a form of “bridging ­social capital”: it represses local and intercultural difference, and motivates people to work towards new, more flexible and open common identities (VillalongaOlives, Adams, & Kawachi, 2016). As has been widely discussed in the literature sparked by the work of Putnam (2000) and Robert Bellah (1985), voluntarism (“joining behaviours”) did not only go into crisis in churches across the West through the 1960s, but also affected almost every other form of corporate activity: sports and social clubs, political parties, scouting and other activities. The reason, of course, was because of the combined corrosive effects of highly mediated capitalist individualism on the one hand, and the direct cooption of local community self-help and governance into increasingly bureaucratic, depersonalised State and Federal processes. At the time of writing there is national-level finger pointing for the outbreak of what is, by some, being referred to as ethnic gang violence in Melbourne. Interestingly enough, for Harrison’s analysis, those places which have reported very low levels of conflict over large migrations of refugees from war-torn countries include places such as Toowoomba, where there has been high engagement by churches and community groups in incorporation of migrants into a smaller urban setting. As one reporter noted, “Our religiosity has been a driving force. Migrant after migrant told us that Toowoomba’s congregations warmly welcomed them” (Farmer, 2018, online). The ‘incipient religious pietism’ to which Harrison adverts is obviously not “dysfunctional” in all settings.

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The issue, it might be suggested, is the “frame” in which he is interpreting the actions of Carter and others – i.e., as part of a redefinition of the idea of “democracy” away from its popular base towards the corporate, national politics dominated by academic and political elites. The Jesus March of 1972 in Wellington, for example, was organised largely by charismatics – why is such a demonstration less democratic than, say, a march by the cfmeu through Sydney for “workers’ rights,” or by women in the usa on 21 January 2017 for “women’s rights” (and against a “democratically elected” President)? Such apparent contradictions of a word such as “democracy” flow from a priori assumptions about the values which are permitted in a corporate federal democracy such as Australia. In other settings, such as the Philippines (where missionaries from Christian Faith Centre had a significant impact on popular Catholic circles) and in Africa, charismatic experience could be a liberating and democratising force mobilised against entrenched elite corruption at the highest level (see Offutt 2015, Introduction). So, the relationship between “anti-democracy” and pietist, charismatic cultures is perhaps not so unidirectional as Harrison suggests. It is important to look at the other frames within which people such as Carter can be understood. It is also important, at this point, to note the continuing missions influence in Carter’s life. He notes in Go Through the Gates that he became involved in missions work after a “retired” missionary from North America, Dwight Ferguson, the founder of Men for Missions (a layman’s organisation connected to what was then the Oriental Missionary Society) visited his congregation. Neville Buch has shown that such connections were on the rise in all Protestant denominations since the end of the War, but were particularly strong between the Australasian regional Baptist Unions and Southern Baptist Union elements based in Nashville and Texas. As the director of the Baptist Union of Queensland’s youth arm, the Rev. John Knight not only adopted American techniques into his own area of responsibility, but could say in 1951, “We are all aware of the great strides being made in the development of the work of our denomination in America …. The same emphasis can result in a comparatively similar advance in this country” (Buch, 1990, p. 23). A similar trend was observable in Pentecostal circles, particularly in the Assemblies of God, where part of the conflict through the 1970s was to be sparked by attempts among older ­ministers to centralise this indigenous, Australian congregationalist movement on the American “headquarters” model. While America was a source (through Oral Roberts and other itinerant Pentecostal entrepreneurs) of great inspiration for the younger generation, in typical larrikin fashion many of them (such as David Cartledge, 2000) thought they could do as well or better without formal

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a­ ssociations or adopting foreign approaches. In this sense, the new charismatic megachurch founders were as much indigenisers as they were globalisers. In 1965, Carter was invited to minister in Dallas, Texas, for a couple of months by a visiting Southern Baptist minister. This was an invitation into the heartland of wealthy, technocratic, doctrinal preaching culture of the South, for the most part anti-charismatic. In preparation for the trip, Carter (who, it will be remembered, had had an experience, but not yet a charismatic baptism in the Spirit) experienced real challenges, but also real provision. Starting with almost nothing, they found that their needs were met at every turn: “Money rained from heaven!” They bought a Greyhound bus pass for $99 which allowed them to travel anywhere on their system: “We were young and enthusiastic and loved every minute of it.” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 45) After several months in Dallas, they travelled to Haiti with a mission band. It was his first introduction to charismatic power ministries in a majority world setting, where “spiritual techne” and capital connected directly to an indigenised charismatic ­setting with, in David Martin’s words “a shamanic underlay” (Martin, 2002) which predisposed people towards belief. “While in Haiti I saw things which blew my mind and shattered many of my theological concepts … I have always known that God really answers prayer. But in Haiti God was doing things by His Spirit – healings, deliverances, miracles – which, according to my theological perspective, He was not supposed to be doing…. I was a convert!” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 53) This required a significant left turn in Carter’s thinking. His older brother, John, had been baptised in the Spirit early in the charismatic movement, something which Carter’s Baptist theology did not allow him to entertain. “In those days, to be a Baptist minister was to be anti-Charismatic” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 76). For all that the denomination saw growth in some churches, the Baptist Union as a whole was reticent. In 1969 a Report by the “Special Committee set up to Investigate the Effects of Neo-Pentecostalism on New Zealand Baptist Churches” (Worsfold, 1974) noted some beneficial effects but “emphasised its harmful influences” (Ward, 2011, p. 2), not among the least was the tendency for charismaticised ministers of ability (such as Tom Marshall) to avoid the frustrations of Baptist governance models by leaving the denomination. Haiti caused Carter to rethink his own resistance to the movement: “On our return from the United States and Haiti, I began to study the whole issue of the ministry of the Holy Spirit.” He also imported church growth theory, and the Southern Baptist model of the “All Age Sunday School,” which he saw grow from 65 members to around 700. After an all-night prayer meeting one Saturday night in 1967, “I knew something had happened, but because I lacked the experiential manifestations others had had, I felt it was just an anointing”

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(H. Carter, 1981, p. 83). This non-standard “infilling” experience has created some confusion. Hey suggests that Carter was pressured to leave the NZ Baptist movement after he “received the Spirit” in 1965 (Hey, 2011, p. 112), but Carter’s own account suggests that he did not seek it until 1967.3 It is also clear that he is not central to Logos until Paul Collins invites him into cfc circles in early 1970. Carter’s Sydney connections had been growing as the charismatic renewal (after 1967) also spread there. He had received a number of invitations to pastor in Hong Kong and India, and early in 1968 they received an invitation to “go to Australia to work in an evangelistic team, Bible teaching, preparing for crusades and teaching in those crusades…. We really began to pray about it and God spoke to us from Isaiah 62:10: ‘Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a standard for the people’” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 88). In December that year, they moved to Sydney. “We were young and inexperienced, with four young children, including a four-week-old baby. The temperature in Sydney when we arrived was 106° F” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 88). As Simon McIntyre was to say of another group of entrepreneurial evangelists who transferred to what New Zealanders are inclined to call “the mainland,” Sydney was a more unforgiving place than Auckland: “we arrived to what we thought would be something, and it turned out to be entirely different and much harder” (McIntyre, 2003 ). After a number of months, the evangelistic opportunity dried up, leaving Carter without work for 3 months: the family rapidly burned through their savings. The Carters, however, had walked right into the first early burst of charismatic formation in Sydney. In 1969, Alex Reichel returned from his encounters with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the usa, and commenced prayer meetings at St Michael’s College, the University of Sydney. After that, the “subterranean” renewal which had been quietly operating for years in circles connected to Jim Glennon’s Cathedral Healing service in the city, and on the edges of Pentecostal, Anglo-Catholic and Keswick higher life circles, broke out into the open and became of broader interest in the Church (Egan, 2012). After a prophecy at a small Charismatic meeting in Sydney, to which Carter had been invited by another Kiwi, the phone began to ring with invitations to a Presbyterian group, then a Methodist group, then a Methodist camp in Katoomba. “In

3 Hey also suggests that Carter set up the Logos Foundation in Christchurch in 1966, with Peter Morrow, Kevin Conner, Paul Collins etc. contributing Restoration and Latter Rain articles to Logos as a quarterly magazine. His source for this is Geoffrey Coleman, but Carter’s own autobiography suggests this must have been slightly later, and Carter himself was not central to the magazine when it appeared.

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one week I had over three months of meetings totally booked up.” While working in accounts for a local real estate agent in Pennant Hills, Carter also decided to go back into “the family business”: in 1970, $2000 he bought a tiny ­“Rotaprint” press, installed it in an old building in Pennant Hills, and used that to start circulating information about the Logos Foundation (H. Carter, 1981, p. 96). He gathered a growing number of supporters of his work, including Adrian Meston, Geoffrey Coleman, Carter’s cousin Graham Lyttle, Graham and Patricia Fletcher, among others. Bob Mumford came to Australia, providing Carter with an entrée into the circles (then known as the Holy Spirit Teaching Mission) which would bring shepherding teaching to Australia in 1974. After joining Faith Centre, Collins and Carter commenced annual Conventions at Stanwell Tops Convention Centre, and (over time) others in Dubbo, nsw and Perth, WA. To fill the gap in teaching seminars, Graham Lyttle expanded their printing capacity, and Carter commenced a correspondence and resource ministry which he called “Home Ministry”: A pattern of ministry was clearly established in those days. Using “Restore” magazine and the Home Ministry, and supplemented by periodicals, books and tapes, the message of Restoration and God’s end-time purposes began to be released. Complementing the Seminar ministry, long week-end Conventions and the annual Family Convention, the literature thrust has continued as a significant and strategic key to bringing people on into the Lord and touching nations. h. carter, 1981, p. 120

By 1982, the ministry was reaching (he claimed) “into over 40 different countries.” He was in the usa regularly (1970, 1972, 1974) building networks which he would mediate back into the charismatic movement in Australia. Increasingly asked to speak at engagements at the Kihilla Conference Centre in Lawson, the Blue Mountains offered (for a New Zealander and an itinerant) a climate that was more amenable, less expensive and (one suspects) more controllable. His Logos group settled in a community house up in Hazelbrook: “Graham Fletcher lived in the house, his wife Patty (she was single then), Hillie Dijk (now Mrs Dyke) and Beth Watson (now Mrs Skinner)” (H. Carter, 1981, p. 105). Most of those who were staff were first the students, and then the staff, of Carter’s bible college. From Christchurch, Peter Morrow – who started his own career in the Blue Mountains two decades earlier – would ring and visit and insist to him that God wanted him to start a church there. Meetings of what became the “Covenant Evangelical Church” thus commenced in July 1972, with some 50 people in regular attendance. They would follow Carter to Toowoomba when,

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in 1987, he declared that God was directing the community there, many selling up houses and leaving jobs to follow him. There is no room in a chapter of this length to outline every detail of Logos and Howard Carter’s career from the mid-1970s. There were a series of disruptions and disasters which pointed to a lack of discernment, and a growing authoritarianism in the leader, which were only exacerbated by the Spirit and discipling language and loose accountability structures which took the place of a formal ecclesiology. Faith Centre fell apart from a combination of financial and building decisions, and the spread of a “cancerous” culture of control through shepherding and prayer counselling teaching. “When discipleship teaching began to tear at the agreement in the church, Howard was prepared to take it over” (Hutchinson, 2012, p.). When Paul Collins returned from Hong Kong, David Jackson and Roger Waters faced him and said that “it is either you or me.” Collins walked away – the building trust collapsed, and while the church staggered on under Jackson and Carter as a cell-group movement, the days of Sydney’s first charismatic megachurch were effectively over. Carter took a remnant of the members to the Blue Mountains with him, and then departed for Canada, where he built a church and bible school in Vancouver for a number of years before returning in 1985. While it is clear that Carter had been reading Rushdoony and Reconstructionist thinking prior to the move (the Logos-related churches in 1980 became the “Australian Fellowship of Covenant Communities”), the shift in doctrine from pre-millennialism to the much more marginal Dominionist theology of the Chalcedon Foundation is most marked after his return, suggesting that his stay in Canada and the usa was fundamental in terms of his political formation. Collins’ hopes in Carter as “the great organiser” showed a discernment perhaps overwhelmed by the hope that a local church could essentially act as an extension of his missionary dreams. Carter’s hopes in the Logos Foundation showed lack of discernment as to (as Derek Prince later noted on his withdrawal from the shepherding movement) the seductiveness of power, irresponsible rationalisations and impossible freedoms. “We were guilty,” wrote Prince, “of the Galatian error: having begun in the Spirit, we quickly degenerated into the flesh” (Moore, 2003, p. 174). 5

Indigeneity and Charismaticism

Before concluding, it is worth pointing to the fourth, underlying framework that helps explain Carter’s more general significance. While Harrison’s identification of cultural pietism is a helpful pointer to the often overlooked role of religion in Australian life, it does not go far enough. At every point of the rise

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of the charismatic movement in Australia, one sees the networking influence of missionaries and the impact of communications technologies. What they were communicating was the fact that the world “out there” did not have the same approach to spiritual realities as the established elites of the emerging, secular and increasingly nationalistic dominions of the first world, Pacific “big islands,” Australia and New Zealand. From Charles Abel’s particular sympathy with Māori peoples (which led to his involvement on Kwato), to the Anglican/ Brethren engagement with the New Hebrides, to the emergence of “hidden” indigenous spirit movements among both Māori (such as the Rātana movement) and Aboriginal peoples in Australia (among Bundjalung and Daintree peoples in Queensland) in the 1920s (Newman, n.d.; Paul, 2010; Knowles, 2003; Ono, 2012), the importance of having accessible repositories of alternative spiritualities in the Pacific has been essential to the rise of the charismatic movement. Carter’s experience in Haiti came as a shock to him in part because he had not really looked out his back door, where people like Rob Wheeler and Ray Bloomfield had been running evangelistic campaigns, with charismatic “evidences” among Māori communities for over a decade (Hutchinson, 2018). As Michael Frost notes, this potential was seen well back into the nineteenth century, with the rise of Māori prophetic movements which: demonstrate a unique fusion between traditional Māori beliefs and spirituality, Christian influence and the Bible (in particular the Old Testament), and millennial views that looked toward a revolutionary change that would usher in peace and justice for Māori as God’s chosen people. frost, 2016, p. 170

The potential for this among Aboriginal peoples has been explored by people such as John Blacket (1997), Stuart Piggin (1996), and Carolyn Schwarz (2010). For Aboriginal people, the Elcho Island revival (which was sparked by, and then fed energy back into the charismatic renewal in missions and Uniting Church circles from 1979), charismatic renewal was “a spiritual solution to a desperate cultural and social crisis” (Piggin, 1996, p. 200). Among Māori people, the convergence of the charismatic and indigeneity produced one of New Zealand’s most notable evangelists, Muri Thompson (a significant contributor to the charismatic renewal), and has since produced the socio-political movement of the Destiny Churches (Moetara, 2012). Carter’s missionary genealogy, brought to bear through family stories of divine provision, healing and encounter, and the expectations raised through the evangelistic campaigns of the 1950s, primed him for an experience which (when he went to the usa) he was not expecting. In coming to Sydney and joining with the missionally-engaged

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Christian Faith Centre, he certainly landed in the right place to have these understandings of the world reinforced. Carter was not a missions activist. No understanding of how his spirituality came to be would be complete, however, without reference to the missionary and indigenous frameworks which shaped his life. 6 Conclusion In the end, Howard Carter was not a particularly important person. Australian history could be written without paying much attention to him. The fact that the Australian press and academy have paid any attention to him, however, arguably says more about them than it does about him. As Molly Worthen notes with regard to Rushdoony’s impact in America, This most virulent form of Christian reconstructionism never claimed more than a handful of adherents. However, while journalists have made too much of reconstructionism’s grip on mainstream evangelicalism, they have also overlooked its real significance in the development of conservative Christian thought. worthen, 2008, p. 400

The same might be said of Carter. The trends that reflect upon and in his life course are both more generalised and more important than anything which he himself achieved. And like Rushdoony, the tendency of the Australian academy to participate in the manufacture of moral panics in order to demonstrate impact and relevance (in Worthen’s words, “Hide your children! there is a movement afoot among conservative Christians to take over our country and give America a theocratic makeover.” Worthen, 2008, p. 399) causes them to miss the point. Why has a movement, which flourishes as a protest and survival movement in indigenising settings by mobilising spiritual capital, appeared in the suburbs of Australian cities and in rural centres? The more Carter’s Logos Foundation headed for the Reconstructionist end of the spectrum, the less relevant, and the more polarising he became. The middle ground was captured instead by the other flows in which he participated, which became megachurches precisely because they had (to quote one participant), in their rejection of the premillennialism of their forefathers, stumbled across a plausible “charter for Christian freedom” (McIntyre, 2003). (How long that plausibility lasts, of course, is subject to the usual historic drivers for the rise and fall of ideas.) In the middle of a crisis of Western “joining,” and of the undermining of

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metanarratives, why is it that these testimonies to charismatic social capital continue to thrive? Now that is a question worth answering. Perhaps they represent something broader about the costs of the very material success of those Western cultures into which so many Australian megachurch movements have diversified. Work by Rodemeier in Surakarta might point the way, when she declares that “it is clear that radical Islam serves as breeding ground for a charismatic mega-church” (Rodemeier, 2017, p. 70). In short, pressure downwards on the establishment elements of universalising Christianity preferences its dissenting and charismatic potentials, particularly where there is an underlying spirituality with which it can be fused. This points again to the “alternative contexts” which Australian scholars need to take into account in ascribing historical importance to entities such as the Logos Foundation and Howard Carter. Wouldn’t it be an odd turn if, as Andy Lord has noted, just as “radical Islam serves as breeding ground for a charismatic mega-church” in Indonesia, aggressively secular public cultures were playing a similar role in the West? (Lord, 2018, pp. 224ff) References Austin, D. (2013). Our college: a history of the National College of Australian Christian Churches. Parramatta, nsw: Australasian Pentecostal Studies. Austin, D. (2017). Jesus First: The Life and Leadership of Andrew Evans. Parramatta, nsw: apss. Baxter, E. (1975). Structure of Christian Ministry. Restore 5(1), p. 2. Bellah, Robert N., et. al. 1985. Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Blacket, J. (1997). Fire in the Outback. Sutherland, nsw: Albatross Books. Buch, N. (1990). American Influence on the Reshaping of the Baptist Union of Queensland, 1945–1985, unpublished manuscript, apsc, Alphacrucis College. Bullock, A. (1980). The Hitler Addiction, The New York Review of Books 27(12), (July 17), p. 27. Carter, E. (2000). The Memoirs of Enid Adeline Carter, “Mardi.” Privately printed [2000]. Carter, H. (1981). Go Through the Gates. Blackheath, nsw: Logos Foundation. Cartledge, D. (2000). The Apostolic Revolution: The Restoration of Apostles and Prophets in the Assemblies of God in Australia. Chester Hill, nsw: Paraclete Institute. Chant, B. (2011). The Spirit of Pentecost. Asbury. KY: Emeth Press. Clifton, S. (2009). Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia. Leiden: Brill.

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Collins, B. (1974). The Glorious Plan, Restore Magazine 4(6), p. 6. Collins, P. (1975). No Choice – Just a Command, Restore 5(1), p. 1. Conner, K. (2007). This is my story. Waverley, vic: kjc Publication. Egan, P. (2012). The development of, and opposition to, healing ministries in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, with special reference to the Healing Ministry at St Andrew’s Cathedral 1960–2010. PhD Thesis. Macquarie University. Farmer, K. (2018). Explaining Toowoomba and Melbourne’s differences. Toowoomba Chronicle, 6 Jan, Available at: https://www.thechronicle.com.au/news/explainingtoowoomba-and-melbournes-differences/3304196/ [Accessed 6 January 2018]. Frost, M. (2016). A Pentecostal Theology of Social Engagement with a Particular Focus on Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. PhD Thesis. University of Otago. Gilling, B. (1990). Retelling the Old, Old Story: A Study of Six Mass Evangelistic Missions in 20th Century New Zealand. PhD Thesis. University of Waikato. Gilling, B.D. (1992). “Back to the Simplicities of Religion”: The 1959 Billy Graham Crusade in New Zealand and its Precursors, Journal of Religious History 17(2), pp. 222–234. Guy, L. (2006). The Man from Wales’: A Study of the Mission of Ivor Powell in New Zealand, 1955–1956, Pacific Journal of Baptist Research 2(2), pp. 21–46. Harrison, J. (2016). Safe Schools: The Christian Right’s roots in rural Queensland, Sydney Morning Herald 10 April 2016, Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/ safe-schools-the-christian-rights-roots-in-rural-queensland-20160410-go32sd.html [Accessed 3 January 2018]. Harrison, J. (n.d.), The Logos Foundation: The rise and fall of Christian Reconstructionism in Australia, Available at: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8027/HAR RISON_eprint_.pdf [Accessed 3 January 2018]. Hey, S. (2011). God in the Suburbs and Beyond: The Emergence of an Australian Megachurch and Denomination. PhD Thesis. Griffith University, Brisbane. Hopkins, M. (1991). What Did Spurgeon Believe? Christian History 29, Available at: https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/what-did-spurgeon-believe [Accessed 3 January 2018]. Hunter, H. (1988). Shepherding Movement. In: S. Burgess and G. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Grand Rapids, MI: Regency Reference Library, 1988. Hutchinson, M. (1993). Anglican Charismatic Renewal: Aspects of its rise and fall, csac Working Papers 1.14, pp. 1–18. Hutchinson, M. (2012). Collins, Paul Herbert (1936–2012). Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Available at: http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ ojs/index.php/ADPCM/article/view/201/198 [Accessed 9 January 2018]. Hutchinson, M. (2018). Wheeler, Rob, (b. Whakatane, New Zealand, 7 February 1931 – ). Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Available at:

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http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/article/view/232/229 [Accessed 4 Jan 2018]. Hutchinson, W., and C. Wilson (1959). Let the People Rejoice: Billy Graham’s 1959 New Zealand Crusade, Wellington NZ: 1959. Knowles, B. (2000). The history of a New Zealand Pentecostal movement: the New Life Churches of New Zealand from 1946 to 1979, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Knowles, B. (2003). History of the New Life Churches in New Zealand. PhD Thesis. University of Otago. Lineham, P. (1982). Tongues Must Cease: The Brethren and the Charismatic Movement in New Zealand. Christian Brethren Review, 34 (Nov.), pp. 7–51. Lord, A. (2018). Emergent and Adaptive Spiritualities in the Twentieth Century. In: M. Hutchinson, ed., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Vol v: The Twentieth Century: Global Variations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Maddox, M. (2005). God under Howard: the rise of the religious right in Australian politics. Crows Nest, nsw: Allen & Unwin. Martin, D. (2002). Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. McIntyre, S. (2003). Interview, Simon McIntyre, 30 May 2003, apsc Archives, Alphacrucis College. McKinnon, M. (2013). Independence and Foreign Policy: New Zealand in the World Since 1935. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press. Millikan, D. (1991). Imperfect company: power and control in an Australian Christian cult. Port Melbourne, vic: Heinemann Australia / abc. Moetara, S. (2012). Maori and Pentecostal Christianity in Aotearoa New Zealand. In: H. Morrison, L. Paterson, B. Knowles, M. Rae, eds., Mana Maori and Christianity, Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers, pp. 73–90. Moore, S. (2003). The shepherding movement: controversy and charismatic ecclesiology. London, UK: T & T Clark International. Mumford, R. (1973). The Problem of Doing Your Own Thing, Ft Lauderdale, FL: for the author, 1973. Newman, K. (nd). Rātana Church – Te Haahi Rātana – Founding the Rātana Church. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Available at: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/ ratana-church-te-haahi-ratana/page-1 [Accessed 6 January 2018] Offutt, S. (2015). New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ono, A. (2012). You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How “culture” is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales. Oceania 82, pp. 74–85. Ortiz, J.C. (1975). Disciple, Carol Stream, IL: Creation House.

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Paproth, D.N. (1997). Failure is not final: a life of C.H. Nash, Sydney, nsw: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity. Paul, J. (2010). Hetherington, Isabella (1870–1946). In: M. Hutchinson, ed., Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Available at: http://webjour nals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/article/view/211/208 [Accessed 6 January 2018]. Piggin, S. (1996). Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word and World. Melbourne, vic: Oxford University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Reid, M. (2003). “But by My Spirit”: A History of the Charismatic Renewal in Christchurch, 1960–1985. PhD Thesis. University of Canterbury. Rodemeier, S. (2017). Emergence and establishment of a charismatic church within the framework of Javanese self-perception in Surakarta, Indonesia. Indonesia and the Malay World, 45(131), pp. 1–22. Roe, J. (1986). Beyond Belief: Theosophy In Australia, 1879–1939. Kensington, nsw: unsw Press. Saunders, W.A. (1992). Interview tss, William Arthur Saunders, 9 December, Collection 471, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton, IL. Schwarz, C. (2010). Carrying the cross, caring for kin: the everyday life of charismatic Christianity in remote Aboriginal Australia. Oceania 80(1), pp. 58–77. Stevenson, C. (2011). Is the Australian Christian Lobby dominionist?, Available at: http:// www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/09/19/3320809.htm [Accessed 3 January 2018]. Villalonga-Olives, E., Adams, I., and Kawachi, I. (2016). The development of a bridging social questionnaire for use in population health research. ssm – Population Health, 2, pp. 613–622. Wallace, J. (2011). Exposing Chrys Stevenson’s blind faith, Available at: http://www.abc. net.au/religion/articles/2011/09/23/3324270.htm [Accessed 3 January 2018]. Ward, K. (2011). The charismatic movement in New Zealand: sovereign move of God or cultural captivity of the gospel? A paper presented at the “Pastoral and Practical Theology Association of New Zealand conference,” Dunedin, November. Available at: https://kevinrward.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/charismatic-movement-in-nztheological-perspectives.pdf [Accessed 26.12.2017]. Williams, R. (2015). Post-God Nation: How Religion Fell Off The Radar in Australia – and What Might be Done To Get It Back On, Melbourne: HarperCollins Australia. (Kindle version, Amazon.com). Worsfold, J. (1974). A History of the Charismatic Movements in New Zealand. Bradford: Puritan Press.

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Worthen, M. (2008). The Chalcedon Problem: Rousas John Rushdoony and the Origins of Christian Reconstructionism. Church History 77(2), pp. 399–437. Yuan, S.Y. (2013). “Kiwis” in the Middle Kingdom A Sociological Interpretation of the History of New Zealand Missionaries in China from 1877 to 1953 and Beyond, unpublished. PhD Thesis. Massey University, Albany. Zwartz, M. (2008). Apostles of Fear: a church cult exposed. Boronia, vic: Parenesis Publishing.

Chapter 2

Australian Proto-Pentecostals: The Contribution of the Catholic Apostolic Church Peter Elliott 1 Introduction Barry Chant is recognised as one of the pioneering historians of Australian Pentecostalism. His 2011 publication The Spirit of Pentecost: the origins and development of the Pentecostal movement in Australia 1870–1939 is a comprehensive overview of the subject, based on his doctoral thesis and expanding some of his earlier work. In The Spirit of Pentecost, Chant determines that there were three main tributaries flowing into Australian Pentecostalism: “wesleyanism, the Dowie movement and the Evangelical movement” (Chant, 2011, p. 3). This paper will argue that Chant has overlooked another major tributary – the Catholic Apostolic Church. Chant claims that Sarah Jane (Jeannie) Lancaster began “the first Pentecostal congregation to be formally established in Australia” in 1908 (Chant, 2011, p. 44). This is clearly after the formal rise of American Pentecostalism in Topeka, Kansas and Azusa Street, Los Angeles in 1901/6. Chant is also keen to acknowledge the earlier contribution of Joseph Marshall who led a small group exhibiting glossolalia in Portland, Victoria from 1870 into the 1880s. Of these Portland meetings, Chant writes, “As far as is known, these were the first Pentecostal meetings held in Australia and among the first conducted anywhere in the world” (Chant, 2011, p. 42). These meetings determine the beginning of Australian Pentecostalism for Chant, as indicated by the 1870 date in the title of his book. The distinction between Lancaster’s group and Marshall’s is primarily that of formal/informal. Chant also traces some family links between Portland participants and Lancaster’s later congregation (which was known as Good News Hall), thereby making a direct historical link between the two groups. Before examining the validity of these claims about the beginning of Australian Pentecostalism, it is worth considering how Chant uses the term “Pentecostal.” He is clearly aware of the work of Vinson Synan, but he appears to be using the term with greater flexibility than Synan’s “classical Pentecostal” definition, which encompasses the doctrinal stance that glossolalia is the initial

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004425798_004

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evidence of baptism with the Holy Spirit (Synan in Burgess, et al. 2002, pp. 553–555). For instance, although there is evidence that Lancaster held to the classic Pentecostal doctrine of tongues as “initial evidence,” there appears to be no solid evidence that Marshall held firmly to that teaching (Chant, 2011, pp. 111, 42).1 It appears that Chant is using “Pentecostal” in a broader sense to describe any group that exhibits glossolalia. This is further supported by how Chant describes John Alexander Dowie, a Scot with a noteworthy healing ministry who pastored in three Australian states before relocating to America. Dowie was “never himself a Pentecostal” (presumably because he never spoke in tongues), even though he exercised the gift of prophecy, had a dynamic healing ministry, and prayed for an outpouring of the charismatic gifts (Chant, 2011, pp. 75–76).2 A similar understanding appears to be present when Chant writes of John Henry Coombe attending meetings in the home of Mrs J.H. Nickson in September, 1906, which were (in Chant’s view) “the first Pentecostal meetings held in Melbourne” and that in February, 1907, Coombe became “the first person in Melbourne, Victoria, to speak in tongues” (Chant, 2011, p. 96).3 It seems that it is the appearance of glossolalia that renders these meetings Pentecostal for Chant, rather than a specific doctrinal stance. So, for the remainder of this paper, we will continue with what appears to be Chant’s working definition of “Pentecostal,” i.e. any individual or group demonstrating glossolalia. This working definition allows for the inclusion of groups that might more exactly be described as “proto-Pentecostal,” as they may exhibit glossolalia but may not have been aware of, or adhered to, an “initial evidence” position. Chant is clear on what he believes to be the place of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Australian Pentecostal history. “Certainly, in Australia, there is no evidence of the Irvingite movement having any influence on the development of Pentecostalism. The Catholic Apostolic Church, established after Irving’s death, has been in Australia since 1883 under the name Apostolic Church of Queensland. It recognises apostles and uses prophesying from time to time for direction, but does not practise glossolalia. As its initial constituency was largely German and the first services were German-speaking, it has tended to be isolationist” (Chant, 2011, p. 26). 1 Chant heads in this direction where Marshall is concerned but without supplying evidence. 2 Chant cites Ottersen (1986, pp. 14, 16) for evidence of Dowie praying for all the charismatic gifts. The timing of Dowie’s prophesying is open to question due to a problem with sources, cf. fn 19. 3 Chant’s source for the claim is Moorhead (1908, p.28). Moorhead is drawing from J.H.Nickson, “Pentecost in Melbourne, Australia.”

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Before evaluating Chant’s claims with the use of primary sources, it is necessary to outline briefly the origins of the Catholic Apostolic Church. Edward Irving4 was a Scottish Presbyterian who was born in Annan, studied at Edinburgh University, and trained under Thomas Chalmers at St John’s in Glasgow before accepting a call to a small London congregation in 1822. On his arrival in London, he became noted for the effectiveness (and length!) of his sermons, and the congregation that initially struggled to pay his salary was soon struggling to contain those attending Sunday services, as fifty became fifteen hundred (Grass, 2011, pp. 53–54). When a member of Parliament publicly complimented his preaching, he gained the attention of the nobility, many of whom attended his services. Irving’s tendency to denounce individuals from the pulpit was another dynamic that attracted many likely targets, such as Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin, to attend to see if they would be mentioned! Once mentioned, they would return to show they were not offended (Drummond, 1934, p. 50). Irving was profoundly influenced by the Romanticism of the Scottish borders and maintained key friendships with two other influential Romantics: the political historian Thomas Carlyle (who also hailed from the Annandale region) and the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge.5 Irving’s innate Romanticism deeply informed his theological distinctives. During his ministry in London, Irving effectively erected three theological “lightning-rods” which attracted varying degrees of controversy: a pre-millennial eschatology; a Christology that insisted Christ had assumed fallen humanity, but remained sinless through the power of the Holy Spirit; and openness to the availability of the charismatic gifts (a move away from his initial Presbyterian cessationism).6 Irving argued vigorously that his Christology was completely orthodox, Biblically-based, and rested on a long theological pedigree that included the Cappadocian axiom that what has not been assumed has not been redeemed (Gregory of Nazianzus, 1996, p. 440). Nevertheless, a charge of heresy was brought against him over this. His perception that Christ was fully reliant on the Holy Spirit to remain sinless, combined with his determination to see the Church triumphant, made a conceptual space for the charismata that eventually (via the influence of his assistant, Sandy Scott) overcame his innate cessationism (Grass, 2011, pp. 205–206). Even before reversing 4 This summary of Irving’s life draws from Elliott (2018). 5 My book (2013) addresses these two relationships in depth in Chapters 4 (Coleridge) and 5 (Carlyle). Irving met Coleridge after moving to London. 6 The last forty years have generally seen a positive re-evaluation of Irving’s theological contribution, e.g. Strachan (1973) and Dorries (2002). Karl Barth (1970 p. 154) was an early contributor to Irving’s re-evaluation.

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his ­cessationism, Irving’s premillennialism anticipated a charismatic outpouring prior to the Parousia (Elliott, 2013, pp. 159–160). In the midst of controversy over his Christology, combined with his grief at the death of a child, Irving heard news that there had been an outbreak of charismata in the parish of Rosneath, Scotland (Oliphant, n.d., p. 298).7 An investigating committee (apparently all Anglicans) visited Rosneath and reported favourably on what they experienced (Dallimore, 1983, p. 111). Shortly afterwards, some members of Irving’s congregation began speaking in tongues and prophesying. Irving treated this development with caution, initially only allowing it to occur in private prayer meetings (Oliphant, n.d., p. 320). In ­October, 1831, he removed this restriction and allowed a time for the charismata in public worship, believing that others in the congregation needed the opportunity to test what he had examined and believed to be genuine (Oliphant, n.d., p. 322). In the end, although the majority of the congregation had supported Irving through the heresy charges regarding his Christology, it was the operation of the charismata in the public services that terminated Irving’s career in the Church of Scotland, officially because he had allowed women and the unordained a voice in public worship (Oliphant, n.d., pp. 355–356). Irving maintained the legitimacy of his position, arguing forcefully from both scripture and history (Grass, 2011, p. 254). Irving’s supporters followed him to a building in Newman Street where they began meeting in October, 1832 (Grass, 2011, p. 269). Shortly afterwards, the office of apostle was established within the nascent movement. Irving had been longing for the restoration of a spirit of apostolicity since at least the mid1820s.8 Initially, this had surfaced in the context of missionary work, but the arrival of the charismata in the congregation had allowed a broader interpretation that the loss of the apostolic office had contributed to the “low state of the Church” (Oliphant, n.d., p. 318).9 The first apostle, Cardale, was appointed through Drummond’s prophetic utterance in November, 1832 (Flegg, 1992, pp. 58–59). In due course, other apostles were appointed in similar fashion, and Irving – who neither spoke in tongues nor prophesied personally – was now surrounded by the charismatically-gifted. This produced a growing tension as Irving worked to discern the nature of the authority of his role as angel (pastor)

7 Like many nineteenth-century families, the Irvings lost several infant children. 8 This appeared in his sermon on the parable of the sower, which appeared in print first in his 1828 three volume Sermons, and later in his Collected Works, volume 1 (London: Alexander Strahan, 1864, p. 301). 9 This refers to a letter of Irving’s that dates from approximately July 1831.

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in a context increasingly dominated by those who saw him as less gifted, and therefore unqualified to have a moderating voice on the charismata.10 Irving continued to pursue a divine endowment in the midst of this increasing ecclesiastical cross-fire; it seems to have been the only way he could respond to his fading hopes and relegation in the new movement. His dogged pursuit came at a cost to his health, and resulted in his tragically avoidable early death from tuberculosis at the end of 1834.11 Irving’s death was followed by the apostles taking the reins of power and forming the Catholic Apostolic Church in 1835. The Catholic Apostolic Church continued to exist throughout the nineteenth-century, establishing congregations throughout the world. One view of the church’s subsequent worship was that it largely left its charismatic roots behind, and moved in a much more formal, liturgical direction. This view was explicitly stated by some: The Prophetic Movement had burnt itself out within the next few years. Out of the molten material of healing, prophesying, and speaking with tongues, there emerged “the Catholic Apostolic Church,” an institution essentially priestly… The historian will notice the rapid transformation from spontaneous enthusiasm to hierarchical and sacramentarian order, which the Irvingite Movement underwent between 1834 and 1842….12 Drummond, 1934, p. 233

Certainly, the Catholic Apostolics did move in the latter direction, but there is strong evidence that they did not believe they were faced with an either/or choice here, but rather continued both elements simultaneously. One of the factors that has led some scholars to believe that the charismatic element disappeared from Catholic Apostolic worship is that there was a move to keep it away from public gaze. Columba Flegg, in writing of United Kingdom Catholic Apostolic worship in the 1860s, said, “The exercise of spiritual gifts was more freely permitted in prayer meetings than in public worship” (Flegg, 1992, p. 176). During Irving’s lifetime, glossolalia, especially, had been the target of much ridicule and controversy; it is not surprising that the decision was made to limit its occurrence in public services. While such a move naturally resulted in less public discussion of the charismata, there is strong evidence that it ­continued to be part of Catholic Apostolic worship throughout the 10 11 12

For details of this complexity, see Elliott (2015). Space prohibits a fuller explanation. For more on this, see Elliott (2013, pp. 202–205). See also Worsfold (1974, p. 51).

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­ ineteenth-century. This includes such official sources as Cardale’s 1866 publin cation giving direction on women prophesying in the church, and ongoing eyewitness testimony (Whitley, 1955, p. 75).13 This being the case, it would be expected that international Catholic Apostolic efforts in this period would also continue to endorse charismatic practice, while reflecting an increasing desire to minimise it as a public spectacle. From this background, we turn to consider the Australian context, and the initial primary sources we will examine consist of local newspapers. The first representative of the Catholic Apostolic Church to arrive in Australia was Alfred Wilkinson, in 1853 (Martin, 1992, pp. 4, 6–7). He wasted no time in announcing his arrival: The Argus of 23 February 1853 (p.8), carried an advertisement announcing that one of their ministers had arrived in the colony. Members of the Catholic Apostolic Church were summoned under the description of those “who have recognized and embraced the restored fourfold ministry (vide Ephes.iv.11–13).”14 The identical advertisement was repeated sixteen times up to early June. Clearly, Wilkinson either knew or expected that a number of Catholic Apostolics were already in the colony. In a more biblicallyliterate age, these advertisements were also a clear declaration of the ongoing relevance of apostles and prophets that would not have been missed, especially since Edward Irving had received significant coverage in the Australian press during his lifetime, as had the ongoing international activities of the Catholic Apostolics (often referred to as Irvingites). This continued throughout the nineteenth century in the Australian press. For example, in 1860 and 1887, there were lengthy reports of lectures on Edward Irving’s life in, respectively, The Sydney Morning Herald (p. 8) and the Balmain Observer and Western Suburbs Advertiser (p. 5), the latter based largely on Thomas Carlyle’s Reminiscences, and continuing Carlyle’s disdain for glossolalia and the prophetic. The Northern Argus of December 1874 (p. 3) contained an eye-witness report of a service at the Gordon Square, London congregation (originally in the Pall Mall Gazette), which included a message in tongues. What is significant about this report is that the writer notes that in Catholic Apostolic practice at the time tongues and prophecy were “never uttered” in “ordinary services,” but were reserved for “special” services; it was to one of these that the writer gained admission. This resonates with what we have already noted was the practice in 13 14

Whitley writes of witnessing glossolalia several times in Catholic Apostolic services when he was a boy in Edinburgh. As he was born in 1906, it was clearly continuing into the twentieth-century. The same advertisement was repeated on March 5, 10, 15, 16, 18, 22, 28, 29 & 30, April 1, 5, 6, 7, 22, May 28 & June 4.

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­ ritain at the time. The Evening News in 1899 (p. 3) also contained a report from B the London Daily News clearly indicating that glossolalia were continuing in Catholic Apostolic churches there until the very end of the nineteenth century. In the years following Wilkinson’s arrival, the Catholic Apostolics frequently advertised sermons in the newspapers, and drew their share of attention (e.g. The Australian Star, 1889, p. 6). In 1866, Percy Whitestone arrived from England and the details of his address in West Maitland have survived. He proclaimed the restoration of the gifts of the Spirit through the revived apostolate and manifestations of God’s Spirit that were “unmistakeable” (The Newcastle Chronicle, 1866, p. 4). On both evenings he spoke, the hall was “completely filled.” In The Newcastle Chronicle (1868, p. 3) the correspondent for West Maitland recorded the visit of Wilkinson who spoke twice to “crowded audiences” and although he touched on eschatology, “He moreover dwelt more upon the tenets of his system than anything else, such as the working of miracles, speaking with tongues and prophesying, and the restoration of the four orders in the Church of Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, and Pastors or Teachers.” This “fourfold” ministry was also the topic of a sermon in June 1882, accompanied by a sizeable newspaper advertisement (The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, p. 2). Another advertisement in May the same year had the topic “The Out-pouring of the latter Rain of the Holy Spirit: indispensable to the perfecting of the Harvest of the Christian Church” (The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, p. 2). This level of activity on behalf of the Catholic Apostolics spurred a flurry of newspaper and preaching activity criticising the teaching and practice of the “Irvingites.” These examples indicate the continued Australian interest in, and publicity surrounding, the life of Edward Irving and the subsequent activities of the Catholic Apostolics from the 1860s to the end of the century. Whether or not the general public had free access to witness the charismata in Australian Catholic Apostolic services, it is clear that there was a widespread awareness of the beliefs and practices of Edward Irving’s theological progeny. The evidence considered so far, demonstrates that Chant is incorrect in both his estimate of the arrival of the Catholic Apostolics in Australia (by 30 years) and in his assertion that they did not practise glossolalia in Australia. Chant’s view is further challenged by the Evening News of 23 August 1882, which featured a report of a Catholic Apostolic preacher who “largely dwelt on” the subject of glossolalia “enumerating the persons who are supposed to have been thus endowed” (p. 6). The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser of 30 September 1887 (p. 8), in reply to a reader’s questions, wrote that “[the charismatic] gifts are still believed in by the so-called Irvingites of

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the present day…They prophesy and have visions of the Second Coming. They are supposed to possess in some instances the gift of tongues…” While a survey of newspaper advertisements of sermon topics does not indicate that the Catholic Apostolics emphasised glossolalia in their preaching (there was a stronger emphasis on eschatology), it was presumably covered in topics such as “Spiritual Gifts” (Evening News, 1890, p. 1), “They were all filled with the Holy Ghost” (Evening News, 1890, p. 1), “The Gift of the Holy Ghost” (The Telegraph, 1899, p. 1), “Have ye received the Holy Ghost?” (The Brisbane Courier, 1893, p. 1) and, certainly, we have already seen that it was well-noted in the media of the day that the group practised glossolalia and the other gifts. There were also sermons such as “The Prophetic Ministry in the Christian Dispensation.” (The Brisbane Courier, 1900, p. 6). In June, 1873, Wells gained a largely negative response from a “densely crowded meeting” when he claimed that the restored apostolate of the Catholic Apostolic Church “were endowed with the same powers as those possessed by the Apostles of old” (The Sydney Morning Herald, 1873, p.3). Twenty years later, he was still preaching the same message: The Brisbane Telegraph of 2 September 1893 (p. 2) gave a detailed report of a lecture by Mr Wells on the topic of “The Restoration of Apostles and Prophets” claiming the gifts of the Holy Spirit had been restored. Another source records sermons preached in New Zealand in 1863 and 1864 by Mr Wilson from the Melbourne Church in which he taught on glossolalia and clearly implied that it was occurring in Australia at that time (Anon, 1881, p. 3).15 It is a logical inference, therefore, that glossolalia was part of the Melbourne Catholic Apostolic experience from at least 1863, if not earlier. The anonymous author of the “Under the Pulpit” column in the Melbourne Leader from 1875, visited a Catholic Apostolic Service. The manifestations were the cause of much ridicule and annoyance in fact, and it was determined to give them privately. This determination has become the rule of proceeding, and none but members of the congregation are admitted to witness or hear the inspired speakers. On the Sunday before last, I found the doors of the Drummond street establishment closed to the general public, and though the sound of voices was audible outside, I was excluded with a number of the uninitiated from the satisfaction of testing them (p. 18)

15

This was William Wilson.

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It is clear from the language here, that by 1875, charismatic utterances had been occurring for some time in the Melbourne Catholic Apostolic congregation and that this had previously attracted attention from curious locals, as well as negative reactions. It also resonates with the earlier comments from Flegg and our London observer that Catholic Apostolics there were reserving the manifestation of the charismatic gifts for “closed” services to which casual observers could not gain admittance; clearly something similar was happening in Australia. This limited selection from various newspapers in different States and other sources indicates that the Catholic Apostolics were firmly established in Australia from 1853 onwards, taught and practised the charismatic gifts (from at least 1863, if not the beginning), and aroused interest and criticism for doing so. Evidently, this newspaper coverage eluded Chant who, as previously noted, believed they did not arrive until 1883, were largely German-speaking, and did not practise glossolalia. This already undercuts Chant’s previously-noted claims that 1870 Portland represented the first instances of Australian glossolalia and the first Australian Pentecostal meetings, as well as his assertion that the first Pentecostal meetings in Melbourne occurred in 1906. Although the selection of evidence that we have seen from local newspapers is substantial, there is even more valuable evidence that has really only been readily available since the publication of Chant’s book. It is important to note that the Catholic Apostolic Church has kept most of its primary sources out of public view, a process that continues to the present day, under the current Trustees operating out of Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. This derives partly from the concept of the “time of silence,” a term used since the last Apostle, Francis Woodhouse, died in 1901, thereby ending the possibility of future ordinations. Despite this, some primary source material is available elsewhere, including some of what are known as the Angels’ Records Books, located in Bradford, Yorkshire. This collection has recently been digitised and it includes verbatim transcripts of interpreted glossolalia and prophecy. It covers the years 1869 to 1928, so unfortunately, it does not cover the first sixteen years of Catholic Apostolic activity in Australia. I have examined this material elsewhere, and calculated that between 1869 and 1900, there were a total of 62 Australian utterances recorded.16 It is important to note that this would certainly not represent the total number of utterances, but only a small percentage – those that were thought worth preserving 16

See Appendix.

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and sending back to the Apostles at Albury, England for permanent record.17 There is a specific instruction to all Angels regarding this in the Minutes of a Conference in 1878. After stating that the words of Prophecy sent up from the Churches were very voluminous & were increasing in number, & that the revisal of them previously to their being submitted to the Apostles, entailed much & increasing labour, the Coadjutor begged the Angels to sift more thoroughly than heretofore the words reported to them by their scribes. He stated that no words are sent up by him to the Apostles which do not contain either new light, or striking present present [sic] application of old light or such as show any peculiarity of form. These latter are included that opportunity may be given to the Apostles to judge the manner & spirit in which the gift of Prophecy is exercised in the Churches. And he begged the Angels in sifting the words to be guided by the same rules & to strike out any words which do not come under one of other of these heads. The Coadjutor remarked that all words spoken in the Particular Church are primarily for the edification of the Church in which they are spoken, and only incidentally for any more extensive use. Bradford Apostolic Church Records, 17 July 1878, 53D95-3-3, pp. 89–90

As an indication of just how much prophecy and glossolalia might occur in a single congregation, we have a fascinating example from Bradford, Yorkshire. The digitised collection originated from the Bradford congregation, and includes a collection of utterances given there during a series on the Book of Revelation between 1 and 12 May, 1860. In this period of less than two weeks, 132 pages of verbatim prophecies and interpreted glossolalia were recorded in this one congregation! (Bradford, Angels’ Report Books, 53D95-5-1). While it would be inadvisable to take this one example as the norm, it would be equally inadvisable to ignore it: it is a clear indication that substantially more charismatic utterances took place than were forwarded to the Apostles at Albury. The digitised sources show there were no Australian utterances recorded and sent to Albury between 1869 and 1876. This almost certainly does not mean that no utterances were given, but that none were seen as essential for international circulation. It is also interesting that 1876 contains the most recorded utterances of any single year (8) until 1897 (9). So here is, I believe, the earliest 17

Tim Grass, who has published extensively on Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church, estimated that recorded utterances sent on to the Apostles in England would only represent a small percentage of the total given. Personal conversation July 2016.

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extant example of Australian prophecy and glossolalia from 1876. It evidently begins as a prophecy, and then continues as two messages in tongues, which were interpreted. From the Church in Melbourne, Victoria, During Communion The hireling fleeth because he is a hireling because he seeth the wolf coming. Ah, shall Christendom say in that day, The Lord’s ear does not hear & His arm is shortened that He cannot save[?]. Ah Zion, Zion, open thy gates that thy sons, thy sons may go forth in thy power, & in the grace & in the wisdom of thy [Father/Fathers] [Tongue] Ah the time cometh for the gates of Zion to be opened, that her sons may go forth. Ah! Jerusalem, Jerusalem, must be ministered unto by her sons as ye O Sealed of the Lord have been ministered unto by His Holy Apostles. [Tongue] Because the wolf cometh, he cometh & the hireling shall flee. Ah the love of the Lord Jesus unto the scattered sheep, scattered up & down. Ah the dark valleys, & on the mountains. Ah the Lord would gather them as His other sheep, as He hath gathered you, O ye beloved. Bradford Apostolic Church Records, Angels’ Report Books, 53D95-1-2, pp. 128–129

In summary then, we can state that the Catholic Apostolic Church formally arrived in Australia in 1853, that they taught and practised glossolalia and prophecy from at least 1863 until the end of the nineteenth-century; and they should therefore be seen (under Chant’s working definition) as holding the earliest Pentecostal meetings in Australia. In addition, Mark Hutchinson has drawn direct historical links between Catholic Apostolic families and later Pentecostalism, stating “There are many examples wherein the family trails begun in Catholic Apostolic churches end up in Pentecostal churches…,” going on to name several specific families (Hutchinson, n/d, fn 58). In the same article, Hutchinson raises the possibility that John Alexander Dowie, whose ministry in three Australian States is widely seen as an Australian Pentecostal precursor, may have been influenced by the Catholic Apostolic Church. Certainly Dowie’s later writings acknowledge his awareness and admiration of Irving and his theology (e.g. Bennett, 2014, pp. 315–321).18 There is, then, direct historical evidence linking the activities of the Australian Catholic Apostolics with the later Pentecostal movement. For the purposes of this paper, we have been working with Chant’s looser working definition of Pentecostal, rather than

18

David Bennett explores links between Dowie and Irving in an appendix. What remains unclear is exactly when Dowie was influenced by Irving.

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Synan’s “classical” Pentecostal definition, so some may wish to disqualify the Catholic Apostolics because they did not hold to an “initial evidence” position. I can make two responses to this. Firstly, such a restriction would also eliminate other groups and individuals who are widely accepted as Pentecostal precursors; secondly, it is worth noting that Edward Irving regarded tongues as the “standing sign,” and that an examination of his pneumatology will demonstrate that it aligns closely with the “initial evidence” position. In closing, let us briefly reconsider the three main nineteenth-century tributaries that Chant identified as contributing to Australian Pentecostalism: Wesleyanism, evangelicalism, and the Dowie movement. The Wesleyan tributary did not include glossolalia and prophecy (unless the Portland group under Joseph Marshall is considered Wesleyan, which Chant considers to be “probable”; in any case, it is an exception. Chant, 2011, p. 42). Australian evangelicalism also did not feature glossolalia or prophecy prior to 1900. The Dowie movement featured healing and miracles, but not glossolalia, and although Chant mentions that Dowie himself operated in prophecy, the sources for this are not available, so it is currently impossible to tell what period of Dowie’s ministry this reflected (Chant, 2011, p. 82).19 It could well be from the American phase of his ministry after 1888; at any rate there is currently no firm evidence for prophecy within the Dowie group in Australia. In contrast to these three acknowledged tributaries, the Catholic Apostolic Church consistently demonstrated glossolalia and prophecy in Australia for at least the last forty years of the nineteenth-century. No other group did this. One of the main reasons that the contribution of the Catholic Apostolics has been largely overlooked has been their own desire for discretion where the charismata were concerned, although contemporary newspapers indicated a widespread awareness of both their teaching and their practice. The Catholic Apostolic desire to keep the charismata away from prying (and especially mocking) eyes has been crystallised in the policy of the Trustees of Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, who continue to keep extensive primary sources away from public scrutiny. Nevertheless, even the sources we have accessed for this paper conclusively demonstrate that the historiography of Australian Pentecostal origins needs to be revisited, and the contribution of the nineteenthcentury Catholic Apostolic Church added as a strong tributary flowing into the broader river.

19

fn.98 mentions that these sources were not recorded.

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Appendix: Occurrences of Australian Charismata from the Angels’ Record Books20

Year

Place

1876 1877 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1888

Melbourne Melbourne Melbourne Melbourne Melbourne Melbourne Melbourne Sydney & East Talgai Melbourne Melbourne East Talgai Melbourne

8 6 3 2 2 3 2 2 2 2 1 4

Sydney

2

Melbourne Sydney Melbourne Sydney Brisbane Brisbane Melbourne Brisbane Melbourne

1 1

Melbourne Sydney Melbourne

1 1 5

1889 1891

1892 1893

1894 1895 1896 1897 1899 1900

Totals

Brisbane Sydney

Utterances

1 1 1 9

1 1 62

20 This table was first published in Elliot (2018).

Healings Reference

1 1

1

3

53D95-1-2, 128–131 53D95-1-2, 169–170 53D95-1-3, 127–128 53D95-1-3, 169–170 53D95-1-3, 225 53D95-1-3, 379–380 53D95-1-3, 480–481 53D95-1-4, 505–507 53D95-1-4, 603–606 53D95-1-5, 182–183 53D95-1-5, 181–182 53D95-1-5, 386–387; 462–465 53D95-1-5, 387–388; 465 53D95-1-5, 608 53D95-1-6, 114–115 53D95-1-6, 118–119 53D95-1-6, 124 53D95-1-6, 191 53D95-1-6, 289 53D95-1-6, 432–433 53D95-1-6, 720 53D95-1-6, 605–608; 720–726 53D95-1-7, 123–124 53D95-1-7, 124 53D95-1-7, 242–243, 384–386 53D95-1-7, 383–384 53D95-1-7, 386–387

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References Anon. (1881). Three Sermons Preached in the C.A. Church, Wellington, Nov. 1880. Wellington: Edwards & Green. Barth, K. (1970). Church Dogmatics i/ 2. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Bennett, D. (2014). Edward Irving Reconsidered: the man, his controversies, and the Pentecostal movement. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Cardale, J.B. (1866). Directions on the Subject of Women Prophesying in Church. Privately issued. Chant, B. (2011). The Spirit of Pentecost: the origins and development of the Pentecostal movement in Australia 1870–1939. Lexington, KY: Emeth Press. Dallimore, A. (1983). The life of Edward Irving: the fore-runner of the charismatic movement. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. Dorries, D.W. (2002). Edward Irving’s Incarnational Christology. Fairfax, VA: Xulon. Drummond, A.L. (1934). Edward Irving and his circle, including some consideration of the “Tongues” movement in the light of modern Psychology. London: James Clarke. Elliott, P. (2013). Edward Irving: Romantic Theology in Crisis. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Elliott, P. (2015). Edward Irving’s Hybrid: towards a nineteenth-century Apostolic and Presbyterian Pentecostalism. In: J.W. Buisman, M. Derks, & P. Raedts, eds., Episcopacy, Authority and Gender: aspects of religious leadership in Europe, 1100–2000. Leiden: Brill, pp.139–148. Elliott, P. (2018). Four Decades of “Discreet” Charismata: The Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia 1863–1900. Journal of Religious History 42 (1), pp. 72–83. Flegg, C. (1992). “Gathered under Apostles”: a study of the Catholic Apostolic Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grass, T. (2011). The Lord’s Watchman: Edward Irving. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Gregory of Nazianzus. (1996). “Epistle 101,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. vii. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Hutchinson, M. (n.d.) Edward Irving’s Antipodean Shadow. Australasian Pentecostal Studies, [online] issue 10, Available at: http://aps-journal.com/aps/index.php/APS/ article/view/26/23 [Accessed 19 December 2016]. Martin, J. (1992). A brief survey of the Lord’s work in Australia. Melbourne: unpublished document. Moorhead, M.W. (ed.) (1908). A Cloud of Witnesses to Pentecost in India, Pamphlet no 4. Bombay. Oliphant, M. (n.d.) The life of Edward Irving. 5th edition. London: Hurst & Blackett. Orig. 1862. Ottersen, R. (1986). Peace to Thee! Zion: Christian Catholic Church. Strachan, G. (1973). The Pentecostal Theology of Edward Irving. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.

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Synan, H.V. (2002). Classical Pentecostalism. In: S.M. Burgess & E.M. Van der Maas, eds., The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Whitley, H.C. (1955). Blinded Eagle: an introduction to the life and teaching of Edward Irving. London: scm Press. Worsfold, J. (1974). A History of the Charismatic Movements in New Zealand. Bradford, UK: Puritan Press.

Newspapers

The Argus



The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser



The Australian Star



Balmain Observer and Western Suburbs Advertiser



The Brisbane Courier



Evening News

23 February 1853, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4790085, p.8 [Accessed 12/12/2016].

30 September 1887, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/189324273, p.8 [Accessed 14/12/2016].

7 July 1889, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/227562374, p.6 [Accessed 14/12/2016].

11 June 1887, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/132306411, p.5 [Accessed 14/12/2016].

2 September 1893, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3565425, p.1 [Accessed 16/12/2016]. 7 July 1900, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/19051535, p.6 [Accessed 16/12/2016].

25 February 1899, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/113700476, p.3 [Accessed 14/12/2016].

Leader

2 January 1875, “Under the Pulpit,” Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ page/21353765, p.18 [Accessed 13/6/2016].

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The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser



The Newcastle Chronicle



Northern Argus



The Sydney Morning Herald



The Telegraph

June 1882, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/853900, p.2 [Accessed 14/12/2016]. 27 May 1882, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/852727, p.2 [Accessed 14/12/2016]. 23 August 1882, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/108205103, p.6 [Accessed 14/12/2016]. 3 May 1890, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128769324, p.1 [Accessed 15/12/2016]. 24 May 1890, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128775262, p.1 [Accessed 15/12/2016].

12 December 1866, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128922452, p.4 [Accessed 19/12/2016]. 4 July 1868, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/111330438, p.3 [Accessed 12/12/2016].

3 December 1874, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/214287980, p.3 [Accessed 15/12/2016].

11 September 1860, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13045695, p.8 [Accessed 18/12/2016]. 16 June 1873, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13316053, p.3 [Accessed 19/12/2016].

23 August 1899, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/175302863, p.1 [Accessed 16/12/2016]. 2 September 1893, Available at: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/172070995, p.2 [Accessed 15/12/2016].

Chapter 3

City, Portal and Hub: Brisbane and Catholic Charismatic Renewal John Maiden 1 Introduction “Today the name ‘Bardon’ has become a symbol for one of the most amazing situations in the Christian life of the Australian continent.” So reported the Revd. Philip Audemard, of Moore Park Baptist Church in Brisbane, in September 1973. His article, in The Fraternal, a British Christian journal, explained that the church of St. Mary Magdalene, in the Brisbane suburb of Bardon, had become the centre for “Catholic ‘Pentecostalism’” in the city and “the parent body of a movement amongst Australian Catholics that is growing every week.” He described a weekly, three hour Friday night prayer meeting, attended by up to three hundred, where joyous worship and Christian compassion were both evident. All this was something of a puzzle for Audemard, who admitted he had been accustomed to suspicion of Roman Catholicism. Yet it was at the Bardon gathering – which although organised by Roman Catholics was attended by members of various Protestant denominations – that he first heard a Jesuit priest speak in public. He witnessed also authentic Christian oneness in the Spirit (Audemard, 1973).1 Audemard, this chapter will argue, was astute in his observation about the seminal importance of the Bardon prayer meeting – and also, from 1975, the Brisbane Emmanuel covenant community – for charismatic renewal in both Brisbane and the wider Australian context. Furthermore, the “Bardon” renewal was caught up in the transnational religious flows of people, ideas and media which characterised the charismatic “movement.”2 As Mark Hutchinson (2017) has asserted, scholars of Pentecostal/charismatic history have too often overlooked Australia’s position in these transnational flows and its connections with both old imperial and new American pathways, as they have instead been drawn to locations on the Pacific Rim.

1 According to David Parker (1996), Audemard previously had a charismatic experience in Melbourne in 1970. 2 On transnational religious connections as “flows,” see Wuthnow and Offutt (2008).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004425798_005

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The charismatic renewal was a diverse and pan-denominational religious sub-culture of local prayer meetings and communities, denominational and ecumenical service groups, national and international conferences, and media circulations which became noticeable on the Australian religious scene during the mid-1960s, first within Protestant circles and then – from 1969 – amongst Roman Catholics. Seeking a return to “New Testament Christianity”, the wider renewal movement – both Protestant and Catholic – tended to display five broad emphases: experience (of the baptism of the Spirit and the supernatural charisms); expression (oral and embodied acts of worship and spiritual creativity); body (the renewal or restoration of the local Body of Christ through the every-member-ministry of men and women, often in new manifestations of Christian community); unity (the ecumenical breaking down of historic denominational barriers between Christians); and Scripture (the use or even a “rediscovery” of the Bible for teaching and devotions). In Australia, the identity of the wider movement was fostered by magazines such as Logos (later Restore) and Charismatic Contact, and in 1973 by the first National Charismatic Conference, held in Sydney, organised by the Logos Foundation and the Temple Trust. For one observer, this conference was “a declaration that ‘this is the beginning….’ of the wider move of the Holy Spirit which will spread to every area of Christendom in Australia in accordance with the promise of God” (Cairns, 1973).3 Catholic Charismatic Renewal [hereafter ccr] in Australia usually had a tandem orientation towards this wider, ecumenical movement and a distinctive Roman Catholic charismatic identity. ccr in Bardon and Brisbane had a crucial role in cultivating both. Although a narrative of ccr in Brisbane has emerged through the autobiography of Brian Smith (2000), one of its leading figures, and Catholic charismatic practitioner Adrian Commadeur’s (1992) study The Spirit in the Church (1992), it has not been the subject of published scholarly work. Indeed, historical analysis of ccr remains sparse.4 This chapter, furthermore, provides an even rarer historical case study on ccr outside the United States. The linkages with America were to prove crucial in the development of ccr in Australia. Pennsylvania – and the “Duquesne weekend” of 1967 – is conventionally at least regarded as the birthplace of ccr as a movement, and the upper Midwest university centres of South Bend, Indiana, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, the prime 3 There had been some noticeable manifestations of charismatic renewal since 1959, and amongst individual mainline Christians before this. See Hutchinson (1998). 4 For examples of published works on the US, see Connelly (1971) and Maurer (2010). There are many ethnographic studies; some of which discuss the historical context. See, for example: Lado (2009) and Csordas (1997). For the history of ccr in Australia, see, Hutchinson (n/d).

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movers in its North American and global expansion. What follows assesses the mobilities and moorings of ccr by adopting a multi-scalar approach to assess the movement in Bardon/Brisbane during the 1970s, addressing the relationship between its city-wide context, its transnational linkages with the American upper Midwest cities and its national and pan-regional connections.5 2

City: Renewal in Brisbane

The widespread emergence of the charismatic renewal in Australia occurred on the cusp of two periods; one which might be viewed broadly as one of religious resurgence and innovation, and another, again generally, of developing religious and social uncertainty from the mid-1960s. In 1954 the Brisbane Roman Catholic community was the largest in Australia outside of Sydney (Hilliard, 1990, p. 479). The denomination had the highest number of regular worshippers of all denominations, and Archbishop James Duhig (1873–1965) led an ambitious building programme of churches, schools and hospitals. Brisbane’s annual Corpus Christi procession was the largest such public expression of Roman Catholic faith in the country. As the population of Brisbane became increasingly cosmopolitan, Duhig had welcomed communities of Italian Capuchins from New York, Dutch Premonstratensians, Italian Canossian Daughters of Charity and Polish Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth to engage migrant groups alongside the existing ethnic Irish population. The year 1953 had seen the visit of Fr. Patrick Peyton and his “Family Rosary Crusade”, with eighty thousand gathering for a rally at the city’s exhibition showgrounds (Hilliard, 1991, pp. 247–251). The Vatican ii conference (1962–65) brought, as elsewhere, the Latin Mass in the English language and new awareness of ecumenical possibilities. There were notable developments in lay spirituality, including a rising interest in Marian piety and the arrival of Cursillo, a movement, established on the island of Mallorca, Spain, in 1944, which fostered lay and clerical cooperation, innovative small-group expression of community, bible reading and evangelistic outreach.6 However, during the decade of the 1960s, as in other “Western” national contexts, powerful challenges emerged for the Roman Catholic Church, notably rapid social and moral change and divisive controversies, in particular over Humanae Vitae and the war in Vietnam. Tellingly, the number of Roman Catholic students preparing for priesthood in Australia 5 These are helpful terms used in Hannam et al. (2006). 6 On Marian piety, see Hilliard (1990). On the Cursillo movement generally, see NabhamWarren (2015).

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d­ eclined from 1486 in 1961 to 977 in 1971 (Hilliard, 1997, pp. 222–223). Many watched this decline – and also the many Roman Catholic priests and religious “opting out” – with some concern. As one Australian priest recalled of the early 1970s: “All of us had friends who had left – many of them generous, gifted, hardworking people. Why had they left? A chill entered one’s soul with the next question: If they left will I last?” (Glynn, 1974, p. 11). It was in this context – and the confluence of religious energies and uncertainties – that ccr in Bardon emerged.7 Fr. Vincent Hobbs, the assistant priest at Bardon, had read reports of “Catholic Pentecostalism,” as it was first known, in an article by Edward D. O’Connor, Professor of Theology at Notre Dame University, South Bend, early in 1970, on the emergence of Catholic prayer groups in the United States. At this stage, Fr. Hobbs was unaware that a group was already underway in Australia, at St. Michael’s College, Sydney, which had been established by academic mathematician Alex Reichel on his return from Colorado in 1969. Fr. Hobbs was involved in Cursillo, through which he had met an svd priest, Fr. Frank Gerry, who had studied in the United States and there witnessed glossolalia – including, it was claimed, an old lady who had unknowingly prayed the Hail Mary in German (a language in which he was fluent). Fr. Hobbs invited the priest to share his testimony to a small group. Those attending included others involved in Cursillo, some members of the Brisbane Catholic Social Club and young adult Catholic group, as well as other parishioners. Initially there were no baptisms in the Spirit or manifestations of the supernatural gifts. At this time other literature from the United States, notably Catholic Pentecostals (1969) by Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, the influential members of the movement in South Bend, Indiana, was also circulating. A married couple (the husband also had links with Cursillo) had received the baptism in the Spirit, and through them Fr. Hobbs also received the experience. The weekly meetings continued and in September 1970, Brian Smith, a layman who had heard a tape recording of Kevin Ranaghan’s account of the beginnings of ccr in America the previous month (and was at that time suspicious of Pentecostalism, having recently watched the film Elmer Gantry), attended for the first time. Afterwards, he told Fr Hobbs in the confessional that he wanted to receive the baptism in the Spirit. They went to the steps of the altar, where Smith said the Creed and renewed his baptismal promises. Hobbs laid hands on the layman and prayed for a release of the Holy Spirit that had been received at baptism and confirmation. Smith, after some internal struggle, spoke in tongues and had a deep experience of Christ (Smith, 1972). The 7 The narrative presented in this single paragraph is distilled from three sources (Vince and Norma Kearney, n.d., pp. 5–9; Smith, 2000, pp. 9–7; Smith, 1973b).

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priest and the layman became the central figures the Bardon prayer meeting. During 1971 charismatic figures from Sydney, Alex Reichel and Fr. Gerald Hawkins,8 a Cistercian who had also recently returned from the United States, visited the Bardon gathering, which began to grow significantly, eventually having to move to the St. Mary Magdalene parish church in order to accommodate numbers. By the end of 1972 two hundred were in attendance on a Friday night. It was the largest Catholic charismatic prayer group in Australia (Reichel, 1972). The meeting came to be widely considered a “kind of Mother Community” to ccr in Brisbane (Kearney and Kearney, n.d., p. 9). The growth was largely suburban, with four home prayer groups quickly established in the expanding Brisbane suburbs of Kedron, Mt, Gravatt, Geeburg and Stafford (Newsletter, July 1973, pp. 14–15). The characteristics of ccr in Bardon and from there the wider city reflected the emphases of charismatic renewal described at the beginning of the chapter, with a distinctive Roman Catholic flavour. Experience, centrally the baptism in the Spirit, usually accompanied by speaking in tongues, was the motor of renewal in Bardon. As in other denominations, this experience was often sought by individuals seeking a greater sense of authentic spiritual “reality” and empowerment in an uncertain religious and social context. Before Brian Smith received this baptism he had known a long period of spiritual dryness, to such an extent that he feared losing his faith. The experience, however, reinvigorated his spiritual life, with for example daily attendance of Mass and regular recitation of the rosary with his family (Smith, 1972; Smith, 2000, p. 17). Although they borrowed the terminology of classical Pentecostalism, the Bardon charismatics – as was frequently the case in ccr more widely – increasingly located this experience within the framework of Roman Catholic initiation and tradition. Smith later described the Catholic experience of the baptism in the Spirit as the “awakening response to God’s ever abiding love in the soul.” This awakening of the faith was understood to be firmly in the tradition of the experience of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Vincent de Paul and St. Peter Damien (Smith, 1973b, p. 15). The Friday night prayer meetings included instruction and prayer for baptism in the Spirit in the church sacristy (Newsletter, July 1973, p. 15). “Bardon” became known as a place for receiving a transformative spiritual experience. 8 Fr. Hawkins, born in Melbourne, became the liaison between Cardinal Gilroy and the Sydney diocese and its charismatic prayer groups after returning from the United States in 1970, where he had been known to leaders of ccr (see Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). It is not known for sure how he became involved in ccr. However, a possible link was his role as Abbot of Our Lady of Guadalupe priory from 1951. This had been situated in Pecos, New Mexico, and although it relocated to Oregon in the 1950s (see Connelly, 1971, p. 218).

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Alongside this was outward expression. The laying on of hands for receiving the baptism in the Spirit, while apparently counter-cultural for men (Smith observed “Australian men, certainly at that time, did not lay hands on people unless it was a football match or funeral!”), was one practice (Smith, 2000, p. 17). The Friday night meeting displayed joyful and spontaneous worship. Philip Audemard, who had visited the Friday night meeting at least ten times by 1973, remarked that no two meetings were the same, that there was great freedom in worship and prayer, with the leaders keeping a low profile. Above all there, he felt, there was an atmosphere of love (Audemard, 1973, p. 41). He described one such meeting as involving thirty minutes of expressive singing of both traditional hymns and songs originating from within the ccr; testimonies of healings and conversions (including of nuns calling on the congregation to “Praise the Lord” for the “conversion of unruly boys”); “Singing in the Spirit”, a spontaneous practice which had been revived by the Latter Rain movement and then permeated through independent Pentecostals into charismatic renewal; and public prayer, particularly for family issues (Audemard, 1973, pp. 41–42). Thirdly, there was an emphasis on the corporate renewal of the body of Christ. This was evident not only in the spontaneous ministry of the Friday night gatherings, but also in the prayer groups across the city. The central Bardon “service group,” which is discussed further below, required that any new prayer group seeking to start in Brisbane should have the full complement of ministry gifts, in order that effective mutual ministry within the body could occur (Smith, 1973a). These groups were encouraged to manifest genuine Christian community. One group, for example, adopted the rule that “every word must be spoken in love – let no-one ever speak unkindly of another.” The group’s leaders sought to cultivate an atmosphere of Christian love, for example by caring for families with new babies; arranging babysitting so that parents could attend the Friday night meeting; visitation of those ill or grieving; “around the clock” prayer support for those in special circumstances; and “listening, praying and loving’ people in need” (Hayter, December 1973, pp. 3–4). The wider Brisbane community also gathered together on special occasions, for example on Easter Monday of 1973 when a community picnic was followed by open-air Mass, with over one hundred receiving Communion (Newsletter, May 1973, p. 7). Such intimate expressions of fellowship provided a basis for the formation of the Emmanuel covenant community in 1975. The ccr in Bardon, fourthly, emphasised unity across denominational borders. Socially, this was partly a product of a post-war process of suburbanisation which had resulted in Catholics and Protestants living in closer proximity. It also, of course, reflected something of the spirit of the times in the period after Vatican ii. While many sectarian tensions remained in Australia during

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this period, there had been some growth in ecumenical cooperation between Catholics and Protestants, for example in inter-church councils, ministers’ fraternals and ecumenical services (Hilliard, 1997, p. 216). Although Catholic in leadership, the renewal in Bardon was deliberately ecumenical. During the early period a large number of Anglicans, in particular, were involved in the meetings (Smith, 1973a). There was also, however, cooperation with the Assemblies of God churches, Trevor Chandler’s Christian Life Centre, and the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (the latter organisation had also engaged significantly with the ccr in the United States). It was through this initial convergence with pentecostals that the practice of the supernatural gifts developed amongst the Catholics (Smith, 1973a; Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). The wider charismatic scene in Brisbane would mushroom in the 1970s (Harrison, 2006, pp. 56–66). Some pentecostal churches, such as Mt. Gravatt Assemblies of God (which later had a 600-seat auditorium) and Gerald Rowland’s Glad Tidings Tabernacle developed a charismatic sensibility. From 1971 the American evangelistic organisation Teen Challenge operated an urban community centre in the city called The Way. Speakers on the international charismatic circuit were drawn to Brisbane. In 1973 alone these included the Argentinian Juan Carlos Ortiz, New Zealander Winkie Pratney, Canadian Ern Baxter and American Presbyterian theologian J. Rodman Williams (Cartledge, 1973b, pp. 9–10). This wider charismatic sub-culture contributed to strong ecumenical relationships. In 1973 a Brisbane Charismatic Minister’s Fellowship started, attended by a range of Protestant denominations and Roman Catholics (Cartledge, 1973a, p. 8). Gerald Rowland would have shocked some fellow Assemblies of God pastors when he expressed a concern for a unity between Protestants and Catholics, arguing: “We need to break down the walls of isolation and come together for conversations in the spirit of Christian love” (Rowland, 1974 , pp. 10–11).9 Charismatic renewal had a significant role in addressing the historical animus between Protestant and Catholic in Australia. Finally, while there was a resurgence in attendance of Mass and devotional practices – such as praying the rosary – renewal also produced a marked emphasis on the role Scripture in the Christian life. Kevin Ranaghan, speaking of the ccr more broadly, described this development as “One of the most remarkable results of the charismatic renewal” amongst Catholics (Ranaghan, 1973, p. 37). The literature on renewal which flooded into Brisbane from the United States and Europe was inundated with biblical references which aimed to place charismatic experience in a Scriptural framework. Philip Audemard

9 On broader tensions in the aog over charismatic renewal and “Catholic Pentecostalism,” see Clifton (2009, pp. 143–145).

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expressed this flourishing of lay Catholic bible reading when he described how r.s.v. Bibles in Brisbane, along with other charismatic literature, were “going at a rate that would cause any bookseller to sing the Te Deum!” (Audemard, 1973, p. 43). Although the Bardon Friday night meeting and prayer groups had a spontaneous feel, behind the scenes coherent structures and principles were developed to maintain the unity of the renewal and keep it within the scope of the diocese. A service group was set up, and the new Archbishop, Francis Roberts Rush (1916–2001), requested this should oversee the renewal as it expanded in the city. His desire was apparently that “Brisbane Charismatic Renewal be united” (Newsletter, June 1973, p. 11). The service group established three main guidelines concerning the formation of new prayer groups: first, that it should have the permission of the parish priest to begin; second, that is should have the assistance of a member of the service group; and third, as described above, that there should be a full complement of ministry gifts (Smith, 1973a). Such groups must not become what was known as a “smot” (“Secret Meeting of the Saints”), but rather should be open to all (Hayter, 1973, pp. 3–4). However, though efforts to establish pastoral structures had some success, there were also challenges. These often related particularly to the ecumenical orientation of ccr in Brisbane. Its involvement in the wider sub-culture of charismatic renewal exposed ccr to a diversity of beliefs and practices. On occasion the service group had to take definite steps in order to prevent unauthorised literature being made available at the Friday night meetings, warning in its Newsletter that some leaflets and pamphlets in circulation “may not be in accordance with the teaching of our Mother the Church” (Newsletter, May 1973, p. 17). Interaction with pentecostals, while encouraged by the service group, could also result in tensions over water baptism, as it did elsewhere in the charismatic renewal (Commadeur, 1992, p. 102). A wider problem faced by ccr in Australia during the 1970s was the draw of pentecostal churches and revival centres. As these expanded rapidly, a large portion of new participants came from mainline churches, including many from a Catholic background (Commadeur, 1992, p. 102). In Brisbane in the early 1970s there was apparently sometimes pressure from pentecostals to leave the mainline churches; however, when the Ranaghans visited from the United States in 1973 they found Catholics were not being drawn away from their Church (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). In the case of the revivalist Christian Outreach Centre (Hey, 2010, pp. 161–162), which started in Brisbane in 1974, there was some Catholic interest – with priests and nuns visiting the ecumenical meetings – however, when compared to other denominations the vibrancy of ccr in Brisbane seems largely to have kerbed transfers.

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Portal: The American Connection

A variety of immediate factors on the ground therefore contributed to the emergence and early development of ccr in Brisbane; in particular, Cursillo provided a fertile soil for a lay, community-based spirituality and local relationships with pentecostal groups were important. The news of what had been happening on American university campuses and elsewhere since 1967 was also important – though to begin with this influence was largely indirect, the result of circulations of media and the mobility of Australian priests, religious and others returning to their country. However, the apparent similarities between the Brisbane ccr gatherings and those outlined in American Jim Cavnar’s pamphlet Prayer Meetings (1969) suggest that Roman Catholics in Notre Dame/Ann Arbor quickly came to have a more direct influence on the shaping of renewal in Brisbane. Various historical scholarship on post-war Australian Protestantism has recognised a “drift” towards America – following political and cultural trends – which became particularly marked from Billy Graham’s 1959 visit onwards (Buch, 1995; Parker, 1996; Piggin, 1994, p. 299). Neville Buch describes an “Americanization of Queensland Protestantism” (Buch, 1995, p. 12) through the interchange of Christian leaders and the growing influence of printed and audio-visual media from the United States. The ccr displayed a similar inclination. The movement in the United States had complex roots (Connelly, 1971), which only briefly need be rehearsed here. The most influential American expression of the ccr emerged in the upper Midwest states, when from 1967, a movement based on experience of baptism in the Spirit emerged, particularly through Cursillo networks, in the small university cities of South Bend, Ann Arbor and East Lansing. From this year, conferences at Notre Dame provided a focal point for the wider movement, and in 1970 a Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services Committee (ccrsc) was formally established which largely consisted of leaders from South Bend and Ann Arbor. Under the leadership of this group, South Bend had responsibility for the Notre Dame conferences and also a communication centre (which distributed tapes from the conference); while Ann Arbor Catholics coordinated a pastoral newsletter, which later became New Covenant magazine, and leaders’ conferences (Martin, July 1970). The Committee became increasingly aware of a wider global network of the ccr, and from 1972 it assumed responsibility for “formulating International strategy and supervising it”. An International Communications Office (ico) was established in Ann Arbor, headed up by lay leader Ralph Martin (ccrsc, 1972). Soon the energies and leadership of the ccrsc would come primarily from newly formed ecumenical covenant communities: The Word of God

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(1970) in Ann Arbor and True House (1971) and the People of Praise (1971) in South Bend. These became fixtures on the itineraries of Catholic charismatics attending the annual Notre Dame international conference and seeking experience of community life first hand. The ccrsc and these covenant communities developed an unrivalled global influence on the ccr in terms of teaching and modelling patterns of leadership, ministry and community. During the 1970s, the Brisbane ccr grew strong links with the American ccrsc and the ico, and some of its participants developed a close affinity with The Word of God covenant community. American teaching and testimony literature and cassette tapes, and New Covenant magazine were increasingly made available. In November 1972, Bardon charismatics wrote to the New Covenant magazine that they were finding the magazine was “sharper than a two edged sword” and “virtually rocking the clergy” (Lewis and Smith, 1972). Earlier in 1972 Brian Smith attended the Notre Dame conference, and he also visited the three covenant communities mentioned above – becoming “very good friends” with Ralph Martin of Ann Arbor who with Steve Clark was a leading figure in the covenant community movement. It was here, Smith later recalled, that “seeds of community building were sown in my own heart” (Smith, 2000, p. 27). In 1973, Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan visited Australia. Their stay in Brisbane was significant in terms of solidifying its connections with South Bend/ Ann Arbor. Their visit included a meeting with Archbishop Rush, a presentation to about 300 priests and religious at All Hallows convent and school; and, less auspiciously perhaps, a gathering organised by the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship at the Royal Park Motor Inn (Newsletter, February 1973, pp. 3–4). The Ranaghans were impressed, reporting to the American ccrsc: “The status of the charismatic renewal in Brisbane is just as wonderful as we all thought it was” (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). The Ranaghan visit consolidated the flow of the American ccrsc media into Brisbane and more specifically a communications centre which Brian Smith and others had already set up. These resources included reel to reel master tapes from South Bend which could then be recorded onto cassettes locally for distribution (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). Brisbane became the main source of New Covenant, tapes and literature for Australia (Smith, 2000, p. 29). The Ranaghans focused their teaching on “mutual commitment, submission, humility, respect for the leadership gifts as they emerge, learning to work as organic functions within a body, working for the renewal of the Church,” and also on their experience of community (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). The latter teaching was to have a profound influence on the development of the ccr in Brisbane. The Bardon Newsletter explained:

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The visit of the Ranaghans was like a trigger, starting off a reaction which should envelope all of us. There have been individual yearnings and promptings and now Kevin and Dorothy have voiced them. Surely this is the precision timing of the Holy Spirit and not to be ignored. We now have a goal together for our charismatic future. Newsletter, February 1973, pp. 3–4

The Ranaghan’s report to the American ccrsc confirms the teaching on community validated the feeling amongst some in Brisbane that God was calling them to closer and authentic commitment to each other (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). The growing emphasis on community in Brisbane came about, therefore, through the interplay of external and local influences – of “prophecy and inner conviction” about the direction in which ccr should be going (Newsletter, February 1973, pp. 3). American influence gave further impetus in this direction the year after, when members of the Bardon core team visited the Notre Dame conference and the True House, the People of Praise and The Word of God communities (Miscamble, 1973, pp. 2–6). In 1975, Ralph Martin of The Word of God visited Australia, and plans for a community were again discussed (Smith, 2000, pp. 38–39). Brian Smith saw covenant community as a means of consolidating renewal in Brisbane by addressing deficiencies which he perceived during this period. He had observed problems of “revolving door syndrome” in the prayer groups, of some tendency towards unhealthy individualism where personal “ministries” were concerned, and challenges in engaging families with the renewal. He also came to see new forms of community living as an example to the world – a “bulwark” in the face of a “fading Christian culture” in Australia (Smith, 2000, p. 37; quote on p. 52). Covenant communities were described by one Notre Dame Catholic as groups “whose members are committed to love each other as brothers and sisters and who commonly share daily living situations, pray together as a group, exercise some form of common service or outreach, and agree to pastoral direction” (Whitney, 1974, p. 17). The Brisbane Covenant Community officially began in February 1973 with fifteen families and a few singles – with two of those involved Anglicans. A covenant was written by the four male elders of the community and the community members made their commitment in June. It was soon named the Emmanuel covenant community. The group grew: by 1980, 700 were involved in the community, with 300 of these covenanted. Emmanuel was largely modelled on the patterns of the Ann Arbor community and in 1976 it became an affiliate of the Association of Communities, with Steve Clark and Ralph Martin taking a particular pastoral interest. As in Ann Arbor, headship was practiced and members were expected to submit

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to the decisions of the elders; a formation course was set up for those seeking to be covenanted; and in 1978, after some Australian men received training in Ann Arbor, a single gender household was established. Another influence from the American charismatic renewal was an interest on the Jewish roots of Christianity. From 1979, men began to identify with Hebraic religiosity by wearing a prayer “mantel” and women by wearing a white veil during Emmanuel gatherings, and community Sabbath meals taking place on Saturday evenings (Smith, 2000, pp. 40–55). During the decade of the 1970s, therefore, Brisbane had become a significant portal for the influence of American upper Midwest ccr. Brian Smith’s biography, however, asserts that the rise of Emmanuel also produced some tensions within the unity of the Brisbane charismatic scene. He claims that it was sometimes perceived that the new covenant community – with its radical teachings and lifestyle – was setting itself up “as a superior form of Renewal”. Soon after its formation Emmanuel and the Bardon core group became separated (Smith, 2000, p. 40). There were also ecumenical challenges. Some community members belonged to Protestant denominations, and in contrast to the Bardon Friday night fellowship and prayer meetings they saw Emmanuel as the beginnings of a non-denominational group. When this did not transpire some non-Catholics left the community (Smith, 2000, pp. 82–87). 4

Hub: National and Pan-Regional ccr

The ccr expanded in all major Australian cities during the decade. By one estimation there were 7,000 Catholics involved in the renewal by 1976 (Perrotta, 1976). The strength of its links with the South Bend/Ann Arbor, its own media infrastructure and the exemplar status which the Brisbane ccr had for many observers, meant it became the flagship for the Australian movement. The city became a draw for charismatics: the Mt. Gravatt Wednesday night prayer group alone reportedly saw 500 lay, religious and clergy visit during the seven years it functioned (O’Shea, 2015, pp. 13–14). The initiative which Bardon members took in setting up a communications centre was instrumental to this development. Cassette tapes were made of the Friday night meetings and of teachings from the United States (O’Shea, 2015, pp. 13–14) and by 1976 the tape library had 500 recordings in its catalogue (Smith, 2000, p. 29). Audio recordings of teaching and testimonies were particularly important because of the distance between Australian cities. They could also reach more isolated locations. Where a bishop had forbidden charismatic prayer groups, tapes could bring ministry into the home – even, as in

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one recorded case, a vehicle for receiving Baptism in the Spirit (Smith, 1973a). A link with a large Catholic bookseller with import licenses allowed the Brisbane service group to bring in charismatic media, not only from the United States but also the United Kingdom, where the Fountain Trust sent material from both Europe and America – titles such as Michael Harper’s Prophecy: a gift for the body of Christ and Larry Christenson’s Speaking in Tongues: A Gift for the Body of Christ – at reasonable prices (Ranaghan and Ranaghan, 1973). Following a 1973 national meeting of the Australian ccr leaders in Canberra it was decided that the service centre should formally take on a nationwide and pan-regional scope, distributing charismatic literature and tapes, New Covenant magazine, and expanding the audience of its Newsletter to engage “Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand and the Far East” (Schoonder, 1973, p. 1; Newsletter, October 1973, pp. 2–4). It was now the pan-regional agent for ccrsc media. The evolving tagline of the original Bardon Newsletter indicates this expanding influence: from “For the Bardon Catholic Charismatic Renewal”, to “For the Catholic Charismatic Renewal”, to “Serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific.” Smith became the director of the centre and later Emmanuel took responsibility for its running. The post-war period had seen a significant increase in Catholic missionaries to Melanesia (Breward, 2001, p. 335), and when the centre discovered that it could take eight weeks for materials to reach New Guinea by surface mail, financial donations were sought to allow materials to be sent by air (Editors comments, National Newsletter, February 1975, p. 2). Connections were also developed beyond Southeast Asia – with places such as Japan and India where ccr was taking hold.10 Reports came from the Good Samaritan Convent in Japan, and from Fr. Edgar Blain, a missionary serving in the Diocese of Sambalpur, India (Law, 1974; Blain, 1975). “It is to Australia that our brothers in Asia look,” asserted the Newsletter in 1974 (Centre News, Newsletter, July 1974, p. 9). The Newsletter began to share stories of the missionary outreach of Brian Smith and others from the Brisbane. These travels, within Australia but also to locations such as New Guinea and Indonesia (from where an invitation was received from a pastor who had visited Bardon) became more frequent during 1974 (“Gospel Outreach to the Pacific”, National Newsletter, November 1974, p. 2). In New Covenant, he reported after a trip, at the invitation of Archbishop Patrick Copas of Port Moresby, to New Guinea in 1975 (the year of its independence) that during prayer meetings “many people were baptized in the Spirit” (Smith, 1975). From the following year, the influence of Smith and the centre 10 On ccr in India, see the 1977 study Charismatic Renewal in India. Bangalore: National Biblical, Catechetical and Liturgical Centre.

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also gave the Emmanuel community a national and pan-regional reach. In Australia, such was the wider reputation of Emmanuel within the ccr that in 1977 around 70 individuals sold their properties in Perth in order to join the community in Brisbane (Smith, 2000, p. 55). Emmanuel also assisted in the establishment of the Bethel (Perth), Hepzibah (Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide), the Disciples of Jesus (Sydney and Melbourne) communities. From 1978, the Brisbane community became involved in sending teams to China, Malaysia and Singapore to build ccr communities (Smith, 2000, pp. 73, 75). Brisbane had become a national and pan-regional hub for ccr. 5 Conclusion This chapter has analysed Brisbane and the ccr during the 1970s in local, global, national and pan-regional perspective. The tendency in the popular and scholarly historiography of the global ccr has often been American-centric. By adopting a multi-scalar framework, this chapter has sought to understand Brisbane ccr by exploring it at these different levels of analysis. At a city level, it is clear that the rise of ccr in Brisbane was less a simple, strategic transplantation from the United States, and more the product of complex and unplanned networks and flows of people and media, and this in interplay with local factors, such as Cursillo and relationships with the Assemblies of God and other Pentecostals. Brisbane would, however, become a significant portal for direct and highly relational American influence. In the connection between the Brisbane ccr with the upper Midwest locations of South Bend and Ann Arbor, a religious globalisation of smaller cities is evident. This description is particularly appropriate for South Bend and Ann Arbor; but while Brisbane was larger and experiencing rapid suburbanisation, it was not comparable in population to either Sydney or Melbourne. Transnational connections – with the Americans the dominant partner – shaped the Brisbane ccr as the decade progressed, particularly in the formation and identity of the Emmanuel covenant community. However, Brisbane also became a hub for the ccr both nationally and pan-regionally during this decade. The transnational dynamics of the ccr had also begun to change significantly from the middle of the decade. Since the establishment of the International Communications Office in Ann Arbor, the Americans had sought more deliberately to involve other national leaderships. Brian Smith was asked to become an international consultant and then advisor; and also to be a subeditor for New Covenant. The 1975 International Conference on the Charismatic Renewal was an important moment, consolidating the position of renewal

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within the wider Church, but signalling a shifting centre of gravity away from the American upper Midwest towards Europe. In 1976, with Cardinal Suenens patronage, the ico moved to Malines, Belgium, and then later to Rome. An associational connection which had in 1976 been established with various American communities, including the People of Praise and The Word of God, also came to an end, and in 1983 the Australians had a key role in the formation of an International Brotherhood of Communities (iboc), involving groups from a range of regions, including North America, but also Australasia, Europe and south east Asia. Smith became the first president of the iboc. When this became the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Communities and Fellowships, he was in 1995 appointed a member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity (Smith, 2000, pp. 59, 65). The position of Australia, which to borrow Hutchinson’s words in this volume was “a space intrinsically caught up in globalising flows”, shaped renewal in Brisbane but it in turn allowed it to influence the wider ccr movement. References11 No author. (1973). Community picnic. Newsletter (For the Catholic Charismatic Renewal), May, p. 7, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. No author. (1973). The Ranaghan visit and what it meant to the charismatic renewal in Brisbane’, Newsletter (For the Bardon Catholic Charismatic Renewal’), February 1973, p. 3–4, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. No author. (1973). Teen challenge in the tropics. Logos Journal, Nov–Dec, p. 63. No author. (1973). Charismatic Contact, 2(4). No author. (1973). Canberra: unity. Newsletter (Serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific). October, p. 2–4, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. No author. (1974). Centre news. Newsletter (Serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific). July, pp. 9–10, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1.

11

Many of the primary sources are from the Newsletter of the Bardon renewal, later the Brisbane communication centre. This publication went through various appellations, as the citations below indicate. It was usually identified by its month of publication rather than volume/issue. Sometimes the author or title of a piece was not given. Where titles are available, but not authors, these a listed below as “No author”; and a short separate list of sources without title or author is given at the end. All the Newsletters are found in the University of Notre Dame Archives [hereafter unda], Louis Rogge Collection (manuscripts) [hereafter crog], box 8 folder 1, “Newsletter: Australia Catholic Charismatic Conference, 1974–1975.”

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No author. (1974). Gospel outreach to the pacific. National Newsletter (serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australia and the Pacific). November, p. 2, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. No author. (1975). Editor’s comments. National Newsletter (serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific). February, p. 2, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Audemard, P. (1973). Bardon: a puzzle for the Protestant evangelical. The Fraternal, 168, pp. 40–44. Blain, Fr E. (SVD). (1975). Letter. National News (serving the Charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific). January, pp. 3–4, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Breward, I. (2001). A history of the churches in Australasia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buch, N. (1995). American Influence on Protestantism in Queensland since 1945. PhD Thesis. University of Queensland. Cairns, Hardcastle P. (1973). Most Significant Religious Events. Charismatic Contact, 2(2). Cartledge, D. (1973a). Brisbane’s First Holy Spirit Seminar. Charismatic Contact. 2(3), p. 8. Cartledge, D. (1973b). Australia Blessed by Overseas Missionaries. Charismatic Contact, 2(3), pp. 9–10. Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services Committee. (1972). Committee minutes, 28 October. Sword of the Spirit website. Available at: http://www.swordofthespirit.net/ history-catholic-charismatic-renewal/ccrsc-minutes/ [Accessed 30 November 2017]. Clifton, S. (2009). Pentecostal Churches in Transition: analysing the developing ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia. Leiden: Brill. Connelly, J. (1971). The Charismatic Movement 1967–1970. In: K. Ranaghan, and D. Ranaghan. As the Spirit leads us. New York: Paulist Press, pp. 211–232. Commadeur, A. (1992). The Spirit in the Church: exploring Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Melbourne: Comsoda Communications. Csordas, T. (1997). Language, Charisma and Creativity: The Ritual Life Of A Religious Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Glynn, P. (1974). A Testimony by Paul Glynn S.M. National Newsletter (Serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific’), December, p. 11, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Hannam, K., Sheller, M., and Urry, J. (2006). Editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), pp. 1–22. Harrison, J. (2006). Joh Bjelke-Peterse: Pietism and the Political Culture of Queensland. [Online]

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Hayter, N. (1973). Home Prayer Meetings. Newsletter (Serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific), December, pp. 3–4, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Hey, S. (2010). God in the Suburbs and Beyond: the emergence of an Australian megachurch and denomination. Ph.D. Thesis. Griffith University. Hilliard, D. (1990). The Religious Culture of Australian Cities in the 1950s. Hispania Sacra 42(86), pp. 469–481. Hilliard, D. (1991). A Church on Every Hill: religion in Brisbane in the 1950s. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 14(6), pp. 242–262. Hilliard, D. (1997). The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: the experience of the Australian churches. Journal of Religious History, 21(2), pp. 209–227. Hutchinson, M. (1998). The New Thing God is Doing: the charismatic renewal and classical pentecostalism, Australian Pentecostal Studies [e-journal], 1 [Accessed: 6 December 2017]. Hutchinson, M. (2017). Australasian Charismatic Movements and the “New Reformation of the 20th century”? Australian Pentecostal Studies [e-journal], 19 Available at: https://aps-journal.com/index.php/APS/article/view/9502 [Accessed: 6 December 2017]. Hutchinson, M. (n.d.). Reichel, Alex (1927–2012). Australian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements Available at: https://sites.google.com/view/adpcm/q-ttop-page/reichel-alex [Accessed 6 December 2017]. Kearney, V., and Kearney, N. (n.d.). Brief History of CCR Bardon. In: V. Kearney and N. Kearney, eds., The little church on the hill: memories of early years of Bardon Catholic Charismatic Renewal. [Self-published]. Law, Sister M. (Good Samaritan Convent, Tokyo). (1974). Letter. Newsletter (serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific). July, pp. 5–6, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Lewis, J., and Smith, B. (1972). Volcano (letter). New Covenant. November 1972, 2(5), p. 21. Lado, L. (2009). Catholic pentecostalism and the paradoxes of Africanization: processes of localization in a Catholic Charismatic Movement in Cameroon. Leiden: Brill. Martin, G. (1970). Memo to Catholic Charismatic Renewal Service Committee, July. Sword of the Spirit website. Available at: http://www.swordofthespirit.net/historycatholic-charismatic-renewal/ccrsc-minutes [Accessed 30 November 2017]. Maurer, S. (2010). The Spirit of enthusiasm: a history of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, 1967–2000. Lanham: University Press of America. Miscamble, M. (1973). Impressions. Newsletter ( for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal), July, pp. 2–6, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Nabham-Warren, K. (2015). We Are the Church: The Cursillo movement and the reinvention of Catholic identities in postwar America and beyond. US Catholic Historian, 33(1), pp. 81–98.

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O’Shea, M. (2015). The Establishment of a Communications Centre. In: Emmanuel Community: Celebrating 40 years, 1975–2015. pp. 13–14. Parker, D. (1996). Baptists in Queensland, 1855–1995. De-colonizing or trans-colonizing?’: towards an understanding of Baptist identity in Queensland. Paper presented to Baptist­Heritage Study Commission, 1996. Available at: http://home.pacific.net .au/~dparker/bwa.html [Accessed 29 November 2017]. Perrotta, K. (1976). The End of the Beginning. New Covenant, 6(2), pp. 18–21. Piggin, S. (1994). The American and British Contributions to Evangelicalism in Australia. In: M. Noll, D. Bebbington, and G. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: comparative studies of popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and beyond, 1700– 1900, New York: Oxford University Press. Ranaghan, K. (1973). The Lord, the Spirit and the Church. Word of Life: Ann Arbor. Ranaghan, K., and Ranaghan, D. (1973). The Ranaghan’s trip to New Zealand and Australia. Service Committee correspondence, 1970–73. UNDA, James E. Byrne papers [hereafter JEB], Service committee correspondence 1970–1973. Reichel, A. (1972). Australia. New Covenant, 1(12), pp. 20–21. Rowland, G. (1974). Catholic Protestant Relationships in the Charismatic Renewal. The Evangel, 31(11), pp. 10–13. Schoonder, F. (1973). Editorial. Newsletter (Serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australasia and the Pacific). October, p. 1, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Smith, B. (1972). The hungry are filled with good things. New Covenant, 2(3), pp. 11–13. Smith, B. (1973a). The Beginnings of Charismatic Renewal in a Country (presentation to First International Leader’s Conference, Grottaferrata, Italy). Donald Gee Research Centre, Fountain Trust collection. Box 1. Smith, B. (1973b). Charismatic Renewal in the Catholic Church. Newsletter (for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal), August, pp. 5–7, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Smith, B. (1975). Report from Papua-New Guinea. New Covenant, 4(11), p. 18. Smith, B. (2000). Streams of Living Water: autobiography of a charismatic leader. Melbourne: Comsoda Communications. Whitney, J. (1974). The Charismatic Renewal – What’s it All About? National Newsletter (serving the charismatic renewal throughout Australia and the Pacific), November, pp. 16–19. UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. Wuthnow, R., and Offutt, S. (2008). Transnational Religious Connections. Sociology of Religion, 69(2), pp. 209–232.



The Following Sources, from the Brisbane Newsletter, but without Authors or Titles were also Cited

No author. (1973). Newsletter (For the Catholic Charismatic Renewal). May, p. 17, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1.

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No author. (1973). Newsletter ( for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal). June, p. 11, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1. No author. (1973). Newsletter ( for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal). July, p. 14–15, UNDA, CROG, box 8 folder 1.

Chapter 4

Strong Church or Niche Market? The Demography of the Pentecostal Church in Australia Andrew Singleton 1 Introduction In the spring of 1996 I interviewed a large number of Pentecostal and charismatic young adults for my doctoral dissertation. My research examined the ways in which young people told stories about their significant religious experiences. To collect data, I recruited informants from various religious clubs at my university, and found these young adults more than willing to share their stories. I heard about things that many people in the wider Australian society would regard as anomalous or outlandish: narratives about learning to speak in tongues, encounters with evil spirits, and examples of miraculous healings. “Robert,” for example, told me about how his 19-year-old friend had been healed of jawbone cancer following the prayers of people at his church (see Singleton, 2001). “Jane” told me about the first time she spoke in tongues; this occurred on a weekend Bible camp (see Singleton, 2002). Many of these young adults also told me stories about the time they were “baptised in the Holy Spirit”. At the time, several things struck me about these Pentecostal and charismatic young adults. Each described a vibrant personal faith, grounded in direct religious experiences. Moreover, and perhaps contrary to the stereotypical view of Pentecostals, they were not from the margins of society. They were pursuing higher education and seeking professional employment. It was also clear to me, given their numbers and breadth of activities on campus, that Pentecostalism was not a religious curiosity but something much more substantial. It represented a branch of the church that had large congregations and engaged and committed young people. This trend was largely confirmed by the first wave of the Australian National Church Life Survey, which was conducted around this time (Kaldor et al., 1994, 1999). A few of these young adults were children of the Pentecostal movement and had Pentecostal parents. They had been raised Pentecostal, and had remained loyal to this kind of church through their tumultuous teenage years. Most of

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those I interviewed had joined the movement in their late teens, having been raised in the mainline Protestant or Catholic traditions. They had been looking for a more dynamic style of church than that offered by the denominations in which they had been raised. One or two were complete converts to Christianity, having come to Pentecostalism in their late teens. No matter how they arrived there, they felt Pentecostalism was the most viable religious option in the mid-1990s. In the decades up to this point, Pentecostalism had transitioned from a fringe religious curiosity to a major religious movement with many of Australia’s largest congregations. Today, some 20 years after I interviewed the students, Pentecostalism remains one of the most popular Christian options among young adults (see Mason, Singleton & Webber, 2007). Churches like Riverview in Perth, Influencers Church in Adelaide and Planetshakers in Melbourne draw enormous congregations each weekend. Hillsong in Sydney remains Australia’s largest single congregation and now has chapters in other Australian cities and internationally. By contrast, the mainline Protestant denominations for the most part struggle to attract young adults, and have ageing congregations (see Bouma, 2006; Singleton, 2014). And while adherence amongst Catholics remains reasonably consistent across all age groups, most young Catholics do not attend regularly (see Mason, Singleton & Webber, 2007). For those who study religion in Australia none of this is news. However, this is only part of the contemporary Pentecostal story. Many of those who joined the Pentecostal movement in the 1960s and ’70s have left. They have been replaced by a younger generation of Pentecostals, many of whom are migrants or the children of migrants. It is now a religious movement characterised by great cultural diversity, perhaps more than any other Christian denomination or movement in Australia. This chapter explores this transformation, using a range of data that charts the changing demographic profile of Pentecostalism in Australia. It argues that the Pentecostals have prospered not only because of their worship style, politics and philosophies, but because they have connected with particular segments of the changing Australian community. Their success is due to both their religious activities and wider, global religious forces. This chapter begins with methodological considerations. This is important because counting Pentecostals in the census and surveys is not without problems. Next, I document the rise of Pentecostalism in Australia, particularly its boom period from the late 1960s. From there I examine the contemporary demographic characteristics of the Pentecostal movement in Australia. I show how it has become a more culturally diverse movement in a short span of time.

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This analysis of census and survey data clearly shows the Pentecostal movement in Australia continues to evolve and adapt. 2

Counting Pentecostals in Australia

For this chapter, I use two main sources of demographic data on Australia’s Pentecostal community. These are the Australian Census for various years, and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (hilda). Outside of the National Church Life Survey (ncls), these are the only reliable national-level sources of data on Pentecostals. Other surveys in Australia collect data on religion, including the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (Aussa) and the World Values Survey (wvs). Unfortunately, the latter two survey programs have small sample sizes and one cannot make accurate estimates about Pentecostals because so few are included in their samples. The excellent ncls has collected data from Pentecostal denominations and churches for more than two decades. These data, however, are restricted to church attenders only, and not every Pentecostal congregation participates. Using more widespread survey programs enables us to see how Pentecostals figure in Australia’s broader religious firmament. In this chapter, I use census data from the 1981 to 2016 censuses inclusive. For some of the more in-depth analysis, I use the 1% census sample file from 2011. This is a random selection of cases from the census. It is extremely accurate, with acceptable margin of errors around all the estimates I make. I use it because it allows for superior data manipulation compared to the regular census data that are available. At the time of writing a census sample file for 2016 is not yet available. The second data source I use is Wave 14 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (2014). The hilda is a national, longitudinal survey program that collects data from more than 15,000 people. It periodically asks questions about religious identification, attendance at services of worship and religious salience (how important religion is to a person; its place in their daily life). While not as accurate as the Australian census – the number of Pentecostals it counts is much smaller – it is still accurate enough for some robust conclusions to be made about the religious lives of Pentecostals in Australia. There are some important methodological issues to consider when it comes to measuring Pentecostals in surveys and the census. The Australian census only asks about religious identification. Religious identification is a subjective assessment of how people see themselves, whether they count themselves

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“­ belonging” in a broader sense to a religious tradition, religious movement or a denomination. Unfortunately, religious affiliation is only one small measure of a person’s religious commitments. Declared religious affiliation cannot tell us about the salience of these ties, nor does it provide a clue about everyday religiosity (this is better measured with a metric combining religious practice and belief) (Singleton, 2014, p. 72). Furthermore, what people understand by “adherence” or “affiliation” to a “religion” is also a complex issue (see Wuthnow, 2015). For some, to belong to a religious tradition is to be a participating member of a congregation, mosque or temple. For others, including the majority of Australians, it is a loose, sometimes affective link to a religious tradition. Nonetheless, examining religious identity or adherence is a useful way of mapping religious change over time and for understanding the vibrancy of a particular religious community or group. Another important issue is how groups are counted. Depending on the group, affiliation is counted differently. The major religions, those with no religion and several historically large Christian denominations (e.g. Anglicans, Catholics) each have their own “tick-a-box” in the Australian census and the hilda questionnaire. This is not true of Pentecostals writ large, or Pentecostal denominations such as the Australian Christian Churches (acc) or the Foursquare Gospel Church. These adherents have to write something in for themselves. The acc made a concerted effort prior to the 2016 Census encouraging its members to specify that they are “Pentecostal” as opposed to being a member of a particular Pentecostal denomination. This message was communicated to its member churches on the acc website, under a news item “Let Your Faith Count”. The website noted: “Together, let’s make a collective effort to be counted and recognised as a strong influence in our nation.” Hillsong in Sydney also asked its members to identify in the census as Pentecostal. In broader reports and data releases the Australian Bureau of Statistics counts people who nominate themselves as members of a Pentecostal denomination, like the Foursquare Gospel Church simply as “Pentecostal.” For all of this, it is likely that census and survey counts of Pentecostals are too low and do not give us the full picture of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement in Australia. In the past, there has been some anecdotal evidence that some Pentecostals have been reluctant to nominate their religion (see Bouma, 2006). There may also be ambiguity around the label itself. Not every person who acts in ways that are identifiably Pentecostal, such as speaking in tongues or claiming to have been baptised in Holy Spirit, will see that label as applicable to them. A graduate student of mine comes from sub-Saharan Africa and happily describes himself as Pentecostal. He recently made the observation to me that many members of his church in Australia did not think of

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themselves as Pentecostal in the same way that he did. He said they saw themselves as members of his particular independent church, which just happened to be Pentecostal in its style. For him, however, to be Pentecostal was an important part of his religious identity, mainly due to his experiences in his country of origin. Additionally, people may identify as “charismatic” but declare their religious identification as something else. The term charismatic applies to individuals and groups within larger mainstream denominations who are either favourably disposed towards the Pentecostal experiences or have these experiences themselves. In Australia charismatic congregations, small groups and individuals can be found in the Anglican, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran and Churches of Christ denominations, amongst others. For these reasons, some data-­collecting organisations and social scientists prefer the term umbrella “Renewalist” to cover both Charismatics and Pentecostals (e.g. Pew Forum, 2006). There is also considerable debate around the very definitions of Pentecostalism. Scholars of Pentecostalism note the incredible diversity worldwide among Pentecostals, and the diffuse movements encompassed by the term (see Anderson, 2004; Yong, 2010). This includes established denominations, house churches and independent congregations. One also finds references in the scholarly literature to distinctions between “Classic Pentecostalism” and “Neo-Pentecostalism.” Given this, Pentecostal theologian Amos Young, for example, prefers to spell Pentecostalism with a lower case “p” to signify the broadness of this movement. In sum, counts of Pentecostals are an indicative rather than exhaustive measure of participation in the Australian Pentecostal and charismatic movement. In this chapter, I analyse data from people who identify themselves – or have been classified – as Pentecostals in the hilda or census. In a sense, these are people who identify with a broader religious movement, one which is not as clearly demarcated as membership of a Christian denomination, like the Methodist or Catholic churches. Nonetheless, we can reasonably infer that these are people who accept the central doctrinal elements of Pentecostalism: belief in the “gifts of the spirit” (e.g. speaking in tongues, miraculous healing), and the doctrine of “baptism in the Holy Spirit”, and as I show below, almost certainly attend a Pentecostal church. 3

The Establishment, Growth and Consolidation of the Pentecostal Church in Australia

This section charts the growth of Pentecostalism in Australia. It is not intended to serve as an exhaustive narrative history of the movement; this has been

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done elsewhere (see Chant, 1984, 2011; Miller, 2015). Briefly, the Australian Pentecostal movement really started to grow following the seminal Azusa St Revival in Los Angeles, although its antecedents can be traced back even further than that (see Chant, 1984, 2011). From the 1920s there were Pentecostal revivals in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland (Hutchinson, 2009, p. 519). The first peak body of Australian Pentecostal churches, The Assemblies of God, was founded in 1937. It is difficult to quantify precisely how many Pentecostals there were prior to World War ii, as census reports of this era do not list Pentecostals among the Christian adherents. The official 1933 census, for example, counted groups such as the Christian Scientists and the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) but not Pentecostals. Nonetheless, the Pentecostals were an important presence in Australia’s religious scene. The Pentecostal movement began to expand decisively in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Chant, 2011; Hutchinson, 2009; Miller, 2015). This is also the case in other Western nations, and coincided with the emergence of the charismatic renewal movement that swept the Protestant and Catholic denominations (Fiddes, 1984). This is a period of great historical significance for both church and society. It is widely agreed that the 1960s and early 1970s – termed the “long 1960s” by some scholars of religion – was a social turning point in countries and regions like Western Europe, Australia, Great Britain, Canada and New Zealand (see McLeod, 2007). It was a time of tumultuous social change, as evidenced by the civil rights and peace movements, the second wave feminist movement, and the availability of the Pill. Churches were not immune to the reforming spirit of the age; Vatican ii was a concerted effort by the Catholic Church to modernise (see Singleton, 2014). Around this time the Jesus People movement began in the United States (see Eskridge, 2013). The Jesus People movement offered a new musical expression of faith, folding a Christian message into contemporary rock and folk music genres. They pioneered the praise music style that has proved so critical to the Pentecostal movement’s success (Eskridge, 2013). Influential “charismatic” churches, such as the Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard churches grew from the Jesus People movement (Eskridge, 2013). More generally, the Jesus People movement’s concerns and ambitions overlapped with those of the Pentecostal movement. Both proposed a more “authentic,” less doctrinal and liturgical approach to religious worship and practice. Such a popularising approach fitted with the sensibilities of the time, in which young people were increasingly turning away from the style of the traditional churches (Brown, 2014; Putnam & Campbell, 2010). There is insufficient data available to properly quantify the growth of the Australian Pentecostal movement from the 1950s to mid-1970s, however, it is worth noting that in Great Britain, the number of Pentecostal churches and congregations grew by 123% between 1950 and 1980 (Field, 2017,

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p. 186). By the end of the 1970s, Pentecostalism in Australia had transitioned from a small-scale crusade to major church movement. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (abs) first reported on Pentecostals in 1976, counting 38,393 Pentecostals, approximately 0.3% of the population. Across the next two decades they experienced their most decisive period of growth and expansion in Australia. By 1996 they had grown to 174,720 adherents, which represented 1% of the Australian population. Put another way, the number of Pentecostals had grown by 355% in just two decades from the mid-1970s. Why did the Pentecostal movement grow? Most scholars agree that the growth between the 1970s to the late 1980s is a combination of church-related and broader social factors. Pentecostalism is a dynamic and appealing form of religion: it is contemporary, alive and energetic. This is often in contrast to the staid, liturgical and traditional styles found in the mainline churches. As noted above, the widespread use of contemporary gospel music was critical to Pentecostalism’s appeal (Cox, 1995; Beyer, 2006; Miller & Yamamori, 2007). Preachers taught about the reality of supernatural intervention in everyday life, and many Pentecostal churches offered the prospect of miraculous healing, widely practised in the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions (see Singleton, 2001). It is also true that successful individual congregations within mainline Protestant traditions tend to be those that have either charismatic elements or are evangelical in style. This approach to religious practice attracted “switchers” to Pentecostalism from the mainline denominations, particularly those Protestant denominations that were experiencing decline (Kaldor et al., 1999). This pattern has occurred not just in Australia, but also globally, no more so than in the Global South (see Jenkins, 2002; Pew Forum, 2006; Coleman, 2000). Other broader social and demographic shifts seemingly assisted Pentecostalism’s cause in its boom period. Pentecostal congregations were easily able to grow in the fast-expanding suburbs of the major cities, a tribute to the adaptability and flexibility of the Pentecostal movement (see Singleton, 2014). This often began with the renting out of a school hall or community centre as the first space of worship for a new congregation. As the congregation grew, new and larger spaces were financed. From often humble beginnings, the Pentecostals were able construct so-called “mega-churches.” The Hillsong Church in Baulkham Hills is an important example of this. This less bureaucratic, ­independent approach to church planting and growth effectively superseded the cumbersome parish system found amongst the mainline Protestant ­nominations – one which could be easily implemented in smaller colonial ­cities, but not so when attendances were stagnating and resources becoming scarcer (see Akehurst, 2013). This is less true for the Catholics, who are g­ enerally .

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better resourced and have an education system that has provided schools (and accompanying parishes) in the expanding suburbs. Similar processes occurred in regional towns around Australia. Since the late 1980s, the Pentecostal movement has stopped growing in any meaningful way and has instead maintained its “market share.” Figure 1 shows the proportion of the Australian population who have identified as Pentecostal in the Australian census since 1986. This chart also shows the other major Australian denominations, along with those who claim to have no religion. It demonstrates clearly the fortunes of different religious groups across this period of time. This chart shows that the proportion of the population who identify as Pentecostal has remained steady across the past three decades. While the absolute number of Pentecostals grew from 219,689 in 2006 to 260,558 in 2016, their proportion in the population has remained effectively the same. In other words, their numerical growth is consistent with the general population growth. They did experience an enormous dip in 2001, mainly because the Assemblies of God changed their name to the Australian Christian Churches and encouraged its members to write that on the census rather than to identify as Pentecostal. In that census, the abs did not count members of the Australian Christian Churches as Pentecostals. Now if a person identifies as being a member of the 35 30 25 Catholic Anglican World Religions No Religion Pentecostal

20 15 10 5 0

1986

Figure 1

1996

2006

2016

Australian Population: religious identification by census collection year Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics census data for various years

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Australian Christian Churches they are counted as “Pentecostal” by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. By contrast, the overall proportion of the population identifying as Christian has declined decisively since the 1980s. Much of this loss has come from the mainline Protestant denominations, particularly the Anglican Church. Concomitantly, the proportion of those who claim no religious affiliation – the “nones” – has increased dramatically, and now represents some 30% of the population. The nones are now the single largest grouping among “religious” categories (i.e. Catholic; Anglican etc.). The proportion of the population that identifies with other world religions has grown markedly, and now represents 8.2% of the population. There is little doubt about the pronounced vitality of this religious movement compared to other Christian denominations and groups. Moreover, the broader Pentecostal community, unlike other mainline Protestant or Catholic denominations, exhibits a stronger relationship between religious identity, practice and salience. For the absolute majority of adherents, to be Pentecostal is to be actively religious. This can be demonstrated using the hilda dataset. In order to measure religious salience (what religion means to a person), the 2014 hilda asked respondents: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how important is religion in your life”, with 10 being the most important. Table 1 compares mean scores on this item for Pentecostals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, those who follow world religions (e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism) and the nones. As can be seen from Table 1, Pentecostals report much higher levels of religious salience (importance of faith in everyday life) than Catholics or mainline Protestants. All of the differences between groups are statistically significant (that is, the differences between scores are unlikely to have occurred by chance or sampling error). The high mean (average) score for Pentecostals (8.80) shows that the majority of them rate their faith as particularly important to their lives. Pentecostals rate their faith as far more important than other major denominations and groups; indeed, twice as much as the Anglicans or Catholics. Not surprisingly, this high level of religious salience is accompanied by regular attendance at services of worship. According to the hilda data, 92% of those who identify as Pentecostal have fairly regular or very regular attendance at services of worship (more than a few times per year). This is in contrast to the Catholics, with only 42% claiming regular or semi-regular attendance. It is even lower still among the mainline Protestants, with only 31% of adherents

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Australians (Ages 15+): Importance of Religion in Life by Denomination (Mean Score for each Group)

Denomination

Mean Score

PENTECOSTAL WORLD RELIGIONS (inc. Islam; Hinduism, Buddhism) CATHOLIC MAINLINE PROTESTANT NO RELIGION Total respondents

8.80 6.36 4.72 4.23 0.72 N=14,748

Source: 2 014 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey

maintaining some kind of regular or semi-regular attendance. To put it another way, Pentecostals are three times more likely the mainline Protestants to attend regularly; and more than twice as likely as Catholics to do so. Only four people who identify as Pentecostals in the hilda dataset say that they never attend services of worship. Neither the mainline Protestants or Catholics can rely on their adherents to attend regularly or to rate their faith as important in their lives. This has proved particularly deleterious for the mainline Protestant dominations, who have experienced the most substantial decline in affiliation since the 1970s. This is different for the Pentecostals. There is little doubt that their success is due in large part to the defined relationship between affiliation and other religious practices. This is a community of adherents who practise their religion with vigour and commitment and represent the very strongest of Christian communities in Australia. This marks them as different to other mainstream denominations and Christian traditions in Australia, who are constituted by a mix of those who attend and those who maintain an affiliation for other reasons, whether that is tradition or culture. The Pentecostals’ characteristics are more like those of a sect (as this is conventionally understood in the sociology of religion), groups like the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Christadelphians and Brethren, whose members largely express their commitment through participation (see Stark & Finke, 2000). In sum, the Pentecostals have prospered since the 1960s because of their worship style, politics and philosophies, and because they have connected

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with particular segments of the changing Australian community, those that still seek something from church. They now represent an established and ­stable group in Australia’s changing religious mosaic. However, this is not the whole story. The external appearance of growth and stability obscures a large change that is taking place within the Pentecostal movement. A closer look at the demographics of the contemporary Pentecostal community reveals that this religious group, perhaps more than any other, embodies the intersection between global change and local religion. 4

The Contemporary Pentecostal Community: Stability and Change

In this section, I explore the demographics of the contemporary Pentecostal community. I concentrate mainly on the age profile and country of birth of the Pentecostals, comparing them to other religious traditions on these measures. It is generally accepted that Pentecostalism is a style of Christian practice, belief and theology particularly attractive to young people. This is substantiated by the data. Figure 2 presents the age profile of Pentecostals using census data from 2011 (as noted above, 2011 is selected for this particular comparison because the detailed 2016 data are not yet released). It compares this with other denominations and traditions. I examine the age profile of these groups by focusing on the different birth cohorts (also described as “generations”) found in each denomination or grouping. For ease of reference, each birth cohort is 100%

1% 7%

90%

4%

16%

80%

26%

2% 5%

1% 4%

21%

21% AGE GROUPS OLDEST b. before 31

26%

70% 60%

31%

21%

50%

23%

26%

20%

40% 23%

30%

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18% 20%

20%

26%

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14% 23%

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Figure 2

15%

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20% WORLD RELIGIONS

Australian Population 2011: age groups by religious tradition (% of Religious Group) Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics census sample file 2011

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given a name: i.e. “Boomers” or “Generation X.” The dating and naming of these birth cohorts largely follows conventions established in a series of reports by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (abs, 2004; 2006). These data show Pentecostals are comprised mainly of Baby Boomers, Generations X and Y, and Millennials. This is a similar age profile to the world religions (such as Islam Hinduism and Buddhism), and the nones. All three of these groups are dominated by members of the younger generations. Remarkably, two thirds of Pentecostals are born after 1967. Contrast this with the mainline Protestant denominations: less than half of them were born after 1967. Since the late 1970s, the Pentecostal movement has drawn most of its members from the younger birth cohorts. Increasingly, however, it is appealing to people who are young and are migrants, or the children of migrants. I suggest that it is this fact more than any other that has sustained the church in the past decade. This point requires some explanation. In 1981, more than two thirds of Pentecostals were born after 1947. This is not surprising, as the 1981 census captured all of those Baby Boomers (and their young children) who had come to Pentecostalism in the 1970s, that period of rapid expansion for the Pentecostal movement. In effect, its major expansion in Australia through the 1970s was built on Boomer affiliation. However, many of the Boomers who came to the Pentecostal movement in these decades have left for all time, and been replaced by others, many of whom are migrants, and their children. This is evidenced in part by the current age profile of the Pentecostals, dominated now by members of Generation X, Y and Millennials. It is also clear if we look at the changing cultural profile of Australia’s Pentecostal community. Figure 3 compares the changing cultural profile of four major groups: Pentecostals, Catholics, those with no religion and the largest of the mainline Protestant denominations, the Anglicans. It is here we see a change that has occurred among the Pentecostals, and almost no one else. This figure shows the proportion of each denomination or group who was born overseas from 1981 until the latest census in 2016. In 1981 about a quarter of all Catholics were born overseas. In 2016 about the same proportion of Catholics were born overseas. However, it is a different story for the Pentecostals. In 1981 about a quarter of all Pentecostals were born overseas. This remained fairly stable until 2001. Between 2001 and 2016 the proportion of Pentecostals born overseas increased rapidly, so that by 2016 36% of all Pentecostals were born overseas. No other group has experienced such a profound shift in its demographic composition. Additionally, a substantial proportion of Australian-born Pentecostals have either a mother, father or both

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% of denom. who are born overseas

35 30 25

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ANGLICAN NO RELIGION

15 10 5 0

1 3 5 7 9 1 3 5 7 9 1 3 5 7 9 11 3 5 198 198 198 198 198 199 199 199 199 199 200 200 200 200 200 20 201 201 YEAR

Figure 3

Religious Identification by Place of Birth by Year Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics cenus data for various years

­ arents born overseas. Pentecostals are more likely than Catholics, Anglicans p and those with no religion to have one or both parents born overseas. Pentecostalism in Australia is thus profoundly affected by migration, and broader global trends. As evidenced by abundant research, the Pentecostal movement has grown globally, especially throughout the Global South (Anderson, 2004; Cox, 1995; Jenkins, 2002; Johnson & Grim, 2013; Kalu, 2008; Pew Forum, 2006). It is the fastest, or one of the fastest-growing Christian movements throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. It is now the dominant strand of Protestantism in many nations (remembering that the Latin American countries and the Philippines are majority Catholic), having overtaken other more established Protestant denominations. For example, in present-day Brazil, which has a majority Catholic population, about seven out of ten Protestants are Pentecostals, while in Kenya, which has a majority Protestant population, about 50% of Protestants are Pentecostals (Pew Forum, 2006, p. 4). This global growth is impacting Australia’s religious life, in much the same way that Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism have grown here too. Pentecostals are migrating from around the world and join or form Pentecostal churches once they arrive in Australia. Australian Pentecostals who are born overseas come from many locations, however, the largest groups are those from sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania (including New Zealand). These regions have been

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­ rofoundly affected by Pentecostalism. In 2016, approximately 15% of all Ausp tralian Pentecostals were born in one of these two regions. In a sense, these people typify what Bouma (1996) describes as “religious settlement,” the processes by which migrants bring their faith with them from one country to another. In Australia, we see Pentecostal migrants enriching established Pentecostal churches. We also see the establishment of wholly migrant community churches, or Australian branches of overseas congregations (see Figures 4 & 5). Figures 4 and 5 show two migrant churches in Melbourne’s inner city. These were founded to meet both the cultural and religious needs of migrants from one country (in this case, Peru and Nigeria), and to nurture specific transnational religious networks. Both of these churches were founded in the country of origin and thus have extended their mission to expatriates in the host country. Services are in familiar languages, and there is less interest in expanding their mission to those outside the cultural community. By contrast, other Pentecostal migrants are less committed to a transnational church and thus seek out a new congregation on arrival, joining in with others from a range of

Figure 4

Peruvian-Based Pentecostal Church in West Footscray, Vic Source: The Author

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Nigerian-Founded Redeemed Christian Church in Kensington, Vic Source: The Author

c­ ultural backgrounds. Established Pentecostal churches sometimes offer services in languages other than English, but this is not a given. Further, the increasingly irreligious Global North is a particular focus of the missionary activity of Pentecostal churches in the Global South. We see the phenomenon of “reverse mission,” where missionaries are sent to the Global North to conduct mission work (see Jenkins, 2007; Dennis, 2017). The Foursquare Gospel Church in png, for example, have sent missionaries not only to neighbouring Pacific nations but to nearby Australia as well (see Singleton, 2014). 5 Conclusion This chapter has explored the changing demographic characteristics of Pentecostalism in Australia. Perhaps more than any other Christian movement, save for the Mormon church and Asian evangelical churches, Pentecostalism has prospered in Australia in recent decades, its fortunes bolstered somewhat by the recent migration of people from countries where Pentecostalism is a major religious movement. The title of this chapter asks whether it is a strong church or simply represents a niche market, reaching out to those who still seek faith in contemporary Australia. In a sense, it is both. As illustrated by the hilda data, its adherents maintain the strongest levels of religious belief and practice amongst all Christian adherents. However, a declining proportion of people in

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Australia are interested in practising the Christian faith, and the larger “market” for Christianity has shrunk in recent decades. The notion that the Pentecostal movement can grow significantly or maintain their current level by appealing to the religiously disaffected or the nones is not supported by the data. Indeed, many of the Baby Boomers who came to the movement in the 1970s and 1980s are no longer Pentecostals. This strong form of religion does not appeal to secular Australians. It seems unlikely that any Christian movement can alter Australia’s broader secular trajectory. Rather, Pentecostalism is the religion of choice for particular segments of the changing Australian community, including recent migrants, and the children of recent migrants. Australia’s religious life, more than any other time, is shaped by global religious forces, and Pentecostalism aptly illustrates this. 5.1 Note This research uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (hilda) Survey. The hilda Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this research, however, are those of the author and should not be attributed to either Fahcsia or the Melbourne Institute. References Akehurst, C. (2013). The Decline of the Suburban Church, Quadrant, 57(12), pp. 51–56. Anderson, A. (2004). An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (1981; 1991; 2001; 2011). Census of Population and Housing, Basic CURF, CD-Rom. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2004). Australian social trends. Canberra: ABS, cat no. 4102.0. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2006). A picture of the nation. Canberra: ABS, cat no. 2070.0. Beyer, P. (2006). Religions in Global Society. London: Routledge. Bouma, G.D. (1996). Religious settlement: religion and the migration process. In: G. Bouma ed., Many Religions, all Australian: Religious Settlement, Identity and Cultural Diversity. Kew: Christian Research Association. pp. 45–65.

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Bouma, G.D. (2006). Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Brown, C. (2014). Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s. Wooodbridge: Boydell Press. Chant, B. (1984). Heart of Fire: The story of Australian Pentecostalism. Unley Park: House of Tabor. Chant, B. (2011). The Spirit of Pentecost: The Origins and Development of the Pentecostal Movement in Australia, 1870–1939. Lexington, KY: Emeth Press Coleman, S. (2000). The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, H. (1995). Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Reading, MA: Perseus Books. Dennis, D. (2017). Travelling with the Spirit: Pentecostal Migration Religiosity Between Ghana and Australia. PhD Thesis: Victoria University of Wellington. Available from http://hdl.handle.net/10063/6185 [Accessed 22 June 2017]. Eskridge, L. (2013). God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America. New York: OUP. Fiddes, P. (1984). The Theology of the Charismatic Movement. In: D. Martin and P. Mullen eds., Strange Gifts, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 19–40. Field, C. (2017). Secularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain. Oxford: OUP. Hutchinson, M. (2009). Pentecostals. In: J. Jupp ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion in Australia. Melbourne: CUP, pp. 516–523. Jenkins, P. (2002). The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, P. (2007). God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, T. & Grim, B. (2013). The World’s Religion in Figures: An Introduction to International Religious Demography. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kaldor, P., Bellamy, J., Powell, R., Castle, K. and Hughes, B. (1994). The Winds of Change. Sydney: Lancer Books. Kaldor, P., Dixon, R., and Powell, R. (1999). Taking Stock: A Profile of Australian Church Attenders. Adelaide: Openbook. Kalu, O. (2008). African Pentecostalism: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLeod, H. (2007). The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mason, M., Singleton, A., and Webber, R. (2007). The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia. Melbourne: John Garratt Publishing. Miller, D., and Yamamori, T. (2007). Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Miller, E. (2015). A Planting of the Lord: Contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in Australia. PhD Thesis: University of Sydney. Available from: Sydney Digital Theses. [Accessed 25 May 2017]. Pew Forum (Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life). (2006). Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Putnam, R. and Campbell, D. (2010). American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon and Schuster. Singleton, A. (2001). Your faith has made you well: the role of storytelling in the experience of miraculous healing. Review of Religious Research, 43(2), pp. 121–138. Singleton, A. (2002). The importance of narrative in negotiating otherworldly experiences: the case of speaking in tongues, Narrative Inquiry, 12(2), pp. 353–375. Singleton, A. (2014). Religion, Culture and Society: A Global Approach. London: Sage. Stark, R., and Finke, R. (2000). Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wuthnow, R. (2015). Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith. New York: Oxford University Press. Yong, A. (2010). In The Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism And Political Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Part 2 Home-grown Australian pcms

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Chapter 5

A Match Made in Heaven: Why Popular Music is Central to the Growth in Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities Daniel Thornton 1 Introduction Few things define Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities (pcc) as much as their musical worship. While in recent times many broader evangelical and conservative denominations have adopted songs and performative elements of pcc worship, its origins and much of its driving force still come from pcc churches. Contemporary congregational songs (elsewhere called “praise and worship” or contemporary worship music)1 emerged in the charismatic renewal of the 1960s and 1970s. The “Jesus people” of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and David and Dale Garrett from New Zealand, were two notable sources of a new style of congregational song that quickly spread not only through pentecostal-charismatic2 movements, but well beyond. Commercial albums were developed from the recordings of those early “choruses,” and an extension of the popular music industry soon formed around this new worship music along with its consumerism and commodification, and a conspicuous growth in the pentecostal-charismatic churches promulgating them. Recent Australian National Church Life Survey data supports previously anecdotal evidence that the pcc worship style and the accompanying worship experience significantly contributed to the growth of such churches (Thornton, 2016, pp. 239–240). pcc growth connected to its choice of musical worship has resulted in a widespread acceptance and appropriation of the genre across scores of den­ ominations. While it may not be with the explicit motive of gaining the growth 1 “Praise and Worship” or “Contemporary Worship Music” are the more popular terms for this genre. However, I have theological and semantic issues with both of these terms which I have outlined elsewhere (Thornton, 2016, pp. 3–6, 16–21). 2 “pentecostal-charismatic” (with a lower case “p”) is the term Ingalls chooses to identify the origins of contemporary worship music and practices (Ingalls and Yong, 2015, p. 4). It deemphasises the Pentecostal denominational implications and alludes rather to the orientations of churches that initially produced and popularised this genre/style of congregational worship. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004425798_007

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observed among pcc, such churches self-consciously choose contemporary congregational songs (ccs) which are relevant to believers and engage them in an authentic musical worship (Thornton, 2016, pp. 239–245). At the same time, the use of ccs has sparked countless ecclesial battles over the nature of corporate worship, and the nature of music itself. The resulting “worship wars” of the 1990s have been well documented (Dawn, 1995; Dawn and Taylor, 2003; Galli, 2011; Nekola, 2009; Thorngate, n.d.). Fortunately, in more recent times, much of the literature is examining pcc worship practices as they exist, rather than whether they should exist. The current literature also tends to focus on specific instances and contexts of contemporary worship (Ingalls and Yong, 2015; Ingalls, 2008; Jennings, 2014; Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner, 2013). However, in order to examine the broad growth of pcc in Australian contexts, this chapter analyses pcc worship practices as a whole – a musical genre – rather than an individual church’s application of those practices. In so doing, it identifies features and values of secular popular music as they have been appropriated by pcc, as well as noting the ways in which aspects of popular music are contested, negotiated, or reenvisaged. In conclusion, this chapter will demonstrate how ccs produces an authentic vernacular expression of worship for a growing number of contemporary Western(ised) Christians. 2

Contemporary Congregational Songs

It is impossible to explore every song within the contemporary congregational song genre. Christian Copyright Licensing International (ccli), the central licensing body for churches utilising ccs, represent around half a million songs. Thus, a representative sample for analysis is required. The 25 most sung ccs (in Australia), found in Appendix A, are that sample. However, even though that list is based on reliable sources at the time – ccli royalty reporting data and popularity in YouTube (Thornton, 2016, pp. 66–76) – it is no longer current. Older songs are constantly being replaced by the latest ccs in pcc churches, just as new songs perpetually displace old songs on the secular popular music charts. Of course, such practices are as much industry driven as they are consumer driven. These new ccs, although utilised in churches, take 6–12 months to appear in the ccli charts. Despite the aging songs under analysis, further aged by the publication timeline process, “top songs” lists over the last two decades reveal that charting ccs are more stable than equivalent secular popular music charts. Seventeen of the top 25 have remained on that list for at least seven years. In fact, 15 of the top 25 (60%) are over 10 years old, and the oldest song, How Deep The Father’s Love is over 25 years old. Finally, even when

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songs slip from the top 25, on the whole they remain in the top 100 for decades. Therefore, while this analysis is based on only a snapshot of the genre, it is still indicative of the genre over at least the last 25 years. A theomusicological3 and media studies analysis was undertaken with regard to these most sung songs (Thornton, 2016, pp. 89–212). Building on that initial research, the following section explores the alignment between ccs and secular popular music. It then examines the ways in which pcc worship and secular popular music are misaligned and how those misalignments are negotiated or reframed. 3

Points of Alignment

There are many musical, lyrical, and extra-musical points of alignment between secular popular music and contemporary congregational songs. This section takes a summary analysis of the ccs genre (based on the top 25 ccs as described above) and compares it to features of secular popular music. As one might expect, the greatest alignment can be seen in the musical components: however, it is not as simple a connection as one might expect. The current ccs genre is marked by songs written/co-written by predominantly male singer-songwriters since 2009. Secular popular music is much more current, and slightly less singer-songwriter oriented (depending on the sub-genre), but still highly skewed towards male songwriters (Cunningham et al., 2010; Throsby and Zednik, 2010). The older average age of ccs is due to a slower turnover of songs in (mostly) non-Pentecostal churches as well as perennial favourites, such as How Great Thou Art, which are still in copyright, and thus reported to ccli. ccs, like secular popular music, are recorded by artists who have high-profile digital and physical platforms (including industry financial backing and marketing). For ccs, these platforms may include prominence at large churches, cross/non-denominational conferences, touring, and/ or popular online social mediums. Such prominence initiates the momentum required to seed the song across enough churches and denominations for it to start to register on ccli charts, not dissimilar to the way in which secular platforms are used to generate initial sales to propel secular popular music to the

3 This term was first coined by Spencer (1991) and is a paradigm for marrying the disciplines of theology and musicology, whereby theology informs musicological methods, and musicology informs theological methods.

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Australian Recording Industry Association (aria) charts.4 Unique to ccs, however, is that writers are identifiably connected to a local church context. ccs are predominantly recorded in a live worship context, typically with electric guitar(s), acoustic guitar(s), keyboard(s), bass, drums and lead vocal/ backing vocals. This is an important feature of the genre, helping identify it as vernacular music, where the co-performance by the congregation is key, unlike secular popular music, where the primary concern is the artist’s performance. Like their secular counterparts, ccs will be commercially available and registered with a performing rights association (in this case, ccli). The majority of them will also be recorded on video and a version of this, or just as likely a fan created lyrics-with-background-pictures version uploaded to YouTube. Until the last couple of years, secular popular music industries were ahead of the ccs industry in adopting and promoting music through streaming services. ccs tend to be in white note Major keys and always contain chords i, iv and v with one or two extra chords added, often vi or ii. Secular popular music has a much larger contingent of songs in minor keys, although the harmonic content is almost identical. ccs are on average 6’16” long, with a tempo below 80bpm, and in 4/4 time. This is in contrast to secular popular music which on average is much faster, and shorter, although the 4/4 time prevails. As already mentioned, most ccs recordings are live, which means they contain not only the song itself, but extra elements of live worship practices, such as spontaneous singing sections (“free worship”), a spoken address, prayer or encouragement from the worship leader, and moments of “waiting on God.” All of these add additional time to the average song length. Furthermore, slower songs are more easily replicated in local church settings, as they do not require the level of production/instrumentation that is often a feature of faster songs. Thus, charting ccs are generally slower and longer than secular popular songs. ccs, like secular popular songs, are likely to have more than one Verse, a Chorus and either a Bridge and/or an Instrumental. ccs lyrics contain, on average, 123 words (without considering repeated sections), although it might be half or double that amount. While comparative secular data is sparse, ccs lyrics generally contain similar word counts, although not compared with wordheavy genres such as rap or hip-hop. ccs are likely to have a range of a P8ve somewhere between D4 and E5, with a tessitura around B4, and their melody will be made up of mostly small intervals. While secular popular music is also generally made up of smaller intervals, the range and tessitura are tailored for the artist, without consideration of the need for co-performance by the audience/congregation. Commercially recorded versions of ccs are also tailored to 4 aria charts are the equivalent of the usa’s Billboard charts.

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the artist/worship leader, however when applied to local settings, keys often vary. Importantly, ccs, like all popular music, contain some easily identifiable lyric hook, or instrumental riff that is reoccurring. 4

Somatic, Emotive, and Metaphysical

Another way in which ccs and secular popular music are aligned is along the axes of the somatic, emotive and metaphysical. The somatic nature of secular popular music is well researched (Hesmondhalgh, 2013, p. 29; Middleton, 1993; Whiteley, 2013). The bodily experience of popular music, and perhaps even more so of rock music, is central to its musical style. Drums are an obvious contributor to such “felt” music, but even in their absence, the predominant driving simple quadruple (4/4) time signature (or less frequently compound duple, 6/8), is performed and experienced physically. Scholars of contemporary congregational songs (ccs) have similarly observed this genre’s embodied qualities (Corbitt, 1998; Hawn, 2006, p. 24; Ingalls, 2008; Jennings, 2008; Ong, 2011; Wagner, 2013;). Such expressions invariably include singing, and standing, and might often also include clapping, dancing, moving, kneeling or foot-­ tapping.5 Some of these actions are explicit in many ccs lyrics, for example, “bow down,” “shout,” and “sing.” While dancing is less explicitly referenced in ccs lyrics, Corbitt, in fact, suggests that a “danceable” quality is fundamental to the genre (1998, p. 285). Such physical expressions of pentecostal-charismatic worship are also observable and exemplified by the live worship videos of the top ccs on YouTube (Thornton, 2016, p. 156). The emotive power of music, and in this case, popular music, is a wellestablished vein of scholarly inquiry. Frith (1998, p. 52) argues that the assessment of musical value is “its ability to take one out of oneself, offering intense experiences, an overwhelming mood”. Music not only has the power to affect people’s emotions (Levitin, 2011, p. 191), but people actively and consciously shape their lives through this trait. DeNora observes that music is part of a repertory of strategies people employ for “generating pleasure, creating occasion, and affirming self- and group identity” (2000, p. 16). One of the primary reasons people listen to popular music is because it elicits a desirable emotional response in them. pcc emotional worship is not only plainly observable, but actively constructed (Jennings, 2014, 2008), despite many conservative scholars voicing 5 It should be noted that such physical expressions of worship were also documented in the earliest accounts of Pentecostalism (Booker, 1988).

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concerns of the potential for emotionally charged music to manipulate worshipers. For example, Webber suggests that emotionally geared worship eventually wears thin, that people will ultimately tire of the “antics” (1996, p. 25). Johansson similarly accuses ccs of being “simplistic, pleasure-oriented, emotionalistic, intellectually weak and undisciplined”, finally stating that immaturity is the result of such a diet of songs (1992, p. 136). In the same vein, Abbington proposes that modern forms [of worship] involving “ecstasy,” volume, musical style and bodily engagement (that is to say, ccs) quickly become entertainment. He suggests that this becomes a downward spiral where those who are not taught the nature and theology of worship ultimately choose entertainment in worship’s place (2009). Although these voices are quite influential in the literature, there are others who come to different conclusions. Kallestad, for example, sarcastically counters with this statement, “if people actually enjoy the presentations and if they respond to entertaining music, then the programs must be artistic sell-outs; the audience is stupid, and the art critic knows what is best” (1996, p. 18). Whichever position is taken, ccs are undoubtedly created for emotional engagement (Jennings, 2014; Ong, 2011; Wagner, 2013). While the music itself contains emotive qualities, emotive language in ccs lyrics is explicit, including words such as “desperate,” “fear,” “hungry,” “joy,” “love,” “pain,” “peace,” and “suffering.”6 Music’s metaphysical attributes are often difficult to language, nevertheless they are well documented. Although not specifically addressing popular music, Nattiez observes that scholarship has limitations when attempting to engage with these elements of music (1990, pp. 104, 154). More succinctly, Walser states that, “it’s OK to write about music” (2003, p. 23), but that “music often seems not to require translation”. The unlanguable elements of music prompt such aphorisms as, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Scripture, however, frames the metaphysical power of music in terms of spiritual experience, influence, and authority. For example, according to 2 Kings 3:15, Christians read that Elisha knew that a musician would facilitate the prophetic utterance. In 1 Samuel 16, David played music that caused an evil spirit to leave King Saul. In the New Testament, the singing of hymns is aligned with a miraculous intervention in Acts 16:25–34. While some researchers (Evans, 2006; Jennings, 2014; Robinson, 2011) have attempted to engage with the transcendent attributes of worship music, metaphysical properties are often difficult to quantify within social science or musicological disciplines. Biblical concepts such as “the anointing,” “God’s manifest presence,” and “the glory of God” resist empirical discussion. Nevertheless, their subjectivity and intangibility should not discount their reality within the experience and understanding of pcc 6 These examples come directly from the representative sample of analysed ccs.

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worship. Despite the inadequacy of language to deal with the metaphysical qualities in music, ccs composers still attempt to articulate the divine encounter including lyrics such as “awestruck,” “mystery,” “overwhelms,” “Spirit,” “splendour,” and “things unseen.”7 It is worth noting that these elements of secular popular music and ccs also have parallel ideas in Pentecostal theology (Vondey and Mittelstadt, 2013, pp. 10–12; Warrington, 2008), which is one of the reasons Pentecostals have initiated and perpetuated this genre in their corporate musical worship. 5

Divergence from Popular Music

It should be clear by now that there is a great deal of alignment between pcc worship (utilising ccs) and secular popular music. However, to conflate secular popular music values and contexts with those of pcc worship is problematic. For example, popular music is generally performance-oriented, with the concentration on the artist/band, and while there is communal performance in much “stadium rock,” this is not its primary purpose. While ccs can be experienced simply as performed music with religious content, the nature of gathered believers worshiping is communal; gathered believers express their relationship with God through the singing of songs. This kind of musicking (Small, 1998) is thus perhaps better described as vernacular music, rather than popular music. Vernacular music is a relatively new scholarly term coined by Bruce Johnson (2000, p. 8) in examining music which is: largely generated at a local level and expresses the sense of the immediate, lived experience, of individual and collective regional identity. It includes ethnic, indigenous, folk, jazz, pub rock, and community and domestic music experience. The dictionary definition of the term – vernacular – indicates an everyday language spoken by a group of people. In the same way, vernacular music is indicative of music created for and by laypeople and reproduced physically, rather than just playing a recording or attending as an audience. Happy Birthday is sung at all manner of venues, by groups of people, to celebrate a birthday. Generally, all attending will sing, whether trained or untrained, whether musically gifted or completely tone deaf. At the football stadium, fans will spontaneously launch into their team’s anthem a cappella. People join in as 7 These examples are also taken directly from the representative list of analysed ccs.

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someone picks up a guitar at a home dinner gathering and starts to play “old favourites.” These are but a few examples of vernacular music. Evans argues that ccs are “essentially reflective of the immediate, lived experience of particular churches” (2006, p. 11) and thus fit within the vernacular music discourse. Therefore, it should be understood that although ccs carry many of the hallmarks of secular popular music, they are in fact a marriage of vernacular music and popular music. The distinction between popular music and vernacular music in pentecostalcharismatic worship can also be witnessed through features of performance. While the lighting, stage, and media elements of pcc often reflect those of secular popular music performance modes, there are differences. pcc worship often features more singers at the front of the stage, than just the worship leader (solo artist), to remind the congregation of the communal nature of the singing. Projected media elements ubiquitously include song lyrics, specifically to encourage active engagement through communal singing as opposed to only listening to or enjoying the song. The stages are often not as elevated as those at popular music performance venues, to encourage a greater sense of community and connection between musicians/singers and the congregation. Celebrification of artists/musicians/songwriters is another point of divergence between popular music and pentecostal-charismatic worship. Celebrification certainly occurs in pcc, not only of worship leaders and others in the worship team, but also of anyone whose role is on the platform. Many authors acknowledge its reality and practice as a music industry imperative, or less malignantly as a religious reflection of the star-driven secular entertainment culture (Ingalls, 2008; Jorstad, 1993; Price, 2003; Teoh, 2005; Wagner, 2013). Singer-songwriters such as Darlene Zschech, Chris Tomlin, Joel Houston, and Matt Redman have achieved a star-like status in the genre, even though many of them publicly reject such attribution. As Wagner observes, “it would be disingenuous for Hillsong’s worship leaders to deny that they are famous. Hillsong’s worship leaders therefore speak openly and often about the dangers of success, always taking care to acknowledge the true ‘Famous One’” (2013, pp. 76– 77). While the “dangers of success” may be discussed, success, at least in terms of influence, is vigorously pursued through protective, selective and co-supportive platform-sharing. Of course, it is often not the artists themselves who choose whom they promote and endorse: they represent churches, movements, music distribution networks, etc. Furthermore, one cannot discount that there may be a genuine admiration of other high-profile worship leaders/ musicians/songwriters that results in invitations to each other’s conferences, churches and recordings. If the deflection from the “dangers of success” is

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e­ ntirely genuine, are they simply “victims” of the wider cultural practice of celebrification? Whichever way, there is still a clear attempt to differentiate this aspect of popular music culture from pcc worship culture. Unlike pccs appropriation of popular music into corporate worship, ambivalence is an accurate word for this negotiation within the ccs genre (Thornton, 2015). 6

Further Negotiations

Besides the obvious difference between ccs lyrics and secular pop chart lyrics, there are a number of subtler negotiations which take place in the validation of ccs lyrics in pcc contexts. For example, the full gamut of human experience is carefully framed in ccs lyrics, not just in light of Christian doctrine, but also denominational orientation. Matt and Beth Redman’s song, Blessed Be Your Name is an interesting case study. The Redmans’ rework the biblical quote from Job 1:21 “You give and take away” in the Bridge of the song, which may not have been problematic in its initial Anglican context (the liturgy framing which includes personal and corporate repentance). However, there has been a reticence in pcc circles to affirm God as One who takes things away from His children. For pcc, God is the One who blesses, enriches, provides, and satisfies (Genesis 12:2, Ephesians 3:20–21, Philippians 4:19). This perspective is often associated with Kingdom Now theology, a branch of Dominion theology popularised from the 1980s onwards, and explains why Blessed Be Your Name has been far less popular in the ccli denominational charts of pccs (Scotland, 2011). At the same time, lyrics that touch on areas of human suffering, challenge, and difficulty are quite common in popular ccs, as long as they are presented in a context of hope, faith, and the finished work of Christ. Here are some examples from songs in the representative list: And on that day when my strength is failing – 10,000 Reasons I once was lost… was blind… – Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) When darkness seems to hide His face – Cornerstone This is my prayer in the fire, in weakness or trial or pain – Desert Song Where feet may fail and fear surrounds me – Oceans (Where Feet May Fail) Constant in the trial and the change – One Thing (Your Love Never Fails) You stood before my failure – The Stand There is a delicate balance that ccs writers negotiate between honestly expressing the full spectrum of human experience including suffering, grief, and

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pain, yet placing all experience within the revealed nature of God in Christ, and the ongoing empowerment of the believer through the Holy Spirit. Redman provides another example of this lyric negotiation process for pcc in his song The Heart of Worship. The repentant tone of the Chorus includes the line: “I’m sorry Lord for the thing I’ve made it [worship]”. No other popular ccs expresses repentance so directly, albeit specific repentance, rather than general repentance from sin that Christian doctrine associates with salvation. It is possibly one reason that this song has not lasted long in pcc churches. A lyric such as “I surrender” is palatable for pcc for it could simply mean that whatever agenda the worshiper had, he/she sets aside, but “I’m sorry” suggests a particular awareness of one’s sin, an experience of the feelings of guilt and shame, and moreover, a need to ask for forgiveness. pcc ccs tend to focus on the post-salvific experience – a life empowered by grace, expressions of faith (the ideal) over reality, ultimately more God-conscious than sin-conscious, more future-focussed than past-focussed. Such an orientation for ccs lyrics might also reflect the larger Western culture in which they are written, where notions of “sin” have been thoroughly rejected by a postmodern society. Where lyrics in pop songs invite diverse and personal interpretations, ccs lyrics are less ambiguous. There is certainly abundant poetic language and technique within ccs, which inevitably require interpretation, however, these are bound by broader doctrinal orthodoxy. For example, there is a large volume of partially quoted or paraphrased scripture in popular ccs, here are a few examples: You’re rich in love and You’re slow to anger (Numbers 14:18, Psalms 145:8)8 – 10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord) (When He shall come) with trumpet sound (1 Corinthians 15,52)9  – Cornerstone …if our God is for us, then… who could stand against us (Romans 8:31)10 – Our God The Lion and the Lamb (Revelation 5:5–6)11 – How Great Is Our God 8 9 10 11

“The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” (Numbers 14:18). “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52). “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31 nkjv). “See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah… Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne…” (Revelation 5:5–6 nkjv).

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Your love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:8)12 – One Thing Remains Hosanna in the Highest (Matthew 21:9)13 – Hosanna Lifted me from the miry clay (Psalm 40:2)14 – For All You’ve Done Worthy is the Lamb who was slain (Revelation 5:12)15 – Revelation Song There is no suggestion that ccs writers are intentionally misquoting or decontextualising scripture, though such “sound bites” are poised for interpretation. In fact, the partial quoting or paraphrasing of scripture both validates the song as a ccs, as well as elevating the role of personal revelation, context, application and perspective to the cited verses. There are also quasi-scriptural elements that, while not pernicious, are not unequivocally orthodox: Ten thousand years and then forevermore – 10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord) Into the darkness you shine, out of the ashes we rise – Our God And there I find you in the mystery, in oceans deep my faith will stand – Oceans (Where Feet May Fail) The earth shall soon dissolve like snow – Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) Baptised in blood and fire – Beneath The Waters (I Will Rise) I see His love and mercy, washing over all our sins – Hosanna There is always the potential for such lyrics to be misinterpreted, or blindly accepted as doctrine because of the authoritative context in which they appear, that is to say, endorsed by those leading from a congregation’s platform. Interpretation is a key element to lyrics as a poetic form, and context plays a significant role in that interpretation. Frow (2006, p. 10) states that genre, “is a set of conventional and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning”. In other words, the ccs genre itself places “constraints on the production… of meaning” derived from its lyrics. Thus ccs lyrics, occurring in a pcc worship context, that are not specifically scriptural are assumed 12 13 14 15

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away” (1 Corinthians 13:8 nkjv). “The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Hosanna in the highest heaven!’” (Matthew 21:9 nkjv). “He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, Out of the miry clay, And set my feet upon a rock, And established my steps” (Psalm 40:2 nkjv). “Saying with a loud voice: ‘Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom, and strength and honour and glory and blessing!’” (Revelation 5:12 nkjv).

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to align with doctrinal orthodoxy, even if a more literal interpretation of the lyrics may indicate otherwise. Two more examples of this context-specific interpretation of lyrics come from the songs One Thing Remains, and Our God. One Thing Remains makes no mention of the Godhead by name, beyond the 2nd person possessive pronoun (Your). Yet, this has been an extremely popular song, evidently adequately addressed to God from many worshipers’ perspectives. Christians with some degree of maturity would be aware of the passage in 1 Corinthians 13 concluding with “And now these three things remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (vs 13). This passage is clearly paraphrased in the chorus “Your love never fails, it never gives up, never runs out on me”. From the context, this can only be a reference to God’s love, as human love falls short of the description. Even if it could be interpreted hyperbolically as someone else’s love that “never fails,” the rest of the lyrics, and the context in which it is sung results in the intended Christian rendering of the lyrics. That being said, interpretive ambiguity in ccs lyrics, such as in One Thing Remains, has allowed songs to cross over into the secular sphere of pop music. In 2014, secular pop artist Selena Gomez tweeted the Bridge lyrics of Oceans (Where Feet May Fail) to her 57 million Twitter followers without concern that it may tarnish her reputation. Even though the lyrics specifically mention “Spirit (lead me where my trust is without borders)”, it was separated from its context of Christian worship and ambiguous enough that followers could interpret it in a way that was not deemed to be evangelistic or “preachy.” While some may lament that ccs lyrics are not more unequivocally Christian in their message and meaning, the genre is constructed in a way that purposefully creates and celebrates that ambiguity. Our God contains the line, “out of the ashes, we rise”. It is undoubtedly a moving metaphor, though not an explicitly scriptural one. It seems to be more directly a Greek mythological reference to the Phoenix. Of course, it is not surprising that this part of Greek mythology should find its way into the Christian dialectic, given that the Phoenix dies but is reborn; an imagery easily associated with the death and resurrection of Christ, or with Christian’s symbolic death of their old nature, and rebirth in Christ. Furthermore, the idea that out of pain, challenge, and loss, God renews and restores is not anti-scriptural; for example, Isaiah 61:1–3: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me. Because the Lord has anointed Me… To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness (nkjv).

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While the most direct interpretation of the lyrics does not lead initially to a Christian metaphor, the Christian interpretation is applied because of its performative context. In addition to the meaning making processes that Christians engage in for ccs lyrics, ccs lyrics also become the personal confession of those who sing them. Thus, personally interpretable lyrics are potentially problematic when it comes to forming orthodox doctrine in disciples. This is not solely an issue for ccs, but for all historical Christian congregational song forms that contain poetic language. However, it is particularly evident here, where the ccs lyric form sits within the broader context of personal poetic interpretations of pop song lyrics, and the still broader postmodern meaning making paradigms. 7 Conclusion The marriage of popular music and pcc worship has been a contentious issue since its inception. Despite this fact, such musical worship has played a key role in the growth of pcc. Musically, theologically, and culturally, the appropriation of popular music into pcc as a vernacular expression of worship is a pragmatic and evidently fruitful decision. There is a conscious alignment between secular popular music and ccs, through musical, lyrical, and extra-­ musical elements. There is a further alignment through somatic, emotive, and metaphysical features of both ccs and secular popular music, which also have echoes in Pentecostal theology. Christians in the Australian context (and well beyond) or those exploring the possibility of Christianity who are looking for a perceived authentic expression of faith, evidently find this alignment appealing. In other words, ccs provide an expression of an authentic musical worship for such believers or seekers. At the same time, there are clear distinctions between ccs and secular popular music. ccs are as much vernacular music, as they are popular music. They are communally performed, with a musical and lyrical canvas that is intentionally broad and as accessible as possible, without losing its popular music features. This marriage of vernacular and popular music is constantly contested and negotiated. Those who write contemporary congregational songs attempt to hold spiritual truth and communal relevance in some kind of balanced tension. Perhaps it is not a match made in heaven, but certainly (for many churches) a productive and beneficial match made here on earth; and one that has demonstrably contributed to the growth of pcc.

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A Appendix #

Song Title/ ccli#

Songwriters

Year

1 2

10,000 Reasons – 6016351 Cornerstone – 6158927

2011 2011

3

Our God – 5677416

4

How Great Is Our God – 4348399 Oceans (Where Feet May Fail) – 6428767 Blessed Be Your Name – 3798438 Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) – 4768151 Mighty To Save – 4591782 Here I Am To Worship – 3266032 God Is Able – 5894275 Beneath The Waters (I Will Rise) – 6179573 One Thing Remains (Your Love Never Fails) – 5508444 In Christ Alone – 3350395 Hosanna – 4785835 I Surrender – 6177317 Jesus At The Center – 6115180

Jonas Myrin and Matt Redman Jonas Myrin, Reuben Morgan, Eric Liljero, William Batchelder Bradbury and Edward Mote Matt Redman, Jonas Myrin, Chris Tomlin and Jesse Reeves Chris Tomlin, Jesse Reeves and Ed Cash Matt Crocker, Joel Houston and Salomon Ligthelm Matt Redman and Beth Redman John Newton, Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio Reuben Morgan and Ben Fielding Tim Hughes

2006

Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan Brooke Ligertwood and Scott Ligertwood Brian Johnson, Jeremy Riddle and Christa Black Gifford Keith Getty and Stuart Townend Brooke Ligertwood Matt Crocker Israel Houghton, Adam Ranney and Micah Massey Matt Redman

2010 2011

Stuart Townend

1995

Tim Hughes and Ben Cantelon Laura Story and Jesse Reeves Joel Houston Reuben Morgan

2006 2004 2005 2004

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

The Heart Of Worship – 2296522 How Deep The Father’s Love – 1558110 Happy Day – 4847027 Indescribable – 4403076 The Stand – 4705248 For All You’ve Done – 4254689

2010 2004 2012 2002

2006 2000

2010 2001 2006 2011 2011 1997

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A Match Made in Heaven #

Song Title/ ccli#

23

Open the Eyes Of My Heart – Paul Baloche 2298355 Desert Song – 5060793 Brooke Ligertwood Revelation Song – 4447960 Jennie Lee Riddle

24 25

Songwriters

Year 1997 2008 2004

References Abbington, J. (2009). Music Wars: A Perspective from the Black Church. Liturgy 24(4), pp. 40–47. Booker, Q. (1988). Congregational Music in a Pentecostal Church. The Black Perspective in Music, 16(1), pp. 31–44. Corbitt, N. (1998). The Sound of the Harvest: Music’s Mission in Church and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Cunningham, S., Higgs, P., and Australia Council. (2010). What’s Your Other Job?: A Census Analysis of Arts Employment in Australia. Sydney, NSW: Australia Council for the Arts. Dawn, M. (1995). Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-Of-The-Century Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Dawn, M, and Taylor, D. (2003). How Shall We Worship?: Biblical Guidelines for the Worship Wars. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers. DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, M. (2006). Open Up the Doors: Music in the Modern Church. London: Equinox Publishing Limited. Frith, S. (1998). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frow, J. (2006). Genre: The New Critical Idiom. Abingdon, OX: Routledge. Galli, M. (2011). The End of Worship Wars. ChristianityToday.Com. Available at: http:// www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/march/endworshipwars.html. Hawn, M. (2006). Congregational Singing from down under. [4], Experiencing Hillsong’s “Shout to the Lord.” Hymn 57(2), pp. 15–24. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). Why Music Matters. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. Ingalls, M. (2008). Awesome in This Place: Sound, Space, and Identity in Contemporary North American Evangelical Worship. PhD Thesis. University of Pennsylvania. Ingalls, M., Landau, C., and Wagner, T., eds. (2013). Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience. Surrey, England: Ashgate.

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Ingalls, M., and Yong, A. eds. (2015). The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Jennings, M. (2008). “Won’t You Break Free?” An Ethnography of Music and the DivineHuman Encounter at an Australian Pentecostal Church. Culture and Religion 9(2), pp. 161–174. Jennings, M. (2014). Exaltation: Ecstatic Experience in Pentecostalism and Popular Music. Berlin: Peter Lang. Johansson, C. (1992). Discipling Music Ministry: Twenty-First Century Directions. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Johnson, B. (2000). The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity. Sydney: Currency Press. Jorstad, E. (1993). Popular Religion in America: The Evangelical Voice. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Kallestad, W. (1996). Entertainment Evangelism: Taking the Church Public. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Levitin, D. (2011). This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession. London, UK: Atlantic Books. Middleton, R. (1993). Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Bridging the Gap. Popular Music 12(2), pp. 177–190. Nattiez, J. (1990). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Nekola, A. (2009). Between This World and the Next: The Musical “Worship Wars” and Evangelical Ideology in the United States, 1960–2005. PhD. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ong, J. (2011). Resonance: A Music Director’s Theomusicological Study of “Praise” and “Glory” in a Selection of Four Liturgical Music Excerpts. PhD Thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/43508 [Accessed 7th May 2019]. Price, D. (2003). Praise and Worship Genre Blessed with Global Growth. Billboard. 115(7), 1–3. Robinson, D. (2011). Contemporary Worship Singers: Construct, Culture, Environment and Voice. PhD Thesis. Griffith University. Available at: https://www120.secure .griffith.edu.au/rch/file/a6e0fbc7-2dce-895f-bf5f-f72bdccbf30d/1/Robinson_2011_02 Thesis.pdf. [Accessed 7th May 2019]. Scotland, N. (2011). From the “not yet” to the “Now and the Not yet”: Charismatic Kingdom Theology 1960–2010. Journal of Pentecostal Theology 20 (2), pp. 272–290. Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover: Wesleyan.

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Spencer, J. (1991). Theological Music: Introduction to Theomusicology. New York: Greenwood Press. Teoh, H. (2005). Worshipping the Worshipper: When Worship Leaders Become Famous. Papers from the Trans-Tasman Research Symposium, “Emerging Research in Media, Religion and Culture.” Available at: http:/search.informit.com.au.simsrad.net.ocs. mq.edu.au/fullText;dn=038905051200287;res=IELHSS. [Accessed 7th May 2019]. Thorngate, S. (2011). Church Music after the Worship Wars | The Christian Century. The Christian Century. Available at: http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-11/ new-harmonies [Accessed May 20, 2013]. Thornton, D. (2015). Ambivalent Fame: Insights from the Most Sung Composers of Contemporary Congregational Songs. Presented at the Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, UK, July. Thornton, D. (2016). Exploring the Contemporary Congregational Song Genre: Texts, Practice, and Industry. PhD thesis. Macquarie University. Throsby, D. and A. Zednik. (2010). Do you really expect to get paid? An economic study of professional artists in Australia. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Australia Council for the Arts. Vondey, W., and Mittelstadt, M. (2013). The Theology of Amos Yong and the New Face of Pentecostal Scholarship: Passion for the Spirit. Leiden: Brill. Wagner, T. (2013). Hearing The Hillsong Sound: Music, Marketing, Meaning and Branded Spiritual Experience at a Transnational Megachurch. PhD Thesis. Royal Holloway University of London. Available at: http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/files/19680902/ 2014wagnertphd.pdf. [Accessed 7th May 2019]. Walser, R. (2003). Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances. In: A. Moore. ed., Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16–38. Warrington, K. (2008). Pentecostal Theology: A Theology of Encounter. London: A&C Black. Webber, R. (1996). Blended Worship: Achieving Substance and Relevance in Worship. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson. Whiteley, S. (2013). Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. New York & London: Routledge.

Chapter 6

Marketing and Branding Practices in Australian Pentecostal Suburban Megachurches for Supporting International Growth Mairead Shanahan 1 Introduction Sociologists of religion have examined growth-oriented Pentecostal and Charismatic megachurches in a range of suburban settings (Martin, 2001; Schaefer, 2002; Marti, 2008; Adogame, 2010; Kalu, 2010; Kim, 2012; Bowler, 2013; Agana, 2016). In the Australian context, Hillsong Church has received much local and international scholarly attention, in which the church’s rapid local and global growth in members and finances has been observed (Connell, 2005; Jennings, 2008; Goh, 2008; Riches, 2010; Wade & Hynes, 2013; Wade, 2015; Riches & Wagner, 2017). However, less attention has been paid to the practices and techniques that Hillsong Church and similar Australian churches (such as C3 Church, Planetshakers, and Influencers Church) use to facilitate this growth. In his denominational study, Clifton (2009) noted the marketing and branding practices of churches associated with the Australian Assemblies of God, and Marion Maddox (2012, 2013) observed growth theology in Hillsong Church, noting organisational marketing abilities and orientation to theologies of consumption. In his observation of Hillsong’s London location, Wager (2013) argued that branding is integral to the religious experience of self the church offers, and Wager and Riches (2012) observed the links between marketing and music at Hillsong, contending that branding assists transnational megachurches to achieve growth. This chapter contributes to a scholarly understanding of marketing tactics and brand creation in Pentecostal megachurches. The chapter argues that marketing and branding have become key dynamics in the ways in which suburban-based Australian Pentecostal megachurches can achieve transnational growth to compete in a global Christian resources market. The brand developed by these charismatic suburban megachurches draws on a theology emphasising individualised spirituality, renewal, abundant living, and prosperity teachings. The churches market theological features to cultivate a brand of

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Christianity that aims to appeal to modern living: a relevant, contemporary, and global approach to church. These branding abilities assist the churches in achieving local and international growth in membership and finances. The chapter is concerned with how Australian Pentecostal megachurches define themselves through commercialisation and marketing strategies. The chapter draws on Kevin Schilbrack’s (2010, p. 1112; 2012, p. 97) response to Timothy Fitzgerald’s critical religious studies that provides a method for studying religion as a socially constructed category subject to historically mediated power relations. This methodological perspective facilitates the examination of Australian suburban Pentecostal megachurches as an act of re-description, as opposed to an ethnomethodological approach that would constitute a church-attender’s insider description. Schilbrack (2012, p. 97) argues that religion should be studied as a social fact; that is, on its own terms within the social, economic, and historical contexts of its occurrence. For Schilbrack (2010, p. 1112; 2012, p. 97) religion requires understanding within the terms of reference of the participants, while being situated in broader dynamics to account for its socially constructed nature. Accordingly, the chapter focuses on the analysis of texts and artefacts that are produced by participants to contextualise their religious experience (Hjelm, 2011). This allows scholars to situate a religion within broader contexts, while using participants’ own terms of reference and materials produced. Material culture in religious studies relates not just to the objects of production themselves, but also asks scholars to position these products, objects, or artefacts within a range of environmental dynamics. The study of material culture does not seek to reduce or reify religion to explanation in terms of idea, dogma, or artefact. Instead, religion is seen as “inseparable from a matrix or network of components that consist of people, divine beings or forces, institutions, things, places, and communities” (Meyer et al., 2011, p. 209). Within material religious studies, Meyer et al. (2011, p. 210) point out the impact and uses of new and old media by religious traditions, highlighting “the importance of media technologies as inalienable elements of religious communication.” By analysing the artefacts produced by Australian neo-Pentecostal megachurches, the chapter shows how technologically mediated artefacts such as digital texts, websites and social media accounts are important for understanding the self-representation of religious forms in modernity. To deduce how marketing and branding assists churches in realising organisational goals, the chapter takes its primary field of inquiry from material produced by Hillsong Church, C3 Church, Influencers Church, and Planetshakers. These materials include a variety of texts and artefacts; books written by senior

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pastors, worship songs, videos and recordings of sermons and conference proceedings, promotional brochures and films, websites, blogs, social media accounts, and applications for smart devices. Analysing materials produced by suburban-based Australian Pentecostal megachurches means that the chapter is concerned with interpreting the ways in which the churches present a brand to a wider audience beyond congregations. To do this, the first section of chapter explains how Australian-based Pentecostal megachurches employ commercialisation and modern marketing techniques to create a brand of Christian church. The second section of the chapter examines how the churches have used digitisation to conduct marketing in online spaces. The third section examines the nature of the church brands to deduce how the churches practice marketing to engage potential and returning congregants globally. The chapter finds that suburban Australian-based Pentecostal megachurches have become adept at using modern technologically mediated marketing techniques to develop a branded approach to successfully facilitating local and global expansion. 2

Branding a Religious Vision: The Contribution of Marketing to the Global Growth of Suburban Australian Pentecostal Megachurches

A key development of late-modern commercialisation is the extension of brand creation to aspects of life beyond the corporate culture that invented globally recognised brands. Klein (2010) observes that the critical insight of modern corporate culture was to shift corporate organisational goals from manufacturing products to producing brands. Klein (1999) uses the examples of transnationally-recognised brands such as Nike and Microsoft that have outsourced manufacturing processes to second and third parties, and the main activity of a company is to develop brand awareness. As Klein (2010, original emphasis) argues “Nike isn’t a running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports, Starbucks isn’t a coffee shop chain, it’s about the idea of community.” The importance of an organisational ability to create brands is evident in Klein’s (2010) observations that “increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces – schools, museums, parks.” The import of marketing and branding processes to areas beyond commercial and corporate ventures means that in modernity anything can be commercialised and sold. Levy and Luedicke (2012, p. 63) observe the transition from marketing to branding means that organisations “are more aware than ever of the necessity of building relationships with

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their customers based on more than product function but on the salience of reputation.” Commercialisation, corporate culture, and brand creation have been absorbed into the organisational practice of religious institutions in modernity. Kitiasara (2010) states that “religious commodification exists everywhere as it forms a crucial part of complicated human religious ventures.” Commodification of religion – seen in the sale of sacred objects and religious experiences – is hardly a new event. As Ward (2006, p. 186) observes, “Many of the great Medieval churches in Europe are built on the funds of the commodification of religion in terms of endowing chantries to sing masses for souls following death.” While religious commodification as a fundraising venture may not be new, the driving forces of globalised consumer capitalism within modernity offers unique opportunities for religions comfortable in the modern marketplace. Kitiasara (2010) defines religious commodification as “a process which turns a religious faith or tradition into consumable and marketable goods… simultaneously involving both market force commodifying religion and religious institution taking part in marketplace and consuming culture.” Coupled with the advent of a globalised consumer society, religious institutions that actively embrace commodification and commercialisation maintain a competitive advantage. Hillsong Church, C3 Church, Planetshakers, and Influencers Church infuse commodification and commercialisation into the development of church organisational culture. Brian Houston, senior pastor of Hillsong Church, establishes links between suburban commerce and church in his vision for his church. Houston said that he chose the Sydney suburb of Baulkham Hills as the site for Hillsong Church: partly because of a hugely successful car dealer out there who “used to be on the TV and sell Holdens. And I thought to myself, ‘If you could build the largest Holden dealership in Australia there, surely it must be somewhere where you could build a church’” (Snow, 2015). Brian and his wife Bobbie Houston were Australian-based pioneers in marrying corporatised branding tactics with the promotion of their church. In the Hillsong Church vision statement, the Houstons see growth and influence as central to their church’s organisational goals: The Church that I see is a Church of influence. A Church so large in size that the cities and nations cannot ignore it. A Church with a message so

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clear that lives are changed forever. A Church growing so quickly that buildings struggle to contain the increase. Hillsong Church Vision Statement, 2017

For the Houstons, achieving rapid church growth is assisted through a display of success, health, and wealth as evidence of God’s blessing. This is apparent when Brian Houston says, “It’s all about encouraging people to be successful in every sphere of life, and that’s attractive” (Dolby, 2007). In this, Houston links an attractive church – a large church that people want to attend – to displays of the success by its leaders and members. In 1999, Houston published You Need More Money in which he argued that God desires for Christians to prosper financially, although Houston says that he now regrets choosing that particular title (Hutchinson, 2017). Houston (2013) followed with the How to Maximise Your Life series that outlines methods of achieving “prosperity for a purpose.” For Houston, prosperity and success come from an individual believer’s faith that is tangible in their visible capacity for health and wealth. This version of aspirational Christian living is central to Brian Houston’s ministry and Hillsong Church’s brand of Christianity. In the 1980s and 1990s, Phil and Chris Pringle planted Christian City-branded churches in Sydney, expanding this church planting model to found ten other Christian City churches in cities around the world, the first of these in New York in 1989 (C3 Church, 2017). Christian City Church was rebranded as C3 Church in the late 2000s and, according to the church’s website “With over 450 churches in 64 countries, we are rapidly moving towards the 2020 Vision of 1,000 Locations planted by the year 2020” (C3 Church, 2017). The emphasis on global growth is central to the way that C3 Church explains the success of their church planting. C3 Church’s growth narrative is a key part of C3’s brand development and links to the sense of relatability Pringle envisaged for his church, connecting the Pringle couple’s leadership to C3-branded churches around the world. Bridging the gap between local and global church plants, the couple appear to have personal input into the vision and planting of each C3-branded church. In a video released for the thirtieth anniversary of C3 Church, Pringle (2010) discusses his desire for his church to be “modern and contemporary and to look like you were relevant to today.” In a film clip from the 1980s, Pringle (2010) explains the church’s success as “People can relate to the kind of language that we use. We’re speaking in their terms. We’re relating to their world; talking about the pressures they are facing and meeting the real needs in their lives.” The Pringles pride themselves in cultivating a church environment in which a congregant is “able to walk through the doors of any C3 church and feel like your home” (C3 Noosa, 2017). Emphasising abundance and prosperity,

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Pringle says, “We never apologise for people succeeding or doing well or winning at life because we know that it’s been the result of discipline, hard work and really applying all the things that God has given them in their life” (C3 Noosa, 2017). The vision for C3 Church is “a place where you will encounter the presence of God, develop your life, and maximize your potential so that you can live the absolute best life that God has in store for You” (C3 Church, 2017). C3 Church emphasises positivity, faith embodied in action, aspirational living, and a display of health and success. In 2000, Australian Assemblies of God leader Andrew Evans passed on the leadership of his successful Pentecostal Paradise Community Church megachurch in Adelaide to his son Ashley and daughter-in-law Jane. Ashley Evans rebranded his father’s ministry, changing the name to Influencers Church in 2012 (Shand, 2012). Under the Influencers Church brand name, Ashley Evans planted three more churches in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia usa. Ashley and Jane Evans have built on Andrew Evans’s achievements to develop a church that seeks to be relevant and contemporary. Influencers Church’s (2017) vision statement says: We believe that to reach this generation, you need to speak their language. The language of this generation is media and so we are committed to engage with media to communicate to & capture the vision and hearts of the generation that will take the baton from us and run further and faster than we ever will. This outlines Ashley and Jane Evans’s desire to remain relevant and contemporary, growing their church using modern communication tools. Influencers Church highlights the importance of faith in action to receive God’s blessings. In his book No More Fear: Break the Power of Intimidation in 40 Days Ashley Evans (2012, p. 1) says, “Is the world limited in opportunities and resources, or is it unlimited, with boundless possibilities and blessings? If God is the source of all things and He is unlimited, then life is a treasure basket of dreams just waiting to become reality.” Ashley Evans teaches that God will bless Christians with an abundance of unlimited resources, and that is the responsibility of the individual believer to seek. Ashley and Jane Evans have taken Andrew Evans’s goals for Paradise Community Church and sought to update the church’s approach to growth, marketing the church’s branded experience as relevant, contemporary and global. In 1997, Ashley Evans’s brother Russell and his wife Sam established Planetshakers, in Adelaide, South Australia. Originally a Pentecostal youth-oriented revival-style concert, this event grew rapidly from three hundred attendees in

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1997 to sixteen thousand in 2002 and a praise and worship band formed under the same name as the conference (Austin, 2017, p. 145; Daystar Television, 2017). In 2004, Russell and Sam Evans capitalised on the success of the Planetshakers conference and band, and founded a Planetshakers-branded church in the Melbourne suburbs (Austin, 2017, p. 145; Daystar Television, 2017). From this base, the couple planted four more Planetshakers churches in Melbourne and expanded internationally, planting churches in Singapore, South Africa, Geneva, and the city of Austin in Texas, usa (Planetshakers, 2017). The Planetshakers annual conference was renamed “Awakening” and in 2018 ran in two Australian cities (Brisbane and Melbourne), and four international locations: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Austin, Texas (Planetshakers Awakening, 2016). The Planetshakers founding slogan “To empower generations for generations” signals Russell and Sam Evans’s vision for their church: contemporary, global, and long-term. The original focus on young people has resulted in the church engaging an experiential approach in marketing. According to Russell Evans, two-thirds of the church’s twelve thousand congregants are aged between eighteen and forty years old (Daystar Television, 2017). Reflecting on the youthorientation of his church, Evans states, “Planetshakers is more than a worship experience. It’s a combination of presenting praise and worship in a ‘new school way,’ speaking the language of the day, whilst not watering down or losing the presence of God” (Daystar Television, 2017). The “new school way” reference is a youth culture idiom that succinctly captures the contemporary approach Russell and Sam Evans take in developing the Planetshakers brand. The couple model principles of aspirational living, word of faith, prosperity gospel, and individualised approaches to spirituality in their preaching and activities. The opening paragraph of Russell Evans’ (2014, p. 1) book, The Honor Key: Unlocking a Limitless Life, begins “If you’re like me, you want to experience heaven here on earth. You want to have abundance, receive an inheritance, and release generational blessings.” Russell Evans argues it is up to the individual believer to seek salvation through the act of honouring God and through this, a Christian can access the abundance and blessing that God has in store for them. Russell and Sam Evans realised their goal of developing an international religious movement, implementing branding approaches in their church organisation. 3

Digital Marketing and Branding Tactics in Australian Pentecostal Megachurches

The advent of digitisation and social media marketing provides a virtual space for Australian Pentecostal megachurches in which they can curate images and

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symbols of their church in a unified way. These virtual spaces afford opportunities for the churches to market their products and services without having to pay for access to broadcasting space on commercial television or radio. The popularity of social networking sites and increased smart-device use means that Australian Pentecostal megachurches have access to cheaper forms of brand dissemination through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and also through creating and selling smart phone apps for a range of church-related activities. The churches maintain user-friendly websites with regularly updated graphics through which interested parties can access information about the church’s Sunday services, locations, upcoming events, charities, institutional history, and senior pastor biographies. The Planetshakers and Hillsong Church websites offer a streaming service allowing access to video recordings of sermons across multiple church locations (Planetshakers TV, 2016; Hillsong TV, 2016). Recordings of church sermons are available on video streaming services such as YouTube and Vimeo; Hillsong and C3 Church manage multiple YouTube channels for church services, music releases and live performances from the church band (Hillsong Church YouTube, 2016; Hillsong Church YouTube, 2017a; Hillsong Church YouTube, 2017b; C3 Church YouTube, 2017a; C3 Church YouTube, 2017b). Australian Pentecostal megachurches use their online presence through well-maintained websites and video streaming services to form the centre of an online hub, co-ordinating social and online media strategies to unify the church brand. The churches maintain multiple social media accounts for separate branches of church activity, different events, and personalised accounts for leaders. For example, the Influencers Church homepage links to the official Influencers Australia Twitter account (Influencers Home, 2016; @InfluencersAUS, 2017). At the time of writing, this account follows ninety-four Tweeters which includes several personal accounts of the senior ministry team: senior pastor Ashley Evans, his wife Jane Evans, Atlanta campus pastor Mark Evans, church staff member Judah Cheah, and Perth campus pastor Sarah Gibson (@InfluencersAUS Twitter, 2017). Influencers Australia on Twitter also follows ten accounts dedicated to individual church plantings and specific events including the annual conference, the youth-oriented arm of the church and the church music band (@InfluencersAUS Twitter, 2017). These Twitter pages are linked to personal Facebook and Instagram accounts for the senior ministry team and for particular events and church-run activities (@InfluencersAUS Twitter, 2017). Hillsong, C3 Church, and Planetshakers manage similar social media strategies which serve as a platform for posting church-related images, events, and products online.

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Rinker et al. (2016, p. 2) observe the increased use of “applications” (apps) – computer programs that perform a specific function on smart devices and computers – for religious purposes, which have the effect of facilitating the conduct of church-related activities at any time through privately accessed digitised means. The use of apps for such religious purposes extends Helland’s (2005, p. 13) observations on the complexity of ways in which Christian religions have engaged with online capabilities, incorporating both interactive and informative capacities. Australian Pentecostal megachurches offer churchbranded apps which centralise accessibility to a variety of church services to a private smart device: prayer requests, tithing functions, access to blogs and devotionals written by the senior pastors, livestreams of events and conferences, and early-bird viewing for new music releases, video clips, and books. C3 Church has thirty-three apps for the iPhone and twenty-seven for the iPad available for download through iTunes. C3 Church’s apps provide a platform for congregants to conduct church activities through their smart devices offering prayer requests, absentee registration, short reflections on Bible verses, a function for recording notes as the Sunday sermon is delivered, and social networking opportunities with local congregants who are also registered to the app. Hillsong Church’s mobile app provides access to blogs, TV episodes, music updates and videos, livestreaming from Hillsong events with the tagline “Be a tap away from Hillsong wherever you are.” Planetshakers’ app creates a similar centralised virtual space, providing access to church-branded social media accounts and online visual content, along with services such as tithing platforms through Paypal and credit card facilities, prayer requests, and connection to local church-branded homegroups. Australian Pentecostal megachurches have adeptly embraced digital media and marketing strategies to create a sophisticated online presence that capitalises on a demand for apps through which people can conduct religious activity. The churches use websites mostly to provide information about the church, while the apps provide an interactive element to online capabilities facilitating another platform for conducting church engagement with attendees. The churches use such online platforms for consolidating the creation of a church brand. Australian Pentecostal megachurches use social media to unify the church brand aesthetic. This is particularly evident through promotional campaigns around significant events. The churches capitalise on the conference model by holding separate revival events targeted at a particular congregant demographics: youth, women, men and business leaders. These events are supported with their own marketing campaigns and branded promotional material. After the final Planetshakers 2017 Conference event, the same image of Sam Evans

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leading­the Planetshakers Band was posted to Planetshakers’ Twitter (@ Planetshakers Twitter, 2017), Instagram (@Planetshakers Instagram 2017), and Facebook (@Planetshakers Facebook, 2017) with the caption That’s a wrap on our first #Planetshakers Conference in Austin, Texas! us “Only ask, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, the whole earth as your possession.” Psalm 2:8 We asked & He is always faithful to provide! We are believing for the greatest outpouring of His Kingdom across Texas and the usa over the coming months. Let’s shake the planet! This social media coordination allows Planetshakers to communicate a unified message to a global audience. The social media platforms provide links to videos of the conference events from around the world posted on the Planetshakers’ YouTube channel and Planetshakers TV website (Planetshakers YouTube, 2017; Planetshakers TV, 2017). Promotional images and film clips for the Planetshakers 2018 conference are posted to the church’s social media accounts during the ending of the 2017 conference with links to the website for purchasing tickets (Planetshakers Home, 2017). This kind of social media marketing unifies the presentation of the church brand and provides promotional opportunities for future church events. In this way, Australian Pentecostal megachurches have incorporated digital marketing social media strategies and developments in smart phone technologies into church organisational and operational structures. 4

Australian Pentecostal Megachurch Brands: Competing in a Global Market

In a study of Christian consumption of religious goods in America, Park and Baker (2007, p. 501) observe that religious consumption comprises a multimillion-dollar market indicating that Christians are “getting religion” in ways other than going to church on Sundays, purchasing products designed for a Christian market in mass quantities. Park and Baker (2007, p. 502) observe, due to “improvements in manufacturing and developments in non-print media technologies… more religious products were available than at any other time,” noting the popularity of products such as Californian megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s positive and aspirational book series The Purpose Driven Life, the Left Behind books (a fiction series speculating on the effects of the rapture), films

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such as The Passion of Christ, and children’s television programs that carry a Christian message such as VeggieTales. Park and Baker (2007, p. 502) argue …consumable religious goods can enhance attachment to a particular religious culture (e.g., Christian “witness wear” that reminds one and others of evangelical identity) and they can reflect mastery of that culture (e.g., purchasing a study Bible for a small group study). In their study of a Christian bookshop in the United Kingdom, Stoddart and Johnson (2008, p. 335) note the lucrative nature of the Christian resources market and argue that such purchases offer ways for Christians to express aspects of their identity. Thomas (2009, p. 58) points out the diversity of good and services offered within this market, using an example of a hypothetical Christian mother …taking out an insurance policy from a preferred Christian insurance company, following a Christian diet programme and buying Christian branded food products (…) buying a car from a Christian car dealer, products from a Christian grocery store and persuading her children to find partners through a Christian dating service – thus affirming a life lived within the confines of an exclusive religious economy. Australian suburban-based megachurches participate in this market, commercialising products and experiences to maintain a reputable church brand. The churches use marketing techniques to create church brands emphasising aspects of their advertised church experience and adopt marketing language to promote their church activities. Each of the churches constructs their brand to signal the type of religious experience advertised. Similar to Nike’s “Just do it” or Microsoft’s “Be what’s next,” the churches’ names signal their style of Christianity. “Hillsong” invokes the church’s songs – praise and worship music for which the church is globally recognised – and signals the Sydney suburb Baulkham Hills where Brian Houston planted Hills Christian Life Centre. Planetshakers’ emphasises the goals of achieving world-wide outreach and the “Empowering generations for generations” slogan signals the focus on youth. Influencers Church signals their mission to cultivate influence. C3 Church’s abbreviated name (from Christian City Church) removes the “Christian,” indicating the church’s seeker-friendly branding approach to marketing the church as  relevant, in contrast to older Christian denominations. The churches are acutely aware of how branding and marketing strategy can assist them in

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r­epresentation to the public, and this awareness is developed in choice of church names which are rebranded and repositioned in the market as the churches develop marketing capabilities. The ability to successfully commercialise aspects of a religion lends to enormous possibilities of growth for a church in a globalised consumer economy. For Australian suburban megachurches, the possibilities of growth are enhanced by commercialisation particularly through the technique of brand management. Casidy (2013, p. 231) argues that using branding strategies attracts congregants and enhances their perspectives on the benefits of belonging to the church. Gordon and Hancock (2005, p. 394) observe that for corporatised versions of Christianity “branding is the key to success.” Church-branded activities – such as leadership conferences, concerts, and annual conferences for congregants – encompass the opportunity for transcendental worship experiences, and access to sacred experiences can be purchased by buying tickets to the event. Poon, Huang and Cheong (2012, p. 1969) argue that the commodification of the communication process is central to successful modern religions, stating, “digitalization facilitates a process of mediatization that converts religious performance into forms suitable for commodification and commoditization.” The processes of commodification and commercialisation are amplified in the modern economy using emerging media forms available through the Internet. Australian Pentecostal megachurches capitalise on digitalisation to create commercial ventures in online “stores” around branded church events that promise an experience of the sacred. The proliferation of new media forms has allowed Australian Pentecostal megachurches to commercialise the Pentecostal theological emphasis on experientialism facilitated through the orientation to growth, consumerism, and material aspiration as a measure of success within consumer culture. Australian Pentecostal megachurches create a church brand to unify associations between church experiences and church products. Branding provides such churches with the ability to commercialise almost any aspect of their religion (Ellingson, 2013, p. 65). In addition to receiving tithes, sales of a range of products, from T-Shirts to books written by the leaders of the churches, increase the capital the churches gather. Charging congregants to attend annual conferences, music concerts, prayer breakfasts and youth events provides further revenue for the church. The churches have a unique church logo that appears on all promotional materials. Hillsong, C3 Church, Planetshakers, and Influencers manage online stores selling tote bags, hats, USBs, coffee mugs, notebooks and Bibles that display the church logo. Both products and events are marketed with the church logo and the process is curated by

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lead pastors and, often, a team of marketing managers. Hillsong Church employs several marketing experts on its board of directors with specific skills in brand management and sales (Hillsong Communications: Link from the Digital and Design Team, 2016). Similarly, C3 Church has several marketing and communications experts working in church plantings such as Cairns and San Diego (C3 Cairns Creative Teams, 2016; C3 San Diego Worship and Creative Teams, 2016). Using a brand to unify product commercialisation provides Australian Pentecostal megachurches avenues for increasing growth in church membership and finances. For the churches, “the brand becomes cultural material with which participants shape, generate, express, and understand ‘personal’ values” (Wagner, 2014, p. 62). As such, the churches provide a variety of ways to express these personal values through consuming products and experiences. Products are created and sold for specific events such as the women’s, youth, men’s, and leadership conferences. The products display slogans referencing these events and are available to buy before, during and, for a limited time, after the event. Before the 2016 women’s conference, Hillsong’s online store offered a range of T-shirts emblazoned with references to the upcoming conference including such slogans as “Found in his love story,” “Royal,” and “Love lead me home” (Hillsong Store, 2017). Hillsong’s online goods store is organised in sections according to the importance of the promoted event. In preparation for the 2017 youth conference, attendees could buy T-Shirts, hats and beanies that display the conference title “Young & Free” (Hillsong Store, 2017). Updating the brand requires the development, manufacture, and sale of new items for purchase. The commercialisation of these products complements the item’s religious significance, developing the exercise into one of branding. These church-branded products give an attendee the opportunity to own a souvenir from a particular event and demonstrate loyalty to the church through their public display: wear the T-Shirt; own the coffee mug. Photographs from the 2015 Hillsong youth conference show young people wearing their Hillsong-branded clothing and are displayed in the promotional website for the 2016 youth conference (Hillsong Conference, 2016). Planetshakers’ online store sells music products, apparel, accessories (including hats and bags), and books written by senior pastors (Planetshakers Store, 2017). Apparel is branded in conjunction with music releases; hats, jumpers, and a coffee table book were sold branded with the 2017 album Legacy (Planetshakers Store, 2017). The branded products provide the churches with a unifying image to present publicly and promote a version of church. Australian Pentecostal megachurches create marketing campaigns around Christian holy days using commercial branding strategies. For the 2009 Easter

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service, Hillsong Communications Director Jay Argaet wanted to promote ­Hillsong Easter services to potential attendees and created a marketing campaign for Easter that would reach non-church-attending people (Russel & James, 2017). The Hillsong Communications team made cards displaying the symbols “✝ = ♥” and Argaet says his team asked the church to, go out and do random acts of kindness, maybe buy someone a coffee and just leave a card behind. And the church jumped in like, crazy, like we couldn’t print enough cards. And that year we just saw so many people get saved at Easter. So, I think that was like the original point where we were like, oh maybe we should try this again. russel & james, 2017 Argaet attributes the conversions to Christianity that he observed during that Easter to Hillsong’s rebrand of the Easter message (Russell & James, 2017). Argaet drew inspiration for “✝ = ♥” from the story of Arthur Stace, a reformed alcoholic who converted to Christianity and spent his adulthood writing the word “Eternity” in yellow copperplate script in public spaces throughout Sydney in the mid-20th Century, with the aim getting people to consider their religious beliefs (Russel & James, 2017; Hogg, 2017). Argaet says that the Arthur Stace story “shows the power of one person, you know, in their area of life doing something that led people to Christ” (Russel & James, 2017). In 2010, Argaet sought to capitalise on the success of the “✝ = ♥” symbology, and Hillsong gave their congregants pieces of chalk encouraging people to draw the symbol all over their cities in the lead-up to Easter. Seeking to work in a similar way to Arthur Stace’s writing, Argaet says “maybe if someone sees it, it’ll stir a thought” (Russel & James, 2017). The “✝ = ♥” campaign is an example of how the Hillsong Communications Team use branding strategies – drawing on recognisable, simple symbols and using the volunteer capacity within a large church congregation – for marketing a significant event to potential converts and congregants. This is an extension of the seeker sensitive practices that create branding strategies with the aim of encouraging non-churched and unchurched people to convert to the Pentecostal megachurch version of aspirational Christianity. Selling access to church events enables Australian Pentecostal megachurches to facilitate experiential participation in the branded church experience. C3 Church, Hillsong, Influencers, and Planetshakers all hold annual conferences over several days and conduct marketing campaigns leading up to these events to encourage as many people to attend as possible. The churches charge conference attendees a registration fee ranging from thirty-three dollars to attend

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the Planetshakers 2017 international conference in Malaysia (Planetshakers Awakening Asia, 2016) to three hundred and forty-nine dollars to attend the four-day annual Hillsong conference held at a sporting arena in Sydney (Hillsong 16 The Invitation, 2016). The bigger church conferences, Hillsong and C3 Church, cater to the needs of a family, supplying crèche facilities, breastfeeding rooms and offering parents the opportunity of paying for their older children to attend specific children’s activities (Hillsong Kidsong, 2016; C3 Church Presence Conference, 2016). The conferences operate as revivals and the conference marketing materials claim that attendees will experience the work of God by coming to the conference. However, the key difference between traditional revivals and the Australian Pentecostal megachurch version is that in the past, people were not necessarily required to pay to attend. The marketing video advertising the 2016 C3 annual conference Presence states “He is our support system. In the beginning and after the end. A journey and destination. The mystery and revelation. As two become one. For He pierced our gravity. Running at us. Son of God. Rescuer. Jesus” (C3 Church Presence 2016). The video uses sloganeering language, single word and short sentences, to capture attention. In the video, a sense of C3 Church’s largeness is implied through the images of forests racing past, cliffs beside an ocean, and a man falling from a waterfall (C3 Church Presence 2016). The video uses footage of huge crowds dancing with raised hands and bands performing in front of C3 Church song lyrics projected onto large screens (C3 Church Presence 2016). These images and words promise a conference experience that engages with the global aspect of the church, where like-minded Christians from all over the world gather for the opportunity to participate in mass-worship and discussion. The juxtaposition of scenes of nature with dancing crowds signals the megachurch Pentecostal theological perspectives on the relationship between humans and nature, a specific aspect of the church brand. The leaders believe that nature exists to remind humans of God’s love. In a blog post titled “Creation Shouts!,” Phil Pringle (2014) argues that man is the pinnacle of God’s creation. After appreciating abundance of animal life on Earth, Pringle (2014) writes, “And then man himself, with all the glory of his intelligence, his dance, songs, art and rhythms, discoveries, inventions and adventures.” Pringle (2014) states that the existence of nature and animals reveals, a creator who loves, in the colours, the scents, the nutrition yet not purely utilitarian, but beautiful in taste, scent and feel. The rains, the sun, the oceans, the mountains, the sheer breathtaking pleasure of the beauty of it all is love.

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Australian Pentecostal megachurch leaders see God as source of infinite grace and love, and that God provided nature to remind humans of God’s power. Evoking the natural environment in the context of God’s love is evident in Hillsong United (2015) song titles including “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail),” “Touch the Sky,” and “Desert Song.” In “Shout to the Lord,” one of Hillsong’s first chart-topping songs, the lyrics are “Shout to the Lord, all the earth, let us sing/ Power and majesty, praise to the King/Mountains bow down and the seas will roar/At the sound of Your name” (Hawn, 2018). Lyrics for the Hillsong song “God of All Creation” state “I’m totally abandoned to You/I’m lost inside the rivers of your love” (Hillsong, 2000). Here, the river metaphor implies that environmental phenomenon exists as all-encompassing reminder of God’s love for people. Using “rivers of love” evokes erotic imagery, inviting the worshipper to imagine themselves as loved, intimately, by God. The juxtaposition of these images with crowds of people implies that every person on Earth can also access this love signalling an element of the brand of Christianity Australian Pentecostal megachurches market; that nature exists to remind all humans of God’s love, suggesting intimate and even erotic dimensions to that love and power. Using these images in promotional film clips signifies a brand of global church that is available to all humans, through participation in creating the Australian Pentecostal megachurch brand. 5 Conclusion The chapter examines technologically-mediated artefacts such as digital texts, websites, and social media accounts to understand the self-representation of suburban-based Australian Pentecostal megachurches. Analysing these artefacts is important for understanding the ways in which such modern religious forms adapt to the changing cultural and social circumstances facilitated by technological developments. Australian Pentecostal suburban megachurches have embraced online commercialisation and marketing practices to create a branded religious experience for competing in a globalised Christian resource market. The churches sell branded products and commercialise access to church events consolidating association with a particular product or experience with the church brand. Church logos prominently displayed on products and promotional material provide a central image for recognition of that church’s aesthetic and style. The churches capitalise on the increased use of online marketing platforms through social media strategies and develop­ ment  of church-branded apps for smart devices. This subset of Australian

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Pentecostal churches uses commercialisation and marketing to sustain a form of branded religion that successfully operates in the modern marketplace of globalised consumer capitalism. These churches have become adept at curating and presenting a branded self-image. Using material religion theory to ­examine the online activities of Australian suburban-based megachurches reveals the ways in which modern religious forms not only adapt to technology but actively embrace technological advances to further organisational goals of growth. References Adogame, A. (2010). Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements in Global Perspectives. In: B.S. Turner, ed., The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 498–518. Agana, W.A. (2016). “Succeed Here and in Eternity”: Prosperity Gospel in Ghana. In: D. Marmion, G. Theissen and N. Hintersteiners, series eds., Studies in Theology, Society and Culture, 13. Oxford: Peter Lang Publications. Austin, D.A. (2017). Jesus First: The Life and Leadership of Andrew Evans. Sydney, Australia: Australian Pentecostal Studies. Bowler, K. (2013). Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. C3 Cairns. (2016). Creative Teams [online] Available at: http://c3churchcairns.org/cre ative-teams/ [Accessed 16 May 2016]. C3 Church. (2016). Presence Conference [online] Available at: http://www.presencecon ference.com/ [Accessed 18 May 2016]. C3 Church. (2017). About C3 [online] Available at: http://www.c3churchglobal.com/ [Accessed 28 June 2017]. C3 Church. (2017a). C3 Church Oxford Falls. YouTube [online] Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCr6vdPRDfewykWkW8epidZQ [Accessed 13 November 2017]. C3 Church. (2017b). C3 Music. YouTube [online] Available at: https://www.youtube .com/user/CCCOF [Accessed 13 November]. C3 Noosa. (2017). Our History [online] Available at: http://www.c3noosa.org/about .php?page=84 [Accessed 13 November 2017]. C3 San Diego. (2016). Worship and Creative Teams [online] Available at: https://c3sand iego.com/worship-creative/ [Accessed 16 May 2016]. Casidy, R. (2013). How great is thy brand: the impact of church branding on perceived benefits. Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 18(3), pp. 231–239.

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Hillsong. (2016). Kidsong [online] Available at: https://hillsong.com/conference/syd ney/kidsong/ [Accessed 16 May 2016]. Hillsong. (2017). Vision Statement. [online] Available at: https://hillsong.com/vision/ [Accessed 30 October 2017]. Hillsong Church. (2016). Hillsong Channel. YouTube [online] Available at: https://www .youtube.com/channel/UCMe2iSRlUiGHxe6GFlYg7p [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Hillsong Church. (2017). APP [online] Available at: https://hillsong.com/app/ [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Hillsong Church. (2017a). Hillwsong Worship. YouTube [online] Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/user/hillsongchurchsydney [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Hillsong Church. (2017b). HillsongunitedTV. YouTube [online] Available at: https:// www.youtube.com/user/hillsongunitedTV [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Hillsong Store. (2017). Hillsong United Wonder [online] Available at: https://hillsong store.com.au/music/united/ [Accessed 20 October 2017]. Hillsong TV. (2017). Hillsong Channel [online] Available at: https://hillsong.com/chan nel/ [Accessed 20 October 2017]. Hillsong United. (2015). Zion. Sydney: Hillsong Music. Hogg, M. (2017). Arthur “Eternity Man” Stace, the real story, 50 years on from his death. The Daily Telegraph [online] Available at: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ newslocal/southern-courier/arthur-eternity-man-stace-is-remembered-50-yearson-from-his-death/news-story/6f91bb316c6139a16e9186587a5ce64f [Accessed 30 October 2017]. Houston, B. (1999). You Need More Money. Australia: Hillsong Australia. Houston, B. (2013). How to Maximise Your Life. Sydney: Hillsong Music Australia. Hutchinson, M. (2017). “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity. Geographies of Emotion, and the Rise of Hillsong. In: T. Wager and T. Riches, eds., You Call Me Out Upon the Waters: The Hillsong Movement Examined. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39–61. Influencers. (2017). Home [online] Available at: http://music.influencers.church/ [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Influencers. (2016). @InfluencersAUS. Twitter [online] Available at: https://twitter .com/InfluencersAUS/following [Accessed 16 May 2016]. Influencers. (2017). Vision [online] Available at: http://influencers.church/vision [Accessed 24 June 2017]. Jennings, M. (2008). “Won’t you break free?”: An ethnography of music and the divinehuman encounter at an Australian Pentecostal Church. Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9(2), pp. 161–174. Kalu, O.U. (2010). Holy Praiseco: Negotiating Sacred and Popular Music and Dance and African Pentecostalism. Pneuma, 32(1), pp. 16–40.

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Kim, S. (2012). The Heavenly Touch Ministry in the Age of Millennial Capitalism: A Phenomenological Perspective. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 15(3), pp. 51–64. Klein, N. (1999). No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Canada: Picador, pp. 3. Klein, N. (2010). Naomi Klein on how corporate brandings has taken over America. The Guardian [online] 16 January 2010. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2010/jan/16/naomi-klein-branding-obama-america [Accessed 12 June 2017]. Kitiasara, P. (2010). Towards a Sociology of Religious Commodification. In B.S. Turner, ed.,. The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell, pp. 563–583. Levy, S.J. and Luedicke, M.K. (2012). From Marketing Ideology to Branding Ideology. Journal of Macromarketing, 33(1), pp. 58–66. Maddox, M. (2012). “In the Goofy parking lot”: Growth churches as a novel religious form for late capitalism. Social Compass, 59(2), pp. 146–159. Maddox, M. (2013). Prosper, consume and be saved. Critical Research on Religion, 1, pp. 108–115. Marti, G. (2008). Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Martin, D. (2001). Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Meyer, B., Morgan, D., Paine, C. and Plate S.B. (2011). Introduction: Key words in material religion. Material Religion, 7(1), pp. 4–8. Park, J.Z. and Baker J. (2007). What Would Jesus Buy: American Consumption of Religious and Spiritual Material Goods. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 46(4), pp. 501–517. Planetshakers. (2017). Facebook [online] Available at: https://www.facebook.com/ planetshakers/ [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Planetshakers. (2017). Home [online] Available at: https://www.planetshakers.com/ [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Planetshakers. (2017). Instagram [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/ planetshakers/?hl=en [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Planetshakers. (2017). Planetshakers Mobile App [online] Available at: https://www .planetshakers.com/planetshakers-app/ [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Planetshakers. (2017). Store [online] Available at: http://store.planetshakers.com/ [Accessed 30 October 2017]. Planetshakers. (2017). Twitter [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/planetshakers? ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor [Accessed 13 November 2017]. Planetshakers. (2017). Planetshakerstv. YouTube [online] Available at: https://www .youtube.com/channel/UC3z9rRoiie3RXzhUxv1Bdqw [Accessed 13 November 2017].

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Chapter 7

Andrew Evans: The Making of an Australian Pentecostal Politician Denise A. Austin 1 Introduction For an Australian politician whose political career only lasted seven years, Rev Dr Andrew Evans has attracted a disproportionate flurry of academic and media interest. Despite no political experience or major party backing, the former General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in Australia (aga, 1977–1997) co-founded the Family First Party in 2001, serving as a Legislative Councillor of South Australia (2002–2008). In the absence of insider perspective or historical research, most narratives on the emergence of Family First seek to build a genealogy linked to the “religious right” of the United States of America (usa) (Maddox, 2005a; Lohrey, 2006; Economou, 2006; Gibson, 2007; Warhurst, 2008; Smith, 2009; Gleeson, 2011). The resulting configuration usually discredits other factors that may be in play. As political theorist, Ernesto Laclau (1994) argues, the political discourse of a group is “determined only but its opposition to all the others.” Yet, it is the specific context of Andrew Evans within Australian Pentecostalism that made this new minor party such a success. Based on oral interviews, archival research and analysis of secondary sources, this chapter argues that Evans was effective in his political career through: a politicised theological foundation; established national profile; the South Australian political climate; unique organisational structure; interdenominational and interfaith support; sophisticated preferencing; the “family values” agenda; use of an emotive discourse; and unprecedented federal support. 2

Politicised Theological Foundation

Given the historically apolitical nature of Pentecostalism (Walker, 1983), it is somewhat surprising that Evans developed a politicised theological foundation. Following the pacifism of Assemblies of God of Great Britain leaders (Kay, 1989), early aga policy did not encourage military action (Gee, 1935).

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During World War ii, many aga members were staunch conscientious objectors (Averill, 1992). With the outbreak of the Korean War, aga General Superintendent, Ralph Read (1950) exhorted: “Are we to look to the politicians for leadership while the modern pulpit remains uncertain of its mission and message?… Is our trust in the Atom Bomb or in the Rock of Ages?” By contrast to this environment, Andrew Evans was born and grew up in the political hotspot of Pune, India (where Mohandas Gandhi was imprisoned during 1942–1944). Evans (July 2, 2016) remembers as a child, he observed “Britain quit India” demonstrations, helped dig World War ii trenches and endured terrifying runs to the air raid shelters as Japanese bombers flew over. As Pune was a base for the British army, Evans (July 2, 2016) recalls that many British soldiers were invited into the Evans’ family home for meals, so he often overheard political conversations. Evans converted to Christianity at an early age in India, studied at the aga’s Commonwealth Bible College in Australia and embarked on a fulltime life-long career in ministry. Wolfgang Vondey (2013) argues that Pentecostalism often encourages political activity if the socio-political context is conducive. As a child and teenager, Evans experienced first-hand the devastation of World War ii and the volatile struggle for Indian independence, so he formed a heightened awareness of political issues. Evans further cemented his theological understandings as a young aga missionary in Papua New Guinea (png) between 1963 and 1969. Pentecostal theologian, Gordon Fee (2009), notes that Pentecostal theology emphasises the “kingdom of God being here (present in the here and now),” affirming the need to be engaged with the surrounding society. Evans viewed his missionary role in png as helping bring the kingdom of God to that nation. Therefore, seeing the damage that gambling was having on the already impoverished local communities, he assisted a colleague in a political campaign against gambling which was ultimately successful. In explaining this decision to campaign, Evans (May 21, 2016) states, “My understanding was this, that the Gospel is to tell the Good News but also resist evil.” He (May 21, 2016) adds, “I saw, first hand, what could be achieved through the political process.” As Eldin Villafañe (1996) notes, Pentecostal theology views the Holy Spirit as “the great personal and social transformer,” therefore believers should outwork the Spirit’s liberating task in society. Dabbling in local png politics heightened the already politicised theology of Evans. The triumphalist tendencies of Pentecostalism also helped shape Evans’ convictions. Charles Farah (1979) explains from this viewpoint the “emphasis here is on what God can do” for humanity rather than vice versa. Evans once preached:

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When you have faith in the mighty power of God, the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God who just spoke and the millions of stars just came into place, the God who made this beautiful world of ours and we see his great power in creation… you can face any obstacle that may come across your pathway and be a winner… For if God be for you, who can be against you?. cited in austin, 2017b

Evans believed that God had “called” him into politics, therefore it was a logical assumption that he was “called” to win. This affirms the argument of Andy Flannagan (2011), executive director of Christians in Politics that, since heaven is a sphere where God’s reign is total, then Christians must demonstrate the reality of heaven on earth within and through political structures. Pentecostal theologian, Amos Yong (2010) adds that, consciously or not, “pentecostal ecclesial practices function performatively to engage the domain of the political.” He believes it is about “modelling a viable and alternative form of life in the footsteps of the Messiah, as empowered by the Holy Spirit.” Shane Clifton (2009) notes that Andrew Evans was one of many young aga preachers who were influenced by the “fivefold gospel” teaching of Rev Dr Yonggi Cho on faith and blessing which later became central to Australian Pentecostal identity. Certainly the secular Australia media painted Pentecostalism in terms of triumphalism. One secular news article described Pentecostalism in Australia as: “contemporary and prosperous. Hip even…where winners hang out…” The triumphalist nature of Australian Pentecostalism encouraged Evans that he was being empowered to bring about societal change. 3

Established National Profile

A key reason for the success of Andrew Evans in South Australian politics was his established profile in Pentecostal leadership. As senior pastor (1970–2000) of Paradise Community Church in Adelaide, he saw the congregation grow from 200 people to 4000 people, making it one of the largest churches in Australia at that time. Evans also ran a television program broadcast to around 10,000 people a week across the state (Austin, 2017a). The 3000-seat auditorium at Paradise Community Church in Adelaide, which opened in 1982, accommodated the largest number of people of any building in South Australia (White, 1982). Former senior pastor and father to Andrew, Tom Evans, offi-

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cially opened the building and the ceremony was televised across the state. As is common with significant public events, various political dignitaries attended the official opening included Hon. Mrs Jennifer Adamson (Minister of Health and Tourism), Dr Bruce Eastick (Member of Parliament and Leader of the Opposition 1972–1975) and members of the Campbelltown City Council (Law, 1982). Evans had also established a prominent national profile as a Pentecostal denominational leader. During his time as aga General Superintendent (1977– 1997), the movement grew from 152 churches and less than 10,000 constituents to 826 churches and over 115,000 constituents (Clifton, 2009). Not only did Evans encourage the aga movement to embrace the charismatic renewal which was sweeping the world but he also radically restructured the national and state executive leadership, fostering local church autonomy and church planting drives. The number of Australian Pentecostals increased from about 15,000 people in 1979 to more than 250,000 in 1999. On average there was a new church opened in the nation every 11 days for 20 consecutive years (Austin, 2017b). In fact, by 1996, over 10% of all church attenders in Australia were Pentecostal, overtaking Anglicans to become the second highest church attenders behind Roman Catholics (Kaldor et al., 1999). Evans was also a key organiser of a combined mass prayer meeting by the Australian Pentecostal Ministers’ Fellowship in 1994 at Parliament House, Canberra (Cartledge, 1994). He mentored many prominent Pentecostal leaders, who went on to establish some of the largest churches in Australia. This included tennis champion and denominational founder, Margaret Court, as well as Hillsong Church founder, Brian Houston. Such a high profile religious leader was able to build extensive support networks for his political ambitions. Evans was well known among international Pentecostal circles also. At the 1994 Assemblies of God World Congress, Evans had the opportunity to preach to around 25,000 people at the Yoido Full Gospel Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. This was the largest church in the world with almost 800,000 adherents. Evans was one of 20 Pentecostal leaders invited to meet with President Kim at his palace. While on the Executive of the World Assemblies of God (1988–2002) Evans was impressed by the political effectiveness of its leader, Rev Dr Yonggi Cho, who was also the founding leader of Yoido Full Gospel Assembly. On one occasion, Cho organised a mass protest against the persecution of pastors which received widespread government attention after it jammed fax machines of certain embassies (Evans, 1992). So, while Evans has no official ties to the “religious right” of the usa, he willingly admits to adopting the lobbying methods of his Korean mentor.

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South Australian Political Climate

The political climate in South Australia, at the turn of the 21st century, made it conducive to the electoral victory of Evans. Historically, South Australia had been a pioneer in public policy reform, from Australian Indigenous land rights, liberalising abortion laws and decriminalising homosexuality (Peppard, 2008). However, instability had haunted the South Australian state government for around a decade. Between 1992 and 2002, there were only four years that a majority government had held power in the 47-seat House of Assembly. As media commentator, Norman Abjorensen (2006) reveals, although the Liberal Party had been in office, since 1993, a significant number of defections had forced the government to rely on independents, opening a window for Family First to enter. Andrew Parkin (2003) argues further that proportional representation requirements in the Legislative Council meant that minor parties and independents could hold the balance of power, leading to a high turnover rate for members of the House of Assembly. For instance, Terry Cameron was elected as a Labor member, in 1997, but he defected to the newly formed SA First political party. The political system within South Australia allowed an unlikely minority party to win office. Other political factors were also creating a volatile environment. In 2000, the Labor Party in South Australia was pushing to restrict the autonomy of hiring policies in Christian schools and Evans decided that he should do something proactive to voice concern (Evans, May 21, 2016). As political researcher, Zareh Ghazarian (2015) demonstrates, minority parties have played an influential role in Australian politics, being “mobilised on particular issues” and “specific agenda demands usually outside the main economic and welfare policy debates.” Political scientist, Marion Maddox (2005a), holds that Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal government (1996–2007) also fostered a culture of “more acceptable religious politics” and an “increasingly overt embrace of the extreme end of conservative Christianity.” She argues that this led to an unprecedented “struggle for Australia’s soul.” Given the conducive political climate, Evans chose to become part of the decision-making processes in the South Australian parliament. The two party system of the Labor Party and Liberal Party has historically dominated Australian politics (Marsh, 1995). Convinced that neither of the major parties would accept a 65-year-old candidate and, considering Evans did not agree with most progressive policies of the Australian Greens or the Australian Democrats, he sent a letter of enquiry to Nick Xenophon’s independent party but received no response. Eventually, former associate pastor at Paradise, Paul

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Newsham (2016), who by this time hosted “Sunday Night Talk” on the Christian radio station, Life FM, approached Xenophon personally about the possibility of Evans running as a candidate. Instead, Xenophon recommended that Evans start his own party majoring on “family values.” Evans (May 21, 2016) explains that when was accused later of being a “puppet” of American “Christian Right” extremists, he replied, “No, I’m not actually – just go ask Xenophon. It was his idea!” While Evans (May 21, 2016) affirmed his foundational conservative Christian values, he denied any association with American political parties. 5

Organisational Structure

Evans’ extensive experience in organisational governance was also a key factor in his political success. In July 2001, Evans along with his son, Ashley, the new senior pastor of Paradise Community Church (later renamed Influencers Church), co-founded the Family First Party. Within half an hour of presenting the vision to the Paradise congregation, the new party had 300 members. This confirms the findings that religious parties often use their large congregations as leverage in the electoral system (Coe and Domke, 2006). However, unlike the “McMansions” stereotypes of some Pentecostal megachurches in New South Wales (Murphy, 2007), the Paradise congregation of early 21st century Adelaide was largely made up of blue collar workers who resonated with the “family values” touted by Andrew and Ashley Evans. Doris Buss and Didi Herman (2003) state, “When the [Christian Right] refers to ‘family’… it is a very particular form of family; mother, father, and their (preferably biological) offspring.” Family First defined “family” more broadly as a mother and father, boys and girls, grandfathers and grandmothers, and singles. This strategy is described by Marion Maddox (2005b, 2004) as a “carefully pitched Christian Right ‘dog whistle,’” using neutral terms like “family,” “common sense” and “decent.” It also reflects the John Howard’s federal government’s privileging of “Judeo-Christian values” (Johnson, 2007) and “heteronormative assumptions.” (Johnson, 2003). The Family First Party Constitution was developed largely from Nick Xenophon’s constitution, with a few modified policies from the controversial Fred Nile, head of the Christian Democratic Party (cdp) and long-serving member of the New South Wales parliament. Family First went to great pains to make it clear that it was not a religious party, distancing itself from the cdp. Nevertheless, its policies were clearly based on conservative Christian evangelical foundations. ChristianThomas Frame (2006) says, “Although the Family First Party does not hide its social conservatism, the word ‘Christian’ does not appear on

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Picture 1 Andrew Evans, 2001, from Andrew Evans’ private collection

its website or in its literature. Such an omission only serves to encourage suspicion on the part of outsiders…” From the outset, Family First made it clear that the party opposed same-sex marriage, euthanasia, abortion and the legalisation of marijuana. Peter Goers (2002) quips: Family First is for families, Aboriginal reconciliation, education and the environment and against marijuana, prostitution and sex out of wedlock. It’s not the Ministry of Fun… Defacto relationships are tolerated but marriage is better for Family First. These party room players “want to encourage debate which shows a healthy community.” Methinks they’ll find it and how. Although Family First Party was not a Christian party, its mission statements aligned to the doctrinal views of the aga. Family First Party Australia Limited organisational structure was unusual for a political party in that it was a company limited by guarantee with centralised decision-making power held by the Directors of the Federal Executive Committee. Zareh Ghazarian (2015) explains that the biennial National Conference, which met every two years, was made up of the national directors,

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state executives, state delegates and party founders. In many ways, this structure mirrors the ecclesiological structure of the aga/acc which is governed by a National Executive and State Presidents, with a National Conference held every two years (Who We Are, 2018). Within this Pentecostal-type ecclesiology, Family First members of parliament were required to adhere to all objectives, policies and principles of the party. If the parliamentarian failed to do so, the Federal Executive Committee had the power to disendorse that person. Family First’s organisation clearly gave much power to the party’s founders, resembling many right-of-centre parties (Ghazarian, 2015; Economou, 2006). However, Family First also had a significant extra-parliamentary presence, with a large membership base and a branch structure. This mirrored the restructuring Andrew Evans had instigated within the aga during his leadership (Austin, 2017b). Family First’s innovative organisational structure, based on the aga model, attempted to accommodate its grassroots membership within a structure that maintained the control of the oligarchs. 6

Interdenominational and Interfaith Support

One of the most important factors in the success of Andrew Evans was his effective rallying of interdenominational and interfaith supporters. To gain traction, Evans leveraged his 10-year involvement in the Heads of Churches in South Australia, with many Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and Greek Orthodox leaders promoting Family First. He visited each leader to explain the goals of Family First and to ask their permission to contact local ministers. According to Evans, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Seraphim of Apollonias even wrote to all his Greek Orthodox contacts, encouraging them to vote for Family First. Given the recent terror attacks in 2001, Marion Maddox (2005a) refers to the “subterranean assault waged by the right’s frightened God against… Islam in Australia…” However, Evans (May 21, 2016) actually met with the Muslim imam in Adelaide who affirmed their shared family values and publicly promoted Family First. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints leaders even accepted him and presented Andrew Evans and his wife, Lorraine, with the prestigious international “Family Values Award” (Watson, 2017). Even the Spiritualist Church was receptive. Contrary to assumptions that Evans only had a small aga support base, the strength of his election campaign was his extensive interdenominational and interfaith network. The value of a large religious support base was evident again through the Family First publicity machine. Once the constitutional policies were completed and the website was launched, campaigning commenced in earnest, funded

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by private donations and membership fees. Lorraine Evans volunteered to stand for the lower house, pinning up Family First banners, organised polling booth rosters and posted letters to 25,000 homes in her electorate. Andrew Evans and Paul Newsham spent weeks telephoning over 1000 religious ministers throughout South Australia to promote Family First. Newsham (2016) maintains that, “the reason we got the support from the majority of them was when we mentioned Andrew’s name. He was so well known in the state that they backed him.” Obviously, it was particularly easy to approach all 82 aga churches in South Australia, considering Andrew had played in integral role in pioneering or pastoring most of them. However, he also received support further afield. After hearing that euthanasia proponent, Philip Nitschke, was actively campaigning, Catholic medical doctor and prolife activist, Antonia Turnbull (2016) joined Family First as a candidate to attract the Catholic vote. There was strength in numbers behind the political lobbying of Family First. After decades of experience in the megachurch world, Andrew and Ashley Evans were well versed in mass campaigning which added vitality to the Family First endeavour. One aspect of this was raising financial support in the ecumenical business community, which funded a prime real-estate office, prominent signage and a television blitz. Ashley Evans and Paradise Community Church media relations director, Darren Keneally, travelled extensively raising funds and managing marketing. Andrew Evans had extensive experience broadcasting television programs, so a Family First advertisement was filmed down at the Torrens River with Evans speaking directly to the camera. Ashley Evans (2016) wrote many of his father’s speeches and created the slogan, “Put Families First – Vote Family First.” It was so effective that one columnist even questioned, “Is there some Svengali – either inside the party or a conservative leaning tactician from outside – helping, or are they simply moved by the spirit?” (The Family First Files, 2004). Pentecostal backing, matched with extensive ecumenical support provided a strong launch pad. 7

Sophisticated Preferencing

Zareh Ghazarian (2015) argues that it was Family First’s “sophisticated approach” to preferencing the Liberal, Labor and Democratic parties which brought it broad acceptance across the electorate and defied the “religious right” label. As Graeme Orr (2010) points out, horse-trading over preferences on ideological and pragmatic grounds has been part of Australian politics for almost a hundred years. Following this pattern, the final weeks before the 2002 elections, Paul Newsham (2016) describes as a “chaotic mass of horse trading.”

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Political advisors, such as Anglican Archbishop and lecturer at Flinders University, John Hepworth, provided valuable advice regarding preferencing (Evans, May 21, 2016). It was agreed that preferencing the controversial conservative One Nation party would be political suicide. Both Family First and One Nation still placed each other second last above the progressive Greens Party. This tactic helped Andrew Evans tremendously. Attorney General for the Labor government, and devoted Catholic, Michael Atkinson, also called to discuss preferences. Evans (January 17, 2014) states: “As the moral issues in parliament were based on a conscience vote we decided that we would preference people from either party if they had our values. We made it very clear why we were giving preferences to these people.” From an initial 300 members, Family First membership had grown to 1400 by the February 2002 South Australia state election (Evans, 2002). The new party ultimately ran a total of 27 out of 48 candidates, placed in strategic marginal seats. Family First received over 25,000 votes or 2.64 per cent of the total votes for the House of Assembly, although no candidates won office. Peter Goers (2002) reported that Family First preferenced the National Party in the upper house with the Liberal Party at 13th choice and the Labor Party “almost euthanised” in its preferences. In actual fact, Family First preferences assisted candidates on both sides. Lorraine Evans gained a respectable 5 per cent of the votes for a lower house seat and her preferences for a Labor candidate with similar moral values, John Rau, helped him over the line (Evans, July 2, 2016). At the end of the evening, the final result was too close to call. It was not until 6 March 2002 that the incumbent Liberal Premier, Rob Kerin, conceded to Australian Labor Party leader, Michael (Mike) Rann. The election tally resulted in Labor winning 23 seats and the Liberals 20 seats, with three independents and a National (Abjorensen, 2006). Andrew Parkin (2003) describes it as “another failure to achieve electoral fairness,” considering the Liberal Party won 50.9 per cent of the two-party preferred vote but lost office after post-election negotiations between Labor and two of the independents. Although Family First did not win a seat in the House of Assembly, preferences of the new minority party came into play. Regarding the Legislative Council, after another two weeks, it was finally announced that Evans had received four per cent of the votes, winning by a healthy margin of several hundred. The overall Council resulted in nine Liberals, seven Labor, three Democrats, one Independent No Pokies, one Family First and one SA First member (Parkin, 2003). Evans won the party’s first seat in the South Australian upper house at the expense of the Greens (Ghazarian, 2015). With his election as a Legislative Councillor, Evans became the oldest newly elected politician in Australian history (former journalist, Derryn Hinch,

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later taking the honours in 2016). Leader of the Opposition, Paul Holloway (2002), complimented Evans as, “only the second person… elected outside the major parties or the Democrats. This is a considerable achievement…” One reporter asked if Evans was going to “take God into parliament.” Evans (May 21, 2016) simply responded, “No, he’s already there. There’s [sic] lot of Christians in parliament and we already open with prayer.” Attention centred suddenly on the former senior pastor who now held the balance of power in the South Australian government. 8

The “Family Values” Agenda

While a novice to parliament, Evans soon utilised his new found influence to progress his “family values” agenda. When pastoring at Paradise, two sisters had told Evans that they had been sexually abused as children by their father. He advised the two women to go immediately to the police and report this crime. However, the authorities were powerless to act, as the statute of limitations prohibited prosecution for sexual offences prior to 1982. Now, as a Legislative Councillor, the very first goal of Evans was to see this legal loophole abolished. Evans (2003) tabled his bill lifting the statute of limitations on sexual abuse and Nick Xenophon seconded the motion. After a rigorous 12-month committee process, the bill was passed unanimously by both upper and lower houses. Vickie Chapman (2003), later Liberal deputy leader, voiced appreciation to Evans for “the courage to bring this matter to the parliament and make us all address the issue.” As a result, at least 585 cases were soon under investigation (Atkinson, 2004). While many scholars paint the “family values” agenda of Andrew Evans in a negative light, the passing of this bill during his first term of office had bipartisan support. Evans also established a parliamentary Inquiry into the Status of Fathers, which was the first of its kind anywhere in Australia and led to 19 amendments to the Family Law Act (Evans, January 28, 2017; Marsh, 2017). While Evans continually maintained that Family First was not an officially registered Christian party, the policies are clearly derived from conservative evangelical Christian beliefs. His (July 2, 2016) vote blocked decriminalisation of prostitution, the euthanasia bill, and a religious tolerance bill which would have forced Christian schools to employ non-Christian teachers. In response to the horrific Bali bombings in 2002, instead of making the typical parliamentary speech, Evans simply prayed for the victims and families, as well as for the terrorists themselves. As Marion Maddox (2005a) points out, this is around the same time that John Howard opened the Hillsong Church’s $25 million complex, signifying his

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solidarity with Australian Pentecostalism. The national prominence of Evans (January 28, 2017) continued to escalate as he was awarded the prestigious Order of Australia for service to the Christian church in Australia. Paradise Community Church was also attracting massive publicity with worship leader, Guy Sebastian, winning the very first Australian Idol competition in 2003. This only served to strengthen the solidarity of the congregation and kept Family First in the media consciousness. While some scholars argue that it was Family First’s stance against the Greens which gave Evans much broader appeal beyond the aga denominational limits (Ghazarian, 2015), Evans was also not afraid of siding with the “left” side of politics if he felt it aligned to his “family values” stance. In 2006, the South Australian government tabled its Climate Change and Greenhouse Emissions Reduction Bill with a target of 60 per cent reduction by 2050 (Fowler, 2007). Additional amendments proposed by the Greens and Democrats, with the support of Family First, included opposing the establishment of a national nuclear dump in South Australia and an interim target of a 20 per cent reduction in levels by 2020. In 2007, the Bill was passed, aided importantly by the Family First vote. Therefore, Family First aligned itself to neither major party but used its balance of power to investigate legislation in accordance with the party’s values. This approach also yielded significant media attention for the nascent party. 9

Emotive Discourse

Possibly the most controversial tactic of Andrew Evans was his emotive discourse against the proposed compulsory Sexual Health and Relationships Education (share) program (Australian Family Association, 2017). The share project was funded by the Department of Health and implemented by shine SA (Sexual Health Information Networking and Education South Australia) (Peppard, 2008; Flentje, 2005). It was delivered to Years 8, 9 and 10 students in 15 secondary schools, in partnerships with the State Education Department and funded by the Department of Health. The proposed teachings in the draft teacher training manual, Teach it like it is, evoked several anti-share public meetings, during 2003. These meetings were supported by: Right To Life; the Australian Family Association; Festival of Light; some Liberal Party members; and Family First Party members. Sally Gibson (2007), manager of the share project, links these groups to the globalisation of the Christian Right “family values” movement through “the deliberate use of emotive and volatile language to create fear and panic.” Judith Peppard (2008) maintains that the

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­anti-share meetings were not conducive to constructive dialogue and many of the accusations levelled against the program were inaccurate, portraying Teach it like it is as the actual curriculum. Emotions ran high on both sides of this contentious debate. Evans (May 21, 2016) acknowledges that when he spoke at meetings, he used emotive language and provided graphic explanations regarding the share project. He provides this example of how he described the proposed program to audiences: So on the ground in the classroom there are cards… And then the kids would all stand around in a circle. Then the teacher tells them a story and then they’ve got to pick up one of these intimacy cards and say which one they would use to help conflict in their sex lives. So then the teacher gets up and says Harry and Bill are friends, Harry wants to go all the way but Bill’s not sure… So Harry and Bill could go to the theatre… Or they could go down the beach. Or they could massage each other’s feet… Or they could lick each other … or they could masturbate each other… I’m not going to ask you to stand up and choose a card but that’s what an 11-yearold kid would have to do. Sally Gibson (2007) refuted these claims, stating that the project was “age appropriate,” based on “sound evidence” and provided “more opportunities” for parents to be involved in their child’s education. Nevertheless, in Yonggi Cho style, Evans gathered 4000 faxes of protest which were sent to the Premier’s office all on one day, jamming the machine. According to Evans (May 21, 2016), within hours, the Premier called him to his office to discuss a resolution. As a result of these lobbying efforts, the objectionable content was removed before the program was rolled out. Revisions included reference to delaying intercourse, highlighting the important role of parents, reducing the number of scenarios featuring same-sex couples; and removing the words “harm minimisation” (Gibson, 2007). During a radio interview, Andrew Evans claimed victory, stating: … anyhow, they’ve removed it all but it just shows the general direction and the general direction is built on harm minimisation…let’s give them condoms… very little mentioned about disease problems… if we don’t give them strong boundaries some might jump over the wall to experience it… if you have strong boundaries then there’s less will… that’s where harm minimisation fails. cited in gibson, 2007

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Gibson (2007) contends that conservative fear tactics in the public arena, utilising “family values” rhetoric is a “threatening environment” for those promoting sexual health and relationships education in schools. While concerns remain regarding the tactics employed, the emotive discourse engaged by Evans effected the result of tighter restraints on the sexual education material in state schools. 10

Federal Support

A final reason that Andrew Evans was able to make such a significant impact on the political landscape in Australia was through unprecedented federal support, owing to his national profile as former General Superintendent of the aga. His network stretched well beyond South Australia and he was able to attract candidates to run in every state. So, in March 2004, Family First was launched as a national party. As Peter Harris and Steve Fielding (2004) pointed out, Family First attracted not only religious but also socially conservative voters. Several members of the Liberal-National coalition (an alliance of the conservative political parties) also defected to Family First. So, Family First’s foray into federal politics was described by critics as a “crusade” of conservative “Christian soldiers,” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2005), marching to the drum of the “God of the radical right” (Maddox, 2005a). Melleuish (2010) explains, “As with any group, ‘Christians’ can only have an impact when they are concentrated together and so can influence the outcomes in particular seats.” High calibre candidates took up the challenge to bring Family First into federal politics, including prominent Pentecostal South Australian lawyer, activist, sportswoman and entrepreneur, Andrea Mason – Australia’s first Indigenous woman party leader. Although she did not continue in politics, Mason was later honoured as Australian Businesswoman of the Year (Zillman, 2016). In Queensland, former aga Deputy Superintendent and former aga State Superintendent, John Lewis, ran for the Queensland Family First federal seat. Although unsuccessful at the election, he did receive substantial backing from the aga constituency. Lewis (cited Austin, 2017) comments, “Andrew’s many contributions went beyond church boundaries. His passion to see a political party based on strong Christian values and an emphasis on prioritising the importance of family became a fire in his heart.” As evidence of the unprecedented support for the federal campaign, Ashley Evans (2016) and his team were able to secure substantial financial backing. By 2005, Family First’s income was over $1.6 million compared to just over $370,000

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for the Democrats and approximately $477,000 for the Greens (Ghazarian, 2015). Family First even sponsored a television advertisement right before the Australian Football League grand final coverage. It was apparently the first party in Australian electoral history to fund prime time television advertising in its first national campaign (Manning and Rootes, 2005). An independent political website reported: Family First, as good God-fearing types, aren’t tarts – per se – so we don’t hear that much about them. What they clearly are, however, are efficient organisers – efficient organisers with a good grasp of political tactics with the potential to deploy the people needed on the ground to make a difference. “The Family First Files,” 2004

Despite Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2005) programs insisting Family First was “born out of” the Assemblies of God (Power, 2004), the aga National President, Brian Houston maintained: One thing we are not is a political movement… The Assemblies of God in Australia does not have a political vision and we don’t have a political agenda. I think people need to understand the difference between the church being very involved in politics and individual Christians being involved in politics. There is a big difference morris, 2005

Nevertheless, seeing the extensive influence of this new party, Prime Minister John Howard requested personal meetings with Family First representatives on multiple occasions to discuss preference deals (Evans February 3, 2014). Eventually, in the 2004 federal election, Family First was able to assist almost 30 people from various parties into office through preferences. In South Australia, Family First won 4 per cent of primary vote but succumbed to Labor owing to Greens preferences. The well-established strength of Fred Niles’ cdp in Western Australia and New South Wales meant Family First did not attract votes there. However, Family First came very close to blocking the Greens from winning a senate seat in Tasmania (Ghazarian, 2015). Ultimately, Steven Fielding became the first federal senator from the Family First Party, on the basis preference deals with both Labor and Liberal representatives (Warhurst, 2007). Evans continued to attract political attention. Anna Crabb (2009) states that, “The major parties observed Family First’s success in

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­ obilising voters… and consequently sought to highlight their own Christian m credentials.” Labor opposition leader, Kevin Rudd (2006), simultaneously proclaimed his Christian faith, while criticising the growing influence of conservative Christian groups (“Kevin Rudd and the God Factor,” 2005). Prior to the 2007 federal election, Rudd approached Evans (February 3, 2014) who recalls: “He immediately told me he was a born-again Christian… and held our values” and wanted to “strengthen the Labor Party with more Christians.” Apparently, when interviewed on abc radio, Rudd admitted that in the past he had kept his Christian faith to himself but he was motivated to speak out because Family First was targeting the conservative evangelical vote (Graham, 2009). In the 2007 election, preferential voting by Labor and Democrat primary voters in some states was towards Family First, rather than the Greens, meaning the Greens shared the balance of power in the Senate with one independent Senator and Family First member (Dann, 2008). Family First received 1.62 per cent of the primary vote in the senate, and 1.99 per cent in the House of Representatives. In South Australia, Christian business man Dennis Hood (November 24, 2016) was elected to the upper house, in 2006. According to Evans (May 21, 2016), when the religious tolerance bill was reintroduced by the Labor Party, Family First collected over 11,000 signed facsimiles of protest and the bill was dropped. Seeking to shore up the future of Family First, in 2008, 73-year-old Evans announced his resignation, so that his replacement, Robert Brokenshire (former Minister of Police in the Liberal Party), could be well established before the 2010 South Australian elections. Family First saw ongoing success, eventually holding two seats in Western Australia, three in South Australia and one in Victoria. In 2016, Family First won 1.38 per cent of the national primary vote in the senate, with Bob Day holding office (Ghazarian, 2017). However, he was soon forced to resign when his company went into liquidation (Family First Ex-senator Bob Day’s Election Ruled Invalid by High Court, 2017). In an effort to consolidate the fractured conservative vote and shift publicity off Day’s resignation, in April 2017, Family First merged with Cory Bernardi’s minority party to form the new Australian Conservatives Party (Royal, 2017). Day’s replacement, Lucy Gichuhi, chose to sit as an independent instead of joining the Australian Conservatives. Nevertheless, Zareh Ghazarian (2017) points out, “the merger is a savvy response to the changes to the senate voting system that were introduced in 2016… So, parties can no longer make the same preference deals they had in the past.” While not all members were Christians, Bernardi states, “No one in our party can deny the contribution that the Christian ethos and the way the Judeo-Christian framework is played in our society”

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(cited in “What on Earth is Cory Bernardi Doing?” 2017). The strategy initially seemed to be effective, with many Christian voters wary of the bi-partisan ­support of same-sex marriage apparently transferring membership to the new party (Hutchinson, 2017). However, the rebranding in South Australia from Family First to Australian Conservatives backfired. Robert Brokenshire lost his seat (Owen, 2018) and Dennis Hood defected to the Liberal Party (Harmsen and MacLennan, 2018). Without the prominent federal profile and extensive Pentecostal leadership experience of Andrew Evans, it has proven difficult to sustain a political party based on conservative Christian values. The Australian Conservatives was deregistered as a political party in 2019. 11 Conclusion Using never-before obtained oral interviews and insider perspectives, this chapter provides an historical context for the success of Andrew Evans as a prominent and influential Pentecostal politician. Having grown up in the highly charged social environment of India, served in Papua New Guinea during times of economic hardship, pastored one of Australia’s largest churches for three decades and led a rapidly growing national denominational movement, Evans decided to move into politics. By pioneering a new political party based on his aga version of “family values,” he rocked the normative political environment. Through effective lobbying across a wide diversity of faith backgrounds, Evans was empowered to promote his message. He saw a successful bill lifting the statute of limitations on sexual abuse, as well as supporting environmental protection. He used emotive language to ensure a conservative Christian approach in school sexual education. Finally, through federal support the Family First Party was able to gain some ground at the national level. References

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Cartledge, D. (1994). The Miracle of United Prayer. Ministers’ Bulletin, June p. 5. Evans, A. (1992). From the General Superintendent. Ministers’ Bulletin, October, pp. 4–5. Evans, A. (2003). Bali Bombings. Legislative Council – Hansard-4-1413 257, October 13. Available at: http://hansardpublic.parliament.sa.gov.au/_layouts/15/Hansard/Down loadHansardFile.ashx?t=historicpdf&d=HANSARD-4-1413 [Accessed 10 March 2017]. Evans, A. (2002). Legislative Council Hansard. Adelaide: Parliament of South Australia, May 9. Evans, A. (2003). Criminal Law Consolidation (Abolition of Time Limit for Prosecution of Certain Sexual Offences) Amendment Bill. House of Assembly – Hansard, Wednesday June 3, p. 2543. Goers, P. (2002). Faster Pastor, I’m at Your Service. Sunday Mail, February 24, p. 2. Harris, P. and Fielding, S. (2004). The Family First Debut into Federal Politics, November 17. Canberra: Address to the National Press Club. Holloway, P. (2002). The Hon. P. Holloway. South Australia Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): First Session of the Fiftieth Parliament – Legislative Council, March 5, p. 5. Law, M. (1982). Opening at Paradise: A Day of Victory for Jesus Christ in Australia. Australian Evangel, November, pp. 13–14. Read, R. (1950). A National Call-Up. Harvest Grain, 6(4), December, pp. 22. Rudd, K. (2006). Faith in Politics. The Monthly, October, pp. 22–30. Rudd, K. (2006). Howard’s Brutopia: The Battle of Ideas in Australian Politics. The Monthly, November, pp. 46–50. The Family First Files. (2004). Crikey, 27 September. Available at: https://www.crikey .com.au/2004/09/27/the-family-first-files/ [Accessed 5 January 2017]. Who We Are. Australian Christian Churches. Available at: https://www.acc.org.au/ about-us/ [Accessed 4 May 2018].



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Abjorensen, N. (2006). Rethinking Westminster: South Australia’s Cabinet Experiment. Democratic Audit of Australia – Discussion Paper 30/06. Canberra: Australian National University, October, pp. 1–9. Addison, S. “Andrew Evans on the Rise and Rise of the Australian Assemblies of God,” Movements.net, Available at: http://www.movements.net/2008/08/20/andrew-ev ans-on-the-rise-and-rise-of-the-australian-assemblies-of-god.html [Accessed 4 January 2017]. Australian Broadcasting Authority. (2005). Family First: A Federal Crusade. Sydney: Red Movies and Pacific Film and Television Committee, 2005. Austin, D. (2017a). “Flowing Together”: The Origins and Early Development of Hillsong Church within Assemblies of God in Australia. In: T. Riches, and T. Wager, eds.,

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“You Call Me Out Upon The Waters”: Critical Perspectives on the Hillsong Movement. Melbourne: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 21–28. Austin, D. (2017b). Jesus First: The Life and Leadership of Andrew Evans. Sydney: Australian Pentecostal Studies. Averill, L. (1992). Go North Young Man. Brisbane: Triune Press. Buss, D. and Herman, D. (2003). Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chapman, V. (2003). Criminal Law Consolidation (Abolition of Time Limit for Prosecution of Certain Sexual Offences) Amendment Bill. House of Assembly – Hansard, June 4, p. 3417. Clifton, S. (2009). Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia. Leiden: Brill. Coe, K. and Domke, D. (2006). Petitioners or Prophets? Presidential Discourse, God and the Ascendancy of Religious Conservatives. Journal of Communication, 56(2), pp. 309–330. Crabb, A. (2009). Invoking Religion in Australian Politics. Australian Journal of Political Science 44(2), pp. 259–279. Dann, C. (2008). Experimental Evolution Down Under: Thirty Years of Green Party Development in Australia and New Zealand. In: G. Frankland, P. Lucardie, and B. Rihoux, eds., Green Parties in Transition: The End of Grass-roots Democracy? New York: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 177–197. Economou, N. (2006). A Right-of-Centre Triumph: The 2004 Australian Half-Senate Election. Australian Journal of Political Science, 41(4), pp. 501–516. Family First Ex-senator Bob Day’s Election Ruled Invalid by High Court. ABC News, April 5, 2017. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/family-first-bobday-election-ruled-invalid-by-high-court/8417204 [Accessed 4 May 2018]. Farah Jr., C. (1979). From the Pinnacle of the Temple: Faith or Presumption. Plainfield NJ: Logos International Publishers. Fee, G. (2009). God’s Empowering Presence, The Holy Spirit and the Letters of Paul. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic. Flannagan, A. (2011). Five Reasons why Christians Shouldn’t be Involved in Party Politics. Political Theology, 12(1), pp. 5–10. Flentje, J. (2005). Paper for the 10th National Conference of the Association for the Welfare of Child Health, Sydney, April 28–29. Available at: www.awch.org.au/pdfs/conferenc es/2005/09_FLENTJE_paper.pdf [Accessed 10 January 2017]. Fowler, R. (2007). Emissions Reduction Target Legislation. In: T. Bonyhady, and Christoff, P. eds., Climate Law in Australia. Annandale NSW: The Federation Press, pp. 103–123. Frame, T. (2006). Church and State: Australia’s Imaginary Wall. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

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Maddox, M. (2005b). Interlude: One Country Under Howard. In: P. Browne, and J. Thomas, eds., A Win and a Prayer: Scenes from the 2004 Australian Election. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, pp. 46–47. Manning, H. and Rootes, C. (2005). The Tainted Triumph of the Greens: The ­Australian National Election of 9 October 2004. Environmental Politics, 14(3), pp. 403–408. Marsh, I. (1995). Beyond the Two Party System: Political Representation, Economic Competitiveness and Australian Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsh, W. (2017). About Us. Fatherhood Foundation. Available at: http://www.ausheart .com.au/fathers/aboutUs.html. [Accessed 25 April 2017]. Melleuish, G. (2010). Religion and Politics in Australia. Political Theology, 11(6), pp. 909–927. Morris, L. (2005). Church Expands Horizons. Sydney Morning Herald, May 4. Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Church-expands-horizons/2005/05/03/ 1115092503070.html [Accessed 9 January 2017]. Murphy, K. (2007). When the Middle is a Very Nice Place to Be. The Age, August 25, pp. 1–5. Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/when-the-middleis-a-very-nice-place-to-be/2007/08/24/1187462515658.html [Accessed 9 January 2017]. Orr, G. (2010). The Australian Experience of Electoral Bribery: Dealing in Electoral Support. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 56(2), pp. 225–241. Owen, M. (2018) We Should Have Done Better, Says Cory Bernardi. The Australian March 19. Available at: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/southaustralia-election/we-should-have-done-better-says-cory-bernardi/news-story/ d7ba52a97f6ab21e246a4d5ad67bc8d1 [Accessed 9 January 2018]. Parkin, A. (2003). South Australia. In: J. Moon, and C. Sharmen, eds., Australian Politics and Government: The Commonwealth, the States and the Territories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 104–130. Peppard, J. (2008). Culture Wars in South Australia: The Sex Education Debates. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 43(3), pp. 499–516. Power, R. (2004). The Rise and Rise of the Pentecostals: In an Era of Doubt, an Imposed Set of Values and the Promise of Wealth are Proving a Successful Recipe for the Pentecostal Churches. Arena Magazine, 12(74), p. 1. Royal, S. (2017). What do Family First and Guy Sebastian Have in Common? ABC News,  April 26. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-26/what-dofamily-first-and-guy-sebastian-have-in-common/8472356 [Accessed 4 May 2018].

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Smith, R. (2009). How Would Jesus Vote? The Churches and the Election of the Rudd Government. Australian Journal of Political Science, 44(4), pp. 613–637. Vondey, W. (2013). Pentecostalism: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Bloomsbury. Villafañe, E. (1996). The Politics of the Spirit: Reflections on a Theology of Social Transformation for the Twenty-First Century. Pneuma, 18(2), pp. 161–170. Walker, A. (1983). Pentecostal Power: The “Charismatic Renewal Movement” and the Politics of Pentecostal Experience. In: E. Barker, ed., Of Gods and Men: New Religious Movements in the West. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, pp. 89–103. Warhurst, J. (2010). Campaigning to Christians. Eurekastreet, 20(12), pp. 11–12. Warhurst, J. (2008). Conscience Voting in the Australian Federal Parliament. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 54(4), pp. 579–596. Warhurst, J. (2007). Religion and Politics in the Howard Decade. Australian Journal of Political Science, 42(1), pp. 19–32. Watson, D. (2017). Family Values Award Recipients. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints United Kingdom and Ireland. Available at: http://www.lds.org.uk/familyvalues-award-recipients. [Accessed 5 January 2017]. What on Earth is Cory Bernardi Doing? Vision Christian Radio (July 21, 2017). Available at: https://vision.org.au/radio/2017/07/21/15266/ [Accessed 4 May 2018]. White, P. (1982). 2200-seat Church to take Growing Congregations. The Advertiser, p. 3. Yong, A. (2010). In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology. Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Zillman, S. (2016). NT Indigenous Leader Andrea Mason Named Australian Businesswomen of the Year. ABC News (November 17, 2016). Available at: http://www.abc .net.au/news/2016-11-17/andrea-mason-businesswoman-of-the-year/8032684 [Accessed 4 May 2018].



Oral Interviews

Evans, Ashley. (December 20, 2016). Personal Interview with the Author. Southport QLD. Evans, Andrew. (May 21, 2016). Personal Interview with the Author. Eight Mile Plains QLD. Evans, Andrew. (January 28, 2017). Personal Phone Call with the Author. Evans, Andrew. (January 17, 2014). Skype Interview with Dariel Forlong. Melbourne VIC. Evans, Andrew and Del. (July 2, 2016). Personal Interview with the Author. Broadbeach QLD.

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Hood, Dennis. (November 24, 2016). Personal Interview with the Author. Adelaide SA. Newsham, Paul and Andrew Evans. (November 24, 2016). Personal Interview with the Author. Evanston Gardens, SA. Turnbull, Antonia. (November 26, 2016). Personal Interview with the Author. Adelaide SA.

Chapter 8

“The Work of the Spirit”: Hillsong Church and a Spiritual Formation for the Marketplace Tanya Riches 1 Introduction In 2007, Australia’s nationally-broadcasted television show The Chaser’s War on Everything famously parodied the Pentecostal megachurch Hillsong. Comedian Andrew Hansen stood proudly on a rug under a television screen that read “Hill$ong.” Behind him, representative of the congregation’s worship recordings, stood musicians on guitars, a grand piano, and synthesiser. Waving his hands in a quasi-Pentecostal manner he cried, “Ladies and Gentlemen, in the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit let me hear you say, ‘Amen!’” “Amen!” the studio congregation yelled. “Let me hear you say, ‘Praise the Lord!’” he continued. “Praise the Lord!” the crowd echoed. “Let me hear you say, ‘I will empty the contents of my wallet into that little collection plate when it comes around!’” He paused before adding, “… And it’s all tax-free, Hallelujah!” “Hallelujah!” the studio congregation shouted back. Then as he launched into song, the band played behind him: Praise the Lord for all the cash I’ve got Praise Him for my Rolls Royce and my yacht Serving God ain’t hard with a credit card Jesus died so I could make a lot!. abc 2007

Hansen’s finale hit a crescendo note while he sang kneeling under falling dollar bills. This television segment served as a confirmation that the fast-growing Pentecostal congregation had permeated the national consciousness – but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. This chapter asks, “how are Hillsong Church attendees encouraged to practice Christian distinctives within the marketplace?” Its thesis is that this

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­ ustralian megachurch draws upon a particular missional model of e­ conomics, A which encourages its worshippers to adopt a religiously-imbued work ethic while simultaneously maintaining the belief that God anoints their work as sacred. This facilitates “the work of the Spirit” in the believer’s everyday life, a phrase which represents a special spiritual “anointing” that members believe to be upon this particular congregation. How the tensions of work and reward, as well as sacrament or “charism” (grace) operate in the life of the individual believer will be explored here, with reference to the continual forward-moving or eschatological emphasis of Pentecostalism. The inquiry is first positioned in the Australian context, then its methodology outlined, along with a background to this study through my own previous research. Then, relevant anthropological, sociological, historical, and theological literature is introduced to highlight the global scope of this discussion. Next, the chapter documents recent transitions at Hillsong via five interviews with exemplars, a term that means an example or model. In other words, these are the people who are believed to be outworking the expanding church vision as it relates to the marketplace. It then presents conclusions. 2

In Search of Hillsong’s Everyday Theologies

Hillsong Church was formed on the edges of Sydney, Australia, in 1983. These congregations share a relatively simple liturgy or worship service structured around music, prayer, and Bible teaching. Through attending the meetings congregants are initiated into a habitus, that is, Hillsong’s “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 53). In other words, there is no membership roll. Instead, those who join Hillsong’s congregation do so by learning a particular way of engaging in its gathering, and the expected actions that flow out of them, including evangelism or Christian witness in the workplace. This is Hillsong’s “spiritual formation.” Since its founding, Hillsong has undergone incredible growth. At the time of writing, it had campuses in over seventeen nations, with weekend services drawing over 120,000 people. Worshippers gather weekly within the cosmopolitan cities of Sydney, Paris, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam to name a few, and also (at the time of writing) in the Velvet Rooftop Bar in Kuta, Bali, Indonesia. Hillsong’s reach extends into places that could arguably be viewed as “developing” (such as Mitchell’s Plain, South Africa or Kiev, Ukraine), although its greatest success to date has undoubtedly been within Western nations, during a time of increasing secularism (see Riches and Wagner, 2017).

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Its roots are Pentecostal, although classical Pentecostals lament a lack of glossolalic utterances within Hillsong’s public worship (noted in Clifton 2009, p. 265). There are few pronouncements about the necessity to be “Born Again,” however, Hillsong’s annual conference does invoke or reference earlier types of Pentecostal fervour with themes such as “Revival,” and “Speak, We’re Listening.” Hillsong is largely lauded in popular circles as a renewal movement. In contrast to how many Christian Australians view the church, non-religious Australians draw upon popular or critical media characterisations (such as by Hansen/abc mentioned above, or Greg Bearup’s [2003] article in Sydney’s newspaper magazine The Good Weekender) to reference the church’s theologies and practice. Hillsong’s publicly listed annual revenue and music sales are also used to infer its beliefs and priorities. Although these comedy sketches (and correlated pseudo-journalistic TodayTonight “exposés”) may feel authentic to the average Australian viewer, to date there has been in fact little research conducted on the ever-growing Hillsong congregation’s own views towards its material products, or the beliefs held by adherents regarding the market, money, and work. While the anthropology of Christianit(ies) scholars now intentionally engage with theology and congregational practices (Robbins, 2009; Haynes, 2012; Bialecki et al., 2008) this was not always the case. In fact, Susan Harding (1991) famously summarised the academy’s view of conservative evangelical groups as the “repugnant other.” Overall, but particularly more sociologically-orientated, scholars have adopted a critical religion approach to Hillsong, choosing to overlook the scholarship of attendees’ in preference of more “objective” research (e.g. Lohrey, 2006; Maddox, 2012, 2013; Marti, 2017; Abraham, 2018). This is consistent with previous approaches that deemed Pentecostalism as a “primitive” form of Christianity; and positioned it as “anti and not simply nonmodern” (Coleman, 2015, p. 276; Wacker, 2009). Consequently, Rebecca King recommends the anthropology of Christianity be used to, [call] into question the larger essentializing and normalizing tactics at play in modern epistemologies, such as those that stress an antagonism between the body and the spirit or that view Christianity as a precursor to modernity. king, 2014, p. 256

Such an approach is greatly needed. Therefore, this chapter seeks to explore spiritual formation as understood by Hillsong Church’s attendees, and particularly more recent theological and organisational shifts relating to spirituality and everyday work life. Rather than reviewing the public claims of Hillsong’s

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charismatic popular preachers, or looking only for evidence of “prosperity theology” in Hillsong’s teaching and/or writings (as heresy-hunting blog sites do), this chapter instead seeks to understand Hillsong’s theological approach to work and blessing in the same way its ordinary congregation members do – through the life of the Sydney congregation. It is thus an exploration of lived spirituality. To investigate theologies used in the everyday life of the Hillsong community (as opposed to those exclusively promoted on the platform), I surveyed various members of the church informally. However, many attendees did not feel “authorised” to speak on such a controversial topic. Therefore, instead, six people were selected as recognisable exemplars commonly promoted or referenced by attendees (including staff and college students). These people embodied the ideals of the community regarding financial leadership, or “stewardship”; ideals towards which ordinary members of the congregation aspired. The regularly cited exemplars (and therefore participants interviewed here) included Hillsong’s ceo and cfo, as well as two board members, a well-known Hillsong college pastor knowledgeable in the area of business studies, and a leader of the newly formed Hillsong “business connects.” All attended Hillsong Sydney campuses. These rather lengthy interviews occurred in person or by Skype, with one conducted via email, with transcripts analysed using a grounded theory approach. These interviews clarified that although its traditional forums for discipleship still exist, Hillsong’s business people gather weekly in small groups across Sydney’s cbd under the banner of “Spheres,” seeking to develop a spiritual formation appropriate for the marketplace. This represents an attempted organisational shift similar to Hillsong’s previous transformations noted by an editor of this volume (Hutchinson, 2017, pp. 39–62). 3

Background to the Study

In any ethnographic research, it is important to note the location of the writer. I am a long-term attendee of the church, after joining with my family while young. I later volunteered six years full-time in the creative department to write songs and administrate United, one of Hillsong’s headlining worship bands. In this sense, I have been both a participant in the services, and contributor to Hillsong’s longer-term culture and organisation. However, I am often considered something of a renegade after leaving to obtain my Ph.D. in a Presbyterian seminary. The book I co-edited with Tom Wagner, The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters (2017) was an effort to encourage collaboration with outside voices. Since then, I have returned as a

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staff member and college lecturer to coordinate Hillsong College’s p ­ ostgraduate program. I encourage young leaders within the organisation to bring research methods into their ever-evolving roles. Much of my research into Hillsong focused on the church’s mission and endeavours. In my MPhil study (Riches, 2010) I documented ten years (1996– 2006) of Hillsong Church’s formative past. While not a historical work per se, this study focused on the particular period in which the Australian congregation “Hills Christian Life Centre” became “Hillsong Church.” My study identified themes within the musical product, as representative not only of the congregation’s emic understandings of theologies but also spiritual practices. I was especially interested in how musical product facilitated the organisation’s growth despite a floundering Australian music industry; and the impact of commercial success upon the congregation’s self-perception. Hillsong developed its congregation’s imagination in significant ways, through the creation and distribution of these products for the marketplace.1 During this time, the business practices of the church transformed; Hillsong staff worked hard on the success of their worship music, or sung theologies. Truly, the Hillsong congregation employed their bodies as “affective labour” (see Wade and Hynes, 2013, p. 174). This characteristically Pentecostal ritual “work” (Albrecht, 1999, p.  23), had great efficacy for producing meaning. Importantly, these efforts were underpinned by an unequivocal belief that the Spirit “anointed” this musical product, which therefore represented more than the sum of its parts (Evans, 2017). Initially, at least, Hillsong conceived of itself as a renewal movement, with its branded message broadcast from the edges of the world back into the geographical centre of Christianity (see Riches, 2016, p. 274). Subsequently, this Western Sydney congregation was redefined by fame. My MPhil research unearthed transformations in the worship practices by categorising the lyrics of the tape, CD and dvd product via content analysis. Each video was watched twice in its entirety, with detailed “field notes” taken in the first viewing, and attention paid to the visual details, song structure, themes, and the audience engagement. From this, I developed a coding scheme applied to the lyrical content of ten years of Hillsong music. I also conducted ethnographic interviews with leaders to triangulate these findings. My research found that although its songs did emphasise “prosperity” and “blessing,” Hillsong moved away from such terms towards an understanding of God’s closeness in pain and suffering in the aftermath of 9/11 (Riches, 2010, p. 82). During this review of ten years of business practices what became clear was that, in Bourdieu’s (1993) sense, Hillsong had staked a new position in the 1 Notably, Hillsong itself does not call these “products” but prefers the term “resources.”

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­religious field.2 In other words, the church had intentionally taken a risky or start-up position, by creating contemporary music, of which the most important quality was its sacramentality, i.e., its potential to communicate an experience of God’s Spirit to the people. Hutchinson (2017, p. 45) demonstrates how this young, little known and moderately skilled group of musicians intentionally defied Sydney’s elite cessationist churches in the very act of musical production. Early Hillsong CD titles provocatively proclaimed, “God is in the House!” and the congregation sang, “People get free!” However, undeniably, as the music was purchased by the masses, Hillsong’s art turned commercial. By producing up to three albums a year, the various localised processes soon yielded access to the best of the international music industry. During this transformation, Hillsong’s leaders gathered enough cultural (and economic) capital to challenge the religious elites in Sydney’s declining mainstream churches. Since this time, Hillsong has continued to expand, with its music now catering to the preferences and experiences of four distinct generations via Hillsong Live, Hillsong United, Hillsong Young & Free, and Hillsong Kids.3 In addition, Hillsong’s ministries have diversified far beyond music into other media streams, e.g. recently gaining a global television channel. The expansion has not resulted in a decline in attendance; instead, new campuses circle the globe. The Hillsong congregations are now united less around their church’s material products than by a distinctive habitus, as Bourdieu defines it, “an embodied history, internalised as a second nature, and so forgotten as history… the autonomy is that of the past, enacted” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 56). This embodied history is found in a range of events and practices. As McIntyre (2007, p. 187) noted, music is undoubtedly a part of, but no longer the totality of, the Hillsong brand. 2 Bourdieu argues that in any field there is pursuit/competition for social and cultural capital through differentiated social action; arguably this is just as true in a religious field. For example, among Christians, the command to “love one another” does not exclude competitive social engagement to gain social and cultural capital. A field generates a habitus, or way of being. So in this case, a religious field forms (disciples) its subjects in the concerns of Jesus and how the church community relates to God, each other, and to the world. But notably, such discipleship also sustains and maintains the hierarchical social strata within the religious field, and directs the action considered virtuous for communities. 3 Initially these music offerings represented the adults (25+), young adults (18–25yrs), youth (12–17yrs) and kids (under 11yrs) ministries of Hillsong Church. However, as the audiences retained their preferred band, these now represent the Baby Boomer, Gen X & Y, Gen Z and Millennial generations.

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3.1 Prosperit(ies) and Theolog(ies) Differences in theological versus other approaches prove important when attempting to amplify congregational realities. For theologians, Christianity represents the shared ideals of the church “universal,” which stretches from biblical times to the many worshiping groups today. As the faith adapted, Christians distinguished theologies from one another. Thus, African historian Jehu Hanciles (2008, p. 17) advocates grass-roots evaluation of the ways Christian communities use the market to both accommodate and resist global economic forces. Following exponential growth, scholars have attended to the movement’s globalisation (Hunt, 2000; Robbins, 2009; Coleman, 2000, 2011) in the “widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness,” or, the shrinking of distance and time (Held et al., 1999, p. 2). Importantly today global inequalities are arguably more evident and more extreme. The biblical book of Acts emphasises the sharing of resources, and even their redistribution to assist the poor. Within Christian tradition, a sin of omission (failure to act) is as potent as a sin of commission (wrong acting). Therefore, theologically, any broad denouncement of “prosperity theology” is often a veiled critique of Christianised mass consumerism and accumulation in a world of poverty and hardship. Failure to undertake social justice (i.e. to redress market inequalities) is seen as a sin of omission with grave consequence. For some, Pentecostalism marks a break from more traditional views on work, by focusing upon its material benefits, and distribution. Thus, the term “prosperity gospel” at times functions as an exclusionary criterion to reject the ideas (and communities) of these Christians based on their perceived understandings and use of material wealth. “Prosperity theology” or “the prosperity gospel” gained strength in the 1980s (Sharpe, 2013). While Hunt (2000, p. 335) is empathetic to those who cast it as a hegemonic American export, he maintains it is a multi-directional movement. The links between global Pentecostalism and prosperity theologies are indisputable; but are most evident in the fundamentalist, individualistic, and indeed materialistic neo-Pentecostal strain called “Word of Faith” (Hunt, 2000; Bowler, 2013). Historian Kate Bowler criticises the North American Prosperity movement in her volume Blessed (2013). Importantly, she distinguishes “hard prosperity” which “judges’ people’s faith by their immediate circumstances” from “soft prosperity” which “appraises believers with a gentler, more roundabout assessment” (Bowler, 2013, p. 34). She notes common themes: faith as an “activator” that turns confessions into realities, resulting in wealth and health. The outcome is victory. But Coleman has noted that it is unclear how “soft prosperity” differs from “the American Dream” (2015, p. 25).

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Various scholars emphasise an astounding global Pentecostal social productivity within a neoliberal economic environment (Haynes, 2013; Coleman, 2000, 2011; Robbins, 2009). Here, Pentecostalism’s democratisation of religion intersects with ascription of the power over personal economic wealth to supernatural forces; via sacrificial exchange everyday believers’ attempt to access wealth and demonstrate success (Coleman, 2011). According to Haynes (2012, p. 125), this often entrenches the dependencies of the poor. This is most evident where “seed offerings” received by church leaders act as “socially productive gifts” that generate (asymmetrical) social ties that both oblige God, and these same leaders, to action (Haynes, 2013, p. 87). Therefore, the critique of prosperity theology is strongest from the developing world, where Birgit Meyer (2007, p. 6) notes the impoverished foreign missionary and the traditional aesthetic prophet have now been replaced. Thus, she states: The [Pentecostal pastor] drives no less than Mercedes Benz, addresses mass audiences in mega-churches, performs miracles in front of the eye of the camera, uses high tech media to spread the message, and celebrates his prosperity as a blessing of the Lord. meyer, 2007, p. 114

The highly technological and mediatised Pentecostal message, she argues, promotes conspicuous consumption, which is accessed and sacralised by faith. Within an entwined dualist spiritual/material world, African Pentecostals provide various interpretations of how God (and Satan) outwork their purposes in the believer’s lives via possessions (also Maxwell 1998). Crucially, Myer (2007, p. 23) suggests Pentecostalism is, in fact, a product of the neo-liberal environment within which it developed, a religion of the poor “caught between hoping for pleasure and feelings of frustration and despair.” Within theological circles there have been attempts to discern and eradicate these more destructive theologies within Christian tradition. The Lausanne Movement’s A Statement on the Prosperity Gospel followed two theological consultations with experts gathering at Akropong, Ghana. It states, We define prosperity gospel as the teaching that believers have a right to the blessings of health and wealth and that they can obtain these blessings through positive confessions of faith and the “sowing of seeds” through the faithful payments of tithes and offerings. lausanne, 2009

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Lausanne’s statement resists ascribing Prosperity Theology to Pentecostalism alone, but identifies its antecedents as theolog(ies) that promote a believer’s rights to (and manipulation of) God’s miraculous power. However, in his address to the conference sociologist Paul Freston outlined South America’s replacement of traditional pietistic doctrinal approaches towards a mass Christianity of the marketplace. He stated, Prosperity Theology is fundamentally about how we understand God’s action in relation to human actions. It is a religious discourse which rejects traditional Christian theodicy. It does especially well where hard work and the other economic virtues produce little reward, at least for sectors of the population. freston 2014

He emphasises these as Pentecostal theologies, but importantly distinguishes between the teachings of religious leaders and the use of them by their (often less wealthy) audiences. As noted, any direct conflation of Prosperity Theology with global Pentecostalism is problematic. Pentecostal theologians Amos Yong and Katherine Attanasi collected seven essays to demonstrate the diversity of global Pentecostal “prosperities” and “theologies” in their edited volume Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-Economics of the Global Charismatic Movement (2014). They locate “prosperity” as an Asian term, noting the role of Korean megachurch pastor David Yonggi Cho (Yong and Attanasi, 2012, p. 15). While recognising Pentecostalism’s failures, they point also to the literature on the role of Pen­tecostal congregations in redressing poverty within the global South. Paulo Freire (1984) and Andrew Chesnut (1997) famously noted Pentecostals improving the realities of poor workers in Latin America, while others note re-­embedding social reproduction in the West (see Barker, 2007). Finally, Amos Yong’s chapter (2012) notes Pentecostal groups who are “for” and “against” prosperity as well as those holding various intermediate positions. Most importantly, he opens space for a “missional” economics which provides recognition (and evaluation) of congregational-level responses to the market. The suggestion that strains of Pentecostalism may be developing missional economics that respond to market forces is well established within the literature. For example, Miller and Yamamori’s (2007) global study charted a number of “Progressive Pentecostal” congregations in which Christians do not abandon evangelistic techniques but also engage in aid and relief programs, as well as individual and even community development (see also Toulis, 1997;

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Freeman, 2012; Gifford, 2015). Similarly, development scholar Bryant Myers (2015), known for his work with ngo World Vision, considers Pentecostal congregations to be among Africa’s most successful organisations. He agrees with Miller and Yamamori that “Progressive Pentecostal” congregations accelerate economic development amongst the poor. He claims Pentecostal leadership structures coexist with a ground-up, grassroots approach that empowers transformation. But much of this work, he argues, is done ritually, i.e., in worship. This “virtuous cycle” reduces poverty in the global South: the use of media to broadcast a message into unfamiliar arenas; an emphasis on affective conversion; the prevalence of normative group behaviours; and “training in the life skills and work habits conducive to modern urban economic life” (Myers, 2015, p. 116). The following section investigates these “life skills and work habits,” before seeking comparable traits at Hillsong Church. 3.2 Theologies of Work and Reward The previous section outlined the complex global debate, which requires nuance, in order to distinguish the theologies that harm the poor from those which may assist them. It is easy to reject those that explicitly invoke God’s power or a “hard prosperity” noted by Bowler (2013). However, there is a need for greater theological definition around “soft prosperity” (Bowler 2013) or a “limited prosperity gospel” (Haynes 2012, pp. 127–128), which rejects the idea that all are equally or uniformly prosperous. Haynes (2012, p. 125) argues that Pentecostal Christianity is not exclusive in accepting financial contributions, but in its “instruction of entrepreneurship.” There is, in fact, little Christian theology located at the intersection of work and reward. Therefore, the most fruitful discussion may be regarding spiritual formation for vocation. Theologian Miroslav Volf explains that a rejection of “works” resulted in missing vocational theologies in Protestant Christianity (See Volf 2001). Therefore, Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) is often used to explain the church’s position. Historically, however, Catholic social teaching addressed the dignity and rights of workers in Rerum Novarum (1891), the need for global solidarity with the poor in Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987), and implications of wealth distribution upon poverty in Laudato Si (2015). Nevertheless, in Laborem Exercens (1981) the tradition declared its theology – that the act of work itself allows participation in the creative nature of God. Nigerian theologian Nimi Wariboko within The Pentecostal Principle (2011) proposes Pentecostalism as retrieval and renewal of older Christian forms; he asserts a synthesis of the Weberian Protestant principle (in particular Calvinism’s work ethic) with the Catholic substance (sacramentality) that materialises divine presence. Thus, Pentecostalism can be seen to be traditional yet

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entirely new, adept at adapting to its neoliberal context. In this way, Hillsong, with an emphasis upon work and worship, can be indeed seen as consistent with its religious roots globally, but with an eschatological or future-forward bent. Wariboko (2011, p. 50) notes that Pentecostals attempt to materialise selfactualisation, which he calls “excellence.” However, he describes this as “excellence grasped in ecstasy.” Meaning, as Pentecostals playfully engage the Spirit in worship, they blur the boundaries of grace and work (Wariboko, 2011, p. 100). Still, Birgit Meyer challenges any assertion that Pentecostalism could offer the developing world the same transformation that Weber claimed of European Protestantism. She is sceptical that this Christianity could “generate a new, Protestant, economically productive middle class” (2007, p. 10). In fact, she encourages researchers to see how capitalism has instead formed Pentecostalism, with its subjects “enmeshed” or “entangled” with neoliberal ideals (2007, p. 11) She claims Pentecostal congregations “attempt to ground the global in the local” via their urban megachurches, which attract successful young converts to prime locations (2007, p. 16). In particular, Pentecostalism reflects and reproduces neoliberalism’s inclination towards the spectacular through the use of “Born Again” conversion performances, and practices that denounce evil by calling upon Jesus as a personal saviour to materialise blessing (Meyer, 2007, p. 14). This argument is outlined in relation to Hillsong by Dreu Harrison (2017) who notes the church utilises a semiotic rather than classical version of sacramentality, which is at times naïve and particularly susceptible to Debord’s “spectacle” (1967). The above summary of the literature was presented in an attempt to validate the importance of combatting destructive global religious movements that prey upon adherents, particularly those in poverty. However, it also attempted to show Pentecostalism as plural, market-friendly global Christianit(ies) with negative and positive impacts upon their adherents. Questions remain as to when exactly “(soft) prosperity” can be viewed just as ordinary Christianity; accordingly, it is blurry as to where “wealth” becomes resources for care, and “health” becomes wellbeing. It is not clear as to where traditional Christian practices of sacrifice and work ethic fit into the categorisations offered by theologians, versus those characterised by anthropologists/sociologists. Thus, it is beneficial to examine local congregational practices. 4

The Global Hillsong Church

This section introduces Hillsong Church, followed by its “discipleship,” or theologies and practices of work and reward conveyed from discussion with the exemplars. Global Senior Pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston lead the Hillsong Church congregations, which were founded in the suburb of Baulkham Hills in

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the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, in 1983. Its name was coined from its geographical location and the popularity of its globally distributed congregational worship music (Riches and Wagner, 2017, p. 1). Hillsong is an oral community with few written binding theologies for its adherents. Thus, it is difficult to pinpoint its relationship to economic realities, notwithstanding charges of promoting “prosperity theology” by the media and academy. Critics such as Bearup cited Hillsong founder, Brian Houston’s self-published volume You Need More Money (1999) to argue that the church promotes the idea that Jesus will make you rich. However, exemplars noted that Houston has repeatedly stated that he regrets this title. In an Eternity magazine interview, he declared: The prosperity gospel is… not a term I’ve ever heard used in our church in any context whatsoever. There’s really only one gospel: it’s the gospel of Jesus, the gospel of grace. houston quoted in sandeman, 2014

It seems that few theologians or sociologists agree. Nevertheless, Houston’s statement demonstrates Wariboko’s claim that Pentecostalism has continued the Weberian work ethic, with its content invoking John Wesley’s adage “gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can” from his famous sermon The Use of Money (Wesley and Harrison, 1924, p.479). The most significant formation for Hillsong’s attendees occurs within its weekend services. Often, detractors such as Hansen in the opening vignette view the church as pressuring its attendees to give money, sometimes due to content heard in the service. These often include dedicated time during which an MC reflects upon a biblical passage, and receives the congregation’s tithes and offerings. The exemplars noted that these messages range widely in construction and scope, particularly from less experienced MCs. As in many evangelical churches, Hillsong attendees are encouraged to voluntarily contribute a per cent of their weekly wage (a “tithe,” or tenth, of pre-tax income). This funds the various programs and department initiatives of the congregation, including food distribution.4 Also, the church collects finances seasonally (“offerings”) from individuals for specific purposes including disaster relief – as widely varied as the Brisbane City floods in 2011 through to the current refugee crisis in Syria. Such occasional events are often initiated globally by Hillsong’s “Aid and Development” or locally by Hillsong’s “CityCare” departments. 4 See the comments below on the Annual Financial Report for more detailed information. The report can be accessed at https://hillsong.com/policies/annual-report-australia.

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On occasion, a “love offering” is taken up at the end of the worship service for guest itinerant preachers and ministries who have contributed during this event. Also, smaller meetings often raise money for Hillsong’s “Nation Builders” program, which targets a few strategically-chosen evangelistic and church projects in Australia and abroad. The church receives online donations towards the Hillsong Channel in order to distribute its message more broadly. Women who attend the church and its conferences fund-raise for various specific “Sisterhood projects” in their neighbourhood and overseas, intentionally gathering to support development initiatives of their choice e.g. prisons and hospitals. Finally, Hillsong attendees also contribute towards charities addressing particular concerns such as A21 (trafficked women), Compassion (child poverty via sponsorship), Pre-emptive Love (refugees and asylum seekers) and Teen Challenge (drug and alcohol rehabilitation). The contributions of Hillsong congregation members thus address a mix of both evangelistic and social justice concerns. Additionally, The Hillsong Foundation funds common causes, such as buildings for the expanding worship services, but also the church’s poverty relief programs. Contributions for this purpose are received in the annual “Heart for the House” offering, received at the end of each Australian financial year. Since 1996, a voluntarily formed group of dedicated business people have strategised towards this annual event. Known as “the Kingdom Builders,” they seek to ensure that Hillsong’s finances meet the organisation’s growing needs. They are supported by various other smaller donors, and interact with the larger congregation (often dubbed the “Army of Believers”). The “Heart for the House” offering weekends centre around multimedia presentations which narrate the continuing story of Hillsong church, drawing connections between the various needs of its ministries and local campuses, and to the broader needs of the world. Hillsong Church is audited annually and reports its financials to the government via the Australian Charities Commission (the acnc). Since 2014, its activity has also been reported voluntarily to the public in the Annual Financial Report that is available online. Peter Ridley, Hillsong’s Chief Financial Officer (cfo), asserted in an interview that four employees dedicate time to reporting, supported by thirty other staff in the various departments. He explained this development as arising from the sense of accountability the church had long felt to those who had contributed finances: There are a couple of goals with the Annual Report. Firstly, it’s to help people understand who we are, and what we do, and why… and then also it’s really healthy to be transparent with our finances [including] how

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we’re governed. [It] gives our congregation some understanding of our values regarding good corporate governance and business practice. Baulkham Hills, 24th May 2017

Interestingly, the Hillsong exemplars disputed the features outlined in either Bowler’s “soft” or “hard” prosperity gospel as promoted by the church. For example, Hillsong’s ceo George Aghajanian disagreed that Hillsong practised either: We believe in the principle of generosity, and that’s what we would preach here… Generosity doesn’t just equate to money. Generosity is the words you speak, the time that you want to put into somebody else’s life. There are so many elements of generosity and we don’t believe in the prosperity gospel as some would define it. Baulkham Hills, 17th May 2017

Hillsong’s cfo Peter Ridley concurred, also linking the extraordinary income of the church to this trait, as practised by the Hillsong congregation: Giving is a personal thing and we don’t [know] what people give… I think there’s positive encouragement around being generous… being “blessed to be a blessing” or being in a position to help other people…. Our church provides leadership and teaching on that. Baulkham Hills, 24th May 2007

Cameron McDonald, the Vice-Principal at Hillsong College, claimed nuance within the church’s beliefs: As a church, “prosperity” for us is not just financial. It’s emotional; it’s physical; it’s relational; and it’s psychological. So when we talk about “being prosperous” or God “blessing” us, it’s not just limited to our finances… I think by extension our definition of “poverty” is the same. Baulkham Hills, 1st May 2017

Claire Madden, the ceo of the organisation Hello Clarity and an attendee of Hillsong’s business connect, further explained: My understanding is that [prosperity] means “a well journey.” God wants us to have a [good] journey… in 1 John there is a prayer, “that you prosper and be in good health just as your soul prospers” … it’s about trusting God

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in spite of our circumstances… There’s no expectation that your business is going to be going awesome, amazing, incredible, expanding all the time. It can be onerous, it’s tough… it’s not going well at the moment or I’ve lost my way with people. [Hillsong encourages] transparency, and honesty, and vulnerability, and trust … authentic relationship [is] to be alongside people whether they’re up or down. Skype interview, 29th May 2017

All participants emphasised a multi-dimensional human flourishing, as more than financial. This belief has become more visible following a structural redesign that focuses the church’s communication about the calling of ordinary Christians. This change reinforces the message of Hillsong church: that as church members put effort into work, the Spirit sacralises their contributions. 4.1 Missional Christian Formation: Grace and the Virtues In recent years, Hillsong church’s vision statement shifted due to its global expansion. Thus, The Church That I Now See replaced The Church That I See. Dreu Harrison (in Riches and Wagner, 2017, pp. 219–234) points out that this evolving statement has operated as a guiding document for Hillsong, the organisation, but also a prophetic utterance reminiscent of its charismatic roots. This rewritten statement hangs in all Hillsong foyers. However, Hillsong’s most recent endeavour to disciple Christians for the marketplace invokes a different document, the unchanged mission statement of the church. A number of exemplars referenced Senior Pastor Brian Houston’s 2017 “Kings and Queens” preaching series, in which he outlined his future hope for a church of individuals with extraordinary influence and provided examples of how the Spirit can anoint ordinary people for work. In the government sphere, Houston highlighted an unexpected appointment of the now-retired Louise Markus, Australian Liberal federal member for the seat of Macquarie, as well as James Lusted, a Hillsong College alumnus elected Tory councillor.5 Both were cited as examples of an unexpected rise to influence in areas previously uncharted for Pentecostals.6 Similarly, Houston relayed anecdotes of church individuals as notable sports people, educators, and musicians. At least three 5 Lusted is cited in the Daily Mail with a particularly Pentecostal quote: “I will ensure that I listen to the residents, not just the younger or the older generation, but every generation from whatever background – everyone will have a voice.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-4478082/Three-foot-7in-dwarf-elected-Britain-s-shortest-politician.html# ixzz4nYBw6SxQ. 6 Since the writing of this chapter Scott Morrison was appointed as Australia’s Prime Minister, and attends the Pentecostal Horizon church in Sutherland, Sydney.

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times in this sermon series, Houston reflected upon the events that led to the writing of the church’s mission statement in the early years in The Blue Mountains. Via televised link to all of Australia’s campuses, Houston recounted gathering all the pastoral staff together to pray and envision the church they were building. He noted that none of the writers were businesspeople. Together this group wrote Hillsong’s mission statement, To reach and influence the world by building a large Christ-centred, Bible-based church, changing mindsets and empowering people to lead and impact in every sphere of life (https://hillsong.com/vision/, 2018). Drawn from this statement, the phrase “every sphere of life” features in Hillsong’s new website introducing seven “pillars” of society (Arts & Entertainment, Business, Education, Family, Government, Media, and Religion). The “Spheres” website declares, The best people to reach and influence the world are all of us who are already in that world. Spheres is all about creating a conversation from a biblical perspective to help you reach and influence your sphere of life! (www.spheres.life, 2018) Its content is supplemented by local events, as well as larger ones including a Spheres session at the annual Hillsong Conference. Launched in 2016, the website notably does not carry Hillsong’s iconic branding. However, for attendees, various references are recognisable. The most obvious is the citation of Ephesians 1:22 (msg) which states, “the church is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church.” This scripture features in many Hillsong services. As its mission continues to be defined, the rhetoric within Hillsong is changing, evident in the various interview responses regarding Hillsong Church’s interface with the market. The exemplars believed the church did not promote an intentional adoption of neoliberal values but empowered individuals to exist within this frame. George Aghajanian: I don’t think we go out of our way to be in the marketplace as a church. But we’re a church that equips business people, equips everybody really, in whatever sphere of life they find themselves, whether it is business or [other] professionals… [or] people who stay home to look after their children. Baulkham Hills, 17th May 2017

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Stephen Crouch: [Hillsong engages the marketplace] through empowering the congregation to believe their day-to-day occupation is indeed a sacred calling. They are stewards of the resources in their care … and through managing [these] well, and building skill and capacity, there is great reward. Email Interview, 30th May 2017

Peter Ridley: Joel A’Bell has Spheres that he’s kicking off; that is our spheres of strategic relationship with areas of the marketplace and [working out] how [individuals] can have a voice, and make a positive contribution… It’s all pretty embryonic … however I think it does help people be reassured that being a cfo … gives you opportunity and a platform to help other people and be effective in the marketplace; to be a thought leader, or to make a positive difference. Baulkham Hills, 24th May 2017

Thus, as Hillsong individuals promote “generosity,” they believe it has a spiritual (and material) impact within the workplace but also society more broadly. Generosity is not the only virtue promoted, however. During Hillsong’s staff meeting, Human Resources manager, John Mays also presented a message about “kindness.” He emphasised that this did not yield material but spiritual benefit. John Mays: Productivity and profit are not our end; our end as Christians is to be like Jesus. Baulkham Hills, May 2nd 2017

Thus, as individuals seek to be more like Jesus, they practice virtues and thus build qualities indispensable for producing good workplaces (MacIntyre, 1981). Members cited other virtues suitable for everyday work life including truthfulness, influence/leadership, excellence, purpose, unity, and diversity. Hillsong’s Business Connect groups studied a list starting with the letter “c” – including confidence, character, change, communication, capacity, courage, creativity, commitment, consistency, and conviction. These Hillsong exemplars juxtapose modern work virtues with the idea that the Spirit renews ancient Christian knowledges. They intentionally tie themselves to the church universal, rather than noting any particular Pentecostal distinctions.

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Claire Madden: Paul writes… “one thing I ask that you continue to remember the poor, the very thing I know you’re eager to do.” So, much of Christianity is about giving and being aware of people that are less fortunate than you… actually doing something about it. It’s the expression of the gospel in tangible ways… from people bringing extra groceries for hampers at Easter and Christmas… to people doing city care projects in people’s streets… I think it gets in the culture of the people in the church. Skype Interview, 29th May 2017

Cameron McDonald: The Book of Acts talks about the community of God having everything in common and sharing their wealth, and I think as a church we look to do that as well … to provide for each other’s needs as a function of prosperity. Baulkham Hills, 1st May 2017

While participants promote charity and other virtues seen in the biblical text, work is also imbued with a certain sacred quality, an active partnership with the Spirit. 5

Conclusion: Work it!

Over time, Hillsong has adapted to the neoliberal world. It is also product of its context in many ways. For scholars deeming Hillsong as “prosperity theology” (Maddox 2012, 2013), it can be framed as the “repugnant other,” a status maintained via continuing questions regarding both its theological orthodoxy and its commitment to social justice initiatives. The recognisable brand can easily be mischaracterised and flattened by popular commentators (such as Bearup and Hansen), and insiders’ scholarship can be characterised as mere publicity for the church. However, it is important to note that Hillsong is not a monolith but a diverse organisation. It is both its popular preachers, and the congregation listening to them. There are signs that it both works within the existing dominant late capitalist paradigm and also seeks to change its logic, redistributing its wealth to support gatherings of Christians across the continents, and in various local helping ministries. Attendees continue to assert that it does not display the features of “hard prosperity” charted by Bowler (2013), or fit the definition as presented in Lausanne’s global summits. Its teaching does promote a traditional Christian theodicy identified as missing by Freston (2014). It has worked hard to become more transparent through the production of the

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Annual Report. Its critics may not agree that these amounts sufficiently demonstrate charitable intention – but at what point would they do so? The organisation’s approach to the market is best characterised as a (developing) “missional” logic, shown here within the Spheres initiative. Primarily, it now promotes links between work and Spirit inspiration via cultivating virtues. The industry exemplars are committed to cultivating virtues, and model an extraordinary commitment and dedication to their industry craft. Hillsong’s preaching encourages attendees to excel in the marketplace. The church’s ministries seek to support them in doing so. But the goal of any influence, however, is not necessarily money or material gain. For certain individuals, it may be. However, those who are considered exemplars within the congregation emphasise the cultivation of virtues. To the Hillsong congregation, work is vitally important. The exemplar financial leaders indicated that the congregation’s practices promote a re-enchantment of work via Spirit inspiration. In this way, they are re-imagining charism, or grace. This shows the shape of Wariboko’s Pentecostal principle. Mapping my previous research onto Bourdieu’s (1993) field of cultural production, this chapter outlined how Hillsong could be seen as an emergent or risky creative collective that turned “industrial” in response to its market popularity, with this music now broadcast all over the world. Through its worship services that include music and theologies, Hillsong attendees are initiated into a very distinct habitus. This is not only embodied in worship or demonstrated in a range of affective responses encouraged via the teaching content (Wade and Hynes, 2013). However, as the congregation moves into new areas, potential members become converts by engaging with Hillsong’s affective content, which promotes the Spirit’s involvement in daily life. The weekly rituals and various ministries of the church encourage a type of normative behaviour that ultimately reproduces itself. This habitus is intended to facilitate the creation of a new world. The goal is to build a new community, that of the church. However, within the organisation, this approach continues, in a developing “missional” approach to other industries via the Spheres initiative. The Spheres website is broadcast into a new global space, where the Hillsong branding may be a hindrance to its message. Its content is interwoven with Hillsong’s teaching, and promoted through special events. There are now nine business connects that meet regularly throughout Sydney, and many other developments in each of the seven identified “spheres.” Therefore, Hillsong can be seen to enact a “virtuous cycle” of Progressive Pentecostalism. The emphasis at Hillsong is both on the potentiality of life and therefore the contribution of the human (work), but is supplemented by the unexpected and uncontainable work of the Spirit (grace). This, then, is the work of the Spirit.

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References Abraham, I. (2018). Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music. Religions. 9(6), p. 192. Albrecht, D. (1999). Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/charismatic spirituality. Vol. 17, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Studies., Supplement Series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABC). (2007). Chaser’s War on Everything, [Television]. Aired on the 16th June. 22 minutes. Barker, I. (2007). Charismatic Economies: Pentecostalism, Economic Restructuring and Social Reproduction. New Political Science, 29 (4), pp. 407–427. Bearup, G. (2003). Praise the Lord and Pass the Chequebook. The Good Weekender. The Sydney Morning Herald. January 25. Sydney. Bialecki, J, Haynes, N, and Robbins, J. (2008). The Anthropology of Christianity. Religion Compass, 2 (6), pp. 1139–1158. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowler, K. (2013). Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. New York: Oxford University Press. Chesnut, R.A. (1997). Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Clifton, S. (2009). Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia. Leiden: Brill. Coleman, S. (2000). The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, S. (2011). Prosperity unbound? Debating the “Sacrificial Economy”. In: L.   Obadia, and D. Wood, (eds.), The Economics of Religion: Anthropological Approaches (Research in Economic Anthropology, Volume 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 23–45. Coleman, S. (2015). Borderlands Ethics, ethnography, and “repugnant” Christianity. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5 (2), pp. 275–300. Debord, G. (1994 [1967]). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Evans, M. (2017). “Creating the Hillsong Sound: How One Church Changed Australian Christian Music.” In: T. Riches, and T. Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined (pp. 63–81). New York: Palgrave McMillan. Freeman, D. (2012). Pentecostalism and Development: Churches, NGOs and Social Change in Africa. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Freire, P. (1984). Education, Liberation and the Church. Religious Education, 79 (4), pp. 524–545. Freston, P. (2014). What is Prosperity Theology: A Sociological Review. Lausanne Global Consultation on Prosperity Theology, Poverty, and the Gospel. 30 March-2 April, São Paulo, Brazil: Lausanne Movement. Gifford, P. (2015). Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa. London: Hurst. Hanciles, J. (2008). Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Harding, S. (1991). Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other. Social Research, 58 (2), pp. 373–393. Harrison, D. (2017). It Is (not) Alternative: On Hillsong’s Vision as Sacrament and Spectacle. In: T. Riches, and T. Wagner, eds., New York: Palgrave McMillan. pp. 219–234. Haynes, N. (2012). Pentecostalism and the Morality of Money: prosperity, inequality, and religious sociality on the Zambian Copperbelt. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18 (1), pp. 123–139. Haynes, N. (2013). On the Potential and Problems of Pentecostal Exchange. American Anthropologist, 115 (1), pp. 85–95. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., and J. Perraton (eds.). (1999). Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Houston, B. (n.d). The Church That I See. Available at: https://hillsong.com/vision/ [Accessed 3 February 2018]. Hunt, S. (2000). “Winning Ways”: Globalisation and the Impact of the Health and Wealth Gospel. Journal of Contemporary Religion. 15(3). Hutchinson, M. (2017). “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion, and the Rise of Hillsong. In: T. Riches, and T. Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters. New York: Palgrave McMillan. pp. 39–61. King, R. (2014). The Anthropology of Christianity Goes to Seminary. Religion and Society: Advances in Research. (5), pp. 255–260. Lohrey, A. (2006). Voting for Jesus: response to correspondence. Quarterly Essay, (23), 106. Lausanne Theology Working Group. (2010). A Statement on the Prosperity Gospel. Evangelical Review of Theology, 34 (2), pp. 99–102. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. Maddox, M. (2012). “In the Goofy parking lot”: growth churches as a novel religious form for late capitalism. Social Compass, 59 (2) pp. 146–158. Maddox, M. (2013). Prosper, Consume and Be Saved. Critical Research on Religion, 1(1), pp. 108–113. Martí, G. (2017) The Global Phenomenon of Hillsong Church: An Initial Assessment. Sociology of Religion, 78 (4), pp. 377–386.

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Maxwell, D. (1998). “Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?”: Pentecostalism, Prosperity and Modernity in Zimbabwe. Journal of Religion in Africa, 28 (3), pp. 350–373. McIntyre, E. (2007). Brand of Choice: Why Hillsong is Winning Sales and Souls. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 20 (2), pp. 175–194. Meyer, B. (2007). Pentecostalism and Neo-Liberal Capitalism: Faith, Prosperity and Vision in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches. Journal for the Study of Religion, 20 (2), pp. 5–28. Miller, D. and Yamamori, T. (2007). Global Pentecostalism. The New Face of Christian Social Engagement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Myers, B. (2015). Progressive Pentecostalism, Development and Christian Development NGOS: A Challenge and an Opportunity. International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 39 (3), pp. 115–120. Francis i, Pope. (2015). Laudato Si. Encyclical. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. John Paul ii, Pope. (1987). Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. Encyclical. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. John Paul ii, Pope. (1981). On Human Work: Encyclical Laborem Exercens. Washington, D.C. Office for Publishing and Promotion Services, United States Catholic Conference. Leo xiii, Pope. (1891). Rerum Novarum. Encyclical. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Riches, T, and Wagner, T. eds. (2017). The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Riches, T. (2010). Shout to the Lord: Music and Change at Hillsong 1996–2007. M.Phil. Dissertation, Dept. of Music, ACU. Riches, T. (2016). Can We Still Sing the Lyrics “Come Holy Spirit?” Spirit and Place in Australian Pentecostalism. Pneuma, 38 (3), pp. 274–292. Robbins, J. (2009). Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms. Social Analysis, 53 (1), pp. 55–66. Sharpe, M. (2013). Name it and claim it: Prosperity Gospel and the global Pentecostal reformation. In M. Clarke (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Development and Religion. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Sandeman, J. (2014). The Difference between Living Rich and Living Blessed. Eternity News, Available at URL: http://www-archive.biblesociety.org.au/news/brian-hous ton-theres-huge-difference-living-rich-living-blessed [Accessed online 16th April 2018]. Toulis, N. R. (1997). Believing Identity: Pentecostalism and the Mediation of Jamaican Ethnicity and Gender in England. London: Bloomsbury. Volf, M. (2001). Work in the Spirit: Toward a theology of work. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Wacker, G. (2009). Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Wade, M., and Hynes, M. (2013). Worshipping Bodies: Affective Labour in the Hillsong Church. Geographical Research, 51 (2), pp. 173–179. Wariboko, N. (2011). The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin. Wesley, John, and Harrison, W. P. (eds). (1924). Sermon 50, Sermons by the Rev. John Wesley, A. M., Sometime fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, vol. II, Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, pp. 476–494. Yong, A., and Attanasi, K. (2012). Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-Economics of the Global Charismatic Movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 9

The Wacky, the Frightening and the Spectacular: Hearing God’s Voice in Australian Pentecostal Churches Tania Harris 1 Introduction In Pentecostal churches, the words “God told me…” are a common and weighty declaration with significant consequences. For Pentecostals, supernatural experiences (including the experience the “voice of God”) serve powerful sociological and theological functions. As early Pentecostal denomination-founder and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson noted in the title of her autobiography “This is That,” the present experience of the Spirit in Pentecostalism is “primitivist,” i.e. taken to be identical to that in the prophecy of Joel in Acts 2:16–17, the legitimising text for the events of the original Day of Pentecost. The Pentecostal claim is that the experience of God’s voice in the present is the continuing voice of Jesus speaking directly and personally by the Spirit as he did for the early church. Pentecostals are thus two to three times more likely than the average Christian to report a direct revelation from God (Alexander, 2009, p. 117), and Pentecostal churches are often prepared to risk higher levels of institutional instability (Richter 1996) in order to celebrate the experience However, the experience has also proven to be volatile and disruptive at both individual and communal levels. Problems arise in two key areas: theological authority and effective ministry outcomes. I explore these issues in this chapter through case studies of three Australian Pentecostal churches. 2

Research on Revelatory Experience

Studies in “hearing God” or “revelatory” experiences in the contemporary church are scarce. Most attention to the experience of “hearing God’s voice” has been among biblical scholars (e.g. Heschel, 1962; Aune, 1983; Forbes, 1997; Witherington, 1999; Goldingay, 2001; Ahn, 2001). More recently, there have been a number of studies on the exercise of the gift of prophecy in the public

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service (Muindi, 2012; Lum, 2018). While these are helpful in Pentecostal theological self-reflection on experience, phenomenological studies of the broader revelatory experience are much less common. 2.1 The Pentecostal Concept of Hearing God’s Voice While “God” in Christian orthodoxy is both personal and communicative, contemporary Pentecostal concepts of prophetic practice is a distinct tradition (Lee, 2001, p. 159). For the Pentecostal, hearing God’s voice involves the spontaneous reception of revelatory messages via the Holy Spirit. God’s words are understood to be delivered by divine initiative and imbued with creative power (Reekie, 1993, p. 37), denoting God speaking forth his thoughts and purpose to humanity. For Pentecostals, the experience includes a variety of forms. Divine communiqués may be received directly as auditions, via the senses (through feelings and impressions) or visually in dreams and visions, or more indirectly via prophecy, word of wisdom, word of knowledge and interpretation of tongues (Cartledge, 1994, pp. 83–84). The Pentecostal experience also comprises fewer mystical forms (Meyer, 2003, pp. 41–42; Huggett, 1986, p.115), such as preaching and teaching, counsel, “common-sense”, circumstances (“providence”), nature and most particularly “hearing God speak” in the Scriptures. Irrespective of the form, the experience allows for new revelation (Cartledge, 1994, p.81), one of the most important sources of Pentecostal spirituality (Lee 2001, p.171). Revelatory messages include the categories of “forth-telling” (declaring the mind of God) and “fore-telling” (prediction of future events) (Robeck, 2002, p.999). Pentecostal “agency” is deeply personal, and revelatory experiences serve to build a relationship with the divine (Luhrmann, 2012, p. xv). Glock and Stark’s taxonomy (1965) assists in understanding the Pentecostal approach. Their four typological categories frame the relational development of the divine and human actors along a continuum of intimacy from “confirming” and “responsive” to “ecstatic” and “revelational.” The lower confirming forms, where the presence of the divine actor (God) is felt and likened to an acquaintance, are seen to progress to the higher revelatory forms where the human actor begins to take a partner role with the divine (through confirmation, response, affect, and/or commissioning). Higher level forms (often discouraged by institutions because of their threat to stability) can include new information and involve personal, directive or predictive elements (Glock and Stark, 1965, p.56–58). As Richter (1996, p. 101) notes, it is these latter which are often preferred by Pentecostals, perhaps because of their resonance with the directive and predictive experiences described in the biblical narratives

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(Martin, 2013, pp. 5, 7). It is this distinctive of new and previously unknown revelation that creates serious challenges for Pentecostal churches. 2.1.1 Theological Challenges One of the more contentious issues between Pentecostals and the largely evangelical Protestant traditions out of which they emerged has been to do with the authority of the Scriptures. A claim to hear the voice of God in ways that are analogous to the biblical experience poses a threat to the uniqueness, sufficiency and authority of the biblical canon (Newton, 2010; Parker, 1996; Lee, 2001; Grudem, 2000; Robeck, 1980; Ash, 1976), and is a primary reason for its rejection by early twentieth century evangelicals (Ruthven, 2007, p. 23). Despite the fact that Pentecostals are usually counted within the evangelical Protestant camp (Bellofatto & Johnson, 2013), evangelical theologians (such as Wayne Grudem) continue to reject the validity of experiences that are phenomenologically equivalent to the biblical experience. For Grudem, prophetic experience beyond the canon is possible, but is always qualitatively inferior to the Old Testament prophets and New Testament Apostles, and never accurate or truly authoritative (Grudem, 2000, loc., 3731). To counter such a priori claims, Pentecostals have responded with cases where revelatory experience has been shown to be “accurate,” and is thereby treated as authoritative for the particular situation (e.g. Jacobs, 1995, p. 101). They are, as Stetzer notes, “continualists” rather than “cessationists,” believing that there is no demarcation between the operation of the Spirit today and biblical times (Stetzer, 2013; McLean, 1984, pp. 35–36). God continues to speak as he has always done. Without a uniquely Pentecostal theological framework for their revelatory experiences, Pentecostals emerging from evangelical backgrounds often found themselves acting duplicitously, approaching prophetic experience as “continualists” while often basing it on cessationist presumptions (Grudem, 2000, loc. 997; Robeck, 1980, p. 28). This tension, particularly evident in North America where major Pentecostal movements struggled for acceptance within the dominant evangelical culture (King, 2009), has been highlighted, with numerous scholars calling for further theological reflection by Pentecostal themselves (Parker, 1996, p. 20; Robeck, 1980, p. 44). Some have proposed that the Spirit is neither seen to be “above” or “below” the Scriptures, but equal (Land, 1993, p. 39, see also Kraft, 1979) as it is consistent with the voice of Jesus (Keener, 2001, p. 41) as defined by the canon itself (Lee, 2001, p. 168). 2.1.2 Ministry Challenges Higher level revelatory experiences also pose threats to institutional stability and individual wellbeing. While many Pentecostals (particularly in the Majority World) believe that hearing God’s voice is essential for ­spiritual growth ­(Dodson,

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2011; Iwe, 2016), this same experience has been noted to bring significant institutional disruption to ministry goals (Poloma, 2003, p. 122, Glock and Stark, 1965, p.60; for a practitioner, see Bevere, 1999). Poloma (1989) in the usa and Cettolin (2016) in Australia, have demonstrated routinisation and institutionalisation pressures towards lower (e.g. “confirming”) forms. The tension between striving for higher levels of intimacy with the divine and the threat to effective ministry outcomes is ever present. That there are significant social effects of such spiritualities (whatever the causality) is gaining acceptance. A number of studies have demonstrated a connection between religious experience and social and personal change. Clear links have been made between religious experience and institutional growth, with charismatic experience (speaking in tongues, healing, prophecy, etc.) found to be the leading predictor of evangelism in the American aog (Poloma in Hood, 1995, p. 175). Similar findings were found in Episcopalian contexts, where the degree to which priests had charismatic experiences was correlated with changes in their parishes, including church growth, level of outreach and evangelism and charismatic manifestations in the congregation (Hood, 1995, p. 176). Poloma and Green further explore the impact of prayer experiences on attitudes, behaviour and subjective well-being, and on social outreach in their (2010) work. Parker extends this work to demonstrate Durkheimian social solidarity as an effect of revelatory experiences. The community is built through decision-making processes that arise from being “led by the Spirit,” encouraging dialogue, reinforcing (selected) tradition(s) and bringing about reconciliation (Parker, 1996, p. 200). Revelatory experience provides a common narrative group history (Poloma and Hood, 2008, p. 184), a crucial factor in the rise of Pentecostal organisations and churches (Poloma, 2003, p. 148). While revelatory experiences have the power to unite and motivate the community, they also have potential for division and damage. Poloma and Hood demonstrate this in their 2008 study of the “Blood and Fire Church” in Atlanta. Persistent claims to personal revelation on the part of the leader, in ways often inconsistent with his behaviour, divided the group, while revelatory experiences acted as a tool for control, threatening any dissenters from the stated vision (Poloma and Hood, 2008, p. 175,186). Clearly, the potential fallout of the more volatile experiences remains an ongoing concern (Cettolin, 2016, p. 81). 3

Methodology: An Ethnographic Study of 3 Churches

Sociological tools allow us to explore the human forces at work in society apart from theological realities. In this study, they will be used to examine the ­Pentecostal experience of hearing God’s voice as well as the role of the community in facilitating and regulating the experience.

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3.1 The Pentecostal Community and Berger’s Social World For the Pentecostal, revelatory experiences are understood to be grounded in the community (Land, 1993; Thomas, 1994; Parker, 1996; Lee, 2001). Although this practice may be driven by theological motivations, sociological theory turns our attention to the social stage upon which these experiences take place. The “sociology of knowledge” is one approach which helps us to observe how context impacts religious experience and how experience in turn impacts the social world (Hood, 1995, p. 179). In Peter Berger’s work, communities create the world by which experience is built and maintained, through socialising forces such as “community correctives” and so-called “legitimations.” For the Pentecostal Christian, the local church community, embedded in concrete realities, provides the objective context for hearing God’s voice and the linguistic and plausibility structures for interpreting subjective experiences (Berger 1967, pp. 13, 15–16). Language both articulates our experience and then acts to change it (Burr, 2004, p. 34). Poloma has noted the key function of dominant discourses for interpreting experience in Assemblies of God and Episcopalian groups (Hood, 1995, p. 178); Dorcas Dennis notes the same among mobile Ghanaian Pentecostals (Dennis, 2017, p. 36). In the Pentecostal community, rites including public prophecy, sharing of testimonies and the use of Scripture narratively “construct” the community (Poloma in Cartledge, 2006, p. 156), which simultaneously legitimises and shapes what such narratives mean and how they are selected. Pentecostal communities also construct themselves within a contemporary, globalised, primitivist Pentecostal movement. The Bible is read with deliberate naiveté, an approach which constructs biblical experience as immediate and personal. The ultimate goal to create a community where “hearing God’s voice is normal spirituality” (Poloma, 2003, p. 121). 3.2 Data Collection and Analysis: Ethnographic Study of 3 Churches To investigate the nature of Pentecostal revelatory experience, three Sydney churches were selected for their ability to represent three different Australian Pentecostal streams, called here “classical”, “neo-Orthodox” and “revivalist.”1 An ethnographic study was conducted in three churches, with six weeks spent in participant observation at each site (for a total of 18 weeks field work). The Sunday service was examined particularly as a window to understanding Pentecostal spirituality and practice (Albrecht, 1999), but data was also gathered from mid-week ministry events and small group meetings. Semi-structured interviews with 15 volunteers in each church were held (stratified by gender and age), and with the Senior/Lead Pastor to investigate all phases of the 1 For a discussion of the problem of categorisation in Pentecostalism, see Hutchinson (2017).

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r­ evelatory experience. Questions focused on the nature and outcomes of the experience, their espoused and operant theology as well as (in the Pastor’s case) any strategies used to facilitate and regulate prophetic experiences in the congregation.2 Revelatory experiences were then categorised according to Glock and Stark’s taxonomy (1965, p.56–58), along with their additional four distinguishing characteristics in the high level “revelational” category: orthodox and heterodox, enlightenment and commission, theological (existing states) versus prophetic (future oriented) and general and personal. Once the data was collected and collated, Berger’s theory was applied to the data. Attention was given to the role of language, the nature of legitimations (including rites, testimonies and the use of Scripture) as well any community correctives. The three churches were then compared for common themes, patterns and differences. 4

Study of Church A

4.1 Background and Description Founded in the mid-1990s on the basis of a revelatory vision, Church A describes itself as a revivalist church with a strong emphasis on the “work of the Spirit.” Every aspect of the church reflects its stated aim to facilitate spiritual encounters, including “signs, wonders and miracles.” As the Senior pastor explained, “God is not a theory; we experience him.” The church has an attendance of several hundred people spread across three services on a Sunday, with a wide age-range of congregants from children to middle age and a small number of the elderly. Evening services are open-ended to allow extended “prayer ministry” at the close. Mid-week programs include a well-attended prayer meeting, small groups and healing ministry. For the uninitiated, services may be confronting and unpredictable, with highly expressive worship and frequent “manifestations” of laughter, tears and bodily movements throughout. As one church member stated: “We have the reputation of being the crazy church – for being a bit out there.” 4.2 Hearing God’s Voice in Church A Interviewees report that, “hearing God’s voice” is a common occurrence and  considered “normal” in Church A. All services and events include the

2 For purposes of concision, field notes and transcripts have not been referenced herein, but were compiled, indexed and safely stored for later reference.

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e­ xpectation that God can and will speak to its members. Reference to the experience is made repeatedly in common speech both publicly and privately. Interviewees answered questions about the experience confidently and with ease, readily recounting personal narratives and applying theological reflection with a shared language. A culture oriented to the hearing God experience was observably linked to heightened experience. As one congregation member reported, “The atmosphere triggers it—my husband became more prophetic after we came here.” Church A also showed a high prevalence of Glock and Stark’s higher-level categories of experience (“ecstatic” and “revelational”) as well as the lower “confirming” and “responsive” levels. Messages strongly featured Glock and Stark higher-risk characteristics: heterodox, commissioning, future oriented and personal. The experiences recounted in interviews were multi-­dimensional and highly sensory. A gamut of topics was covered, from the trivial (“God spoke to me to clean up after my dog”) to the profound (“God told me who I was going to marry”). God was reported as speaking to members about careers, houses, children, wellbeing and death. Subjects clearly deemed these experiences to be highly valued and life-changing. 4.3 Facilitation and Training in Church A In interviews, Church A’s senior leadership specifically noted that they made facilitating revelatory experiences a high priority, and described their approach via a well-articulated theology of and strategy for facilitating them. Both leaders claimed personal prophetic “giftings” and could recount personal high-level experiences. Their strategy was embodied in a formal 10-week training course to which all were invited, and in the healing ministry. Perhaps not surprisingly, this training could then be observed in services as being reinforced informally through ritual, community practices. These included public prophecy (where messages, not limited to adults, addressed individual and corporate concerns); prayer ministry where leaders anticipated unknown information from God as they prayed for various individual needs; and testimonies which nearly always involved a revelatory experience followed by theological reflection by the pastor. The language of the congregation was saturated with an expectation that congregants would hear from God. In some cases, the more declarative phrase “God spoke to me” was employed by both leaders and members, while at other times, a caveat was applied (“I feel God might be saying…”). Such language was practised across public gatherings: in sermons (“The Spirit spoke to me about this passage”), ministry times (“God wants to heal sore backs today”) and in worship. Songs—largely composed locally by the worship team—were laced with first person language that drew heavily

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from the vocabulary of prophetic books of the Bible and invited communication with a personal God. 4.4 Community Correctives in Church A In addition to positive experiences, interviewees in Church A reported some damaging, high risk experiences, though claimed that these were rare. The senior pastor noted that strategies were in place to minimise the risks through training and regulatory protocols. Part of training in Church A, for example, was a “testing process” whereby members were made aware that prophecies required confirmation from Scripture and by the community, and people were encouraged not to speak directionally on behalf of others for areas such as marriage and careers. In these cases, inquirers were encouraged to hear from God directly and have it confirmed by a second “reputable” source. Public prophecies were often recorded on a portable device for review. In the public service, only pre-approved team members are permitted to prophesy. “Car park prophecies”—those given without accountability—were frowned upon. Leadership indicated that correction did occur where necessary—and sometimes publicly, but that a balance enabling the freedom to learn and grow was valued. Leaders rejected an authoritarian approach, despite the acknowledged risk of “unchecked” experiences. As the pastor stated, “Although this is messier, it’s almost easier than the other way when everything goes on under the surface. This way we can just get a broom and together clean it up.” 5

Study of Church B

5.1 Background and Description At the time of research, Church B was a well-established classical Pentecostal church in middle-class suburbia, established some 50 years previously by a [then] itinerant evangelist and “patriarch” of the Australian Pentecostal movement. Healing, evangelism and miracles formed part of the remembered narrative of the church’s founding experiences, along with a legacy of crosscultural missions. The congregation of some 300 was highly multicultural, including a high proportion of longstanding members with older men wearing ties and suits and women twin sets and diamantes. The younger generation was also well represented with a good spread of families, teenagers and young adults. Services followed a common Pentecostal pattern of worship, with ­announcements, offering, Bible teaching and corporate prayer. Remnants of “old school” Pentecostal style existed with plenty of exclamations of “hallelujah” and “glory to God” punctuating the services. Outside the services, small

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groups participated in exegetical Bible studies and sermons steeped in Scripture readings. 5.2 Hearing God’s Voice in Church B Interviews at Church B revealed a relatively even range of reported experiences across the Glock and Stark categories. While some higher category revelatory experiences were recounted, most fell in the middle (ecstatic and responsive) to low range (confirming). Experiences covered a variety of personal topics, but were generally less overt and/or abstract than at Church A: descriptions tended towards “enlightenment” rather than “commissioning,” and were more likely to be wrapped in orthodox biblical interpretation. Predictive experiences and definitive language was notably rarer here than at Church A. “God’s voice” was predominantly experienced through Scripture reading, preaching and teaching rather than the more mystical forms of dreams and visions and Spirit-leadings. Interviews also indicated that older members were significantly more oriented towards higher-level experiences than were younger members-many of the older generation associated these intense experiences in their early days and with the founding pastor. A number of younger interviewees reported a deficit in experience: “I don’t feel personally I’ve ever even heard a clear voice in my head knowing like that is God speaking. It’s more trusting that he’s there and occasionally getting revelation through Scripture.” 5.3 Facilitation and Training in Church B. The Senior Pastor reported that he considered hearing the voice of God to be an essential component of spiritual life, supported by reference to higher-level incidences in his own life. He expressed a clear intent to facilitate similar experiences in the congregation. A “culture of elitism” which “mistakenly” relegated such experiences to pastors and visiting ministries was an obstacle both in the local church and in the broader denomination. He reported that a “Holy Spirit seminar” had been scheduled in the ensuing months: “We’re giving them the freedom, the okay, to step out, but they’re very shy because ministry has always been a one-person show and I’m trying to smash that.” Self-perception of pastoral legitimacy clearly rotated around the release of spiritual experience to others. Notably, however, Church B conducted no formal training in “hearing God’s voice” and there was little demonstration of it in the services during the research period. Occasionally the experience was mentioned by the ­leadership, and inspiration for sermons and events was attributed to the Holy Spirit speaking. Prayer ministry (and its related opportunity for revelatory

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experience) was offered as an option post-service, but was only sporadically taken up by the congregation. 5.4 Community Correctives at Church B. Church B interviewees reported very few instances of damaging experiences. “Testing” processes were reportedly centred on Scriptural parameters more than on explicit interaction with the community: As one interviewee reported, “We do hear from God in the group, but it tends to be more through the Word.” No interviewees referred to regulatory protocols, raising the question as to whether the strong emphasis on Scripture (inculcated by a more recent Pastor) had the effect of suppressing higher category experiences in the younger generations, either through replacement or through the routinisation of charisma. As one interviewee put it; “I take most of my direction from the Bible, so I guess if I didn’t have the Bible, I’d probably be more reliant on hearing God’s voice.” The primary concern here was discernment: “The good thing about that (having the Bible) is that there is no uncertainty because you know it’s coming from a trusted source. It’s black and white – I don’t have to deal with my subjective feelings getting in the way of what I am hearing.” At the same time, interviewees in the younger generations expressed a yearning to participate more in the revelatory experience. 6

Study of Church C

6.1 Background and Description Church C is a neo-Pentecostal urban church birthed in the early 1980s in a revivalist environment, but which has more recently shifted towards a “seekerfriendly” style. Church C has a strong emphasis on youth and families. Services made extensive use of multi-media and followed a consistent format with extended worship, announcements and sermon. Teaching messages were largely topical with an emphasis on application. Small groups were a prominent feature of the church program. 6.2 Hearing God’s Voice in Church C Although espousing a Pentecostal approach to the work of the Spirit, “hearing God’s voice” in Church C was not an explicit emphasis in preaching or teaching. This was clear in both interviews with senior leaders as well as congregation members. Some older members bemoaned the state of things: “The young people don’t even know how to hear God’s voice.” Others commented, “We don’t talk about it much around here. We wouldn’t say; ‘this is God speaking’.

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It’s not really a thing.” While higher level “revelational” and “ecstatic” experiences were reported in interviews, these tended to be in isolated pockets or small groups where leaders had previous experience. One group (including the leader) reported no such experiences. Language about revelatory experiences revealed some confusion about terminology. In one sermon, the spoken “prophetic word” was conflated with the written Word (Scriptures) and a general “word of encouragement.” There were also instances of inconsistency in how theology applied to experience. One interviewee showed resistance to the possibility of specific and commissioning words (since “the will of God is not narrow”), yet followed it with report of a case that involved specific direction. At the same time, hearing God’s voice personally was deemed important in the public pronouncements of the Church. “You cannot live off someone else’s word” was a key message in a sermon by the senior pastor. “Hearing God” was expected, but was more commonly associated with teaching and preaching, reading Scripture and providential circumstances than the more “mystical” experiences that involved new information. The “word of God” was primarily understood to be the Scriptures. For one member of the preaching team; “The only way of knowing God is through his word the Bible. It’s about knowing the Bible and speaking it out.” 6.3 Facilitation and Training at Church C No formal training on hearing God’s voice was noted in Church C, apart from one session in the course for new believers. For the leadership, hearing God’s voice occurred organically in the context of discipleship—you learned by “watching and gleaning.” The majority of small group leaders and interviewees who had personally experienced higher-level experiences reported that the bulk of their learning took place outside of the Church C community. In a few cases, mention was made of the prayer ministry and a particular staff member as a source of encouragement. In public, hearing God’s voice was mentioned occasionally and references to the Spirit speaking were made in the lyrics of a number of songs. Public prophecy seldom occurred. It was clear that the experience was valued, but not particularly practised. 6.4 Community Correctives at Church C Interviews with Church C leadership elicited trepidation about the dangers of hearing God’s voice. Leaders were aware of the potential pastoral challenges and expressed hesitation in embracing it fully. References were made to those suffering with mental illness and situations where a “failed” word had brought disappointment and devastation. Lack of accountability was also a concern in

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cases where the prophetic message of someone outside the community conflicted with leaders in the congregation. For one leader, use of the phrase “God said” was associated with a degree of rebellion and spiritual immaturity. The testing process was alluded to from the platform on one occasion: “Prophecy should come from people you trust. I’ve never been one for some stranger coming up to you in church, saying, ‘I have a word for you.’” By far the most outstanding means of testing came from the Scriptures and then through conversation in the community, although this was not a strong feature. 7

Discussion and Analysis

While hearing God’s voice is largely an individual experience for Pentecostals (Albrecht, 1999, p. 243), the interpretation and predefinitions relating to those experiences are community-based. Poloma (2003, p. 115) likens personal experiences to a bridge between the individual “mystical self” and the communal “mystical body.” For the Pentecostal (in contrast to evangelicals as a whole), the supernatural legitimises and is “normalised” within the community. While all three churches in the study placed value on the hearing God experience, expression of this varied significantly. Applying Berger’s theoretical perspective to the findings demonstrates how the plausibility structures for hearing God’s voice experiences are built and maintained within each community. In particular, we will briefly analyse the language, legitimations and community correctives that exist to maintain the Pentecostal world especially when high-level experiences threaten to de-stabilise them. 7.1 Hearing God’s Voice in Churches A, B and C In the Pentecostal churches studied herein, “hearing God experiences” were evident in all categories described by Glock and Stark’s taxonomy. This parallels Poloma’s work in Canada (2003, p. 122), and confirms Stark’s general assertion that: “Most episodes involving contact with the supernatural … merely confirm the conventional religious culture, even when the contact includes a specific communication or revelation” (Stark, 1999, pp. 289–290). As in Richter’s study, high-risk experiences (the “ecstatic” and “revelational” categories) were emphasised in all three Pentecostal churches, but there were clear differences in the distribution and intensity of these between the churches. Church A (Revivalist, founded in the 1990s) revealed a greater proportion of high-level experiences than either Church B (classical Pentecostal, founded in the 1960s) or Church C (neo-Pentecostal, founded in the 1980s) in ways found to be ­relatively uniform across ages and genders. In contrast, Churches B and C were

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less uniform with more higher-level experiences found in the upper age brackets in Church B, and in pockets where leadership had more expertise in Church C. Such differences are best understood by examining the role of language and the social legitimations in operation. 7.2 The Role of Language Berger (1967) highlights the essential role that language plays in creating and reinforcing plausibility structures. In all three church communities, the experience of hearing God was accepted and mentioned. Prophetic language was “performed” in testimonies, public prophecy and the use of the first person in song. While evangelical theologians question the legitimacy of using the biblical messenger formula, “Thus says the Lord” (Grudem, 2000, Loc.997), its modern equivalent “God says” and phrases such as “the word of the Lord” (Cartledge, 1991, pp. 90–91), are used freely by Pentecostals to model the reality of the experience. At the same time, there was variation in the nature of language used. For Church A, language about “hearing God” personally or corporately was frequent, and plentifully illustrated. Similar language was used in Church B and C, but with a tendency towards the softer phrase: “I feel that God is saying.” At times “God says” was avoided altogether and in Church C was associated with rebellion and spiritual immaturity. This preference for more tentative phrases may convey the tenuous and error-prone nature of the experience (Turner, 1998, p. 317). It may also reflect the increasingly popular notion that hearing God’s voice requires learning (Cartledge, 1994, p. 90; Luhrmann, 2012) allowing for levels of competency and accuracy in the experience. Notably, public use of language oriented towards the hearing God experience was far more prevalent in Church A than B or C, suggesting that an available public language of experience serves to increase the likelihood of revelatory experience occurring (Hood, 1995, p. 178). 7.3 The Role of Legitimations in Maintaining the Pentecostal World Berger (1967, p. 28) reminds us that, “socially constructed worlds are inherently precarious” and must be maintained. Legitimation maintains the “social world” by providing plausibility structures and internalisation enablers (Berger, 1967, p. 32). In these three Pentecostal communities, rites, testimonies and the use of Scripture were key legitimators. 7.4 Public Rites Legitimators such as public rites and rituals are “human-devised ways” by which “we socially enact the ‘existence’ of the gods” (Singleton, 2014, p. 41). As Albrecht (1999, p. 243) notes, “Pentecostal rites create a context that provides

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for a ‘confluence of experience’ where the multitude (of experiences) merge into one corporate expression (experience).” Such rites varied across our three subject communities. In Church A, public prophecy occurred weekly, modelling the language and patterns for individual “hearing God’s voice” experiences. Regular prayer ministry was frequently initiated with a “word from the Lord,” and the annual conference featured a specialist “prophetic” ministry. Consistent with Luhrmann’s work on internalisation, all of these rites were considerably less common in Churches B and C (Luhrmann, 2012, pp. 47–54). 7.5 Testimonies and the Use of Scripture Testimonies are a distinctive feature of Pentecostal communities (Karkkainen, 2002, p. 6; Archer, 2004, p. 188). The retelling of personal experiences serves to reinforce and facilitate understandings about how God speaks, as well as to provide an opportunity to assess subjective experiences against the objective reality of the community (Thomas, 1994, p. 55, Bridges-Johns, 1998, p. 139). Underlying these practises, the Scriptures function to guide and maintain the plausibility structures for “hearing God’s voice.” Personal experience interacts with biblical experience to provide the parameters for hearing God’s voice. As Ellington (1996, p. 21) states: “The Bible is the basic rule of faith and practice and supplies the corrective and interpretive authority for all religious experience.” For one interviewee, hearing God’s voice speak as a child about her future calling was understood against the call of the prophet Samuel. Similarly, the lyrics of songs in Church A echoed the experience of the Old Testament prophets and created the basis for contemporary experience. In this way the biblical experience forms part of the objective reality by which subjective experience is understood. Testimonies were a regular, if not weekly, feature at Church A. These were often followed with theological reflection by the leadership. Connections were repeatedly made between the contemporary and biblical experience. In Church B and C, testimonies from the congregation were occasionally given publicly, but rarely with reference to God speaking. Revelatory encounters were alluded to, but not with the precision or specificity of those in Church A. 8

Community Correctives: The “Wacky” Experiences

Berger (1967, p. 45) reminds us that when under threat, specific social processes operate to reconstruct and maintain the particular world in question. These forces work coercively to impose themselves on individuals through sanctions, controls and punishment (Berger, 1967, p. 11). In other words, the group works

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to disenfranchise and isolate those who engage in experiences that are deemed illegitimate, and reinforce those who serve the status quo. Hood (1973, p. 35) has noted this negative correlation between the intensity of mystical experiences and institutional commitment. While Pentecostals value revelatory experiences (including Glock and Stark’s, 1965, higher “ecstatic” and “revelational” forms), there is a limit to what is socio-normatively useful. Fear of the isolated prophetic type that operated outside the accountability structures of the community was an explicit concern in Church C’s leadership. As has been noted, revelatory experiences have great potential to be disruptive. Coleman (in Glock and Stark, 1965, p. 56) suggests this is in part due to the expectation that all members of the community are expected to hear from God, thus posing the constant threat of cleavage within the group. However, the assumption made by Pentecostals is that true revelation is beneficial (1 Cor. 14; 3–4), making “discernment” crucial for the viability of Pentecostal communities. This has been a specific concern of Pentecostal theologians (Thomas, 1994, pp. 49–50, Archer, 2004, p. 157). The group provides the means by which experience is judged and assessed. As Poloma and Hood (2008, p. 106) state, “prophecy is not truly prophetic” unless it is “socially sanctioned.” Various correctives in the community operate to determine the validity or force of an experience. As Luhrmann (2012, p. 233) notes in her study of a Vineyard community in the usa, most Pentecostal congregations have little difficulty distinguishing between spirituality and, say, psychosis. The Scriptures are used to define the parameters for judging “hearing God experiences,” a strong feature in all three of the churches studied here (see also Parker, 1996, p. 191). Where revelation lay outside of the scope of biblical experience – as was the case in one of the churches studied in which a medically diagnosed schizophrenic was able to distinguish “God’s voice from the voices in her head” (telling her to lay on the railway tracks)—these were judged as being against “the heart of God.” For cases that included commissioning, heterodox, future-oriented and/or personal information, the subject communities acted to assess the experience. This occurred in two ways. Firstly, individuals reported consulting with other members, a practice legitimised by the biblical “wisdom of counsel” (Prov. 11:14), and secondly, via a subsequent confirming experience. With regard to the former, the ability to articulate experience and raise it into common discourse becomes essential. As Parker (1996, p. 193) notes, communities need more conscious discussion of the positive and negative elements of revelatory experience. With regard to the latter, one candidate discerned a message about the spiritual health of their family to be from God when it was confirmed by a

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subsequent prophecy via a visiting minister. Where confirmation can only be found outside the community, the result can be relational disruption (as was the case with one interviewee involved in an abusive marriage, or with a Church which pulled out of denominational structures). At times, experiences were acted on without any confirmation from the community. Regulatory protocols and training do not always ensure testing takes place. In one case, an individual suffered near bankruptcy and loss of his marriage due to a so-called revelatory experience. Later reflection highlighted the role emotions and burnout played in its interpretation. Experiences such as these are often the motivator for rejecting experience – a scenario referred to by one interviewee, and inferred by others. Fear of pastoral damage was a prominent concern amongst the leadership of Church C. Significantly, there was less evidence of this concern in Church A, where higher-risk experiences were more prevalent. Training rather than increased regulation was seen to be the antidote. According to the pastor: “We teach people independence, maturity and the freedom to make mistakes. We say, “You make your choices and live with the consequences. We will love and bless you anyway.” 8.1 Ministry Outcomes of Hearing God’s Voice In all interviews, the experience of hearing God’s voice was held to be important for spiritual growth and vitality. Revelatory messages preceded tangible and sometimes dramatic change – including physical and emotional healing, reconciliation in relationships, direction in jobs and careers. Many interviewees claimed they would not be able to live without the experience, especially for the relational aspect of their spiritual lives. Such findings support the observations of scholars, who suggest a personal, experiential encounter of the Spirit of God is what most typically identifies Pentecostal spirituality (Warrington, 2008, p. 20). For the Pentecostal, God’s purposes in speaking extend beyond static proposition to dynamic transformation (Kraft, 1979, p. 169; Wenk, 2004, p. 124). Ultimately the intention of prophetic speech is relational – involving a relational type of “knowledge” that is more experiential than intellectual (Bridges-Johns, 1998, p. 35-36). 9 Conclusion Experiences of hearing the voice of God are understood by Pentecostals to be historically primitivist, and mediated through participation in the Pentecostal

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community. Pentecostal Christians are likely to experience God’s voice – both in form and content—in keeping with the plausibility structures created by various legitimations and correctives. The data in this study shows: 1. a clear and direct correlation between institutional intention for the facilitation of revelatory experiences and the number and intensity of revelatory encounters. This confirms Poloma’s findings that show clear links between groups that are intentionally organised—by shared theology, practice and language—towards religious experience and incidences of religious experience (in Hood, 1972, p. 193). Such “intentionality” includes both formal training (teaching, courses, etc.) and informal reinforcement (including public demonstration and reflection). 2. that training, based on an adequate theology, serves to minimise the risk of damaging experiences and may be more effective than engaging regulatory protocols. 3. that community participation provides access to important social correctives. Interaction provides a common language, reinforced by the leadership and in public forums, such that, “testing” and consultation can successfully occur where there is language and context that is conducive to consultation. Part of the oft-remarked dynamism and fissiparity of Pentecostalism is situated in the related traditions’ engagement with revelatory experiences. These have the potential to build motivate individuals and their communities or destroy them. These “Pentecostal worlds” provide the context for experiential engagement, testing and response, and these spiritual practises in turn play an important part in the maintenance and innovation for which the “worlds” are known. References Ahn, Y.J. (2001). Prophecy in the Pauline Communities. The Spirit and Church, 3(1), pp. 71–95. Albrecht, D. (1999). Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Alexander, P. (2009). Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism Is the World’s Fastest Growing Faith, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Archer, K. (2004). A Pentecostal Hermeneutic for the Twenty-First Century: Spirit, Scripture and Community. London, UK: T & T Clark. Ash Jr, J. (1976). The Decline of Ecstatic Prophecy in the Early Church. Theological Studies, 37(2), pp. 227–252.

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Aune, D. (1983). Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Berger, P. (1967). The Social Reality of Religion. Middlesex, UK: Penguin. Bellofatto, G. and Johnson, T. (2013), Key Findings of Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 37(3), pp. 157–164. Bevere, J. (1999). Thus Saith the Lord? FL: Creation House. Bridges-Johns, C. (1998). Pentecostal Formation - A Pedagogy among the Oppressed. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Burr, V. (2004). Social Constructionism. London: Routledge. Cartledge, M. (1994). Charismatic Prophecy: A Definition and Description. Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 2(5), pp. 74–120. Cartledge, M. (2006). Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives. Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster Press. Cettolin, A. (2016). Spirit, Freedom and Power. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Dennis, D. (2017). Traveling with the Spirit: Pentecostal Migration Religiosity between Ghana and Australia, unpublished PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington. Dodson, J. (2011). Gifted for Change: The Evolving Vision for Tongues, Prophecy, and Other Charisms in American Pentecostal Churches, Studies in World Christianity. 17(1), pp. 50–71. Ellington, S. (1996). Pentecostalism and the Authority of Scripture. Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 4(9), pp. 16–38. Forbes, C. (1997). Prophecy and Inspired Speech (in Early Christianity and its Hellenistic Environment). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Glock, C., and Stark, R. (1965). Religion and Society in Tension. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally. Goldingay, J. (2001). Old Testament Prophecy Today. The Spirit and Church, 3(1), pp. 27–46. Grudem, W. (2000). The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. Heschel, A. (1962). The Prophets. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson. Hood, Jr, R. (1972). Normative and Motivational Determinants of Reported Religious Experience in Two Baptist Samples. Review of Religious Research, 13(3), pp. 192–196. Hood, Jr, R. (1973). Forms of Religious Commitment and Intense Religious Experience. Review of Religious Research, 15(1), pp. 29–36. Hood, Jr, R. (1995). Handbook of Religious Experience. Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press. Huggett, J. (1986). Listening to God. London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton. Hutchinson, M. (2017). The Problem with Waves: Mapping Charismatic Potential in Italian Protestantism, 1890–1929, Pneuma 39 (1–2), pp. 34–54.

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Iwe, E. (2016), The role of Contemporary Prophecy in the Lives of Members of Pentecostal Churches in Africa, unpublished PhD dissertation, Azusa Pacific University. Jacobs, C. (1995). The Voice of God. Ventura, CA: Regal. Karkkainen, V.M. (2002). Towards a Pneumatological Theology. (Yong, Amos, Ed.). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Keener, C. (2001). Gift Giver: The Holy Spirit for Today. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. King, G.W. (2009). Disfellowshiped: Pentecostal Responses to Fundamentalism in the United States, 1906–1943. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham (UK). Kraft, C. (1979). Christianity in Culture – A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Land, S. (1993). Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Lee, S. (2001). Pentecostal Prophecy. The Spirit and Church, 3(1), pp. 147–171. Luhrmann, T.M. (2012). When God Talks Back. US: Vintage Books. Lum, D. (2018). The Practice of Prophecy: An Empirical-Theological Study of Pentecostals in Singapore. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Martin, L-R. (Ed.). (2013). Pentecostal Hermeneutics: A Reader. Leiden: Brill. McLean, M. (1984). Toward a Pentecostal Hermeneutic. Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, 6(2), p. 35. Meyer, J. (2003). How to Hear from God. New York: Warner Books. Muindi, S.W. (2012). The Nature and Significance of Prophecy in Pentecostal-Charismatic Experience: An Empirical-Biblical Study. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Newton, J. (2010). Holding Prophets Accountable. The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, 30(1), pp. 63–79. Parker, S. (1996). Led by the Spirit: Toward a Practical Theology of Pentecostal Discernment and Decision-Making. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Poloma, M. (1989). The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads: Charisma and Institutional Dilemmas. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Poloma, M. (2003). Main Street Mystics: The Toronto Blessing and Reviving Pentecostalism. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Poloma, M. & Hood, Jr. R. (2008). Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church. NY and London: NYU Press. Poloma, M. & Green, J. ( 2010). The Assemblies of God: Godly Love and the Revitalization of American Pentecostalism, NY: NYU Press. Robeck, Jr. C. (1980). Written Prophecies: A Question of Authority. Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, 2, pp. 26–45. Robeck, Jr. C. ( 2002). The Gift of Prophecy. In Burgess, Stanley M. & Van Der Maas, Eduard M. (Eds.), The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids: MI, Zondervan, pp. 999–1012. Reekie, B. (1993). Prophesying for a Release of Faith. England: Sovereign World.

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Richter, P. (1996). Charismatic Mysticism: A Sociological Analysis of the ‘Toronto Blessing’. In: S. Porter, ed., The Nature of Religious Language: A Colloquium. UK: Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 100–130. Ruthven, J. (2007). On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press. Singleton, A. (2014). Religion, Culture and Society: A Global Approach. London: Sage Publications. Stark, R. (1999). A Theory of Revelations. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religions, 38(2), pp. 287–308. Stetzer, E. (2013). Continualist Christians: An Overview, Christianity Today (17 October), Available at: https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2013/october/continual ists-overview.html [Accessed 22.10.2018]. Thomas, J. (1994). Women, Pentecostalism and the Bible: An Experiment in Pentecostal Hermeneutics. Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 2(5), pp. 41–56. Turner, M. (1998). The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts: In the New Testament Church and Today (Revised). Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers. Warrington, K. (2008). Pentecostal Theology: A Theology of Encounter. London, UK: T and T Clark. Wenk, M. (2004). The Creative Power of the Prophetic Dialogue. Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, 26(1), pp. 26–45. Witherington III, B. (1999). Jesus the Seer: The Progress of Prophecy. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson.

Part 3 A Meeting between Pentecostalism from the Global South and North

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Chapter 10

“Living the Dream”: Post-Millennial Brazilians at Hillsong College Cristina Rocha 1 Introduction “Do you want to come to Chapel?” the Vice Principal of Hillsong International Leadership College city campus asked me at the end of our interview. She explained­that Chapel was a one-hour service ran by and for all the College students on Wednesday mornings. It was like a practice service before they go into the world. She was going to preach that morning and was happy to have me there among the students. I gladly accepted the offer and walked with her from the café, where the interview took place, to the warehouse-like building that houses the church and College in downtown Sydney. While we walked, students passed by us in droves coming from all directions and converging in the church. Most international and out-of-town students live in shared flats around the church and were arriving back to College after their morning break. As we went through the large doors, we found ourselves in a reception area flooded with light. There, three young people were working behind a roundshaped reception desk. They welcomed us with a smile. Four long, roughtimber tables were placed in diagonal lines departing from the desk and some students were working on their laptops; others were chatting with each other. I looked up and realised that the lovely morning light bathing us was coming from a huge skylight in the shape of a spire or pyramid in the ceiling. Everyone was in their early twenties and looked fresh and healthy; they actually glowed. We entered the church auditorium and the Vice Principal left me to go to the stage. It was pitch dark inside and for a moment I was not able to see where I was. But soon enough the lights flashed on stage, the countdown started, and then the band began to play. And it was mayhem! Many of the students moved closer to the stage and started screaming, jumping up and down, clapping, dancing; their hands in the air. A few opened both arms in the shape of the cross in an attitude of openness to receiving the Holy Spirit. A young man with long hair raised his plastic chair over his head and swung it around as if he was about to throw it. My body tensed in fear of violence (a reflex picked up from

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my early years in Brazil), then I recalled that we were in church after all. I saw others stand on their chairs and raise their index fingers in the air, meaning Jesus is the one. After the worship songs, students took turns on the stage/ platform to perform different parts of the service. At one point, the MC called a girl to do the “Out of the Boat”1 session–a 3-minute preaching practice. Under a thunder of clapping and whistling, the Asian-American student came to the stage. Rapidly pacing up and down, she told us of the time she had been invited to go bungee jumping but almost gave up when she was about to jump. She likened that to the moment you give your life to God - “It’s scary but you have to do it,” she concluded. All the while her face was beamed onto the large stage screens behind her. When she finished, more clapping and screams followed. The students’ excitement was palpable. After the service ended, everyone was smiling, hugging and chatting to each other. There was a lot of love there. I know these students have moments in which they feel lost and homesick, and worry about being able to pay their college fees. The students and the Vice Principal told me this much in interviews. Yet the whole morning looked to me like an advertisement for youth culture. If we were in the eighties it would be one for Benneton. There were people of all nationalities and colours; many sported tattoos, mostly were smartly dressed in hipster style–ripped skinny jeans, buttoned up tight shirts, thick blackframed glasses, boots, boho hats, and men wore their hair long or in “undercut” style. As in a Benneton commercial they were beautiful, joyful, well-fed, diverse and cool.

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How did Pentecostalism and Hillsong become a cool choice for young people, and particularly post-millennial Brazilians? Why do post-millennial Brazilians desire to travel to the other side of the world to join the College when many of them will not become Pastors and there are bible colleges in Brazil? Why do they wish to study at the College so much that they will fundraise for years to save enough money, or even defer university until they are much older in order to have this “experience”? And why do they say that by studying there they are “living the dream”? In this chapter I argue that while young people are attracted to Hillsong College and church because of its focus on youth and celebrity cultures (Hillsong’s famous band, intense use of digital media and blurring of religion and popular 1 This is in reference to the story in which Jesus invites Peter to walk on water and because of his little faith he starts sinking. In other words, it is a session on having complete faith in Jesus. For more, see “Jesus Walks on the Water,” Matthew 14:22–33(niv).

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culture), for post-millennial Brazilians there are additional factors that influence their decision to join the College. Brazil is home to the most Pentecostals in the world, with its own share of Pentecostal megachurches (Freston, 2001, p.198; 2004; Mariano, 2010, 2014). However, Pentecostalism has been mostly confined to the disenfranchised sectors of society. In the last two decades it has made inroads into the aspirational middle-class (e.g., Renascer em Cristo church), and more recently some new churches have been aimed at post-millennials by borrowing heavily from Hillsong’s style of service and aesthetics (e.g., Brasa Church and Igreja no Cinema church).2 Nevertheless, the bulk of followers come from the working class and the underclass sectors of society. As a result, churches subscribe to the Theology of Prosperity, concentrate heavily on tithing, spiritual warfare and exorcism, and are generally conservative regarding behaviour, gender roles, dress code and values. Many have also been the focus of police investigation due to accusations of money laundering and corruption. Some pastors have been found guilty and jailed. This means that they have been negatively portrayed in society and the media. In this context, many middle-class, post-millennial Brazilians, who have converted to Pentecostalism, struggle to find an acceptable home for their faith.3 They find this home at Hillsong and its College for several reasons. First, as a seeker-friendly church (Sargeant, 2000), Hillsong focuses much less on spiritual battle and conservative values, and more on attracting people to church through informal, fun and exciting services. Hillsong values inclusivity and acceptance of people’s behaviours in hope that, as they go through the church’s doors, the Holy Spirit will change them and they will convert. As a result, in contrast to most Brazilian Pentecostal churches, church goers and college students are allowed to dress as they please, and participate in youth culture. There is also a modicum of gender equality within the church if compared to Brazilians churches. Second, Hillsong relies on volunteers (many of them College students) to run its services and a lot of its day-to-day management. This makes the lower ranks of its structure more flexible and less hierarchical than Brazilian churches. Volunteers are allowed to choose where they want to work, and later can become leaders in most areas of the church. As a consequence, young Brazilians feel much more invested in the church than in Brazil. Moreover, the College’s focus on “leadership” rather than straight theology and the role of volunteering give students who are on the brink of adulthood tools to become adults and modern subjects (Giddens, 1990, 1991). In interviews they said how significant the College experience was in their lives, as they learned punctuality, 2 See http://www.brasachurch.com/ and http://igrejanocinema.com/. 3 For a similar situation in Argentina, see Köhrsen (2016).

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r­ eliability, and excellence in their work practices, and how to become leaders in any area of work they chose. Third, as we saw in the vignette which opened this paper, there is a lot of excitement, emotion, and pleasure at the College. As I have shown elsewhere (Rocha, 2006, 2017), Brazilians desire to study at Hillsong College because of the cosmopolitan possibilities it affords them. Due to a global power-geometry (Massey, 1994, p.149) Brazilians rate highly ideas, practices, and commodities that come from the Global North, particularly if they arrive in the English language. At Hillsong College they are able to study in English, make friends from all over the world, and be part of global youth and celebrity cultures. This chapter draws on three years of multi-sited fieldwork research in Australia and Brazil. In Sydney, I conducted participant observation at College activities, Hillsong services, and in a Brazilian connect group that meets fortnightly. I also conducted open-ended interviews with the Vice Principal of Hillsong College and those post-millennial Brazilians who go to Hillsong services, are part of the connect group, and are students at Hillsong International Leadership College (HILC). In Brazil, I conducted participant observation in the Hillsong branch in São Paulo and in those churches whose pastors have been to Australia to participate in Hillsong conferences and services. In addition, I interviewed Brazilians who had returned to the homeland after studying at the Hillsong College and/or participating in services and connect group. Many interviewees were recruited through snowballing method—people I interviewed suggested possible interviewees. Others volunteered for interviews during participant observation. Interviews were conducted in Portuguese, recorded and transcribed. All translations are my own and all people’s names are pseudonyms. In what follows, I will start by outlining the characteristics of Pentecostalism in Brazil in order to contextualise the kind of Pentecostalism young Brazilians are used to in their country. Next I will focus on the reasons why Hillsong College has become “a dream” for Brazilians — the possibility of engaging in youth cultures, having gender equality, empowerment through volunteering, becoming modern subjects, and excitement and pleasure. I have engaged with cosmopolitanism at length in other publications and for this reason will not deal with it here. 2

Pentecostalism in Brazil

The fast expansion of Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America prompted Martin (1990) and Stoll (1990) to speculate whether Latin America was

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b­ ecoming Protestant. In 2002 Jenkins argued that in the past century Christianity’s centre of gravity had shifted from the Global North to the South. Indeed, Freston (2004, p. 12) noted that, “60% of all Christians are in the Third World. But allowing for the high rates of non-practice in the West, it is evident that a far higher proportion of active Christians live in the Third World.” Most of this expansion in the Global South is due to the growth of indigenised Pentecostalism, which is exploding throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Jenkins, 2002; Freston, 2004; Miller & Yamamori, 2007; Vásquez, 2009). Presently, Brazil is the second largest Protestant country in the world (behind the US), and the largest Pentecostal one (Freston, 2001, p. 198; 2004; Mariano, 2010). According to the 2010 census, Protestants were 22% of the population, of them 13% were Pentecostal. That means 25.4 million followers in a population of 190 million at the time, and a growth of 61% from the previous census of 2000 when they were 15% of the population. At the same time, Catholicism has been in decline. From 95% of the population in 1940, today they represent 64%, with the sharpest decline taking place in the past three decades – the same period in which Protestantism has expanded.4 Pentecostalism arrived in Brazil in 1910, when an Italian migrant, who had previously lived in the usa, established the Brazilian Christian Congregation in São Paulo. A year later, Swedish Baptist missionaries, who had also converted in the usa, established the Assembly of God in the city of Belém, in the Amazon region. Surrounded by an overwhelming Catholic and hostile society, followers of these denominations distanced themselves from Brazilian popular culture and religion by adopting asceticism, sectarianism, and conservative values and denying this-worldly practices such as playing football, participating in carnival, and other popular and Catholic festivities (Mariano and Moreira, 2015, pp. 47–48). Since then Pentecostalism has expanded and changed considerably. Different denominations and home-grown churches have developed; most churches have adopted Prosperity Theology (a belief health and wealth in this life is a God-given right) and the Theology of Dominion (which asks for strong engagement in all spheres of life, particularly politics). As in other countries, Pentecostal churches have expanded through the intense use of music, mass media and marketing techniques. Most churches attract and support their congregations through the promise of “material prosperity, physical and emotional healing, deliverance through exorcism, and solutions for family, financial, mental and love problems” (Mariano and Moreira, 2015, p. 50). These churches 4 Protestants (including Pentecostals) increased from 9.6% in 1991, to 15% in 2000, to 22% in 2010, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (ibge).

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fulfil immediate needs of a population who is mostly poor and receive little or no government welfare support. For the aspirational middle-classes, they promise economic success in a country where consumption power is a significant marker of social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984; Rocha, 2006). In addition, Pentecostal churches in Brazil increasingly appeal to the young urban middle-classes because they do not require them to leave the world, to have an ascetic life, as do traditional Protestant churches (Mariano, 1999, pp. 101–102). They deemphasise exorcism, miracles and the supernatural, while emphasising self-help techniques of success and the Theology of Prosperity. Pastors in these churches are often more like motivational speakers than religious figures (Pereira and Linhares, 2006). Many of them have bands that play pop/rock worship music selling millions of CDs. However, these churches are conservative in that they preach celibacy before marriage, and prohibit drugs, alcohol, homosexuality, and ecumenism (Dantas, 2010, pp. 55–56). They also forbid other behaviours typical of youth cultures such as clubbing, tattoos, and revealing clothes for women. This is the type of the conservatism in values and behaviour that many young Pentecostal Brazilians are leaving behind by joining Hillsong College. 3

Inclusivity, Prosperity Theology, and Love

Hillsong church can be considered a New Paradigm church (Miller, 1997) or seeker-friendly church (Sargeant, 2000). This style of evangelical Christianity has evolved globally since the 1960s and these churches “tailor their programs and services to attract people who are not church attenders” (Sargeant, 2000, pp. 2–3). These churches do so by creating an informal atmosphere, using contemporary language and technology, and focusing on religious experience. Seeker churches borrow from secular models of business and entertainment, use marketing and branding principles, and innovative methods. According to Miller and Yamamori (2007, 27), they “are at the cutting edge of the Pentecostal movement: they embrace the reality of the Holy Spirit but package religion in a way that makes sense to culturally attuned teens and young adults, as well as upwardly mobile people who did not grow in the Pentecostal tradition.” As a rule, their services are entertaining (featuring a live band, professional lighting and sound, large screens), and focus on people’s everyday lives (with topical messages on practical concerns). Moreover, they focus on positive messages of God’s love rather than on sin, hell or damnation. In this New Paradigm of evangelical Christianity, God is understood as a father who loves humans unconditionally, who knows and cares for each and every one, and who is also close

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friend, a companion whom people can confide on and talk to about their lives (Luhrmann, 2012). These are among the reasons young middle-class Brazilians told me they were attracted to Hillsong. They said they felt welcomed by the church, and that the focus on inclusivity was new to them, and more attuned to their desire to help and change the world. For instance, a first-year student commented on how this focus would make Hillsong successful in Brazil, where it established a branch in late 2016: I think Hillsong will bring Jesus and convert people [in Brazil]. Many young people feel excluded from the Brazilian churches. Because there is still prejudice regarding people’s behaviour especially in regards to homosexuality. Many homosexuals can’t bear churches and pastors. They are angry because they are not accepted… I believe that Hillsong is a church that accepts everyone with open arms. Whether they want to change their life, it’s up to them. But somehow they will hear the truth. sydney, 2 May 2016

Moreover, other students commented on the different roles money and God’s grace play at Hillsong and neo-Pentecostal Brazilian churches. In most Brazilian neo-Pentecostal churches, giving is about establishing a system of reciprocity with God in which you give as a strategy to receive His favours: protection, healing, blessings, and prosperity (in very material terms such as cars, jobs, houses). As a result, there is marked pressure on the faithful to tithe and make large offerings in these churches. Furthermore, the Brazilian and international media have reported extensively on millionaire pastors involved in money laundering and fraud scandals, and some have been arrested.5 Because of these scandals, their emphasis on exorcism, prosperity and donations, and 5 In addition to countless reports on the Brazilian media, in 2013 Forbes magazine published an article titled “The Richest Pastors in Brazil” (Antunes, 2013) in which it reported on pastors of neo-Pentecostal churches who had amassed large fortunes. The reporter wrote that Edir Macedo, the founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, “is continuously involved in scandals, mostly due to allegations that his organization had siphoned off billions of dollars of donations intended for charity. There have also been official charges of fraud and money laundering.” He also mentions the well-known case of the millionaire couple who established the Reborn in Christ Church, who “in 2007 they were arrested in Miami, accused of carrying more than $56,000 in undeclared cash. Some of the money had been stuffed between the pages of their Bibles, according to U.S. customs agents who detained the couple at the Miami airport. They were returned to Brazil a year later. They are also still under prosecution in Brazil for a number of other crimes, including for the collapse of ceiling at one of their temples, which caused 9 deaths.”

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the appeal to the very poor, these churches are stigmatised in Brazilian society. By contrast, at Hillsong, Brazilian students and followers learn that God already loves the faithful and does not need them to enter into a contract to be protect and blessed. Followers should make donations in order to thank God for his grace, not to obtain His grace. Hillsong has historically subscribed to Prosperity Theology but its current preaching is much more focus on “abundance” in abstract terms, and there is little pressure to give for those who just come to its large services. Middle-class Brazilians, who do not have pressing needs for material gains, welcome this emphasis on love and inclusivity rather than money. They feel embarrassed by Brazilian churches’ heavy-handed money strategies and the scandals in the media, and believe that they taint Pentecostalism and deter people from converting. For instance, a young man who studied at the College for two years said: When Hillsong said they were going to open a church here [in Brazil], the World Church of the Power of God and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God felt threatened. This was reported in the media. Why? Because Hillsong does not preach blessing by donation, blessing by tithing, Prosperity Theology, the more you donate, the more you receive. Hillsong talks about a theology of love: the more you love, the more you receive love. You don’t need money. I pray that Hillsong attracts people from all of these churches because these churches have to go bankrupt. How can a church say this? God does not say that the more you give the more you get. [God is about] love, not money. There’s even something in Matthew. You cannot serve God and money [at the same time]. são paulo 13 November 2015

Students were also happy that rather than focusing on spiritual battle and exorcism, as neo-Pentecostal churches do in Brazil, Hillsong focussed on positive messages, encouragement and love. Another Brazilian young man, who studied at College for three years, told me he used to watch Brian Houston’s preachings on dvds in Brazil and decided to enrol in the College after finishing High School because his preachings “were aligned with the way I thought.” He told me that his father was a pastor and he was unhappy with his emphasis in spiritual battle at is church: Some Sundays we didn’t mention Jesus in the Church at all! We talked more about the Devil than Jesus. This always bothered me as young man. There was this session to expel demons. I couldn’t believe that everybody

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was possessed. In the Bible the Holy Spirit provides connection, a relationship with God. Paul, who used to kill people, had an encounter with God. He wasn’t possessed. The Bible doesn’t say that. I began to find our church too shallow. In the third year of College we study Global Ministry and Culture. And I started noticing that much of what happens in churches in Brazil is influenced by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. I saw my father making decisions to fill up the church rather than filling up people. So there is this tension when you are leading the Church. “The Church is full. What is the pastor doing?” He is doing exorcism; he is promising a new car. He is promising prosperity! são paulo, 26 August 2016

In all these interviews, students are comparing neo-Pentecostal churches in Brazil and Hillsong and praising the latter for its inclusivity, focus on God’s love and grace, and light touch on Prosperity Theology. It is clear that most of these students belong to the middle classes given that for many of them their parents covered the cost of College and their stay in Australia. This means that they do not have immediate concerns regarding money and material possessions. In addition, their middle-class sensibility means that they do not approve of spiritual battle, and prefer a focus on education and learning about the Bible. As Freston (1997, p. 188) has argued in regard to middle-class Pentecostals in Brazil, “the search for respectability would not be served by appearing too Pentecostal.” More recently Köhrsen (2016, pp. 41–44) has researched middle-class Pentecostalism in Argentina and found similar issues: The educated middle class shows a critical attitude towards Pentecostalism. Embracing characteristics – such as exorcisms, prosperity gospel, faith healing, emotional outbursts, etc. – perceived as inappropriate, and being regarded as a religion of the ignorant and poor, Pentecostalism does not fit well with the representations of the educated middle class. [Middle-class followers] risk being stigmatized … [so they] underline their differentness from other Pentecostals. As we saw in this section, I found the same tension and strategies of boundary work between Brazilian students’ middle-class sensibility and their affiliation to Pentecostalism. They felt comfortable at Hillsong due to its global high profile, its celebrity pastors, slick services, a focus on education, love and inclusivity rather than money, and lack of public practices associated with the lower classes such as spiritual warfare and exorcism.

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Leadership, Volunteering, and Learning to be an Adult

In her study of the Mars Hill megachurch in the US, Johnson argued that the growth of the celebrity pastor phenomenon has to do with “marketing strategies and commodification processes specific to a digital age…” (2017, p. 160). In making use of social media and interactive technologies, church volunteers and audiences are not merely fans of celebrity pastors and passive consumers but active workers and participants in the megachurch branding process. For her, they are “active contributors to an ‘evangelical industrial complex.’” (Johnson, 2017, p. 160). Johnson borrows this concept from Skye Jethani, who had in mind its similarities with the military industrial complex. Jethani posited that in both there are systemic economic forces propelling their perpetual growth. While the military industry needs to create wars in order to grow, the media industries need megachurch celebrity pastors to sell their books. Hence in order to increase sales they promote pastors, who therefore increase their own fame. Since the 1970s, the Christian market in the US has grown exponentially, and is now worth around $7 billion dollars a year. This growth has been accompanied by the growth in the number of megachurches and celebrity pastors (Johnson, 2017, p. 164). Besides the media industry, others support the evangelical industrial complex on the ground. Johnson shows how volunteers donate their emotional, physical and spiritual labour and time to turn their pastors into celebrities and to give the megachurch its “distinctive experience.” She points out to the considerable costs to their lives because their work goes unrecognised and they are ignored. At Hillsong church volunteers are an integral part of the branding and massive growth of the church. Always sporting easy smiles, they will be in the car park directing you to an empty spot, driving the shuttle bus from the train station to church before and after services, at the gates welcoming you to church, at the reception desk, making coffee at the café, selling merchandise at the shop, inside the church directing you to your seat, behind the cameras and the audio-mixing console during service, and translating the service into several languages for those who do not speak English. And these are just some examples. For College students, volunteering is an integral part in their studies. However, while there are costs associated with volunteering as Johnson rightly pointed out, for young people, volunteering has many benefits. It is a way of creating social capital. Australian researchers found that more often than not young people’s motivations for volunteering were helping others, personal growth, recognition of one’s skills and improving their employment prospects (Mason et al., 2010). These are the same reasons Brazilian students pointed to when asked why they were happy to volunteer at College. ­Furthermore, in

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their research on young Christians in Scotland, Vincett et al. (2012) found that secularism, pluralisation, relativisation, and pervading consumer capitalism of the past forty years has meant a change in the way young Christians engaged with religion. Rather than a focus on a set of beliefs, they were more interested in performing Christianity in everyday life and engaging with the secular world. They may volunteer to undertake charity work, “speak up for social justice and accept others without prejudice or reservation” (2012, p. 282). Vincett et al. (2012) posit that for these youth, belief has become embodied. Believing is a practical process in which they work out their authentic selves. Rather than “Sunday Christians,” for them authentic Christianity is about performing good deeds outside the traditional church. This is very much what I found among young Brazilians at College. Many Brazilian students told me of how much they enjoyed and learned at College and during volunteering at church. They also mentioned how important the College was for them to become adults. For all of them, this was the first time they were away from their parents’ home and their country. Middleclass Brazilians only leave their parents’ home after finishing university and finding full-time professional jobs. In addition, while at the parents’ home they never learn to cook, clean, or shop for groceries as this is done either by their maids or their mothers. Brazilian students usually enrol in College after completing High School. They are in the cusp of adulthood, and for most of them their time at College functions as a “gap year” in which they learn how to be independent adults. For the first time in their lives they need to learn the basics of adulthood such as cooking for and cleaning-up after themselves. Because Hillsong College is not so much geared towards teaching theology but Christian leadership in different areas of students’ lives, it lends itself easily to this role of being a school for young people to come of age. As a 2nd-year Brazilian student told me: I think the reason why Brazilians are coming here is because Hillsong College not only gives you the theory but gives you the practice. It is not only concerned with theology, but to use what you learn in your day to day, in your life. I believe that Hillsong College can be for anyone, because it gives you an understanding of personal leadership, how to organise your day, how to prepare your goals and everything else. sydney, 8 June 2016

Claudia is a good example of how the College helps students in their transition into adulthood and how volunteering has a part in it. Claudia, a 27-year old from an upper middle-class background, went to College at nineteen in 2008

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and studied there for three years. After a year of university her mother suggested that she take a gap year overseas to improve her English skills and learn about another culture. Her father was happy to cover all costs. She was a Christian and liked Hillsong United. She found out about Hillsong College on the internet and decided to go to Australia. She says she had a calling; she always wanted to be a pastor and “change the world.” This desire to make a difference in the world through Christianity is very common among the young Brazilians I interviewed and it is one of the main reasons they enjoy volunteering. When I interviewed her about her College experience, she told me: I learned everything there. Hillsong as a church really shaped me as a person in all aspects. It’s not just in Christianity. [It] shaped me as a person, as a leader, as family member, as a future mother, as a daughter. My mum spoiled me; she used to do everything for me. I had zero discipline. Brazilians don’t leave home till they are thirty. Essentially, parents don’t prepare us to leave home. My mother didn’t prepare me. são paulo, 1 Sept 2016

When I asked what exactly she learned at Hillsong, she painted a picture of a shy girl who did not know who she was and that she had something to contribute to society. She explained: I thought I was antisocial. Today I know I’m an introvert, which is a feature of my personality, and yet I have something to offer people. Hillsong opened my mind. I learned so much! I didn’t think I had anything to contribute, but today I know I have. I’m a service person; I love to serve. I learned how serving works. There I learned to have my boundaries, to know how far I can let people suck [my energy], when I must say: “Oh, that’s not cool in our relationship.” So I learned boundaries. There I learn everything, the Christian life… It is significant that at Hillsong she realised that she loves “serving,” that is, volunteering, and that by learning how to serve she realised her self-worth. Moreover, she cites “Christian life” at the end of the list of things she learned at College demonstrating that more than learning theology, the College experience gave her tools to become an adult. She went on to explain that in contrast to her life at church and at home in Brazil, at College she was treated as a responsible adult the first time. She told me: Here in Brazil you learn more what not to do as a Christian: you can’t drink; you can’t sin; you can’t go out with your friends; you can’t go to the

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street corner with your friends who are drinking, smoking; you can’t dance; you can’t listen to [secular] music; there is a lot of “you can’t.” It depends from church to church. [For instance] at the aog [Assemblies of God] I was bad just because I had my hair cut! As a Christian there were lots of things that I couldn’t do because my pastor said so, not God, my pastor! And at Hillsong I started to see what God says and interpret that. At Hillsong you sort of can do everything, but you have to know what is good for you and what isn’t. [I felt] that for the first time I started to be treated as an adult. Here we can see how Claudia learned at Hillsong College to be a responsible individual who had a modicum of power vis-à-vis her pastor and the church. Rather than submitting to the pastor’s whims, she was able to interpret the Bible and decide for herself what would be appropriate for her. Moreover, she praises the volunteering jobs she did during College and at the Hillsong conference as a way to learn the church culture and how to be a real Christian. The first team that most students work [as volunteers] at the [Hillsong] conference is called “the excellence team.” But why is the team that cleans bathrooms called “the excellence team”? Because everything is “excellence.” Everything has to be done with greatness, with love. The motto is “Love God, love people.” [People think:] “I came here to learn to be a preacher.” “No, you came here to learn how to serve the people. That is your goal for the rest of his life. Serve the people.” And how do we serve them? With excellence. Always. After finishing College, Claudia returned to Brazil in 2011. Back in her church, she was frustrated by lack of the “excellence,” something she had learned at the College and which was so dear to her. She said things were done at the last minute and therefore poorly. She was also unhappy as she was made to serve at the “kids’ ministry” because she was a woman, although she felt she had no talent for it. She could not lead the video-making ministry, the discipline she graduated at College, because as a single woman she was not allowed lead men and women. She sought other churches but the problems of sexism and disorganisation persisted. Like many other Brazilian returnees whom I interviewed, her frustration was so great that she gave up going to church altogether. She had made many good Brazilian and foreign friends at the College and found solace by keeping in touch with them through social media, Skype calls, and actual visits. When Hillsong announced they were opening a branch in São Paulo, she decided to move to the city to volunteer at the church. She is finally using what

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she learned in leadership to run a group of volunteers who work on the ­cameras during service. However, she is finding that she also has to teach the same things she learned at College – excellence, being on time, planning, and encouragement – to her team of young Brazilians who have not studied at College. The College’s focus on leadership and the fact that it delegates a lot of the day-to-day running of the church and conferences to students empower them as they become responsible adults. They are able to perform their Christianity through their volunteering work in church and the secular world. Indeed, in addition to theology, they learn a trade (TV, creative arts, music, graphic design, etc.) and learn how to be on time, organised and to keep deadlines. In contrast to Brazil, gender differences are not a basis for discrimination in regard to which ministry they can learn and how they can serve. Students can also participate in youth cultures such as dancing, wearing whatever they want, and listening to secular music because they are perceived as not intrinsically bad. They may be invisible and unpaid workers in a wealthy church, but they learn important things through their volunteering that they may use for the rest of their lives. 5

Excitement, Emotion and Pleasure

Birgit Meyer (2007) has examined whether Weber’s work on the entanglement between rise of Protestantism and capitalism is relevant for our understanding on the explosion of Pentecostal Charismatic Christianities (pcc) in a time of neo-liberal capitalism. She argues that while Weber’s model is helpful as a source of inspiration to understand the pcc phenomenon, some aspects regarding the popularity of pcc differ from Weber’s model. Following Campbell, she posits that there is “a symbiosis of consumption, desire and pleasure that seems to characterise capitalism life worlds” (Meyer, 2007, p. 9). This new capitalism depends on consumption to reproduce itself. It is through the promise of “pleasure” that consuming becomes important to people and goods exercise power over people. Through consumption people seek new experiences, a new life, and to fashion authentic selves. Rather than the call to shun away from the world as in Weber’s Protestantism, pccs embrace the world through the heavy use of audio-visual technologies and mass media to spread its message, and the promise of entertainment, emotion, pleasure and prosperity through consumption. pccs engage with the world in order to transform it. Emotion and pleasure are important reasons why Hillsong College has become a dream to young Brazilians. The vignette with which I started this article

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attests to that. As I have written elsewhere (Rocha, 2017), young Brazilians ­desire to come and study at Hillsong College because they have been to Hillsong United concerts and have sung its songs in their churches. The church’s location in the Western, English-speaking world, and the American celebrities who are part of the congregation in the US play a role in its fame among young Christians in Brazil. As a consequence of this fame, some Brazilian celebrities travelling overseas have been sharing their experiences in the megachurch in social media. In addition, Brazilian churches have been copying Hillsong — from its logo to its music and to its services format. Thus the celebrity culture surrounding Hillsong has made going to its headquarters a dream for this cohort. Paulo is a good example of this. He went to a Hillsong United concert when he was fifteen and found out about the College through the flyers he was given there. Later on someone prophesied he was going to be a pastor and he took a theology course associated with his church. After a while he became frustrated with it because most teachers were retired and not active in church. He felt they did not have much to offer. He says he used to leave class with lots of doubts and used to think, I don’t want that for me. I want to change the world. I want to leave the world a better place than I found it. I want to inspire people. I want people to have a better life because I helped them. I wanted to have a relevant life, and not follow the script: go to university, date, get married, have children, grow old. sydney, 08 June 2016

He went on to say: I’ve always been a dreamer. And I said “God, I want to study in a place that I’m going to be inspired, that get out of the classroom with my heart burning.” That’s when God reminded me of that flyer I got at the Hillsong United concert in 2006. At the time, he was studying graphic design at university. So in order to save money to go College, he started to make and sell T-shirts with Hillsong’s Easter message “cross equals love” (†=♥) and other Biblical messages in English. He  also created a blog where he wrote about his life and dream to study at Hillsong and sold the T-shirts online. It is a testament to the fame of Hillsong, that soon he was selling these T-shirts faster than he could produce them. He was so successful that after a couple of years he had enough money to enrol at

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College. When I interviewed him, he was in his second year of College and had just been hired by Hillsong to join the graphic design team. Needless to say, he was very excited with his new life. He said: Look, to be honest, I still wake up and think: “I can’t believe I’m living in Sydney.” I still wake up and think: “I can’t believe I’m working for Hillsong.” As a graphic designer, I always followed the Hillsong style. Hillsong is a reference in graphic design to Brazilian Christian churches. You see their envelopes, flyers, video — “excellence” is their hallmark; everything is beautiful. They were an inspiration for me. He told me that at College everyone is constantly saying to each other: “We are living the dream.” For him his new life was indeed a dream come true: I think this is the simplest way for me to explain [how I am feeling] is “this is a dream.” I always wanted to be here; always wanted to live overseas. I never thought one day I would be fluent in another language. I preached twice [in the ‘Out-of-the-Boat’] three-minute session at Chapel in English! I have the video and I can send it to you later. While I was doing that I thought: “Wow, I never imagined that I could be living this.” Because it is so far from the Brazilian reality! I tell my gringo [foreign] friends here: “If you want to see a miracle, just find a latino and talk to them, because it’s a miracle that latinos are here. Just to get the visa, we had to prove that we have aud $18,000.00 in a bank account. This is a miracle in itself.” As we can see, although the idea of “living the dream” is common for College students, it is even more so for Brazilians because of the funding and language difficulties. His preaching in English to his fellow students and teachers was a significant rite of passage into this new life. Paulo calls it a miracle. But “living the dream” is also associated with having fun and joy at College and church. Paulo told me: In one of the Chapels, the College Director turned to me and said: “Paulo, I see you’re going to be very influential. You’re going back to Brazil and will transform that nation. I see that you will bring to Brazil some of that fun element that the churches don’t have there. Theirs is a very heavy, very serious religiosity.” Most probably other Brazilian students had also conveyed to the director that pleasure and fun were not present at churches in Brazil, and this was s­ omething

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they learned at Hillsong. Paulo was not really sure he wanted to return to Brazil. He is now in his last year of College and is fundraising again to save enough money to enrol in a Bachelor of Theology in Sydney. 6 Conclusion The stories of the young people I reproduced here show that there is more to the success of megachurches than just branding and slick marketing. Following Rakow (2015), I suggest the supply side (churches’ appeal through branding) needs to be understood in conjunction with the demand side (why consumers buy into the brand). For Hillsong College, key differences from the ways in which neo-Pentecostal churches are run in Brazil and the fact that most Brazilian students are middle class are significant in their choice of where to study overseas. The young people I interviewed believed it was a dream to study in a church that praised “excellence” and taught them leadership skills through volunteering at the church, and these skills would help them in their adult life. They also valued Hillsong for its focus on love and inclusivity, rather than money and spiritual warfare, and the fact that there is more gender equality than in Brazilian churches. Hillsong’s focus on youth cultures and the fact that they were able to make friends from all over the world were important drawcards. Significantly, the College offered them the opportunity to learn English, and live a kind of Pentecostalism which is fun, exciting and more informal and attuned to youth culture than what they have in their home country. References Antunes, A. (2013). The Richest Pastors in Brazil. 17 January. Forbes magazine. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/01/17/the-richest-pastorsin-brazil/#2f3cc4df5b1e [Accessed 28 July 2017]. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dantas, B. (2010). A Dupla Linguagem do Desejo na Igreja Evangélica Bola de Neve. Religião e Sociedade, 30 (1), pp. 53–80. Freston, P. (2004). Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freston, P. (2001). The Transnationalisation of Brazilian Pentecostalism: The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. In: A. Corten, and R. Marshall-Fratani eds., Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: C. Hurst & Co.

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Freston, P. (1997). Charismatic Evangelicals in Latin America: Mission and Politics on the Frontiers of Protestant Growth. In: S. Hunt, M. Hamilton, and T. Walter, eds., Charismatic Christianity: Sociological Perspectives. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 184–204. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Jenkins, P. (2002). The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford UP. Johnson, J. (2017). Megachurches, Celebrity Pastors, and the Evangelical Industrial Complex. In: B. Forbes and J. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 159–176. Köhrsen, J. (2016). Middle-Class Pentecostalism in Argentina: Inappropriate Spirits. Leiden: Brill. Luhrmann, T. (2012). When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf. Mariano, R. (2014 [1999]). Neopentecostais: sociologia do novo pentecostalismo no Brasil. São Paulo: Loyola. Mariano, R. (2010). Império Universal, in Folha de São Paulo, Caderno Mais, 5th Feb. p. 4. Mariano, R. (1999). O Futuro não Será Protestante. Ciencias Sociales y Religión, 1(1), pp. 89–114. Mariano, R. and Moreira, A. (2015). Expansão, Diversificação e Transformação do Pentecostalismo no Brasil. In: A. Moreira, and P. Trombetta, eds., O Pentecostalismo Globalizado, Goiânia: Editora da PUC Goiás, pp. 47–69. Martin, D. (1990). Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mason, M., Singleton, A. and Webber, R. (2010). Developments in Spirituality among Youth in Australia and Other Western Societies. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. Leiden: Brill, pp 89–114. Meyer, B. (2007). Pentecostalism and Neo-Liberal Capitalism: Faith, Prosperity and Vision in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches. Journal for the Study of Religion, 20(2), pp. 5–28. Miller, D. (1997). Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, D. and Yamamori, T. (2007). Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pereira, C. and Linhares, J. (2006). Os Novos Pastores. Veja, (12 July), pp. 76–85.

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Rakow, K. (2015). Religious Branding and the Quest to Meet Consumer Needs: Joel Osteen’s “Message of Hope”. In: J. Stievermann et al. eds., Religion and the Marketplace in the United States, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 215–239. Rocha, C. (2017). “The Come to Brazil Effect:” Young Brazilians’ Fascination with Hillsong. In: T. Riches and T. Wagner. eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me out upon the Waters. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–141. Rocha, C. (2006). Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Sargeant, K. (2000). Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Stoll, D. (1990). Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vásquez, M. (2009). The Global Portability of Pneumatic Christianity: comparing African and Latin American Pentecostalisms, African Studies, 68(2), pp. 273–286. Vincett, G., Olson, E., Hopkins, P. and Pain, R. (2012). Young People and Performance Christianity in Scotland. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27(2), pp. 275–290.

Chapter 11

Extraordinary Sacrifice and Transnational Spiritual Capital in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God Kathleen Openshaw Moses went up to Mount Sinai as just a man, but he came down as a great leader. The sacrificial climb bore fruits for Israel, giving birth to a nation. This is the purpose of this Campaign of Mount Sinai. You could be the next phenomenon; your life could be a great wonder… uckg Ireland website, n.d.

With their demands on those who risk their faith to ‘challenge’ God, campaigns move people to invest themselves fully in pursuit of the necessary spiritual conditions for divine blessing. kramer, 2002, p. 30

1 Introduction The Campaign of Mount Sinai is an extraordinary campaign of faith. Campaigns of extraordinary faith and sacrifice take place across the global branches of the Brazilian neo-Pentecostal megachurch Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (uckg/Universal Church) twice a year. These campaigns are for those who have “impossible cases” – problems that seem to have no solutions. Many uckg congregants become part of a campaign in the hope that they too will be “the next phenomenon” or indeed have a life that is “a great wonder.” For congregants, the Campaign of Mt. Sinai that took place in the Australian headquarters of the Universal Church at the end of 2016 was extraordinary in terms of its size and preparation but most importantly in its spiritual potency. At the end of the campaign, uckg bishops and pastors from across the world made the arduous journey to the top of Mt. Sinai, in Egypt. There they presented their congregants’ prayer requests (which had accompanied their financial sacrifices) on God’s “natural altar.” This chapter draws on my fieldwork in the Australian uckg headquarters and other branches in the country between August 2015 and May 2017, as well

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as a five-day pilgrimage with uckg congregants to one of the church’s most sacred sites, the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo, Brazil. Furthermore, I actively followed an array of internet-based uckg content across its global networks namely twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, online blogs, websites, YouTube channels and Instagram. I also made sure to tune into the three weekly radio programs hosted on the local western suburb radio station 2GLF 89.3FM and the live Mixlr streams from the church that transmitted the occasional service, as well as prayers and evangelism during campaigns of faith. Over the course of my fieldwork I had countless informal chats and discussions with an array of uckg members, from those who attended so regularly that other congregants saved the regulars’ seats for them, to more transient members who also attended other churches, church assistants and the pastors themselves. All names in this chapter are pseudonyms. In this chapter, I show how congregants in the Australian uckg engage in the seemingly contradictory praxis of intense sacrifice for prosperity, in an attempt to manage their lives and address challenges within the constraints of macro social structures that cannot realistically be altered (Martin, 1998).1 I argue here that local (predominantly marginalised migrant) congregants are embedded within the multiple flows that take place across the uckg’s global spiritual networks. Congregants in Australia make use of the uckg’s spiritually networks in order to effect change in their lives. In the case of the Campaign of Mt. Sinai, congregants had access to empowering spiritual capital through the transnational flows that take place within the uckg. Bishops and pastors from branches around the world trekked through the desert of Sinai in order to offer their congregants’ prayer requests to God on top of Mt. Sinai. This is a site of biblical significance and spiritual potency. There the pastorate “cried out”2 to God on behalf their congregants. For congregants the spiritual strength of this transnational campaign can be life changing. Through the transnational networks created by the uckg, congregants are able to imbue their sacrificial offerings with increased spiritual capital to better call the attention of God. 1 Here I use the term “prosperity” in the sense that it is used in the uckg by congregants and pastors alike. Prosperity is not only to describe financial abundance but to describe a holistic sense of wellbeing which includes happy interpersonal relationships (between spouses, family and friends), good mental and physical health, stable living and immigration conditions. Edir Macedo’s book Vida com Abundância (Life with Abundance, n.d.) deals with all forms of abundance including material prosperity. 2 This is the term often used within uckg services to describe the pleas made by pastorate and congregant alike to God to hear their prayers. To “cry out” is a desperate prayer to God in times of pain and anguish.

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Spiritual Capital and the uckg

Spiritual capital is a non-material, supernatural asset that can be accrued by an individual congregant’s connectedness with God.3 This is in keeping with the uckg’s emphasis on the blurring of the boundaries between the supernatural realm and the lived reality of its congregants. Unlike other forms of capitals – cultural, symbolic and economic capital (Bourdieu 1986) – spiritual capital is more easily accessible to uckg congregants.4 This is so because congregants’ relationship with God is not dependent on their position in society but rather on their commitment to this relationship. This fungible capital is generated in the spiritual realm through the spiritual work congregants do in their daily life. For instance, embodying the habits of an ideal uckg congregant (such as regularly attending church, fasting, sacrificing) and harnessing the power of the uckg’s spiritual networks (as I will show in this chapter) bring congregant closer to God, strengthening their relationship with Him and thus amassing greater spiritual capital. The uckg’s spiritual capital is not scarce in a Boudieusian sense. There is no competition for this resource amongst congregants or the hierarchy of the church. It is abundant as it is generated from a God of abundance. However, it is elusive. Generating this capital requires perseverance, sacrifice and prioritising God and His commandments. This is particularly difficult in a secular Australian context where many of the congregants are already marginalised. Spiritual capital assists congregants in the spiritual war they are waging against evil to better their lives. In the uckg, by accruing spiritual capital congregants are in a position to invoke spiritual authority (power invested by God in an individual) over evil forces within the spiritual realm. Congregants also gain confidence to invoke “self-assurance” capital and “agency capital” (Shah & Shah, 2010, pp. 76–78) in the secular parts of their lives. These non-material capitals encourage congregants to be bold in their life decisions and their faith. Spiritual capital can thus be applied in the double-work (spiritual and nonspiritual) required of uckg congregants to change their life circumstance. 3 In the keeping with the uckg’s rejection of “religion” and “religiosity”, I use the term spiritual capital rather than religious capital. Spiritual capital and religious capital are sometimes used interchangeably. 4 Bourdieu’s direct contribution to the study of religion was relatively modest, however see Verter (2003) for a discussion of how Bourdieu can be applied to the study of religion with particular reference to a symbolic understanding of spiritual capital. Spiritual capital is difficult to define given its ambiguous nature (partly related to difficulties in defining “spiritual” and “capital”). For other definitions of spiritual capital, see Berger & Reading (2010); Guest (2007); Verter (2003); Zohar & Marshall (2004). Definitions often do not include the supernatural element I associate with this form of capital.

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Pastors and congregants alike recognise that problems are a part of everyday life. However, unresolvable or persistent issues are understood by the uckg to be a consequence of spiritual blockages. These blockages are often a result of evil activity (for example the Devil meddling in their lives, witchcraft, curses, demon possession), or as a repercussion of straying from God’s plan (usually by being disobedient to His Word). The uckg’s preachings do not acknowledge the macro-structural issues at play in the precarious lives of congregants but rather take a neoliberal stance, urging congregants to take individual responsibility for their life circumstances. Therefore, critically, spiritual authority gives individuals the capacity to understand the spiritual root of their problems and decree a change in their life circumstances. Congregants utilise this authority to overcome what they believe are the spiritual causes of their problems, for example by casting out demons, healing their physical ailments through prayer and breaking curses. Spiritual capital also benefits the secular work they must do, in conjunction with the spiritual work, to change their lives. It is converted into self-assurance and agency capital as congregants are spiritually empowered to employ secular means (for instance, repeatedly applying for their dream jobs, investigating every pathway to immigration, educating themselves) to achieve what they want in their lives. As Violetta, a Cape Coloured5 from South Africa, who has been attending the uckg in Australia since its very first service in 2006, explained to me: I am very bold. When it comes to my faith I am bold… Whatever you want you persevere but you don’t lean on your own understanding, you go with God. You ask God to guide you. Don’t do it yourself because on your own strength you are nothing but if you go with God you are going to achieve. Interview, January 2017

Spiritual capital allows congregants to be “bold” in their actions and in their faith. Even when failure and disappointment presents itself to congregants, spiritual capital is an asset, as God must eventually honour His biblical promises if congregants “do their part”. The uckg’s particular brand of prosperity gospel is premised on an “active faith” which requires physical work, spiritual commitment and constant effort (van Wyk, 2015, p. 10; Dengah, 2017, p. 52). This concept is a cornerstone of uckg preaching throughout their global networks. Congregants persevere practically and spiritually to overcome the litany of issues that affect their lives 5 This term is not used as a racial slur in a South African context, but rather “Coloureds” are a distinct population group in South Africa. They are descendants of white settlers, African natives, and Asian slaves.

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all the time with the confident assurance that if they “do their part” God as their patron will do His. Sacrifice is one of the ways congregants “do their part” to reframe their life circumstances in Australia. To contextualise the practice of sacrifice in the lives of uckg congregants, in what follows I will briefly introduce the uckg, its Australian headquarters and the congregants who attend it. I will then analyse the seemingly paradoxical practice of sacrifice for prosperity as preached across the uckg’s transnational networks. 3

The Australian uckg: A Node in a Transnational Network

In 2017 the Universal Church celebrated its 40th anniversary. In a wellpublicised­remembrance of its humble beginnings, its founder, Edir Macedo returned to where the roots of the uckg began to take hold – a bandstand in a poor suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Today the uckg is considered a “leading exemplar” of neo-Pentecostal Christianity (Kramer, 2002, p. 28). It is a transnational religious conglomerate, with churches in every state in Brazil and most countries in the world.6 From modest origins, the Universal Church now controls a global media empire, has the financial capacity to build large cathedrals seating thousands (the latest is the opulent Temple of Solomon, estimated to have cost between US$ 300–400 million) and regularly fills sport stadiums to capacity across the globe. In 2006, the uckg established its first Australian church and now headquarters in Liverpool, a working-class suburb in Greater Western Sydney, one of the most culturally eclectic regions in New South Wales. Paradoxically, this Brazilian church does not cater for its own cohort of migrants in Australia (although there are a handful of Brazilians across their sites). Most Brazilians in Australia are middle class, and more likely to attend “trendy” churches (such as C3 and Hillsong, see Rocha’s work in this volume). In Brazil, and across the world, the uckg is mostly attended by the poor. The demographics of the Australian headquarters are much like that of the Universal’s congregations outside of Brazil – disproportionately non-Brazilian, poor, low educated, darker skinned and migrant (Freston, 2004, p. 24; 2005, p.  37; 2009, p. 4; 2015, p. 142; Furre, 2006; Mora, 2008, p. 407; Knowles, 2012, p. 654). Most uckg congregants in Australia originate from the Global South, with a strong cohort of Pacific Islanders (in particular Indo-Fijians and 6 For instance, see the works of van de Kamp (2016) and Premawardhana (2015) in Mozambique, van Wyk (2014b) in South Africa, Freston (2005) in Southern Africa, Mareels (2010) in Brussels, Oro and Semán (2001) in Argentina, Almeida (2009) in Brazil, and Freston (2001) for a good discussion of the transnational global spread of the uckg.

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S­ amoans) and Africans (with high numbers of South Sudanese). They have found themselves in Australia through marriage, asylum and working visas. Some are already Australian citizens, others are not. Many live the precarious life of migrants, or children of poor migrants. Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen (2016, p. 2) note how precarity describes a “…certain historical moment marked by the emergence of a new global norm of contingent employment, social risk and fragmented life situations which provide no security, protection or predictability. The ‘migrant’ is its quintessential incarnation”. Sydney’s uckg migrant congregation is by no means a homogenous group. However, broadly speaking, many represent the urban poor, the “impoverished periferia” (Birman & Lehmann, 1999, p. 147), who are vulnerable to stressors associated with migration, and in particular moving from the Global South to the Global North (Lewis, Dwyer & Hodkinson, 2015). Marginalisation and precarity impact migrants’ individual wellbeing and their social relationships, making economic and social stability difficult to achieve. Many congregants face unemployment, underemployment and job insecurity. Often skills and qualifications gained in their home countries are either diminished or unrecognised by the Australian labour market. Some have opted for less skilled work in place of the financial and temporal burdens of retraining in Australia. Housing issues and residential mobility perpetuate instability. Many experience difficulties becoming accustomed to Australia’s welfare system intended to support them (Ramsay, 2016; Hashimoto-Govindasamy & Rose, 2011; Renzaho & Dhingra, 2016). Ailments associated with urban poverty are common place, in particular substance abuse, physical illness and mental health issues. Some in the Sudanese cohort have mental health issues associated with the traumas of war, and in particular, the asylum journey and resettlement in Australia (Savic, Chur-Hanson, Mahmood & Moore, 2016). Everyday racial discrimination, unfamiliar cultural and social norms, and the emotional toll of familial and social separation only add potency to a complex cocktail of challenges faced each day by many of those who attend the uckg. However, in the uckg, congregants are taught how not to be victims of their circumstances but this requires sacrifice. 4

The Paradox of Sacrifice and Prosperity Gospel

There is a plethora of scholarly works that attempt to understand the apparent universal but yet diverse nature of sacrificial practices (Robertson Smith, 1927; Frazer, 1951; Evans-Pritchard, 1956; Tylor, 1958; Hubert & Mauss, 1964; Girard, 1977; in more contemporary work relating to Pentecostalism, Robbins, 2017).

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For this discussion, I focus on the praxis and the meaning of sacrifice as it is situated within the uckg’s transnational spiritual networks.7 Following Stevens (2016), I use the term “sacrifice” to broadly denote the offering of something valuable (by the sacrificer) to a supernatural entity as part of creating and maintaining a relationship with this entity. I also make use of Hubert’s and Mauss’ (1964) emphasis on sacrifice as an act of human-divine communication, understanding sacrifice as a means to mediate between the spheres of the sacred and profane, between God and his worshippers. For the uckg congregants, sacrifice (of all kinds, not just financial) is one of the main ways that they actively communicate their supplication to God and signal their willingness to enter into a serious relationship with Him. In the uckg’s spiritual war, sacrifices have persuasive potential and can be spiritually and materially transformational. They can be offered up to powers of evil or to God.8 Sacrifice is inherent within the uckg’s spiritual warfare and prosperity teachings. This chapter emphasises sacrificial praxis to God as meaningful to congregants in their quest for a prosperous life. 4.1 A Life on the Altar Prosperity gospel preaches that Christians are entitled to a good life and are able to claim this prosperity through faith (Kramer, 2005, p. 101). The uckg’s prosperity practices are often analysed in relation to neoliberal capitalism. For instance, after fieldwork with the uckg in rural Tswana, Jean and John Comaroff explained prosperity gospel as a result of the Pentecostal-Neoliberal economic encounter. In their influential works (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999, 2000), they privileged economics. For the Comaroffs the occult economy was an important dimension of “millennial capitalism” where capitalism has a new spirit, “a magical, neo-Protestant zeitgeist” (1999, p. 281). However, van Wyk (2014b, p. 27) posits that this understanding of prosperity gospel does not take into account the conditions and demography of congregants, and thus depicts the uckg church body as flat and predicable. In my work with the congregants in the uckg in Australia, I found a similar situation to van Wyk. Whilst societally marginalised, congregants are not befuddled by neoliberalism nor solely reliant on the magical appearance of prosperity. Instead, they exert agency within the boundaries of structural limitations. Congregants in Australia have 7 My focus here is on the meaning sacrifice holds to congregants. I am not assessing the arguably questionable hyper-emphasis the uckg, as an institution, places on monetary sacrifices and how it appropriates this money. For a good discussion on this see van Wyk (2014b). 8 In Australia, witchdoctors and jealous people from congregants’ homelands are often believed by congregants to send curses to them in Australia (this narrative is particularly common amongst congregants from Africa and Fiji). Elaborate rituals of (blood) sacrifices are often believed to be part of the cursing process.

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bought into the uckg’s neoliberal ideal of individual responsibility – they endeavour to be innovative, industrious and entrepreneurial. This neoliberal attitude is arguably more fruitful for uckg congregants in Australia than their counterparts in South Africa, who are not always in a position to access an education, a social welfare system, healthcare and opportunities to work. However, although they are living in a Global North context, congregants in Australia are “doing it tough”.9 The uckg in Australia taps into the migrant experience of disenfranchisement, and calls them to “revolt” against these circumstances. The Universal Church’s prosperity gospel involves reclaiming personal responsibility for one’s life, and a renewal of self-worth through proactively applying faith and engaging in an often spiritually violent war. Having exhausted secular avenues to attain their “Australian Dream,” pastors offer congregants an avenue to circumvent the structural and spiritual blockages inhibiting their lives. Given its roots in Brazil’s urban poverty, the Universal Church is well placed to speak to the marginalisation of the darker skinned, urban precariat in Australia’s neoliberal nation state. The uckg’s prosperity preachings are undoubtedly influenced by neoliberalism and the modernisation of Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s, when the Universal Church was establishing its theology. The rise of neoliberal principles, within a context of minimal social support during the inception years of the uckg, created an attitude within the church that has heavily linked the alleviation of poverty with individual responsibility (Lima, 2012). The uckg’s theology is empowering, instilling a sense of personal accountability and the pursuit of financial autonomy, and teaching some of the skills to escape or soften poverty (Lima, 2012, p. 373). In the Universal Church congregants fight complacency by offering up their faith on the altar. This is most physically tangible when congregants place envelopes of financial sacrifices on the church altar. As Stevens (2016, pp. 24–25) highlights, altars are sacred spaces and highly charged with concentrated supernatural powers. This is true in the Universal Church and so for congregants, sacrifice is an act of defiance and resistance against their circumstances. As Roca (2007, p. 330) rightly notes, the congregants in the uckg do not necessarily expect a rags-to-riches story, but rather learn to administer their money and acquire agency over their resources, and so perhaps, through sacrifice, uckg congregants, are raised “from misery to poverty…[albeit] but no further” (Freston, 2015, p. 148).10 For many this is a significant life change.

9 10

An Australian expression to denote someone who is struggling, particularly financially. Freston here is referring to Pentecostalism in general rather than specifically the uckg.

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Congregants effectively enter a contractual relationship with God where they are in a position to demand the realisation of the biblical promise of life in abundance (John 10:10). However, in practical terms it is not so much about making demands of God but bringing congregants into harmony with God’s desires for them to live a prosperous life (Selka, 2014, p. 173). Congregants aim to build a relationship with God. Premawardhana (2015) argues from his work with Cape Verdean immigrants in a Boston branch of the uckg, that prosperity gospel is less about greed than building a holistic, empowered wellbeing. Certainly in the uckg Australia, extraordinary sacrifices are part of the wider project of self-transformation. Kramer (2002, p. 32) asserts that the uckg’s process of “challenging God” through financial donations “…allows people to assert a measure of symbolic control over money and exchange, precisely the medium and dimension of their social existence least subject to control.” I suggest that this control is not merely in their financial lives but across all aspects of their lives. Encounters with God empower congregants to achieve the objectives they set for themselves (Lima, 2012, p. 391). By sacrificing they enact their faith in order to resolve the impossible cases tarnishing their lives. 4.2 Controversy, Prosperity Gospel and the uckg The uckg is often reduced to a charlatan organisation accused of exploiting disenfranchised individuals.11 This is in large part because of its emphasis on sacrifice. Allegations of financial misappropriations and financial victimisation are common. The Universal Church has certainly amassed incredible wealth and Macedo lives the prosperity he preaches. As well as being a man of God, Macedo is also an author, banker, media mogul and regularly rub shoulders with Brazilian politicians and other members of the world’s politically powerful.12 In March 2013, Macedo, was named on the Forbes billionaire’s list (Antunes, 2013). In 2016, he paid US$9.65 million for an apartment in Dezer Development’s Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles, near Miami, Florida. Many argue that Macedo’s personal wealth comes from the pockets of his 11 The uckg is a registered charity and not-for-profit religious institution in most of the countries it is present. However, a simple internet search will reveal media reports from around the world implicating the uckg in questionable financial dealings. So synonymous is the uckg with matters of money, that the Brazilian Yahoo (until challenged by the Universal Church in 2007) had linked the name of the Church and the expression “casa da moeda” (the mint). 12 Macedo’s name has been linked with the ownership of both the Renner Bank and Banco de Crédito Metropolitano in Brazil. He owns the second-largest television network in Brazil, Rede Record and controls about 30 radio stations. He also has media interests outside of Brazil.

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mostly poor congregants, who along with paying their tithes and providing offerings to the running of their local churches, regularly make extraordinary financial sacrifices, just like during the Campaign of Mt. Sinai. Both media, and academics have highlighted the fervent focus on financial sacrifice and offerings by pastors within the Universal Church. One of the most vocal academics condemning the uckg for manipulating its very poor and (sometimes very ill) South African congregants is van Wyk (2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). Both van Wyk (2014b) and van de Kamp (2016) write about how extraordinary sacrifices are often detrimental to dependents, many times fracturing social networks. The Australian uckg is more moderate in their attitude towards sacrifice than in the likes of South Africa and Mozambique. In a secular Australia, the uckg is a minority church and a church of minorities. It has been slow to grow and does not yield the political and cultural power it has in Brazil and in branches around the world where it has large congregations, a visible public presence and generally more influence. The uckg pastors in Australia thus tread lightly. The pastors in an Australian context do not actively involve themselves in what congregants sacrifice but indicate that congregants will be shown by God through a “sign”, hearing God’s voice (see Tania Harris’ chapter in this volume), or a “feeling” during the 40-day spiritual preparation before the sacrifice. Testimonies from congregants indicate that familial and other financial obligations were de-prioritised in order to fulfil their sacrifice commitments, however, no one had openly expressed to me a fracture with kin resulting from this. The relative economic positionality of congregants in Australia’s uckg compared to those in the Global South, as well as the migrant nature of the congregation made immediate extended networks of financial reliance on them less of an issue (although many congregants do regularly send money to their homeland). Australian uckg congregants largely keep their sacrifices secret until they give testimonies. During my fieldwork I heard how some sacrificed their life savings, others gave the money they had been saving for a new car, some had started saving for this campaign as soon as the last one had finished, others merely pawned an item of jewellery that had deep sentimental but very little monetary value. One church assistant told me how she literally gave her all on the altar. So extraordinary was her financial sacrifice, she confessed to me, that as she left the altar she did not even have enough money to buy a coffee. As Birman & Lehmann (1999, p. 161) point out, condemnation of the uckg tends to reduce its relationship with adherents to a one dimensional monetary exchange, using imagery of consumer capitalism and denying the sort of happiness­and prosperity propounded by the uckg. The hefty focus on manipulative monetary practices in the media and scholarly works, dispossesses

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congregants of their agency as rational actors and diminishes congregants’ capacity to decide to do what they feel is fitting with their money. It can also dismiss the spiritual narratives of the congregants, devaluing of the deep spiritual meaning sacrifice holds for many congregants. Often there is an overtone assumption that such sacrifices are ineffectual, and that promises of prosperity are fallacious. This is problematic. Who has the imprimatur to make the distinction between false and true religious promises? Throughout my fieldwork testimonies (both public and during informal conversations) indicated an efficacy to this theological mechanism in the lives of uckg congregants. The financial focus of these criticisms conveniently disentangles monetary sacrifices from one of the Universal Church’s most fundamental tenet – that of holistic sacrifice, of offering one’s whole life on the altar. For congregants, to sacrifice their lives to God does not just involve giving tithe and offerings. It also includes obeying God’s commandments; devoting time to works of charity, evangelism and church services; prioritising God and others above themselves; and practising forgiveness. Many criticisms of the uckg’s sacrificial practices do not acknowledge the importance to local congregants of the spiritual capital that flows through the uckg’s global networks. The Universal Church connects congregants to biblical epicentres of spiritual power. In this case, Mt. Sinai, where Moses and the Hebrew people received the Ten Commandments and made a covenant with God. Indeed, at the very beginning of my fieldwork (August 2015), Amina a South Sudanese widow in her 60s, evangelise to me about “special sacrifices” (I would later learn were the campaigns) that take place in the uckg twice a year. She explained that one of the reasons she attends the uckg is that the pastors take congregants’ prayer requests to holy places, such as Israel, in order to pray on their behalf that these requests be granted. Poor congregants, who exist on the periphery of the globe (Australia is on the geographical fringes of the world) and Australian society (socio-economically and politically), are able to access spiritual capital and thus, spiritual authority via the movement and exchanges that take place through the Universal’s spiritual network. In the Campaign of Mt. Sinai, Moses’ mediation of the Sinaitic Covenant between God and the Hebrews (and their proselytes) is central to the campaign’s spiritual power. On Mt. Sinai Moses both received the Ten Commandments and sealed this holy covenant with a sacrifice of oxen. By having their prayer requests presented on God’s “natural altar” in a sacred place of biblical significance congregants felt their “petition” to God was strengthened. This spiritual capital, accessed through the global networks of the uckg, supports adherents in embracing their spiritual authority to actively engage their faith and overcome the challenges in their lives.

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The Campaign of Mt. Sinai

Campaigns of Israel have taken place in the uckg since 1980. For almost five years the Universal Church was not able to secure a local guide to lead them in their ascent up Mt. Sinai, as the area became dangerous since the Islamic State began operating there. Therefore, for congregants, the 2016 campaign was a particularly powerful one. On Sunday, 18th of December 2016, those in the Australian Headquarters joined other uckg congregants around the world who were fighting an “impossible case”. It was a spectacle (Kramer, 2005) involving elaborate props and performance, associating biblical narratives and victories with present-day miracles. A huge banner with a photo of Mt. Sinai was placed behind the church’s altar at the start of the 40 days.13 It became taboo to touch the altar as it was to remain untarnished in order to receive the congregants’ sacrifices. Mt. Sinai was the focus, and the congregants, just as the biblical Hebrews, were at the foot of this great mountain, at the mercy of God.14 Their spiritual journey began at the moment congregants took a sacrificial envelope from church’s altar. Each sacrificial envelope contained a new “birth certificate” and the opportunity for congregants to write a new life story. These new birth certificates were a marker of the congregants’ rebirth into liberation. These sacrifices were a culmination of a 40-day period of spiritual cleansing and focus. Sacrificers attended more church services, some increased their evangelism, joined church groups, immersed themselves in uckg spiritual paraphernalia (for example books, live streaming broadcasts, blog posts) and even gave up secular entertainment. Each evening at 10pm congregants across Australia (and some from abroad) tuned in for a special live stream audio broadcasts from the Australian headquarters. Congregant listened as the pastors prayed and encouraged them in their campaign. So as to mirror Moses’ ascend up Mt. Sinai, after the live stream the pastors in Australia would, leave the church to climb a natural high point in Sydney. As the pastors and bishops 13

So central is Mt. Sinai and the trope of sacrifice in the uckg imagination that this same giant image of the mountain is papered onto a high wall in the Temple of Solomon’s carpark in São Paulo. Mt. Sinai overlooks this third incarnation of Solomon’s Temple and in particular a replica of Moses’s tabernacle - where Hebrews first began to atone for their sins through ritual animal sacrifice. A uckg bishop in Brazil also started a tourism agency called “Monte Sinai Turismo” to sell package trips to the uckg pilgrims to holy sites in Israel and Egypt. 14 See Bielo’s (2017) chapter on “Performing the Bible” for an exploration of how the Bible is performed (through replicas and re-creations) to animate lived expressions of Christianity.

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would do in Egypt at the end of the campaign, local pastors prepared the way for their congregants’ sacrifice by climbing a mountain for their congregants, and offering up prayers of strength for those who were taking part in the campaign. The Campaign of Mt. Sinai parallels the Hebrew’s exodus out of slavery with those congregants who are shackled by “impossible cases.” Like Moses, congregants were to spiritually climb the steep mountain of Sinai and call out to God. Thirsty for a resolution to their problems, during the 40 days of spiritual preparation, they made their way through the harsh spiritual desert in order to break Pharaoh’s bondage. Congregants believe that the essence of Pharaoh’s evil spirit remains alive today and enslaves them to a life of pain. This enslavement can take place through curses, witchcraft or simply being spiritually vulnerable by not having the Holy Spirit. The uckg is able to facilitate spiritual potency for its congregants through its use of biblical and Judaic iconology, its capacity to recreate (as in the replica of the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo) and access sacred sites (such as Mt. Sinai and Israel). YouTube videos posted by a Brazilian Bishop from a branch of the uckg in the United States, with the hashtag #MountSinai2016, documented some of the hike to God’s altar.15 Just as Moses is believed to have done, the bishops and pastors of the uckg trekked up the mountain, undertaking the actual journey congregants had gone through spiritually. The hike entwined the spiritual manifestation of a biblical narrative, a sacred site, holy men and faithful sacrificers. This drew the biblical fire of God upon the pastorate and the congregants’ prayer requests. One video shows the bishops and pastors “crying out” in prayer to God. The pastors’ characteristically animated prayers were intended to draw God’s attention to the plight of their congregants. The envelopes were placed on altar stones and burned as the pastors prayed. Many of the envelopes had flags of the countries from which they came printed on the front – a visible representation of a global church united in the Holy Land. Burning the requests (of thousands of congregants from around the world) in the same way the Bible describes Moses burning offerings invoked the covenant between the Hebrews and God, and thus the uckg congregants and God. As the smoke ascended, congregants believed that God descended to break the shackles blocking the prosperity in their lives. At that moment, God gave each congregant who sacrificed with sincerity a new identity, in the same way the Hebrews 15

See Bishop Bira Fonseca’s (2016) YouTube videos for the 2016 campaign: “I’ll take my greatest dream to the top of Mount Sinai”; “Climbing Mount Sinai”; “Special Message from Mount Sinai”. In a similar vein see a photo blog of Renato Cardoso’s (2010) trip to Mt. Sinai in 2010.

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received a new identity as the chosen people of God. As Kramer (2005, p. 107) argues “Prosperity and empowerment in the Universal Church depends on the ritualization of narratives and scenarios that connect individual believers to collective projects and global ideologies.” However, whilst many are blessed with a miracle and give testimonies in the weeks immediately following their sacrifices, some must wait to be set free. Impossible cases do not always get resolved by God straight away, or at all. This is the time when congregants draw on the spiritual capital they have accumulated and continue to persevere and petition God, awaiting the moment the Lord finds them worthy to be “free.” Many newcomers testify to seeing the power of God only after they sincerely16 sacrificed in a campaign (this could be in their second or third campaign). Some congregants retrospectively admitted they did not give “their all” and so began working towards the next campaign. Some simply admitted that they did not believe that their sacrifice would “work” and so blamed their doubt for the ineffectual result. For congregants, it was not the spiritual mechanism that was at fault but rather that their sacrifice was not accepted by God as it was not offered correctly and whole hearted. Roca, (2007) discusses the appropriation of money culture the political project by Neo-Pentecostal churches (specifically the uckg) to Christianise Brazil. He astutely points out that if all believers in the uckg expected immediate returns on their financial sacrifices the church would not last. Rather, Roca (2007, p. 331) argues that: In a way, what the believers are buying is time and space in the house of the Lord; the possibility of building a long-term strategy for their lives; a perspective, a project, a structure, getting out of the vicious fluidity and ephemerality of fungible, ‘living money’…It is a long-term investment in a stable, secure value… There is an inherent bias in my argument in this chapter, given those with whom I interacted during my research were actively attending the uckg and thus would most likely have an enthusiastic and favourable perception of its sacrificial practices. However, some congregants during the course of my research did grow disenchanted by the inefficacious nature of their sacrifice, the focus on money in the Universal Church or indeed how the campaign sacrifices (and other monetary donations to the church in general) are used, and chose to leave or “take a break” from the Universal Church. 16

To be sincere in the uckg is to humbly give one’s all with complete faith in the efficacy of God. It is a complete surrender of any doubts.

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For instance, after church one weekday morning I bumped into Rose, a Filipino pensioner whom I had not seen in the church for a few weeks. She explained to me that she decided to “take a break” from the church as she began to feel uncomfortable with all the “envelopes”. Rose was referring to the envelopes handed out each service (in addition to tithes and offerings) into which congregants could put a special sacrifice. Rose was already helping to support a friend and her friend’s children in the Philippines on her small Australian pension and so felt that she was already making her Christian “sacrifice”. Bahar, a South Sudanese woman, faithful tither, regular “warrior” in the campaigns of faith and active member of the evangelism team, left the church after (among other incidents) feeling that her financial givings to the church were not being spent appropriately. She felt it morally wrong to invite poor people to the church, through her evangelising, when she knew the uckg would not assist the most vulnerable in their basic material needs (such as providing food packages, and assistance with rent and bills). Living from welfare cheque to welfare cheque herself, she assisted those in need where the church would not, by taking them to her local Anglicare17 where she too had to occasionally seek emergency assistance. 6

Global Flows and Local Experiences

Religion has always been inherently global with a history of vast geographical spread and “one truth” ideology (Vásquez, 2008, p. 157; Altglas, 2010, p. 10). Globalisation has become a particularly unavoidable component for understanding religion (Rocha, 2006, 2017; Altglas, 2010, p. 15; Meyer, 2010, p. 116). Globalisation de-territorialises and re-territorialises spaces (Giddens, 1991; Vásquez, 2008, p. 157; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004), whilst also compressing time and space (Harvey, 1989). With advances in travel and communication, flows of capitals, technology and culture are faster and more efficient. This creates ever shifting global centres and peripheries. Pentecostalisms in particular are hyper-mobile.18 Their cosmology is strongly orientated toward world-making (Meyer, 2010, pp. 117–118). Wilkinson (2008, p. 6) has argued that Pentecostals are “globalisers”. They are not merely passive products of globalisation, but zealous agents in transmitting and moulding 17 18

Anglicare is the national umbrella agency for community services associated with the Anglican Church of Australia. I consider Pentecostalisms in the plural given the diversity of churches and practices that self-identify as Pentecostal or focus on the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Anderson (2006, p. 283), echoing Wilkinson, asserts that Pentecostalism is the most diverse of all Christian movements as its different forms of expression are rooted in the local.

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globalisation (Vásquez and Marquardt, 2003, p. 55). Contributions to these global currents do not merely flow from the West to the Rest. As is illustrated by the uckg in Australia, a megachurch from Brazil with congregants also from the Global South, global flows (in this case of spiritual capital) also come from the “periphery” (Altglas, 2010, p. 6; Rocha, 2017), and “from below” (Freston, 2009, p. 3). The adaptive nature of Pentecostalisms provides their faithful with the conceptual tools to deal with the realities of a neoliberal capitalist environment imparting a sense of belonging removed from geographic territory (Vásquez, 2009). For Robbins (2009), the Pentecostal adherent is deterritorialised through ritualised bodies that can be easily transported in the global diffusion of Pentecostalism. These portable citizens of God are interacting with global (spiritual) forces as they experience life in their local setting. 7 Conclusion In this chapter I showed how local Universal congregants are imbedded within the global flows and exchanges of spiritual capital through the uckg’s dynamic spiritual space. In a globalising world where boundaries of all kinds are challenged and changed, religious actors (such as the uckg pastorate, congregants and spirits) are flexible and mobile. Even in the case where uckg congregants are not able to be personally mobile, they can participate in and benefit from these global flows from their local context. I used the example of the Campaign of Mt. Sinai as a way to think about the implications of such global networks, many times facilitated by megachurches such as the Universal Church, for local congregants. In particular, literature on sacrifice in the uckg has not addressed the importance that the uckg’s global presence plays in connecting congregants through their sacrifices to epicentres of spiritual power (in this case Mt. Sinai). uckg congregants are united across the Universal global community as they cry out in unison to God during such campaigns. The congregants’ ­spiritual imagination during the 40 days of preparation for sacrifice lead them on the biblical journey of Exodus. This narrative is intensified when with the uckg pastorate physically travelling the Exodus trail carrying with them congregants’ prayer requests to God. Their personal sacrifices and the local uckg community are connected to a transnational network of those who are in the same spiritual “moment”. This gives their “cry out” an added supernatural momentum, a louder voice to be heard by God. His people, a community with individual hardships, collectively reach up to Him in the same place the Hebrews became His children. Congregants are part of a “polycentric cartography” where different nodes of the ukcg across the globe unite them in real time

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(Rocha and Vásquez, 2013, p. 23). Congregants in Australia, who may not be in a position to travel regularly (or at all) to sacred biblical sites (like Mt. Sinai in Egypt or Israel) or places of spiritual significance (such the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo), are given access to a collective energy created by the wider uckg community and the spiritual capital these sites possess. For the local congregants, this spiritual capital is an important asset in the spiritual war congregants are fighting in order to reclaim control and personal agency in their precarious lives. After exhausting secular interventions (such as health care professionals, lawyers, recruitment companies, government assistance), congregants, use supernatural means to address life predicaments, adverse circumstances and in the Campaign of Mt. Sinai “impossible cases.” For these migrant congregants, even though they are living in the prosperous Global North, they remain on the periphery, living hard lives with little assurance that this will change. Within the global network of the uckg, congregants are not disadvantaged by being on the (geographic/socioeconomic) periphery, rather they become globalised agents engaging and utilising the uckg’s networks to their benefit. References Almeida, R. (2009). A Igreja Universal e seus demônios: um estudo etnográfico. São Paulo: Editora Terceiro Nome. Altglas, V. (2010). Religion and globalization (Introduction). In: V. Altglas, ed., Religion and globalization: Critical concepts in social studies. London: Routledge, pp. 1–22. Anderson, A. (2006). The hazards of writing a book on global Pentecostalism, Pneuma, 28(2), pp. 283–288. Antunes, A. (2013). The richest pastors in Brazil. Forbes, [online]. Available at: https:// www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/01/17/the-richest-pastors-inbrazil/#4a516c755b1e [Accessed 22 November 2017]. Berger, P. and Redding, G. ed., (2010). The hidden form of capital: spiritual influences in societal progress. London: Anthem Press. Bielo, J. (2017). Performing the Bible. In: P. Gutjahr, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 484–503. Birman, P. and Lehmann, D. (1999). Religion and the media in a Battle for ideological hegemony: The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and TV Globo in Brazil. Journal of Latin American Studies, 18(2), pp. 145–164. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In: J. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 241–58.

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Cardoso, R. (23 December 2010). At Mount Sinai. [Blog] Renato Cardoso. Available at: https:// blogs.universal.org/renatocardoso/en/at-mount-sinai/comment-page-1/ [Accessed 13 July 2017]. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. (1999). Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist, 26(2), pp. 279–303. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. (2000). Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture, 12(2), pp. 291–343. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus. London & New York: Continuum. Dengah, H. (2017). Being part of the Nação: examining costly religious rituals in a Brazilian neo-Pentecostal church. Ethos, 45(1), pp. 48–74. Evans-Pritchard, E. (1956). Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fonseca, B. (2016a). I’ll take my greatest dream to the top of Mount Sinai 24 December, YouTube video, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5zlQf-IR90 [Accessed 13 July 2017]. Fonseca, B. 2016b, Climbing Mount Sinai 24 December, YouTube video, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jByC2UDHbGU [Accessed 13 July 2017]. Fonseca, B. 2016c, Special message from Mount Sinai 24 December, YouTube video, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4REDe8E44E [Accessed 13 July 2017]. Frazer, J. (1951). The golden bough: a study in magic and religion. Abridged edition. New York: Macmillan Publishers. Freston, P. (2001). The transnationalisation of Brazilian Pentecostalism: the Universal Church of The Kingdom of God. In: A. Corten and R. Marshall-Fratani, ed., Between Babel and Pentecost: transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, Indiana, pp. 196–213. Freston, P. (2004). Evangelical Protestantism and democratization in contemporary Latin America and Asia. Democratization, 11, pp. 21–41. Freston, P. (2005). The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: a Brazilian church finds success in Southern Africa. Journal of Religion in Africa, 35, pp. 33–65. Freston, P. (2009). Globalization, southern Christianity and proselytism. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 7(1), pp. 3–9. Freston, P. (2015). Development and religious change in Latin America. In: E. Tomalin, ed., The Routledge handbook of religions and global development, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, pp. 141–155. Furre, B. (2006). The ‘Universal Church’ and the spirit of globalization. In: S. Stålsett, ed., Spirits of globalization: growth of Pentecostalism and experiential spiritualities in a global age, London: SCM Press, pp. 39–51. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Guest, M. (2007). In search of spiritual capital: the spiritual as a cultural resource. In: K. Flanagan and P. Jupp, ed., The Sociology of Spirituality. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 181–200. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hashimoto-Govindasamy, L. and Rose, V. (2011). An ethnographic process evaluation of a community support program with Sudanese refugee women in western Sydney. Health Promotion Journal of Australia, 22(2), pp. 107–112. Hubert, H. and Mauss, M. (1964). Sacrifice: its nature and function. Translated by W.D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knowles, C. (2012). Nigerian London: re-mapping space and ethnicity in superdiverse cities. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36, pp. 651–669. Kramer, E. (2002). Making global faith universal: media and a Brazilian prosperity movement. Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3(1), pp. 21–47. Kramer, E. (2005). Spectacle and the staging of power in Brazilian neo-Pentecostalism. Latin American Perspectives, 32(1), pp. 95–120. Lewis, H., Dwyer, P., Hodkinson, S. and Waite, L. (2015). Hyper-precarious lives: migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North. Progress in Human Geography, 39(5), pp. 580–600. Lima, D. (2012). Prosperity and masculinity: neopentecostal men in Rio de Janeiro. Ethnos, 77(3), pp. 372–399. Macedo, E. (n.d.). Vida com Abundância. Rio de Janeiro: Unipro Editora & Grafica. Mareels, E. (2010). When distrust causes too much suffering. Or why there are (few) Brazilians in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God of Brussels. In: F. Carvalho, B. Souza, M. ManuCallou, M. Rubiralta, eds., Atas do 1° Seminário de Estudos sobre Imigração Brasileira na Europa, pp. 154–161. Martin, B. (1998).‘From pre to post-modernity in Latin America: the case of Pentecostalism’. In: P. Heelas, D. Martin and P. Morris, ed., Religion, modernity, and postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 102–146. Meyer, B. (2010). Pentecostalism and globalisation. In: A. Anderson and M. Droogers, ed., Anthropology of Christianity studying global Pentecostalism theories and methods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 113–130. Mora, C. (2008). Marketing the ‘health and wealth gospel’ across national borders; evidence from Brazil and the United States. Poetics, 36, pp. 404–420. New King James Bible (2012). China: Bible Society, John 10:10 p.1025. Oro, A. and Semán, P. (2001). Brazilian Pentecostalism crosses national borders. In: A.  Corten and R. Marshall-Fratani, eds., Between babel and Pentecost: transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 181–195.

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Premawardhana, D. (2015). Continuities of change: conversion and convertibility in Northern Mozambique. In: M. Jackson and A. Piette, eds., What is existential anthropology?, Oxford: Berghahn Books, chapter 1. Ramsay, G. (2016). Black mothers, bad mothers: African refugee women and the governing of ‘good’ citizens through the Australian Child Welfare System. Australian Feminist Studies, 31(89), pp. 319–335. Renzaho, A. and Dhingra, N. (2016). Report: assessing the impact of post migration lifestyle changes on migrant settlement trajectories. Western Sydney University. Robbins, J. (2009). Pentecostal networks and the spirit of globalization: on the social productivity of ritual forms. Social Analysis, 53, pp. 55–66. Robbins, J. (2017). Keeping God’s distance: sacrifice, possession, and the problem of religious mediation. American Ethnologist, 44(3), pp. 464–475. Robertson Smith, W. (1927). Lectures on the religion of the semites: the fundamental institutions. 3rd ed. New York: The Macmillan Company. Roca, R. (2007). Dinheiro Vivo: money and religion in Brazil. Critique of Anthropology, 27(3), pp. 319–339. Rocha, C. (2006). Zen in Brazil: the quest for cosmopolitan modernity. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Rocha, C. (2017). John of God: The globalization of Brazilian faith healing. New York: Oxford University Press. Rocha, C. and Vásquez, M. (2013). Introduction: Brazil in the new global cartography of religion. In: C. Rocha and M. Vásquez, ed., The diaspora of Brazilian religions. Leiden: Brill. Shah Samuel, R. and Samuel Shah, T. (2010). How Evangelicalism – including Pentecostalism – helps the poor: the role of spiritual capital. In: P. Berger and G. Redding, ed., Hidden form of capital: spiritual influences in societal progress. London: Anthem Press, pp. 61–90. Savic, M., Chur-Hansen, A., Mahmood, M. and Moore, V. (2016). ‘We don’t have to go and see a special person to solve this problem’: trauma, mental health beliefs and processes for addressing ‘mental health issues’ among Sudanese refugees in Australia. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 62(1), pp. 76–83. Schierup, C. and Jørgensen, M. (2016). An introduction to the special issue. Politics of precarity: migrant conditions, struggles and experiences. Critical Sociology, pp. 1–12. Selka, S. (2014). Demons and money: possessions in Brazilian Pentecostalism. In: P.  Johnson, ed., Spirited things: the work of “possession” in Black Atlantic religions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 155–176. Stevens Jr, P. (2016). Anthropology and sacrifice. In: C. Murray, ed., Diversity of sacrifice: form and function of sacrificial practices in the ancient world and beyond, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 15–30.

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Tylor, E. (1958 [reprint]). Primitive culture. New York: Harper. UCKG Ireland Website, (n.d.). The Campaign of Mount Sinai. [online] Available at: http://uckg.ie/index.php/the-campaign-of-mount-sinai [Accessed 20 November 2017]. van de Kamp, L. (2016). Violent conversion: Brazilian Pentecostalism and urban women in Mozambique. Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY: James Currey, Boydell & Brewer. van Wyk, I. (2012). A response. Anthropology of Southern Africa, 35(3&4), pp. 119–121. van Wyk, I. (2013). Beyond ethical imperatives in South African anthropology: morally repugnant and unlikeable subjects. Anthropology Southern Africa, 36(1&2), pp. 68–79. van Wyk, I. (2014a). The ethics of dislike in the field. In: D. Posel and F. Ross, ed., Ethical quandaries in social research. South Africa: HSRC Press, pp. 199–213. van Wyk, I. (2014b). The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: a church of strangers. New York NY: Cambridge University Press. van Wyk, I. (2015). Prosperity and the work of luck in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, South Africa. Critical African Studies, 7(3), pp. 262–279. Vásquez, M. and Marquardt, M. (2003). Globalizing the sacred: religion across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press. Vásquez, M. (2008). Studying religion in motion: a networks approach. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20, pp. 151–184. Vásquez, M. (2009). The global portability of Pneumatic Christianity: Comparing African and Latin American Pentecostalisms. African Studies, 68(2), pp. 273–286. Verter, B. (2003). Spiritual capital: theorizing religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 21(2), pp. 150–174. Wilkinson, M. (2008), What’s ‘Global’ about Global Pentecostalism? Journal of Pentecostal Theology, 17, pp. 1–13. Zohar, D. and Marshall, I. (2004). Spiritual capital: wealth we can live by. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Chapter 12

“The demon is growing with sins, but there are angels around”: Bundjalung Pentecostalism as Faith and Paradox Mahnaz Alimardanian 1 Introduction The Australian Indigenous communities of the far north coast of New South Wales and south-east Queensland – collectively known as the Bundjalung nation – are comprised of a number of closely related language and dialect groups who share a common belief system, including a vernacular cosmogony explaining the origin of the Bundjalung people and creation of their Country and landscape. Bundjalung Country is a region located between the Great Dividing Range and the Pacific Ocean and includes the Clarence, Richmond and Tweed River basins, which are collectively referred to as the Northern Rivers. Bundjalung people’s encounter with Christianity as an alternative belief system commenced with the early colonial encounter in their homeland. In contrast with some other parts of New South Wales, no mission was established in Bundjalung Country, although there were Baptist and Methodist missionaries in the area affiliated to the United Aborigines Mission (uam1) and the Aboriginal Inland Mission (aim2) societies (Telfer 1941). Some of the missionaries were permanent residents on the local Aboriginal settlements (“stations”) which were known among the Indigenous communities as “missions.” The missionaries did not administer the stations, since the stations were managed by the colonial authorities from 1883 until 1969 under the Aborigines ­Protection Act (1909), then its amendment (1940), as well as via relevant policies such as the policy of assimilation. The above history outlines the Bundjalung people’s early involvement with Christianity and Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism 1 The United Aborigines Mission was an interdenominational mission initially established in New South Wales in the 1890s by a group of Methodist and Baptist ministers and missionaries. 2 The Aborigines Inland Mission (aim), presently known as Australian Indigenous Ministries, is an evangelical organisation founded by a Baptist missionary, Retta Long (nee Dixon), in 1905.

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offered, healing grace, initiatory faith and localised theodicy to Bundjalung religiosity. 2

Bundjalung Jesus in Bundjalung Country

In Bundjalung social history, there are records and oral testimonies relating to a handful of local and travelling Aboriginal evangelists and pastors, such as Mick Cook, Arthur Bundock and Dick Piety, who brought faith to the people. They introduced elements of Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity to the Bundjalung world as early as the 1910s and 1920s (Ono 2007, pp. 57–75) – a time coextensive with the wider introduction of Pentecostalism to Australia and its extension among indigenous peoples around the world (Anderson 2016, pp. 17–157). Decades after the introduction of Pentecostalism to the Bundjalung people, two anthropologists – Malcolm Calley and Akiko Ono – investigated Bundjalung Christianity. Each conducted intensive ethnographic fieldwork observing Pentecostalism in local Indigenous communities and stations 50 years apart from each other in the 1950s and 2000s. Calley (1955) undertook his research during what is known as the “North Coast Revival days” in Woodenbong (or Muli Muli), Cabbage Tree Island (at Wardel, near Ballina), Tabulam (near Casino) and Cubawee (near Lismore). In addition to the above settlements and nearby towns, Ono (2007) visited Box Ridge (at Coraki), and Hill Crest (in Maclean), Ngaru (in Yamba), Baryulgil and Malabugilmah (near Baryulgil). In the 1950s, Calley referred to the presence of “white churches” in the area, including the Church of England, Presbyterian Church, Church of Christ and Catholic Church. On Calley’s account, none of these churches actively engaged in evangelising, nor did they contain racially-mixed congregations. However, they occasionally provided services to the stations and had an active presence in schools. Calley (1955, Part 3) argued that people in Indigenous communities might assert affiliation with some of these churches, but this connection was not as strong as their participation in Pentecostalism. Calley’s anthropological study of faith was framed by two dominant research and policy making approaches of the time regarding Aboriginal Australia. Firstly, he was interested in the analysis of social organisation (also see Calley 1959), specifically in investigating the function of religion and kinship systems. Secondly, he was also interested in the policy of assimilation introduced by the Commonwealth of Australia and its interpretation as a pragmatic method to create a cohesive society.3 3 According to the ministerial report from 1961, the policy means “…in the view of all Australian governments that all aborigines and part-aborigines are expected eventually to attain the

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Throughout his ethnographic study, Calley (1964, 1955) identified similarities between what he called the “old rules” (local culture, particularly religious beliefs and practices) and the new Pentecostal movement, and wrote of the emergence of a synchronistic belief system. In his analysis, Calley argued that a significant body of traditional religious knowledge had been lost after the colonial encounter and discussed the merging of the remaining body of information into the new wave of religiosity. He wrote: Diversity [in these communities] could be accepted in a manner which would be quite impossible for a European with his [sic] long tradition of religious intolerance, theology and empiricism. The adherent of the old rules can see different religions as complementary and not necessarily antagonistic to one-another. To them, Christianity [Pentecostalism] is like the cult of another tribe, into which one might be initiated but which would not imply the rejection of one’s own local cult… [B]ecoming a Christian would have precisely the same meaning as “going through the rule” [being initiated] on the other side of the Clarence River. calley, 1955, p. 7 in Part 3 Calley (1955, 1964) saw a complementary role for Pentecostalism in the Bundjalung worldview and wondered how it could effectively equip Aboriginal culture to fill an ontological gap between Aboriginal and settler modes of being. He (1955, p. 170) went far beyond this, seeing Pentecostalism as a way of integrating into broader Australian society and considered it an opportunity that gradually would facilitate change and adoption. In Calley’s analysis, Bundjalung people’s relationship with Pentecostalism was an experimental encounter in which people were exploring alternative worldviews, rather than an encounter emerging from the colonial condition. In other words, the power relations between coloniser and colonised and the impact of the associated social dynamics on matter of religiosity were absent from Calley’s account. Fifty years later, Ono followed Calley’s ethnographic path, being fascinated with some of the Bundjalung Christian stories collected by Calley, among them the story of Bundjalung Jesus. Like Calley Ono (2007, pp. 114–121) reported in the 2000s that people may identify with various churches, but their perception of faith correlated with a same manner of living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other Australians…” (from the Native Welfare Conference Statement, by the Minister for Territories in the House of Representatives on Thursday, 20th April, 1961).

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Pentecostal reading of Christianity. She was interested in religion as social structure and in structural aspects of religion, as well as the subject of identity in the post-colonial context. Contrary to her expectation, Ono did not witness a strong presence of combined epistemologies fused by localised Christian figures or biblical stories, as Calley had portrayed in the “revival era.” Ono (2012, 2011, 2007) argued that the precolonial or traditional belief system and Pentecostalism are two oppositional frames that generate competing ontologies, rather than completing ones. In this regard, she was critical of Calley’s laying stress to prove continuity within Bundjalung culture. In her study, Bundjalung Pentecostalism was depicted as an “anti-culture” movement which criticises the “old way” and reclaims Bundjalung Aboriginality. According to Ono, “anti-culture” is a feature that contains a series of precepts and taboos shaping the navigation of daily life in tandem with an explicit rejection of tradition. Ono (2007, p. 75; 2012, p. 82) referred to such prohibition as “processual manifestations” of the way by which people absorb change and configure a “distinctive Aboriginality” through “renouncing” some aspects of Bundjalung culture. She factored in to her analysis the colonial and postcolonial conditions, redefining Aboriginality and regenerating identity. Finally, she posed a question of whether Pentecostalism as an indigenised religious system could remain locally relevant and responsive to Bundjalung social norms, by resisting the current global orientation (common among many Pentecostal movements) towards individualism and personal prosperity, as opposed to community interests and family obligations (Ono, 2007, p. 187). I believe that Calley’s and Ono’s accounts, more than suggesting any difference in the Bundjalung people’s engagement with Pentecostalism over time or providing evidence of (dis)continuity of local traditions, demonstrate that Bundjalung Pentecostalism has been continuously responsive to the Indigenous communities’ living conditions. In fact, there is a trace of pluralistic engagement with the belief system in the above indigenisation process and, therefore, each belief system may inform and settle one type of matter in the Bundjalung world rather than another. Calley’s and Ono’s ethnographic accounts entail examples of switching between two worldviews of Christianity and Aboriginality among people and shifting from one narration and interpretation to another. Politics of identity and power relations are also factors that inform this, process without exclusively merging the two worldviews or discrediting one another. Notably, a recent study by Tanya Riches (2017) from the perspective of a liturgiolist implies the existence of multiple approaches among Bundjalung Christians. The status of Pentecostalism vis-à-vis other Christian denominations was much the same in 2010–2011 when I visited the area. People identified with

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the Catholic, Baptist or Uniting Church; they mentioned being married by ­Jehovah’s Witnesses or remembered relatives going to a Presbyterian congregation, but none of the above affiliations were a significant form of religious identification. In fact, most believed that one only belonged to the community of faith if one was fully and immanently devoted to the faith (a Pentecostal commitment to the Spirit). This was depicted in notions such as being a “fulltime Christian,” a “hundred percent believer” and “true Christianity.” Significantly, even people who did not self-identify as religious also considered the same attributes to define religiosity. In the following statement, Kay, a culturally conscious woman from Coraki, referred to the concept of “full-time Christian” in talking about religion: I believe in Jesus, but you needn’t be a full-time Christian to believe in Jesus. He was a healer, a clever man, but there were ones like him in my Country. Believing in Jesus – it’s a kind of security thing to have him, because he is in Heaven and Heaven is where my people go when they die. Kay’s words on the one hand imply that there are full-time and non-fulltime modes of Christianity and on the other hand emphasise on two parallel belief systems of Aboriginal and Christian religions and identify some commonalities between them. Kay also asserts an Aboriginal autonomy and ownership over Christianity that correlates with the global discourse of the indigenisation of religion. She classifies Jesus into the category of clever men (wiun) – the high-ranking initiated men with a significant social and religious status who were responsible for the wellbeing of their communities. In a similar example, one of Calley’s informants referred to Jesus as balugan, a cultural hero and warrior figure (1955, p. 63 in Part 3). Importantly, Wiun and balugan are two wellknown Bundjalung characters who are constantly engaged in challenge and step into various battlefields proving their truthfulness or saving others. Additionally, the theme of battle and its religious connotations are further recognisable in Ono’s and Calley’s ethnographic accounts of Bundjalung Pentecostalism in the forms of spirit encounter as well as adherents’ struggle with faith, which they refer to by the term “backsliding.” 3

Bundjalung Spirit Encounter and Healing

Bundjalung Country is occupied by various corporeal and incorporeal beings – from djurbhils (ancestral and totemic beings) to other enigmatic creatures with which human-kind share the space. They are immanently present, and their

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existence is marked by boodjeram stories (narratives associated with esoteric Bundjalung knowledge) as well as people’s lived experience of encountering them. Christianity introduced angels, demons and evil spirits in generic forms – not specific identification of Biblical creatures – to this pallet of figures. It also offered a dominant religious theme of confrontation between good and evil. In this regard, both Calley and Ono mentioned the existence of cosmological tension or “warfare” in Bundjalung Pentecostalism that elaborates on the local concept of spirit encounter. Calley (1955, p. 61 in Part 3) wrote that the “Devil, representing all that is opposed to Christ, is thought to be at work all the time among the faithful … he is assisted by a number of demons ‘powers and principalities of darkness.’” Ono (2007, p. 31) also stressed that Pentecostals believe in warfare against the Devil. However, the concept of a clash between various, if not necessarily oppositional, forces is not exclusive to Christian cosmology and it has been present in the Aboriginal worldview. The Creation of the world involves breathtaking moments of chase and escape, fighting, bleeding or shaking in Aboriginal cosmogony. The creative forces, even in their most primordial, latent form, are visualised through geographical marks on the landscape that are not conceptually or metaphorically free of tension. They embody potential encounters and non-mobile forms of action, such as watching out and waiting for unfolding events. In this complex imagery, the engaged forces are not necessarily representatives of good and evil, malevolent or benevolent activity. Heather McDonald (2015), in an article on charismatic Christianity in the East Kimberley, Western Australia, highlights this matter and discusses it as a distinction between the Aboriginal and Christian worldviews, calling attention to the role of Zoroastrian dualism as one of the origins of Abrahamic religions, and therefore of Christian cosmology. Notably, the Zoroastrian dualism is known by the idea of the clash between good and evil; however, good and evil both originate from either an ultimate good or an absolutely impartial realm beyond good and evil in the Zoroastrian world view. This nuanced reading critically illustrates that the stabilised boundaries between the realms of good and evil does not matter the most in the philosophy of dualism but the idea of a battle. The key principle is the struggle per se, and the symbolic clash of various forces as a universal pattern in search of equilibrium. Bundjalung esoteric narrations contain several stories that clearly belie a full oppositional semiotic dichotomy. The creation of Bundjalung Country and its landscape is the result of a battle between dirrarwang (goanna) and rainbow snake, neither of whom fully represent good or evil. In another example, there is a Bundjalung boodjeram describing an encounter between a balugan (a young initiated warrior) and a monstrous giant. Interestingly, the earliest

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recorded narration of story belongs to a Bundjalung Elder and activist, a traditionally knowledgeable initiated man who was enthusiastically organising trips to local Pentecostal congregations in the 1950s (also see Ono, 2007, p. 60). The story relates how long ago, a brave balugan came back to his family camp after a hunting trip, only to find that a giant had attacked the camp and killed all the children and old people and was now sitting beside the camp fire cooking and eating the bodies. Balugan set the camp on fire and called out to the Bundjalung ancestral beings to make his fire so massive that it would threaten the giant. The giant escaped and the balugan followed him for many miles to the site of his death, where fallen pieces of the monstrous giant’s burnt skin left marks on the landscape. The local lands and waters travelled in this run and escape became known by the names the giant called them (in Norledge 1968).4 If recognition and naming are elements of becoming and acknowledgments of existence, then the cannibal giant’s dying journey gives birth to the world in this Bundjalung story of coming into being. Clearly, what is essential for life in the above examples is the battle and the living world is created out of this fateful encounter. On the other hand, the theme of battle or confrontation is not restricted to the Bundjalung Christian or boodjeram esoteric accounts. In fact, Calley and Ono both identified the significance of individuals’ lived experience in this matter. Calley (1955, p. 46 in Part 3) indicated that “…while engaged on the fieldwork … [he] was constantly impressed by the great emphasis which nearly all informants placed on these forms of purely individual religious experience.” Ono (2007, p. 31) refers to it as “sensitivity” and writes: “Pentecostals are convinced that they are divinely sensitive in discerning the Devil. They call this spiritual power ‘sensitivity’ and it is a substantial weapon of warfare against the Devil rather than a mere ‘sense’ or ‘feeling.’” The spirit encounters and theme of battle were also referred to in my fieldwork in Bundjalung Country. Sally from Box Ridge shares her story with me as follows: We were living at this place in a Lismore suburb with many alcoholic and drug-addicted neighbours. We were pretty strong with the Lord then. We were sitting at the front of the house with this friend and she asked if there was any witchcraft in our neighbourhood. We said: “No, just drink and drugs.” But she said there was a warlock on the other side of the road, looking at us and wanting to come towards us, but hesitating. [She said]:

4 “The young man and the giant; an Aboriginal legend from the Dyraaba tribe of Aboriginal people” as told by James Morgan to Mildred Norledge (Richmond River Historical Society).

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“There are angels around your yard, that’s why he can’t come over to this side of the road.” In Sally’s account, there is an element of ongoing struggle between forces that represent divine and demonic attributes. They encounter each other in a living condition entailed by social issues and hardship. The visual scene shows protection and vulnerability simultaneously and manifests the antithetical position of the transcendental presence. Overall, the Bundjalung Christian spirit encounters manifest representatives of evil in the present-day struggles along with agents of Christian protection. The transcendental forces engage with their counter-equivalents while not impinging on ancestral business. This pattern is distinguishable from cases in which Christian order and law occasionally overwrite or defeat the Aboriginal ancestral forces (see Magowan, 2003) or evoke deep intellectual or existential challenges to the local mindset (see Eickelkamp, 2017). In other words, the Bundjalung spirit encounter is in one aspect associated with the dynamics of chaos and order and, the breach of Bundjalung Law (cultural norms, traditional rules and customs) and in another aspect is the projection of the present living condition, challenges and its Christian interpretation. Sally’s story depicts a struggle between oppositional cosmic representatives and a battle that is happening on the ground and shows how humankind’s choices and decisions could lead to joining one “mob” (group) or the other. In another example, which engages the concept of healing, Margaret, a middleaged woman who was very expressive in sharing her spirit encounter experiences with me, mentioned that she was once sick as a child, but was cured after being visited by God and angels: I believe in God in my own way, but don’t go to church [mainstream churches]… I saw God myself. When I was a child, I got polio and couldn’t walk. One day I was sitting in the yard and I saw a couple of beautiful angels, and God put his hand on my head. I never told anybody about this in my life, but God was beautiful, and the angels were on both sides of him, and they were beautiful. The angels were standing at the top of the stairs [of the house she was looking at from a lying position in the yard] and God touched my legs. I’ve never seen God again, but my leg was cured. Margaret’s story has very strong features of charismatic healing. In her case, the struggle or battle was against sickness, while the cure was in hands of the Lord in a vivid and straightforward manner. Significantly, the theme of battle is

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a general theme when it comes to overcoming any form of affliction and the end game is to retain the balance. Generally, the concept of cure in all forms of healing techniques is enriched with a similar rationality or reasoning process: the relevant existing oppositional or complementary forces must be diverted towards equilibrium. While in some specific genres of healing across the world the battle is presented in its full performative potential, which I have elsewhere described as “dramatic healing” (Alimardanian, 2013), others may contain only glimpses of it. The Bundjalung version of healing is similarly associated with the concept of battle. People’s safety and wellbeing are guaranteed if one is immune from harmful forces. Wiun(s) were traditionally responsible to protect their communities and save individuals if one is “caught out” by powerful spirit beings. In explanation of the wiun’s position in Bundjalung society, Calley (1955, pp. 30–45 in Part 2) referred to them as “native doctors,” “religious and mystical adepts,” “medical practitioners and diviners” who should counter balance the sickening and damaging forces. Nonetheless, healing does not only occur in defeating affliction; it also happens in revealing visions and messages like Sally’s that characterise an aggressive tension between divine and dreadful presence and reassert a continuum of transcendental confrontation and protection, in this case against substance abuse (drug and alcohol). Bundjalung Pentecostals’ lived experiences go beyond depicting the struggle between oppositional forces and portraying healing grace. There is a continual experience of joining the circle of faith, creating moments of cathartic purification and transformation which could influence the personal and collective wellbeing of the community. 4

Bundjalung Religiosity as it is Lived

I knew Sally and Michael from my weekly trips to the Box Ridge mission. They both self-identified as Christian. In an occasion of visiting Sally and Michael in their home, I immediately noticed a different happy atmosphere in the place. I knew there had been some recent changes in their life, and that Sally had got a job at the community health centre. She was at the computer desk typing a text from the Bible, while Michael was reading the Book. They always had a couple of Bibles around the lounge room and one was usually open, ready to be read. Songs of praise and worship and country gospel were playing. The pink wall of the living room was covered with family photos, paintings, and pictures of Jesus, as well as Bible quotations. A quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson caught my attention; I asked Sally about it and she mentioned that her sisterin-law had given it to her. She read it with me and paused for a moment in front

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of it: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies in us.” Michael stopped reading, looked at me and said they had had a very successful meeting on Sunday. People from the Assemblies of God church had come over and had had a meeting with them in the backyard: It was so good. We didn’t expect many people, but lots came – Nina, Joyce, Sarah… It opened their ears and hearts. We are all one family. You’ve heard the story of three brothers, right?5 There’s been a lot of fighting [tension between some of the relatives] going on, and it should be stopped; we are all one big family. Since Sunday it’s been so quiet around here. That meeting will help to stop the fights, help us live in peace. Sally’s and Michael’s religious expression was unique during my presence at the mission. It correlated with two shocking deaths in Sally’s family in less than six months and it paralleled the couple’s struggle for change and stability, navigating difficulties from unemployment to family commitment and obligation. However, their connection to the Lord was not always the same. On another occasion, Sally explained to me that: One time when we were living here in the mission, we fell from the Lord and started drinking. My friend rang me and told me she had a vision. She’d seen a demonic force right here, on the other side of the mission, which was growing with sin. “But God is watching your house,” she said. Another time, we were sitting in a circle while Mike read God’s words for us. My friend was here and she said that Jesus was standing above Mike’s head, giving out papers to angels to take to people’s homes. In this case, Sally’s vision not only explained by the battle of faith, tensions and temptations between cosmic forces and human desires, it also indirectly glorified a healing process. On one side, there is a stepping in and out of faith, and on the other a constant healing and blessing presence – a trace of grace. Nina, their corner house neighbour and cousin, wasn’t projecting her belief in the same manner as Sally and Michael in those days although she used to read the Bible as well as “call out” to her deceased mother for help and protection when she needed it. Years after, she regularly attended a local Australian Christian Church, a Pentecostal church based in Tweed Heads, New South Wales. Sally’s

5 This refers to the story of the origin of the Bundjalung people from a single family arriving by boat to the land. Some Bundjalung people may associate it with the Book of Exodus.

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and Nina’s lives in the years that I have known them have been a rollercoaster of grief, sorrow, joy, resilience, “falling off and becoming close to the Lord.” Fluctuation in the degree of commitment to the faith is not exceptional to Sally or Nina cases. Although the number of individuals self-identifying as Christian was generally limited in Box Ridge settlement, this number had never been stable. In fact, based on Ono’s observation, there was only one Elder in  the mission, Aunty Tracy, who followed the faith. During Ono’s research time, the single congregation held at Box Ridge implied to her that Box Ridge had the lowest level of participation among all the Bundjalung settlements. In my view, inconsistency in the number of adherents through time explains the circumstantial attributes of faith and how people move in and out of a Christian transcendental sphere during their lifetime, which is what Pentecostalism offers through its emphasis on lived experience. In fact, the cycle of “conversion and backsliding” and its role in keeping the faith alive and renewing human life are all projected in the lived experience of believers. 5

Bundjalung Faith and Paradox

In the study of Bundjalung Pentecostalism, Calley and Ono recognised interruptions in people’s religious life and both of them conceptualised this as “backsliding.” They engaged with the matter of inconsistency in religion as an obstacle and associated it with the rival positions or incompatibility of Aboriginal and Christian belief systems. Calley (1955, p. 32 in Part 3) wrote that: One who backslides is not excluded from Christian heaven but sacrifices any chance of receiving one of the “gifts of the Holy Ghost” such as speaking with tongues. There is the chance that the Holy Ghost may punish the backslider with sickness … it seems to be a far more serious offence to cease being a Christian having once been converted than it is to refuse to become one at all. Calley’s above account suggests the existence of an inner circle of true believers who are blessed with the gift, but there is nevertheless a constant probability of stepping out of the circle. Ono recognised a similar pattern and marks it by a distinction between an “inner circle of existence,” involving Christian practices and the Holy Spirit’s power to fight against the Devil, and an outer circle representing the Blackfellas’ life in general, including worldly pleasures and fear of the Devil (Ono, 2007, p. 38) – a common pattern of Pentecostal engagement among believers in Aboriginal Australia (see McDonald, 2015).

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­ alley and Ono both saw “backsliding” as a condition created by the encounter C between Christianity and Aboriginality. They neglected the fact that the dynamics of the faith actually exist in a back and forth situation, in which the inner and outer circles of faith existentially depend on one another. The challenge of faith is also reflected rhetorically in Christian scripture and it is specifically recognisable in the parts that are commonly referred to by the Bundjalung Pentecostals. During her fieldwork, Ono collected a series of wellfavoured verses, all carrying the same theme: man is destined to sin (Book of Romans 10: 9–10); if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us (First Epistle of John 1: 8–10); man is made to sin and God is to forgive (Gospel of John 1: 8–10). Other themes emphasised in sermons included: faith secures a promise of a miracle from God (Gospel of Mark 16: 15–18); and if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Epistle to Corinthians 5: 17). In this regard Ono (2007, pp. 188–190) wrote: “the issue of faith is endlessly repeated. The depth of one’s faith is questioned, and the promise of miracles mentioned … as a consequence of faith, a promised cycle of sinning, repentance and deliverance is repeatedly chosen for preaching.” According to her, even pastors talk openly about their past life as sinners. In fact, cyclic patterns like the theme of battle do exist across belief systems and have older roots than Christianity. For instance, in Zoroastrian cosmology and cosmogony (known as Bundahišn) the eternity of time (sarmadi) configures periods of battle between positive and negative cosmic forces (angra mainyu and spenta mainyu). In a cyclic time, each period of being has a commencement point that rises to a peak and fades into a trough before rising again. The continuum and repetition occur in sinusoidal and synodical patterns in which the forces of life interact in a magnetic field of repulsion and attraction. Subsequently, living faithful to the Spirit is not an exception. The constant challenge of moving in and out of faith and struggle with paradox is imbedded in the faith. By definition, faith is a passionate belief full of uncertainties and contradictions. In this regard, I refer to the accounts of two philosophers and theologians interested in existential challenges: Edith Stein, a Jewish-born philosopher who studied under the supervision of Edmund Husserl and converted to Catholicism, and Søren Kierkegard,6 one of the founders of existential ­philosophy, who was born into Lutheranism. Kierkegaard (2014) and Stein (2000) stress the significance of faith in contrast to mere belief or knowledge. In their theology 6 Also see Morton (2013) and Tomlinson (2014) as other examples of theological analysis in anthropology.

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one can believe in God and Jesus, but one is only truly Christian when the passion of faith exists. According to Kierkegaard (2000, pp. 56, 57), faith is not “aesthetic emotion” but the “paradox of existence” as it presupposes infinite resignation. Furthermore, Stein (2000, p. 21), in her imaginary dialogue between Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas, embraces the matter as follows: “…all we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace….” Notably, among Bundjalung believers the concept of paradox is more nuanced than the struggle of stepping in and out of faith. Even in the case of individuals like Aunty Tracy, who is a long-term believer, the existence of contradictions and challenges is recognisable in her words, if not in her actions. I met her some years after Ono did, in Coraki. The same type of self-contradicting statements that Ono refers to among Bundjalung Pentecostals was identifiable in Aunty Tracy’s speech. She talked with me about a djurbhil site which she visits for fishing and reminded me that I need to be accompanied by an Elder if visiting the site. Someone who would be able to “sing out” for me – in other words, introduce me to the local spirit beings associated with the site so that I would be kept safe. In response to my question of whether she performs the gangaalehla (singing out) herself, she said: “I don’t really go for it, I am a Christian and you put God before anything else. I pray to him. I am not really into these sort of things….” Yet she evidently believed in the efficacy of “singing out.” For Bundjalung people, chaotic ruptures work against the routinisation of charisma and foster intense praise, healing and ecstasy. Paradox keeps faith alive and inspires healing and revitalisation. The two sides of Bundjalung religiosity (backsliding and conversion) should not be seen simply as exclusively oppositional, since commitment is always a matter of challenge. The vicissitudes of faith are intrinsic to keeping life in order, which is always in dialogue with chaos. Bundjalung religiosity remains characteristically periodic rather than linear and in constant repetitive struggle, since repetition as a conditio sine qua non [the indispensable condition] begins in faith (Kierkegaard 2000, pp. 102–115). Furthermore, the Kierkegaardian distinction between certain, objective belief and uncertain, subjective faith assists to define the Bundjalung version of Christianity more clearly and explains why Bundjalung people associate Christianity chiefly with charismatic Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism offers a reading of faith that is initiatory, purifying and healing, and in which ­hesitation, uncertainty and failure are acceptable and do exist. Both Calley and Ono in their description of Bundjalung Pentecostal practices pointed to

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the absence of standardised performances in the congregations, as well as to a general disapproval of formality. Ono (2007, p. 149) wrote that: “…it has been customary … [that] the church meetings and relevant activities are unplaced and uncertain about schedule,” as they should be “under the control of Holy Spirit” (Ono 2007, p. 203). Calley (1955, p. 58 in Part 3) also indicated that, “formality has no biblical authority and … the Lord does not want people to worship in such a manner….” He also mentioned that Bundjalung congregations are not “major services” but more like revival meetings where the healing spirit is omnipresent (Calley, 1955, p. 58 in Part 3). In this form of religiosity, rituals and ritualistic behaviours are critical practices, but only to the extent that they are not fully formalised and established, and do not restrict the presence of unconventional forms of sacred presence in time and space. In this regard, Charismatic experience is essential to keep routinisation in check and allow for a wide range of revelatory moments. Notably, the Bundjalung belief system (see Calley 1964, 1955) and, in fact, all Aboriginal belief systems are subjective in a Kierkegaardian sense. They are initiatory, existentially charged and responsive to the matter of experience (for example, see Dussart, 2000; Poirier, 2005). Also, the Bundjalung world is a relational universe that includes both the living and dead, kin and ancestral spirits. In this world, wellbeing is not only a personal matter, since the individual and social bodies are intertwined through a nexus of kinship. Personal and community wellbeing are inseparable and any personal engagement with the divine is also a form of collective engagement. Accordingly, there is no individualistic version of Bundjalung enlightenment or redemption. The paradox and repetition which is imbedded in “backsliding and conversion” keeps the adherents’ lived experience relevant to their faith. Pentecostalism offers a way of theodicy through the dynamics of the sinner’s path and the Lord’s way. Bundjalung Pentecostalism is a religion of constant encounter and surprise, with rises and falls in presence of Spirit being commonplace. It is little wonder, then, that immanent healing processes in Bundjalung Pentecostalism are resourced from the repetitive experience of joining a circle of faith. One may step out of the circle of faith but this won’t n ­ ecessarily cease the flow of grace. There are constantly others in the nexus of kin that keep the faith alive and the grace of healing ongoing. 6 Conclusion According to Calley, Bundjalung Pentecostalism was a platform to reconstruct a consistent belief system that would inform Bundjalung people’s future way of living. On the other hand, Ono saw Bundjalung Pentecostalism as a forum to

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reclaim Aboriginality in a contemporary era. Significantly, Calley’s and Ono’s ethnographic accounts reveal a pattern of “backsliding and conversion” among Pentecostal adherents: however, they both saw it as a failure in the belief system. The concept of paradox, as it is reflected in Calley’s and Ono’s ethnographic accounts of moving in and out of the circle of faith, has no constructive position in their interpretations of Pentecostalism. In this chapter, I have reviewed ethnographic engagements with Bundjalung Pentecostalism and questioned reducing Bundjalung Pentecostalism to “synchronistic” and “anti-cultural” movements. I have identified the common theme of faith as battlefield in Bundjalung Pentecostalism, which is manifested in spirit encounter as well as in struggle with religious commitments. Moreover, I have engaged with the lived experience and examples of “backsliding and conversion” and stressed the importance of faith as a realm of paradox. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, I have stepped away from the previously applied functional and structural mode of analysis in Calley’s and Ono’s works to the one that does not approach paradox as malfunction or anti-structure. Importantly, I have referred to the existential accounts of Søren Kierkegaard and Edith Stein on paradox and repetition and discussed their essential position to keep the faith and grace alive in the Bundjalung world. In my reading of Bundjalung Pentecostalism, paradox is the force that regenerates the faith by giving currency to lived experience. It gives credit to the faith as a battlefield, a ground of repetitive struggles that brings salvation, and healing grace to the people’s life. Acknowledgments The ethnographic data referred to in this chapter were collected during my fieldwork in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales, Australia in 2010–2011 and I am thankful to all the individuals from the area who ­contributed to my research. The research was funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Australia. I am also grateful to Dr John Morton (La Trobe University) and Professor Nicolas Peterson (Australian National University) who commented on the earlier version of the chapter and to the editorial team for their support. References Alimardanian, M. (2013). Porkhani as a Healing Drama, Analysis of a Healing Performance among Turkmen People of Iran, Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 1(1), pp. 54–73.

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Anderson, A.H. (2016). An Introduction to Pentecostalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Second Edition. Calley, M.J.C. (1964). Pentecostalism among the Bandjalang. In: M. Reay, ed., Aborigines Now. pp. 48–58. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Calley, M.J.C. (1959). Bandjalang Social Organisation. Ph.D. Thesis: University of Sydney. Calley, M.J.C. (1955). Aboriginal Pentecostalism: a study of changes in religion, North Coast, N.S.W. M.A. Thesis: University of Sydney. Dussart, F. (2000). The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal settlement: Kinship, Gender, and the Currency of Knowledge. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Eickelkamp U. (2017). Finding Spirit, Ontological monism in an Australian Aboriginal desert world today. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1), pp. 235–264. Kierkegaard, S. (2014). Fear and Trembling, Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Classics. Kierkegaard, S. (2000). The Essential Kierkegaard, (eds.) Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Magowan, F. (2003). It is God who Speaks in the Thunder: Mediating Ontologies of Faith and Fear in Aboriginal Christianity. The Journal of Religious History, 27(3), pp. 293–310. McDonald, H. (2015). Steppe Riders in the East Kimberley Contact Zone: Zoroastrianism, Apocalyptic Judeo-Christianity and Evangelical Missionaries in Australia’s Colonised Periphery. In: P. Toner, ed., Strings of connectedness, essays in honour of Ian Keen. Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 119–141. Morton, J.. (2013). Durkheim, Freud and I in Aboriginal Australia, or should Anthropology contain theology? The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 24(3), pp. 235–249. Norledge, M. (1968). Aboriginal Legends from Eastern Australia, The Richmond-Mary River Region, Sydney: Reed. Ono, A. (2012). You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How “culture” is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales. Oceania, 82, pp. 74–85. Ono, A. (2011). Who Owns the “De-Aboriginalised” Past? Ethnography meets photography: A case study of Bundjalung Pentecostalism. In: Y. Musharbash & M. Barber, ed., Ethnography & the Production of Anthropological Knowledge Essays in honour of Nicolas Peterson. Canberra: ANU EPress. pp. 51–68. Ono, A. (2007). Pentecostalism among the Bundjalung Revisited: The Rejection of Culture by Aboriginal Christians in Northern New South Wales, Australia. Ph.D. Thesis: The Australian National University. Poirier, S. (2005). A World of Relationships, Itineraries, Dreams, and Events in the Australian Western Desert. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Riches, T. (2017). (Re)imagining Identity in the Spirit: Worship and Social Engagement In Urban Aboriginal-led Pentecostal Congregations. PhD Thesis: Fuller Theological Seminary. Stein, E. (2000). Knowledge and Faith. Translated by Walter Redmond, Washington DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies. Telfer, E.J. (1941). Amongst Australian Aborigines, forty years of missionary work, the story of the United Aborigines’ Mission. Sydney: Fraser and Murphet Pty. Tomlinson, Matt (2014). Bringing Kierkegaard into anthropology: Repetition, absurdity, and curses in Fiji. American Ethnologist, 41(1), pp. 163–175.

Chapter 13

Epilogue Allan H. Anderson This interdisciplinary book on Australian pentecostalism is long overdue. Its particular strength lies in its focus on contemporary and recent developments, situating these within global movements, and in opening up the neglected field of the study of Australian charismatic churches. In his Preface, Freston provides an important reminder that the demographics of Australian pentecostalism are quite different from those of the Global South. In both its demography and social setting, Australian pentecostalism probably has more in common with pentecostalism in secular, western Europe – where it also consists of around 1% of the population. We are also reminded in this collection to be careful with the figures bandied about through quantitative surveys – census figures do not measure impact, or importance to particular subcultures. Nevertheless, pentecostals form a very small percentage of the Australian population, with an increasing proportion of its members being migrants from the Global South. In the places of origin of these migrants, pentecostalism has a much more prominent presence. This epilogue tries to draw some of the salient points of this book together by summarising and briefly interacting with its material. As noted elsewhere (Anderson 2014, 2013, 2018, and with Yang and Tong 2017), the Global South has seen a remarkable expansion of pentecostal forms of Christianity in the last century, an expansion that has altered global religious demographics considerably. In Latin America, Africa and Asia, many large urban megachurches have arisen, and much of the rapid growth in Chinese Christianity has come amongst those who have a pentecostal orientation. The internationalising trends of the Charismatic movement in the 1960s and 1970s in a globalised world began to erode the isolation of indigenous independent churches in the Global South, changes which had been brewing for decades. Rapid improvements in communications and travel brought the outside world closer to hitherto isolated communities. With new nation-states created out of former colonies came resistance to foreign cultural symbols, including western hegemony in ecclesiastical affairs. The presence in Australia of Brazilian pentecostals confirms what has been observed by studies all over the western world about these multidirectional global flows of pentecostalism and how accommodating this is to the migrant experience. Despite its relatively marginal

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status however, Australian pentecostalism punches well above its weight in terms of its global influence, as this collection clearly shows. There is an increasing need for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies on pentecostalism, and this book is a good example. The editors point out in the introduction that literature on Australian pentecostalism has been inconsistent and uneven across various different disciplines. This collection corrects some of these methodological and perspectival gaps in the literature by enabling interaction between historians and social scientists in particular. Because secular cultures tend to assume that religion has lost its relevance, scholars are often surprised by the resurgence of religion amongst contemporary migration and renewal movements. The methods and the assumptions adopted by scholars have interfered significantly with the development of literature on pentecostal and charismatic movements in Australia. Because historic migration patterns to Australia were quite different to those of the United States (for example), authors need to have a deep local understanding of the charismatic potentials imported by various movements, and how contemporary movements interact with global flows. This collection addresses these issues squarely. As in other parts of the western world, in the early twentieth century, the idea of being “pentecostal” was not a new thing for Australians. Writers in this volume point to the continuing influence of the Catholic Apostolic Church (or “Irvingite”) movement, of the missions movement, primitivism and liturgical renewal, and the extraordinary contribution that nineteenth century Australia made to the international healing movements. There were also prophetic and millennialist movements which made their way to Australia from Europe and interacted with one another in the new British colonies. Movements which were not specifically pentecostal or charismatic – such as homeopathic medicine, indigenous spiritualities, and many others, interacted with the more specifically theological and experiential elements of “orthodox” Christianity to produce local variants. Globalisation theory helps clarify the understanding of charismatic and pentecostal movements in high migration societies throughout the 19th century. Pentecostalism was a type of revitalisation movement that drew on existing charismatic potentials that, in Australia, were mixed and reconfigured differently from the trends noted elsewhere. As these chapters reveal, many early pentecostals already belonged to transnationalising movements on the margins of religious traditions that were emerging in this continent at that time. These movements continued at least until the mid-20th century. In his chapter, Hutchinson discusses many of these issues in the particular case of the Baptist charismatic leader Howard Carter. Instead of commencing his

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s­ tory with the usual public interest in Carter’s Logos Foundation, Hutchinson traces Carter’s roots back to the missions receiving and sending communities in New Zealand, combined with the increasingly open charismatic flows that began to impact upon mainstream denominations during the 1950s. The particular forms that these took depended heavily upon Carter’s personal context: being a Baptist, his very deep-rooted family connections to missions in the Pacific and to British Evangelical voluntarism, the increasing influence (after World War ii) of the Southern Baptist Convention, and his encounters with indigenous spiritualities both in New Zealand and in Haiti. Hutchinson points out that most authors, even those who study the sources, end up misinterpreting Carter and his place in the rise of the charismatic movement in the 1970s. There needs to be a much more nuanced and context-oriented account of historical materials, before conclusions are made, and this chapter does that admirably. Further evidence is provided in Elliott’s important chapter, which places Australian pentecostalism within its wider historical context. As someone who has studied and written on the history of pentecostalism, I found this most significant. Elliott demonstrates the continuing presence of pentecostal and charismatic spirituality in the Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia from 1853 onwards. This denomination emerged from the revival movement of the Church of Scotland’s Edward Irving in the early 19th century. Elliott’s wellsourced descriptions of this movement and the terminology used at the time bear remarkable similarities to pentecostal movements half a century later, and lasted at least until the end of the 19th century. While some have assumed that there was no direct connection between the Irvingite movement and the rise of so-called “classical” pentecostalism, Elliott demonstrates the contrary. The continuing practice of prophecy, tongues and healing in the cac movement in Australia, and its importance relative to Wesleyan spirituality and the healing practices of John Alexander Dowie (who himself acknowledged his indebtedness to Irvingism, and named his movement after it) all are clearly illustrated from original sources in this study. Elliott reminds us how important it is to revisit the historiography of Australian pentecostal origins, and I would add, that of pentecostalism worldwide. In particular, the 19th century cac had strong pentecostal features that facilitated the later acceptance of the practices of the much larger “classical” pentecostal movement. Indeed, in Australia there were direct diachronic links between the cac and later pentecostal movements. It may well be that these links should be explored in other parts of the world where Irvingism, Dowieism and pentecostalism interacted. Links with Dowie are well established in American pentecostal history. Many of the early American pentecostal leaders

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were in Dowie’s movement, including John G. Lake, F.F. Bosworth and William Hamner Piper, to name a few. Irish preacher and former Salvationist, early pentecostal pacifist William Booth-Clibborn, and Gerrit Polman, founder of Dutch Pentecostalism, were also involved in Dowie’s Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. This all supports my long-held contention that there were many sources for the emergence of what we now call pentecostalism, and that many of them developed from movements and ideas that went far back into the 19th century. It was not a “suddenly from Heaven” movement that started at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. There were many points of origin and many centres out of which pentecostalism developed. This has continued in the more recent history and in contemporary developments in Australia as much as elsewhere around the globe. Globalisation and networking theories certainly help us grasp this. John Maiden traces the rise of the Catholic charismatic renewal in Brisbane, and its rapid expansion to regional and global influence within the Catholic international network of charismatic communities. Queensland was a centre for the emergence of early Pentecostalism amongst South Sea Islander peoples, and in the 1970s Brisbane was the birthplace of the significant inc network of charismatic churches. Its role as a city, portal and hub connected Brisbane to transnational flows emanating from the United States and other parts of the Global North. This chapter demonstrates how the combination of local and American factors established and shaped the Catholic charismatic renewal in the city. By extension, it suggests that the expansion of the charismatic renewal out of the United States was highly dependent upon pre-existing networks and potentials – the global order that was consolidated after World War ii. Brisbane was a major hub in the Pacific campaign, and so was part of that emerging network. Bringing the interdisciplinary focus into the present, Singleton uses a more nuanced statistical analysis to demonstrate that the drivers underpinning the more visible elements in Australian charismatic Christianity – particularly the Hillsong Church network – interact heavily with general social trends, especially in the case of migration. Singleton deals with the problem of defining and counting pentecostals in Australia. He notes that public debate is skewed by the fact that census and survey counts of pentecostals are too low – partly because of the very nature of public surveys, and partly because a large segment of the pentecostal community does not identify with the term “pentecostal.” Facts and figures on the growth of any global religious movement are notoriously­difficult to determine, yet statistics on the growth of pentecostalism are often quoted by pentecostal scholars with a measure of triumphalism. The most frequently quoted ones are those of Todd Johnson and his team

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(World Christian Database 2019), who estimated that Pentecostalism had some 694 million adherents in 2019, a quarter of the world’s Christian population, which they project will rise to almost 800 million by 2025. This figure was placed at only 61 million in 1970, and this enormous increase has coincided with Europe’s secularisation zenith. The accuracy of statistics does not detract from the significant growth of pentecostalism since the 1970s, which appears to have happened in Australia too. In answering the question as to whether pentecostalism is “a strong church” or simply represents “a niche market,” reaching out to those who still seek faith in contemporary Australia, Singleton concludes that it is both. It appeals not so much to the increasingly agnostic middle class, but is the religion of choice for particular segments of a changing Australian population, including recent migrants and their children. Australia’s religious life, more than at any other time, is shaped by global religious forces, forces to which pentecostalism readily adapts. Harris’ account of the persistence of charismatic experiences such as “hearing the voice of God” provides depth and colour to Singleton’s account, unpacking some of the negotiations, legitimations and correctives required for keeping charismatic experience relevant in an otherwise highly rationalised western society. Harris uses the idea of “Pentecostal worlds” to provide the context for experiential engagement, testing and response. These pentecostal practices play an important part in both the maintenance and innovation of these “Pentecostal worlds.” The role of Christian popular music in Australian pentecostalism makes for interesting reading, especially because of the prominent role played in the global spread of Hillsong music and its influence. Thornton’s chapter thus also interacts with Singleton’s theme, demonstrating the ability of pentecostalism to capture vernacular musical expressions with relevance for the role that music plays in the settlement of migration waves in Australia. Popular music does not only appeal to the middle class, but has always been a mechanism by which new migrant cultures have found a home in the pluralising “recipient” cultures of the West. Thornton analyses twenty-five popular pieces of Christian contemporary music, through a semiotic, theo-musicological and media studies analysis. Summarising the related theologies that promote the use of pop music in contemporary expressions of worship, he notes that embodiment, experience, and encounter align well with pop music’s somatic, emotive, and metaphysical qualities. Shanahan’s chapter notes that there are similar consonances in the marketing and branding practices of Australian pentecostal megachurches, which have used elements of consumer capitalism as a mechanism for creating a branded religious experience. This has helped these churches spread around the world. Riches in her chapter, however, notes that such a

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“flattening” of ecclesial practice and experience by external scholars tends to ignore the “missional economics” of Hillsong as a movement. She approaches the topic through ethnographical research to demonstrate a more nuanced, mobile form of identity formation and theologising, albeit within a globalising market economy. She shows how Hillsong can be seen as an emergent collective that became “industrial” in scale, now broadcasting its music worldwide. Although this approach continues within the organisation, it includes a developing missional approach to other industries. In her chapter, Austin draws on her larger biographical study to construct a case study of one of the leading figures of the new form of pentecostalism that emerged in the 1970s. Andrew Evans was the long-serving General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in Australia. However, he was not only a key leader in the renewal and growth of a more charismatic form of pentecostalism (now concretely seen in the unusual prominence of pentecostal megachurches among Australian Protestantism), but he was also founder of a new political party (the Family First Party) and a politician in the South Australian parliament. These are all historically unusual achievements in Australian pentecostalism, which has tended to be small, sectarian and apolitical. Austin accredits a combination of contextual and personal factors for Evans’ unusually high public profile: an innovative theological politics, the unique political climate of South Australia, unusual interdenominational and interfaith support, and clever political manoeuvring such as sophisticated preferencing, the “family values” agenda, and significant divisions in the dominant party structures. The last three chapters of this collection all deal with case studies which further illustrate Singleton’s observations about the success of pentecostalism amongst groups in Australian society that are undergoing mobility or marginalisation. Rocha points to the large number of young Brazilians who come to Australia to involve themselves in Hillsong. She identifies both push and pull factors. Hillsong makes pentecostalism attractive to young migrants on the one hand, and more amenable to middle class sensibilities (with its focus on love and inclusion rather than on judgement and spiritual battle) on the other. Hillsong has succeeded in attracting sectors of the Brazilian pentecostal population who have felt displaced in the very conservative, money-focused, and scandal-prone local “Brazilian” pentecostalism. This form of Australian pentecostalism has become a mechanism to support aspirations and skills – such as using the English language, the pursuit of “excellence,” and other forms of bridging social capital. The success of these globally-networked Australian megachurches is therefore attributable not only to branding and slick marketing, but also to their appeal to values and aspirations profoundly rooted in the emerging culture of global cosmopolitanism.

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Openshaw in her chapter records the “flipside” of those aspirations. She notes that the one place that young Brazilians do not go in cities like Sydney is to “Brazilian” churches such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Drawing on an extraordinary immersive study of the uckg headquarters in Liverpool, New South Wales, Openshaw pens a portrait of poor, marginalised (and largely non-Brazilian) migrant groups constructing spiritual technologies around “extraordinary sacrifice” (monetary giving), so as to mobilize the sort of spiritual capital which will help them find solutions to difficult situations in their life paths. Openshaw notes how the transnational network of the uckg gives members the ability to transform their monetary offerings into increased spiritual capital to better draw God’s attention to their needs. The chapter highlights some of the complexities of the so-called “prosperity gospel” for marginalised migrant communities, and the empowerment of the poor in terms of spiritual capital. This interesting case study gives the perspective of how congregants see their monetary “sacrifices” as a holistic spiritual practice and means of empowerment. The study of indigenous Australian pentecostalism is a neglected but important field (see Riches 2018). In the final chapter, Alimardanian contributes to the gap in scholarship, by extending the scant earlier studies into a similar space of “spiritual capital.” She notes the importance of the concept of “faith as battlefield” among aboriginal Bundjalung networks in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. Counter to earlier accounts that tended to see “backsliding” as failure, Alimardanian notes that for Bundjalung pentecostals, backsliding is a paradox that regenerates the faith by giving relevance to lived experience. Faith is seen as a battlefield that brings salvation and healing grace to the backslider. Openshaw and Alimardanian thus both contribute not just very helpful case studies which expand the literature beyond the more visible megachurches on the suburban hill, but give us important clarifications of elements of “spiritual capital” which help explain Pentecostalism’s resilience in the rationalised Global North. So, these studies on Australian Pentecostalism confirm that this is a form of Christian mission with a transnational orientation based on personal enterprise, the ubiquitous voluntarism of its members, and the constant multiplication of multi-centred, variegated organisations whose primary purpose is to evangelise and spread their influence worldwide. These constant efforts to expand and proselytise are underpinned by a firm belief in the Bible as an independent source of authority, one that resonates with local customs and relates better to a spiritual and holistic worldview – and by theological convictions based on a common experience of the Spirit who empowers believers’ mission to the world. Behind all these activities and efforts, the personal conversion of

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individuals is the goal. The articles collected here demonstrate that contemporary Australian pentecostalism is the product of a long process of development with precedents going back much earlier than the 20th century. Its history was in continuity with charismatic revivalist movements like the cac. It encouraged free enterprise in a religious market. The revival movements challenged European ecclesiastical hegemony and created a multitude of new churches – a type of Christianity in local idiom that was in many ways a cultural protest movement, but was also bound to include emphases on power to overcome evil and provide manifestations of the miraculous. With its emphasis on the priesthood of all true believers, it (intentionally or unintentionally) crossed or broke down barriers of race, gender, and class, and (in its twentieth century forms) challenged the exclusive preserves of ordained male, foreign clergy. Of course, this development included multiple schisms that, while increasing division, also proliferated local leadership and encouraged religious competition. What is often not appreciated, and is illustrated in these studies, is the extent to which pentecostalism takes on distinctive forms in different contexts. One of the main reasons for the growth of pentecostalism worldwide has been its ability to adapt itself to different cultures and societies and give contextualised expressions to Christianity. Australia is no exception. These expressions include energetic and energising worship and liturgies, its music and dance, its prayer with the free use of the emotions, and its communities of concerned and committed believers. Pentecostals are becoming more socially aware and active in efforts to relieve poverty and disease. They are entering politics “for goodness sake” – the current prime minister is a pentecostal! Of all Christian expressions, pentecostalism has an ability to transpose itself into local cultures and religions effortlessly, because of its primary emphases on the experience of the Spirit and the spiritual calling of leaders who do not necessarily have to be formally educated in church dogma. In particular, the ministry of healing and the claims of the miraculous have assisted pentecostalism in its appeal to a world where supernatural events are taken for granted. Some of the features of pentecostalism that have made it attractive in Australia and to the migrant experience have been discussed in these pages. In all its globalising tendencies, Australian pentecostalism developed its own characteristics and identities without losing its transnational connections. The widespread use of mass media, the setting up of new networks, frequent conferences with international speakers that reinforce transnationalism, and the growth of churches that provide total environments for members – these are all features of this multidimensional pentecostalism. Although socio-political and historical factors undoubtedly had a role in the spread of pentecostal Christianity, religious and ideological factors were probably more significant.

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The ability of pentecostalism to adapt to and fulfil people’s religious aspirations continues to be its strength. A belief in a divine encounter and the involvement or breaking through of the sacred into the mundane, including healing from sickness, deliverance from hostile evil forces, and perhaps above all, a heady and spontaneous spirituality that refuses to separate “spiritual” from “physical” or “sacred” from “secular” are all important factors in pentecostalism’s growth. It has been able to tap into older religious traditions with one eye on the changing world of modernity. This combination of the old with the new has enabled it to attract people who relate to both these worlds. With its offer of the power of the Spirit to all regardless of education, language, race, class or gender, pentecostalism has been a movement on a mission to subvert convention. Pentecostalism in its earliest forms broke down the dichotomy between clergy and laity that was the legacy of older churches. A book of this nature can only look at some of the many aspects of Pentecostalism in the Australian continent. There are several important themes that have not been fully explored either here or in most other studies of this nature. As a scholar particularly responsible for the “multiple origins” view of global pentecostalism, I would have liked more historical content like that of Elliott’s chapter, especially tracing the 20th century developments that have made Australian pentecostalism unique. The function of megachurches as total environments, and the use of media, technologies, and networking are all areas that need further study. Research must still be done on areas that have only been hinted at: the power of free association and personal and local agency, the role and nature of the church in Australian pentecostalism, its leadership patterns, its structural and anti-structural permutations, church authority, governance, and the ways in which leadership patterns change over time. Some of this work has already been done by the authors in this volume, in other publications (see Hutchinson 2017). Pentecostals and environmental concerns, the changes affecting established institutions and structures, pentecostalism as liberation and an option for the poor, pentecostals involved in various types of social and public engagement – all these areas deserve attention. Much work has been done in the area of the migration of pentecostals from the South to the North in recent years, but this book opens up the field of migration to the southern continent of Australia and its connections to its region. The extent to which globalization and migration in the 21st century have affected pentecostalism requires a careful analysis. The shapes of the new pentecostalisms that have emerged as a result, how they differ from the older networks of denominational pentecostalism, and what the features of this global shift of centre mean for Australian pentecostalism have yet to be considered. Only when these ­investigations have taken place will we be better able to understand those

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external­forces that forge the religious identities of people in our contemporary societies and the increasingly important role of pentecostalism in this pluralistic world. There are now over four times as many Christians in Africa as there were in 1970; almost the same is true in Asia, while the Christian population of Latin America over this period has almost doubled. Of course, some of this has to do with differentials in population growth; but it remains true that much of the global growth of Christianity has occurred through conversion in the Global South, where the influence of Pentecostalism is strongest. In contrast, the Christian population of Europe during the same period has increased only by about a quarter, and that of North America by about a third. Australia fits more into the latter pattern, though like its Western comparators, is heavily influenced by events outside the West. The decrease in the percentage of world Christianity in the Global North is likely to continue. But even if statistics are wildly speculative, the fact that this movement had only a handful of adherents at the beginning of the 20th century makes its growth an astounding development in the history of Christianity. In countries like Brazil, Guatemala, Nigeria, Kenya and the Philippines, pentecostalism in all its various forms is not only a significant proportion of Christianity, but a sizeable chunk of the entire population with enormous socio-political clout. Its adherents are often on the cutting edge of the encounter with people of other faiths, albeit sometimes confrontationally so. These confrontations play out in places like Nigeria and India where other religions form majorities, and this conflict, which has already claimed many lives, is in danger of escalating. Proponents of the secularisation thesis have to reckon with the fact that the future of global Christianity is affected by this seismic change in its character. The growth of pentecostalism is an example of the effects of social differentiation, where dominant older churches no longer are seen as the binding glue of society, especially among the poorer classes. Their monopoly has been broken and consequently, these societies have become more pluralistic. As one consequence, pentecostalism has thrived. The rise of the Charismatic movement in the western world certainly made pentecostal ideas and practices more acceptable to traditional forms of Christianity. But this might also be seen as one result of the privatisation of religion beginning in the 1960s, when the established churches no longer held monopoly and authority over all things sacred. After the 1980s, the “Pentecostalisation” of older churches outside the western world accelerated as these churches adjusted to the rapid growth of new pentecostal churches in their midst. They began to adopt their methods, particularly appealing to the young and urbanised. Simultaneously, the new form of Pentecostalism exhibited a fierce independence that eschewed denominations­and

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preferred loose associations. This gave rise to the pentecostal megachurches that operate in cities like Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, and Singapore, but also in unexpected places like Kyiv, Budapest and of course, Sydney. The megachurches form networks of similar churches across the world, and these transnational associations are not only North-South, but also South-South and East-South. In most cases, these transnational churches in the North have been unable to break free from their ethnic minority character. It is neither wise nor possible to predict the future of Australian pentecostalism, but a sense of where it has been in the past century will give an inkling of where it might go in the present one. Contemporary pentecostalism is very much the result of the process of globalisation. The mass media, beginning with the use of periodicals and newsletters, followed by a ready acceptance of new technologies – first radio and then television and internet – tourism and pilgrimages to megachurches, ubiquitous voluntarism, and an international economy, combined to create conditions conducive to the spread of a globallyfriendly religion like pentecostalism. This manifested itself in many different ways. Some of the networks have begun to take on the appearance of new denominations. Some have passed to a second generation of leadership whose organisational ideas were quite different from those of the founders. Some of the new churches leave much to be desired – especially those with wealthy leaders whose questionable and exploitative practices continue to be debated in public forums. The adaptability of pentecostalism to a culture is more easily achieved in those parts of the world where a spiritual universe exists and healing and the supernatural are regarded as normal experiences. But pentecostalism also grows where a pluralistic religious environment is the norm. This makes pentecostal forms of Christianity more amenable to Australia than to Denmark or France. At the same time, the principle of social differentiation means that there will always be groups for whom pentecostalism is an attractive religious option, even in those countries where voluntarism, pluralism, and freedom of association are limited. The Christian world has become more interconnected than ever before; and increasingly pentecostals are having conversations with other Christians that are bringing them out of their self-imposed isolation. Whether this will result in more unity or more division and diversity is anyone’s guess. It is certain that the continuous change and transformation in world Christianity will continue. Social scientific theories about the growth and future of religion are often generalisations. Theological factors such as the emphasis on a personal, heart-felt experience of God through the Spirit offered to all people without preconditions, enabling them to be “powerful” and ­assertive in societies where they have been marginalised, are important in the

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study of pentecostalism. These people are offered solutions to their felt needs in all their varieties, which will continue to draw people to pentecostal churches. When one’s God is an all-encompassing, omnipotent, and personal God who enters into a personal relationship with individual believers, everything becomes a matter for potential prayer. The “born-again” experience focusing on a radical break with the past attracts young people disenchanted with the ways of their parents. Pentecostalism’s incessant evangelism, healing and deliverance, draws large crowds and its organised system of following up contacts means that more unchurched people are reached with this message and joined to pentecostal communities. Its cultural flexibility in its experiential and participatory liturgy, offering a place-to-feel-at-home, a measure of religious continuity with the past, and (at least to some observers) the appearance of an egalitarian community meeting the felt needs of ordinary people – all combine to provide an overarching explanation for the appeal of pentecostalism and the transformation of Christianity in the contemporary world. This book has explored some of these many facets of pentecostalism in Australia to great effect. References Anderson, A.H. (2018). Spirit-Filled Word: Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, A.H. (2014). An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, A.H. (2013). To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, M.P. (2017). ‘“Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion, and the Rise of Hillsong’. In: T. Riches and T. Wagner eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters. London: Palgrave, pp. 39–61. Johnson, T., et al. (2019). World Christian Database. Available at: https://worldchristian database.org/ [Accessed 4 September 2019]. Riches, T. (2018). (Re)Imagining Identity in the Spirit: Worship and Social Engagement in Urban Aboriginal-led Pentecostal Congregations. Leiden: Brill. Yang, F., Tong, J., and Anderson, A.H. (eds.) (2017). Global Chinese Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. Leiden: Brill.

Index A’Bell, Joel 187 A21, Human Trafficking 183 Abel, Charles 46 Abel, Charles William 29 Abel, Enid Adeline (Mardi) 28, 29, 30 Abel, Howard 29, 30 Abel, Robert 28, 29 Abel, William 28 Aboriginal Inland Mission 257 Aboriginal people 11, 14, 46, 260, 267 See also by Indigenous peoples, Australia; institutional name; particular people name Bundjalung 18 Daintree people 46 land rights 152 Reconciliation 154 abortion 152, 154 Acheron Reserve (Victoria) 11 Adelaide 6, 13, 37, 40, 89, 131, 150, 153, 155 See also by church name; and Evans, Andrew Lee; Evans, Ashley Adventism 5, 9, 10 See also millennialism, by church name, and White, Ellen Gould Africa vii, x, 2, 3, 4, 5, 18, 19, 32, 36, 41, 100, 132, 172, 178, 180, 221, 239, 241–42, 245, 248, 250, 274, 283 See also by country or region name Cape Verde 244 migrants from 91, 180, 244 pentecostalism 178, 180, 242, 244–45, 274 poverty 180 refugees from 4 Aghajanian, George 184, 186 All Hallows Convent (Brisbane) 78 alternative medicine 12 See also healing Americanisation 16, 41, 69, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82 See also United States of America Anderson, Allan Heaton 3 See also Epilogue, 274–285 Andrews, Mary 11 Anglicanism 35, 46, 79, 99, 100, 117, 197, 258 Anglicare 250 Anglo-Catholicism 7, 9, 43 in Australia 8, 151

charismatics in 34, 92 See also charismatic renewal. decline 96, 151 Episcopal Church (usa) 197, 198 Scotland 56 social engagement 250 See also by institution name South Australia 155 theology 34 See also theology United States 197 Ann Arbor (MI) 77, 82 See also Word of God Community anthropology 172, 173, 181, 258, 268 See also specific cases; pentecostalism research methods Bundjalung people 258 ethnography 259, 260, 261, 271 sacrifice 242 Apostolic Church of Queensland 54 See also Catholic Apostolic Church Aquinas, Thomas 269 Argaet, Jay 139 Argentina 219n, 225, 240n Armstrong, Maxwell 14 Armstrong, Norman 14 Army of the Lord 13 Asia vii, xi, xiv, 2–4, 36, 100, 179 See also by country name evangelical churches 102 missionaries in 29 pentecostalism in 274 Assemblies of God (denomination) See also by national denominational name, e.g. Australian Christian Churches in Great Britain 148 pacifism 148, 149 in the United States 197, 198 World Congress (1994) 151 World Executive 151 Assemblies of God in Australia 10, 11, 17, 39, 41, 75, 82, 93, 95, 126, 131, 148–50, 159, 279 See also particular church name; Australian Christian Churches Bible College 149

288 Assemblies of God in Australia (cont.) and Indigenous peoples 266 doctrine 154 ecclesiology 155 General Superintendent 161 growth 151 leadership 151 politics 162 Queensland 161 Associated Mission Churches 34 Association of Communities 79 Atkinson, Michael 157 Audemard, Philip Leon 69, 74, 75 Australia, passim 9, 26, 27, 44, 53, 96, 98, 136, 162, 163, 243, 259, 262 See also by placename, church or movement name; institutional name Aboriginal peoples 2, 46, 152, 257–58, 268 Brazilians in ix, 240, 274, 280 Census 90, 91, 93–96, 99, 103 charismatic trends in 4 Clarence River 259 colonisation 2, 257 frontier 3, 6, 15 Great Southland myth x, 8, 9 historiography 28 labour market 241 Liverpool (nsw) 236, 240 media 1, 8 megachurches 186, 278, 284 See also by church name migration viii, 3, 5, 17, 27, 54, 58, 71, 99, 100, 101, 103, 237–41, 243, 246, 250, 252, 275–78 music Industry 174 New Zealanders in 43 Northern Rivers 257, 259 pentecostalism in vii, 2, 33, 274, 275, 281–84 pluralization 278 politics 1, 2, 41 See also by state, region regional affiliations 91, 95, 97 religious right 159 See also party name; politics revivalism 5 secularism/-ization 1, 25, 27, 102, 103, 245, 252

Index suburbanization 94, 126–29, 136, 172, 174, 182, 201 Sudanese in 246 See also Sudan; specific church name Sydney 172, 198, 217, 232, 233, 280 Townsville 40 Welfare State 40, 250, 252 See also by agency world religions in 96, 100 Australian Broadcasting Corporation 162, 163 See also media Australian Christian Churches (acc) 91, 95, 96, 266 See also Assemblies of God in Australia; specific church name Australian Christian Lobby 26 Australian Conservative Party 163, 164 Australian Democrats (political party) 152, 157–159, 162, 163 Australian Family Association 159 Australian Fellowship of Covenant Communities 45 Australian Greens (political party) 152, 157, 159, 162 Australian Labor Party 157, 162, 163 in South Australia 152, 157 Australian Pentecostal Ministers’ Fellowship (apmf) 151 Australian Recording Industry Association 112 aria charts 112 See also Australia - Music Industry Azusa Street Revival 3, 4, 14, 53, 93 See also Revivalism Baby Boom 31 See also demographics by placename, institution name Boomers 103 Balfour, David 35 Ballina, nsw 258 Banks, John 33 Baptism in the Spirit 54, 56, 57, 72–74, 77, 81, 88, 91, 92 See also theology; experientialism Baptist Churches 28, 31, 32, 275, 276 See also Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, and by church name

Index Americanisation 41 Baptist Union of New Zealand 31, 42 Bundjalung people 261 charismatic renewal in 42, 92 missionaries 29, 32, 257 New Zealand 31, 38, 39, 43 Queensland 41 Spreydon (NZ) 39 Valley Road Baptist (NZ) 29, 31, 32 Bardon, Queensland 71, 73, 78, 81 Baré, Michael 36 Barton, Dennis 35 Basham, Donald Wilson 37 Baxter, William John Ernest (Ern) 75 Belgium, ccr in 83 Bennett, Dennis 34, 38 Bentham, Jeremy 55 Berger, Peter Ludwig 198, 205 social construction of knowledge 206, 207, 210 Bernardi, Cory 163, 164 Bethel Temple (Seattle) 33–34 missionaries 33 Bible 7, 8, 14, 202 Acts 177, 188, 194 and worship music 114 authority 196 digital 134 in Catholic Church 71 in song lyrics 118–121, 141, 204, 207 healing in 15 See also healing interpretation 9, 10, 14, 16, 33, 46, 56, 70, 75, 119, 120, 121, 182, 186, 188, 194–96, 198, 201, 202–207, 225, 229–30, 236, 244, 246, 248, 251, 261, 262, 265, 266 prophecy 196 study of 202 Bloomfield, Ray 34, 46 Boddy, Alexander Alfred 4 Booth-Clibborn, William Emmanuel 277 Boston (usa), churches in 244 Bosworth, Fred Francis 277 Bourke, Richard, Church Acts 15 Brasa Church (Brazil) 219 Brazil viii, 18 Belem 221 Catholic Church in 221 corruption 223, 244

289 demographics 221, 222–24 family culture 228 globalization 240 megachurches 223, 225, 229–32, 2 36, 237, 245, 251, 252, 284 See also church name migration 18, 240, 274, 280 modernization 243 pentecostalism 100, 220–24, 229–32, 237, 240, 274, 279, 283 politics 244 popular culture 221 Rio de Janeiro 240, 284 São Paulo 220, 221, 237, 240, 248, 252 students abroad 218–20 See also by placename, church name Brethren (movement) 6, 35, 39, 46, 97 missionaries 29, 31, 32, 33 See also Darby, John Nelson Brisbane, Queensland 82, 83 Floods (2011), church fundraising 182 Brisbane Christian Fellowship (bcf) 34 Britain 13, 32 Tory Party 185 healing movements in 13 British Empire 10, 69 British Israel teaching 10 Brokenshire, Robert 163, 164 Broughton, William Grant 7 Buckingham, Jamie 36 Budapest, megachurches 284 Bundjalung people 46, 257, 258ff, 269 See also Indigenous peoples. activism 263 Box Ridge settlement 267 cosmology 265, 268 Country 262–63 identity 260, 270, 271 kinship systems 258 languages 257 pentecostalism among 257, 258, 259, 260, 262, 267, 270 spiritual warfare 265 spirituality 258, 268, 269, 280 traditional beliefs & Law 261–63, 265, 269, 270 worship 265, 266 Bundock, Arthur 258

290 Calley, Malcolm John Chalmers 258–63, 267–71 Calvary Chapel (usa) 93, 109 Calvary Temple, Queensland 40 Cameron, Terence (Terry) 152 Canada 6, 33, 34, 45 See also Latter Rain Revival; Revivalism, and by city and region name Toronto 32 Vancouver 32 Canterbury Baptist Association 31 capitalism 17, 245 See also economics Protestantism 230 Carberry, Lydia Starr 13, 14 Cardale, John Bate 56, 58 Carey College (NZ) 38 Carlyle, Thomas 55, 58 Carter, Claud Thomas John 28, 30 Carter, Howard Julian 16, 25–48, 275 Carter, John 42 Cartledge, David Frederick 40, 41, 70 Casino (nsw) 258 Catholic Apostolic Church 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 53, 54–59, 61, 62, 64, 275, 276, 281 Apostles 62 Bradford (UK) 61, 65 Carlton (Vic) 60, 63 Gordon Square (UK) 61 Catholic Charismatic Renewal (ccr) vii, 3, 17, 41, 43, 69, 70–72, 74, 78, 80, 81, 283 Philippines 41 Bardon 73, 74 Brisbane 70, 77, 78, 82, 277 Canberra 81 ecumenism 74, 75 Europe 83 globalization 277 in the usa 70 media 78, 80, 81 prayer 69 Service Committee 74, 76, 77–79, 81 worship 74 Catholic Church 92, 99, 100, 151 in Brazil 221 Brisbane 71 Bundjalung people 261 charismatization vii, 3, 41, 283 church attendance 97

Index conversion to 268 demographics 89, 96 ecclesiology 76 ecumenism 75 festivals 71 growth 94 Humanae Vitae 71 institutions 71 Jesuit Order 69 Latin Mass 71 lay spirituality 71, 72, 75 Liturgy 75 modernization 93 Northern Rivers 258 Philippines 100 politics 156 poverty 180 religious orders 71–73 Second Vatican Council 27, 71 school system 71, 95 social teaching 180 South Australia 155; See (and see under institutional names, Indigenous peoples; Bundjalung people, Catholic Charismatic Renewal, ccr; Vatican II) Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Communities and Fellowships 83 Cavnar, Jim 77 cessationism 55, 56, 176 See also theology Chalcedon Foundation 45 See also Rushdoony, Rousas John Chalmers, Thomas 55 Chandler, Trevor Maurice 37, 75 Chant, Barry 53ff Chapman, Vickie 158 Charismatic Contact (journal) 70 Charismatic Ministers Fellowship, Brisbane 75 charismatic movement(s) 3, 16, 32–33, 34–46, 48, 151, 173, 174, 185, 262, 265, 274, 276 See also by region, country, movement and institution name Baptist 275 Catholic vii, 17 See also ccr ecclesiology 76 ecumenism 70, 75

Index experientialism 270 and gender 56, 70 growth 93, 126, 197, 283 historiography 82 identity 92 India 81 Indonesia 48 Japan 81 laying on of hands 74 media 70 See also media miracles 32, 33, 42, 59, 64, 88, 92, 94, 105, 114, 178, 179, 199, 201, 222, 232, 247, 249, 268, 181 missions 29 Oceania 27 origins 281 Papua New Guinea 81 politics 279 prayer 73 primitivism 70 See also primitivism other categories Singing in the Spirit 74 spiritual gifts 55, 57, 59, 61, 76, 204, 267 unity 69, 70, 75, 76 voluntarism 70 worship 17, 69, 74, 109 Cheah, Judah 133 China 2, 11, 32, 82 Christianity 274, 32 missions to 11, 29, 31 China Inland Mission 32 Cho, David Yonggi See also Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul, South Korea blessing theology 150 politics 151 Christadelphians 97 Christchurch (NZ) 35 Revival 36 Christian Advance Ministries (NZ) 34 Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion 13 see also Dowie, John Alexander Christian City Churches (C3) 3, 16, 35, 126–29, 136 aesthetics 131 branding 134, 138, 139 Brazilians in 240

291 conferences 139, 140 digital media 133, 134 growth of 130 material culture 137 Noosa (nsw) 130 Christian Congregation (Brazil) 221 see also Francescon, Luigi Christian Convenanters 12 Christian Copyright Licensing International (ccli) 110, 111, 122 Christian Democratic Party (nsw) 153, 162 Christian Faith Centre (Sydney) 29, 34, 36–38, 41, 44, 45, 47, 75 Christian Life Centre, Darlinghurst 40 Christian Outreach Centre (Mansfield, Q) 76 Christian Outreach Centres (Queensland) 16 See also International Network of Churches Christian Revival Crusades (crc) 16 Christianity 6, 9, 12, 14, 29, 30, 37, 40, 55, 70, 80, 139, 153, 185, 223, 226, 259–61 See also missionary movement denomination, personal and church name China 274 conservatism 163, 164 evangelicalism 27, 53, 64, 163, 182, 196 See also Protestantism experientialism 2, 5, 18, 33, 37, 70, 88, 113, 114, 117, 119, 126, 195, 196, 198, 226 global south 221, 283 See also by country, religious movement liberalism 28, 35 pietism 26, 40, 45 primitivism 6–8, 14, 16, 34, 70, 173, 194 prosperity doctrine 17, 173, 174, 177, 219, 221–25, 237–40, 242, 246, 280 See also by church or movement name; theology politics 150 See also by movement name renewal mvovements 14, 174 See also charismatic movements Reformed Revival 27 Church of the Foursquare Gospel 91

292 Churches of Christ charismatics in 92 Northern Rivers 258 Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer 30 Clark, Steve 78 Coady, Ron 34 Coleman, Geoffrey 44 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 55 Collins, Bunty 36 Collins, Paul 34–37, 44, 45 and missions 43 Commonwealth Bible College, Brisbane 149 Communities - see Intentional Communities Compassion Australia 183 Congregationalism 28 Conner, Kevin 34, 36 Contemporary Congregational Music (ccm) 109, 111, 116, 141, 204, 207 See also media; Hillsong Church; pentecostalism commercialization 109, 111, 116, 141 research methods 110 spread 109 vernacular 115, 116 worship wars 110 Contemporary Congregational Song (ccs) 110, 111, 114, 117, 175, 265, 278, 281 aesthetics 112–16, 119 gender 111 genre 112, 113 lyrics 112, 114–16, 118, 121 Cook, Mick 258 Coombe, John Henry 54 Copas, Patrick 81 Coppin, Ezra 33 Coraki, nsw 258, 261, 269 Cornwall, Judson 36, 38 Court, Margaret 151 Covenant Communities. See intentional communities Covernant Evangelical Church 44 Crabb, Anna 162 Crouch, Stephen 187 Cruz, Nicky 36 Cursillo Movement, usa 71–2, 77, 82 Damien, Peter 73 Darby, John Nelson 10 Day, Robert (Bob) 163

Index Dayton, Donald W. 3, 4 de Queirós, Pedro Fernandes 8, 9 Denmark, pentecostalism 284 Destiny Churches (New Zealand) 46 Dickens, Charles 28 Dijk, Hillie 44 Dominionism 45, 117, 221 Dowie, John Alexander 3, 7, 13, 53, 54, 63, 64, 276 Drinkwater, Ian 34, 39 drugs, recreational 154 Du Plessis, David 34, 38 Duhig, James 71 Duncan, Philip 10 Duquesne University (usa), ccr in 70 Durkeim, Emile 2 ecclesiology 18, 45, 54–55, 57, 150, 187, 195, 205, 282 See also by movement or church name, pentecostalism, theology apostolic 56, 59, 60, 62 gender 58, 219 economics; 281, 282, 284 missional economics 179, 180, 186, 226, 252, 278, 280 See also by movement and church name marketplace 185 neo-liberalism 178, 181, 186, 188, 230, 239, 242, 243, 251, 278 religion 172, 185 remittances 245 Edmonds, David 35 Edmondson, Al 33 Egypt, pentecostalism in 236, 248 Emmanuel Covenant Community (Brisbane) 82, 69, 74, 79, 81 eschatology 5, 7, 16, 55, 56, 60, 135, 172, 181 See also theology Europe 284 See also by country name pentecostalism in 274, 294 secularization 278, 283 euthanasia 154, 156, 158 Evangelicals/-ism See Protestantism Evans, Andrew Lee 17, 40, 131, 148–58, 161, 163, 164, 279 influence 164

Index leadership 153 Order of Australia 159 in Papua New Guinea 149 politics 158, 160 Evans, Ashley 131, 153, 156, 161 Evans, Jane 131 Evans, Lorraine 155–57 Evans, Mark 133 Evans, Russell 131, 132, 133 Evans, Samantha 131, 132, 133, 134 Evans, Thomas Lever 150 exorcism 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225 See also by movement, church name, theology Faith Bible College (Tauranga) 34 Family First Party ix, 148, 152–59, 161–63, 279 See also Evans, Andrew Lee federal politics 161, 163 social ethics 154 Ferguson, Dwight 41 Festival of Light (South Australia) 159 Fielding, Steve 161, 162 Fiji, migration 240, 242 Flannagan, Andy 150 Fletcher, Graham 44 Fletcher, Patricia 44 Fort Lauderdale Five 37 Fountain Trust (UK) 34, 81 Foursquare Gospel Church 102 France 284 See also Hillsong Church Paris 172, 284 pentecostalism in 284 Francescon, Luigi 221 Francis of Assisi 73 Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (fgbmfi) 75, 78 fundamentalism 177 See also by church, movement and personal name; Protestantism Gandhi, Mohandas 149 Garden City Church, Queensland 40 Garrett, David & Dale 109 Garrett, Frank 33 Gerry, Frank 72 Gibson, Sally 159, 160 Gibson, Sarah 133

293 Gichuhi, Lucy Muringo 163 Glad Tidings Tabernacle (Brisbane) 75 Glennon, Alfred James (Jim) 7, 8, 43 global north viii, 118, 251, 252, 259, 274 See also by country, place, movement and institutional name anglophone viii Baby Boomers 99, 103, 176n Christianity 221, 283 class vii consumerism/-zation 109, 120, 126, 128, 129, 135, 137, 138, 177, 220, 227, 230, 260 Generation X 99, 103, 176n Generation Y 99, 176n materialism 179 megachurches 251, 274 migration 2, 241, 243, 245, 282 Millennials 99, 176n missionaries from 102 pentecostalism 94, 100, 181, 197, 274, 283 See also pentecostalism pluralization 284 popular music 110, 111 See also Music, Contemporary Congregational Music postmodernism 121 poverty 179, 245 religion 102 secularization 102, 172, 227, 275, 278, 282, 283 social change in 93 globalisation x, 16, 17, 27, 71, 82, 83, 98, 126–29, 133, 135, 140, 141, 142, 143, 159, 172, 174, 176, 180, 181, 189, 198, 221, 222, 225, 237, 241, 246, 247, 251, 260, 274, 277, 279, 284 financial flows 250 megachurches 132 migration 218, 219, 241, 250, 251 pentecostalism 240, 284 See also pentecostalism poverty 178, 180, 241 of space 250, 251 Glock, Charles Y., experiential scale 195, 199, 200, 202, 205, 208 glossolalia 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 71, 72, 73, 81, 88, 91, 92, 197 See also charismatic movement(s), spiritual gifts

294 Godwin, William 55 Gomez, Selena 120 Good New Hall 13, 16, 53 Good Samaritan Convent (Japan) 81 Graham, William Franklin (Billy) 33, 77 New Zealand campaigns 31 Greek Orthodox Church (South Australia) 155 Green Bay Mission (New Zealand) 29 Grubb, George Darlington Wilson 13 Guatemala. See pentecostalism Guinness, Henry Grattan 9, 10 Haiti 42, 46, 276 Hanna, Henry Piers 35 Hansen, Andrew 171 Harper, Michael 34, 81 Harris, Leo Cecil 37 Harris, Peter 161 Harrison, John 25, 26 Hart, Roland 30, 31 Hawkins, Gerald (Columban) 73 healing 2, 3, 5, 54, 57, 64, 88, 92, 94, 197, 201, 209, 221, 239, 258, 261, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271, 275, 281, 282, 285 See also Hickson, James Moore; Lake, John Graham Brazil 222 Bundjalung people 265 divine 7, 54 See by name failure 205 healing movements 6, 7, 11, 12, 36 indigenous 18 See also by people name Hepworth, John 157 Hetherington, Isabella 14 Hickson, James Moore 3, 7, 11, 13 Hills Christian Life Centre See Hillsong Church) Hillsong Church ix, 3, 16, 89, 91, 94, 116, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 141, 151, 174, 180, 187, 188, 219 “✝ = ♥” campaign 139, 231 aesthetics 217, 219, 220 asceticism 228, 229, 233 Beneath the Waters 119 branding 136, 138, 139, 176, 186 Brazilian students at 18, 223–33, 240, 279 Business Connect 184, 187

Index CityCare 182 communications 139 See also media conferences 139, 140, 173, 186, 229, 230 Cornerstone 117, 118 demographics 223 Desert Song 117, 141 finances 171, 183, 184, 189 For All you’ve Done 119 globalization 172, 176, 185, 189, 220, 225, 278 God of All Creation 141 growth 172 Hillsong College 18, 174, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233 Foundation 183 Hosanna 119 liturgy 182, 217 See also worship London 126 material culture 137, 173, 174, 176, 184, 185, 187, 218, 219, 220, 226, 231, 232 media 134, 139, 176, 183 migration 218, 223, 232, 278, 279 missional economics 181, 189, 278 Oceans 117, 119, 120, 141 One Thing (Your Love Never Fails) 117 orality 182 politics 158 preaching 217, 232 prosperity 224, 225, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 188 sacramentality 185 Sao Paulo, Brazil 220, 221, 229, 230 seeker friendly 219, 222 Shout to the Lord 141 Sisterhood 183 social engagement 182, 183, 188 Spheres 186, 189 spirituality 184, 185, 187 See also asceticisim The Stand 117 Touch the Sky 141 United 173, 228, 231 voluntarism 219, 226, 227, 230 worship culture 136, 141, 172, 173, 176, 217–18, 278 youth culture 138, 218, 219 Hobbs, Vincent 72

Index Holiness Movement 5 Holloway, Paul 158 Holy Land 236, 248 See also pentecostalism, Israel. Holy Spirit Teaching Mission 44 Homosexuality, same sex marriage 152, 154 Honders, Bernard 35 Hood, Dennis 163, 164 Hope, John 7 Horizon Church (Sydney) 1, 185n Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia Survey (hilda) 90, 92, 96, 102, 103 Houston, Brian Charles 129, 151, 162, 181, 182, 185, 186 See also Hillsong Church, Australian Christian Churches preaching 224 Houston, Joel 116 Houston, Roberta Lee (Bobbie) 129, 181 Houston, William Francis (Frank) 34, 39 Howard, John 153 and Hillsong Church 152, 158 Human Trafficking, campaigns against 183 Hunt, Ian 34 Hunt, Noel 32 Husserl, Edmund 268, 269 Igreja no Cinema (Brazil) 219 India 31, 81, 149, 164, 283 Australian missionaries in 149 British Army 149 Indigenous peoples 2, 260 See also Aboriginal people; Bundjalung people; Māori, by movement name, and category, eg. pentecostalism Aborigines Protection Act (1909) (1940) 257 assimilation policy 258 Australia 14, 27, 46, 257 colonialism 257, 259, 260 East Kimberley, WA 262 ecumenism 260, 261 encounter with Christianity 257 existentialism 270 globalization x indigenization 271 Indonesia, missionaries 33 land rights 152, 161

295 New Zealand 12 See also Māori pathologies 263, 266, 267 pentecostalism ix, 11, 18, 259, 267, 268, 280 space 262 spirituality 257, 265 traditional culture 259 Indonesia 36, 48, 81, 132, 172 Influencers Church (formerly Paradise Assemblies of God) 40, 89, 126, 127, 129, 131, 136, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158, 159 See also Evans, Andrew Lee; Evans, Ashley Atlanta, GA 133 branding 131, 138, 139 conferences 139 material culture 137 Intentional Communities 78 See also by community name, e.g. Emmanuel Covenant Community, Word of God Community, etc. Ann Arbor (MI) 77, 78, 79, 80, 83 authority in 80 Bethel (Perth) 82 Brisbane 69, 74 Disciples of Jesus (Sydney) 82 ecumenism 77, 79 Emmanuel (Brisbane) 79 Hepzibah 82 People of Praise, South Bend (IN) 78, 79, 83 True House (IN) 78, 79 International Brotherhood of Communities (iboc) 83 International Conference on the Charismatic Renewal (1975) 82 International Network of Churches (inc) 3 Ireland - Revival in 14 Irving, Edward 3, 54–58, 60, 63, 64, 276 See also Catholic Apostolic Church Irvingites See Catholic Apostolic Church. Islam 2 Australia 155 relations with pentecostal churches 48 Israel 248 Italy 5 ccr in 83 migration 221

296 Jackson, Dale 33 Jackson, David 33, 36, 45 Jackson, Ray 33 See also Latter Rain Revival Japan 149 Good Samaritan Convent (Japan) 81 Jesus Culture, One Thing Remains 119, 120 Jesus March, Wellington (NZ) 41 Jesus People usa 93, 109 Jobe, Kari, Revelation Song 119 Johnston, Howard Whitfield 32 Kenya 100, 283 Kerin, Robert Gerard 157 Keswick Movement 4, 13, 33, 35, 43 Kierkegaard, Søren 268, 269, 270, 271 Kim Young-sam 151 Klimionok, Reginald (Reg) 40 Knight, John 41 Korean War 149 Kwato Mission (png) 29, 46 Kyiv (Kiev). See also Hillsong Church megachurches 284 Lagos, megachurches 284 LaHaye, Tim, Left Behind series 135 Lake, John Graham 277 Lamb, William 10 Lancaster, Sarah Jane 11, 15, 16, 53, 54 Langstaff, Alan 34 See also Charismatic Movement, Australia Latin America vii, ix, 2, 4, 100, 179 See also country name, e.g. Brazil Argentina 225, 283 Guatemala 283 material culture 179 pentecostalism in 274 See also pentecostalism Protestantization 220 Latter Rain Revival 16, 33, 34, 35, 74 Lausanne Movement 188 prosperity theology 178, 179 Lewis, John 161 Liberal Party of Australia 158, 159, 163, 164, 185 South Australia 152 Life FM (radio station) 153 See also media

Index Linder, Robert D. 5 Lismore (nsw) 258, 263 Liverpool, churches in 240, 280 Lo’Vanberyl, John 6 Logos Foundation 16, 25, 26, 27, 32, 35–38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 70, 276 Logos Magazine (NZ) 34, 39 New Zealand 34 Logos Magazine (usa) 70 London (UK) 58, 126 See Britain Lovelock, Peter John 12 Lusted, James 185 Lutheran Churches 155, 268 charismatics in 92 Lyttle, Graham 44 Macedo, Edir 240, 244 Maclean (nsw) 258 Madden, Claire 184, 188 Maddox, Marion 25, 27 Mahoney, Ralph 36 Malachuck, Dan 36 Malaysia 36, 132 Planetshakers Church 140 Manurewa Baptist Church 39 Māori people 27, 33, 34, 46 See also New Zealand, indigenous peoples prophetic movements 12 Markus, Louise 185 Mars Hill Bible Church, celebrity 226 See also megachurches Marshall, Joseph 64 See also Methodism “Sounders” 53 See Methodism Marshall, Thomas (Tom) 42 Martin, Ralph 77, 78, 79 Mason, Andrea 161 Massey University (NZ) 35 Mauss, Marcel 2 Mays, John 187 McAlpine, Campbell 32, 33, 35 McDonald, Cameron 184, 188 McIntyre, Simon 35, 43 McPherson, Aimee Semple 11, 194 media 44, 46, 77, 78, 80, 111, 120, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 152, 155, 156, 159, 178, 189, 221, 224, 231, 232, 250, 274, 282, 284 branding 226, 232 digital 134, 137, 142, 143, 154, 218, 226

Index film and TV 135, 136, 141, 176, 230, 240 Media Studies Analysis 111 pentecostalism 133, 148 See also pentecostalism Radio 31, 153 streaming 112, 113, 133, 134, 247 social media 133, 134, 135, 135, 142, 229, 237 Youtube 112, 113 Medicine - see healing megachurches ix, 3, 48, 89, 94, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 153, 178, 188, 189, 220, 225, 226, 232, 274, 282, 284 See also by name, e.g. Hillsong Church, Influencers Church, Planetshakers Church Adelaide 150 aesthetics 140, 278 Argentina 225 Australia 127, 128, 132, 134, 137, 141, 173, 187, 277 See also by church name branding 130, 132, 134–37, 140–43, 174, 186, 188, 226, 233, 279 Brazil 225 See also by name; Hillsong Church concerts 137 conferences 134, 135, 137, 138 corruption 284 criticism 171, 279 demography 284 finances 137, 138 globalization 176, 284 material culture 135, 136, 138, 142, 223, 226, 227 modernization 130 multisite 132 networks 284 New Paradigm 222–223, 233 politics 151, 156 See also see theology, prosperity theology voluntarism 280, 226, 233, 284 Melbourne, pentecostalism in 61 Melbourne Bible Institute 32 Melbourne Christian Fellowship 34 Melbourne College of Divinity 38 Melbourne, pentecostalism in 16, 61, 89, 132 See also Planetshakers (vic)

297 Melvin, Kenneth H. (radio personality) 31 Men for Missions 41 mental health, pentecostalism 208, 241 See also see healing. Meston, Adrian 44 Methodism 4–6, 8, 13, 14, 43, 64, 92, 276 See also by Church name and pentecostalism 53 missions 257 Queensland 12 New Zealand 35 Primitive 7 Youth 30 Mount Eden Free Methodist Church 29, 30, 31, 32 Micklem, Philip Arthur 7 Midgely, Bob 39 migration viii, 3, 240, 243 Africa ix, x Asia 4 Australia 2, 5, 17, 26, 58, 63 British 7, 13, 28 diasporas 2 German 54, 61 Irish 71 Italian 71 New Zealand 27 pasifika ix, 4 and pentecostalism 17, 18 See also by movement name, church name transatlantic 3, 5 usa 15 Millennialism 35, 242, 275 pre-millenialism 45, 55 Millikan, David 25 missionary movement 14, 29, 36, 41, 42, 46, 47, 81, 82, 102, 149, 275 See also charismatic movement; global south Asia 36, 41, 82, 149 China 31, 43, 82 Deck family 32 economics 278, 280 Egypt 32 Haiti 46 India 43, 149 New Zealand 276 Oceania 29

298 missionary movement (cont.) poverty 178 reverse mission 102 Solomon Islands 32 modernism/-ity 40, 127, 128, 173, 189, 243, 282, 283 Moran, Patrick Francis 9 Mormonism 6, 97, 102, 155 Morrison, Scott John 1 Morrow, Peter 33, 34, 35, 44 Mt Gravatt Assembly of God (qld) 75 See also Hillsong Church, Brisbane Mudie’s Lending Library 28 Muir, Ena Mary (Molly) 32 Muir, James (Jim) 32 Muir, Jean Eleanor 32 Muir, John Stanley (Jack), missionary 31 Muller, Ray 34, 35 Mumford, Bernard C. (Bob) 37, 44 Music 110, 114, 230, 281 See also under genres, eg. Contemporary Congregational Music, theomusicology popular 17, 115, 117, 121, 175, 222, 278 sacramental 175 vernacular 115, 121 worship 17, 30, 136, 174, 265 Nash, Charles H. 32 National Church Life Survey 88, 90, 109 National Party of Australia 157 naturopathy 12 Netherlands, The 172 pentecostalism in 277 New Covenant Magazine 77, 78, 81, 82 New Life Churches (NZ) 33, 34, 39 New South Wales. See by placename New Wine Magazine 37 New Zealand 12, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 39, 46, 100, 109, 276 See also by personal name, place name Auckland 28, 29 Awapuni 39 Blockhouse Bay 29 Christchurch 34 Reporoa 38 New Zealand Bible Training Institute (nzbti) 29, 31, 32, 32, 38 Newsham, Paul, Christian Radio 153, 156 Nickson, J. H. 54

Index Nigeria 101 megachurches 283, 284 Nile, Frederick 153, 162 Nitschke, Philip 156 No Pokies Party (SA) 157 Northern Rivers (nsw), churches in 257 O’Connor, Edward Dennis 72 O’Farrell, Patrick James 5 Oceania 32, 36, 69, 100, 102, 240–42, 276, 277 See also by country name, Pacific One Nation Party (Australia) 157 Ono, Akiko 258–63, 267–71 Open Air Campaigners 32 Order of St Luke 36 See healing Oriental Missionary Society 41 Ortiz, Juan Carlos 37, 75 Oxford Movement 7 Oxley, Hal 37 Pacific 27, 36, 46, 69, 100, 240 See also Oceania, by country name Fiji 242 Missionaries in 276 Solomon Islands 32 pentecostalism 240 Papua New Guinea 29, 81, 102, 149, 164 Paradise Assembly of God Paradise Community Church. See Influencers Church Parkes, Henry 15 Passion of the Christ (film) 136 Pentecostal Churches of New Zealand (denomination) 33 pentecostalism vii, viii, 4, 38, 63, 72, 82, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 110, 112, 121, 131, 149, 151, 153, 159, 173, 174, 178, 181, 185, 196–98, 203, 205, 221, 249, 251, 259, 266, 267, 275, 279, 282–285 aesthetics 116, 117, 121, 131, 137, 189, 200, 217, 219, 220, 230, 269, 278 affectivity 189, 197, 200, 218, 278, 284, 285 Africa ix, 178, 180 Apostolic Revolution 39 asceticism 220, 221, 222, 228, 229, 230, 238, 239, 240 Australia 64, 274, 275, 278, 281, 282, 284 See also by church name, denomination name, region

Index authority 207, 208, 209, 239, 282 Azusa Street 3, 4, 14, 53, 93 See also Revivalism Baptism in the Spirit 32, 33, 40, 54, 56, 57, 72–74, 77, 81, 88, 91, 92 branding 126, 127, 128, 129, 176, 221, 222 in Brazil ix, 224, 229, 230 See also by church name, Brazil celebrity culture 218, 220, 231 class ix, 1, 222 See also demographics consumerization 137, 138, 178 corruption 219, 223, 224 criticism 171, 173, 177, 188 definition 53, 54, 56, 64, 92 deliverance 42, 285 demographics x, 17, 39, 88, 90, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 201, 202, 203, 206, 219, 225, 233, 237, 238, 239, 242, 278, 281, 282 demonology 88, 224, 225, 239, 248, 282 diversity viii, 89 ecclesiology 150, 194, 199 economics 177, 178, 281, 282 embodiment 109, 113, 195, 227, 238, 239, 248, 251 empowerment vii, 282 evangelism 43, 201, 285 experientialism 115, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 218, 219, 222, 251, 263, 271, 278, 281, 282, 284, 285 finances 223, 245, 245, 249, 250 gender vii, 1, 219, 222, 229, 230, 281, 282 global south 94, 181, 197, 283 globalization 198, 220, 240, 248, 250, 251, 252, 274, 275, 277, 281, 281, 284, 279 growth vii, 17, 89, 93, 94, 99, 126, 151, 172, 221, 278, 283 Guatemala 283 historiography 3, 4, 53, 148, 276, 282 hypermobility 250 identity 92, 95, 96, 143 indigenization 42, 259, 260, 261, 262, 267, 270, 279, 280, 281, 284, 285 indigenous peoples ix, 3, 11, 260, 267, 280 initial evidence 54, 64 institutionalisation 197, 204, 269, 270 liturgy 202, 206, 207, 217 See also worship

299 material culture 127–29, 134, 136, 137, 172, 177, 178, 180, 181, 222, 239, 247, 248 media 44, 46, 58, 59, 127, 128, 131, 134, 142, 148, 171, 173, 176, 240, 244, 247 mental health 205, 208, 241 migration 89, 99–103, 232, 237–41, 246, 274, 278, 281, 282 miracles 42, 94, 178, 194, 199, 249, 268, 281 missional economies 179, 180, 186, 226, 280 New Zealand viii, 39 pacifism 148 personal revelations 194, 195, 199, 205–210, 265 politics ix, 3, 18, 25, 97, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 161, 164, 185, 219, 244, 279, 281 popular culture 221, 222, 109, 117, 159 poverty 179, 222, 224, 282 prayer 199, 200, 249 preaching 195, 202, 203, 232 primitivism 173, 194, 198, 209, 275 progressive 179, 189 prophecy 2, 194, 195, 198 prosperity theology 117, 126, 130, 131, 173, 223 psychology vii, viii research methods 88, 89, 90, 91, 127, 128, 148, 164, 173, 174, 194, 195, 198, 199, 202, 220, 236, 242, 260, 261, 271, 274, 275, 277, 279, 282 scholarly bias vii, 2, 25, 47, 148, 173, 275 semiotics 139, 181, 206, 247, 248, 262, 278 Singing in the Spirit 74 social engagement 179, 188, 209, 222, 281, 282 social ethics 149, 219, 222 spirituality 172, 173, 177, 178, 180, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206, 209, 210, 219, 224, 236, 238, 239, 249, 282 testimony 207, 245, 249 theology 115, 195 training 200, 201, 202, 204, 209, 217 See also by College or institution name voluntarism 109, 219, 220, 284, 282 worship 97, 110, 112, 117, 201, 221

300 pentecostalism (cont.) See also music, Contemporary Congregational Music; healing; by region and country name. Perth (WA) 82 Peru 101 Peyton, Patrick 71 Philippines 36, 41, 100, 132, 250, 283 Piety, Dick 258 Piggin, F. Stuart 5 Piper, William Hamner 277 Planetshakers Church (vic) 89, 126, 127, 129, 132, 135 aesthetics 132 branding 132, 133, 138, 139 conferences 135, 139 finances 134 Malaysia 140 material culture 137 media 133, 134 prosperity theology 132 worship music 131, 132 pluralization 218, 219 politics ix, 18, 25, 27, 148, 161 See also political parties by name, Evans, Andrew Lee conservatism 1, 25, 26, 153, 159, 161 indigenous representation 161 Korea 2 Queensland 25, 26 South Australia 152, 155 Polman, Gerrit Roelof 277 Pontifical Council for the Laity 83 Poole, John 37 popular culture 218 Brazil 221, 222 music 159, 278 See also music, media. Portland (vic) 64 Powell, Ivor 31 Praise and Worship music See Contemporary Congregational Music Pratney, William (Winkie) 37, 75 Presbyterian Churches 43, 55 Northern Rivers 258 Church of Scotland 56, 276 Prince, Peter Derek Vaughan 37, 45 Pringle, Christine 130 Pringle, Philip Andrew (Phil) 35, 130, 131, 140

Index prophecy 5, 39, 43, 46, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 79, 81, 114, 178, 185, 194, 196–204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 219, 245, 275 ecclesial effects 18, 195, 196 interpretation 195, 205, 206 prophetic movements 6, 8, 9, 16, 14, 18 See also by movement name prosperity theology 17, 126, 140, 150, 173, 174, 177, 219, 223, 224, 225, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 246, 280 See also theology Brazil 221, 222 Hillsong Church 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 188 Protestantism 89, 97, 99, 100 See also under denominational or movement names anti-catholicism 9 capitalism 180, 230, 245, 278 charismatization 283 ecumenism 75 evangelicalism 182, 196, 220, 226 experientialism 226 globalization 222 indigenization 221, 275 material culture 226 Nonconformism 29 social engagement 227 Spirit of Capitalism 180 voluntarism 182 Quakers 5 Queensland 9, 12, 25, 26 Bardon 69, 70–74, 60, 82, 83 migration 61 Mt Gravatt 73, 75, 80 Toowoomba 26, 40, 44 Ranaghan, Kevin & Dorothy 72, 75–79 Rann, Michael 157 Ratana, Tahupotiki Wiremu 12, 46 Rau, John 157 Read, Ralph 149 Reconstructionism 26, 35, 38, 45, 47 Redman, Matt 116 10,000 Reasons 117–19 Blessed be Your Name 117 The Heart of Worship 118 refugees, Australia 182–83 See also migration

Index Reichel, Alex 43, 72, 73 Renascer em Cristo Church (Brazil) 219 Renner Bank (Brazil) 244 research methods See also pentecostalism - research methods Media Studies Analysis; 111 theomusicology 111 Restorationism 34, 35 Revival Fellowship (Christchurch) 35 Revivalism 32, 33, 37, 93, 198 See also Latter Rain Revival Azusa Street Revival 3, 4, 14, 53, 93 Bundjalung people 270 Canada 16 Christchurch 35, 36 conversion 271 Elcho Island 46 Ireland 14 megachurches 140 See also megachurches New Zealand 30, 31 Northern Rivers (nsw) 260 primitivism 275 Scotland 56 Second Great Awakening 13 Youth revival (usa) 93 Youth Revivals 109 Ridley, Peter 183, 184, 187 Right To Life (South Australia) 159 Rio de Janeiro, churches in 240, 284 Riverview Church (WA) 89 Roberts, Granville Oral 41 Robertson, Marion Gordon (Pat) 38 Robertson, Murray 39 Roe, Jillian Isobel 27 Rolls, Charles J 31, 32 Rowland, Gerald 75 Rudd, Kevin 163 Rush, Francis Roberts 76, 78 Rushdoony, Rousas John 45, 47 SA First Party, South Australia 152 Safe Schools Program 26 Salvation Army 6, 12, 13 same sex marriage 154, 164 Samoa, migration 241 Sanford, Agnes 7 Sao Paulo 237

301 churches in 240, 248, 252 Hillsong Church 229, 230 megachurches 220, 221 Scotland 13, 54, 55, 56, 227 Scriptures. See Bible Sebastian, Guy Theodore 159 secularization 227, 283, 283 See also global north, and by country name Seoul (South Korea), megachurches 284 Seraphim of Apollonias 155 Sexual Health and Relationships Education (share) Program 159, 160 Shakarian, Demos 38 Shaw, Colin 36 Shepherding Movement 16, 37, 38, 45 Shine SA (Sexual Health Information Networking and Education South Australia) 159 Simpson, Charles 37 Singapore 32, 82, 132, 146, 284 megachurches 284 Smith, Brian 70, 72, 73, 78, 79, 81 Social capital 40, 48, 226 spiritual capital 237, 238, 239, 246, 249, 251, 252, 280 Sociology of Knowledge 198 See also Berger, Peter Ludwig South Africa 172, 239, 245 South Australia, Adelaide 131, 150, 152, 153 Australian Labor Party 152 Climate Change legislation 159 employment law 152 Family Law Act 158 Heads of Churches 155 House of Assembly 152 Legislative Council 152, 157, 158 South Australia, nuclear waste 159 politics 148, 152, 157, 163, 279 religion 158, 155 schools 159 South Bend (IN) 78, 82 South Korea, ix 2 megachurches 150, 151, 284 politics ix Seoul 284 Southern Baptist Convention 41, 276 speaking in tongues - see glossolalia

302 spiritual capital 237, 238, 239, 243, 245, 246, 249, 251, 252, 280 Spreydon Baptist Church (NZ) 39 Spurgeon, Charlles Haddon 28 St. Mary Magdalene Church, Bardon 17, 69, 72, 73, 78, 81 St. Michael’s College, Sydney 43, 72 Stace, Arthur, Eternity 139 Stark, Rodney, experiential scale 195, 199, 200, 202, 205, 208 Stein, Edith 268, 269, 271 suburbanization, Australia 136, 174, 181, 182, 201 megachurches 153 migration 241, 246, 250 Sudan, war trauma 241 Suenens, Leo Jozef 83 Sumrall, Ken 38 Sunday School Movement 30 Sydney (nsw) 129, 136 See also Hillsong Church, by church or institutiional name, by placename churches in 198, 217, 218, 284 migration 232, 233 pentecostalism 10, 185n, 198, 199, 218, 280 Synan, Harold Vinson 53 Syria, Refugee Crisis 182 Tamaki, Brian Raymond, Destiny Churches 46 Tasmania 10, 162 Taylor, Clyde 11 technology, globalization 250, 284 See also media Teen Challenge 75, 183 Temple Trust (Australia) 34 Teresa of Avila 73 terrorist attacks, 9/11 155 Bali bombings (2002) 158 Thailand 36 theology 262 angelology 264, 265 anointing 172, 174 authority 194, 210 cessationism 176, 196 continuationism 196 cosmology 262 creation 140 creation 262

Index Dispensationalism 10 eschatology 5, 7, 16, 55, 56, 60, 135, 172, 181 demonology 239, 257, 262, 263, 267, 282, 285 divine love 222, 224 ecclesiology 187, 197, 282, 260 epistemology 269 existentialism 268, 269, 270, 271 faith 242, 268, 269 family ideology 153 Holy Spirit 149, 150, 171, 195, 199, 202, 203, 217, 222, 225, 268, 270, 270, 280, 284 immanence 141, 149, 150, 197, 261 Kingdom Now 117, 149 leadership 219, 227, 282 miracles 32, 33, 42, 59, 64, 88, 92, 94, 105, 114, 178, 179, 199, 201, 222, 232, 247, 249, 268, 181 modernism 149 of God 195, 285 of work 180 ontology 259 prosperity 140, 219, 225, 280, 150, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 188 revelation 199 sacramental 176, 180, 185 sacrifice 242, 245, 249 sin 268 theodicy 188, 258, 270 triumphalism 150 theomusicology 111 Thompson, Muri 32, 46 Tomlin, Chris 116 Amazing Grace 117, 119 How Great is Our God 118 Our God 118, 119, 120 Toowoomba (qld), Churches in 26 Tory Party (UK), and religion 185 Tractarian Movement 6 transnationalism viii, 2, 77, 126, 128 See also globalization Turnbull, Antonia 156 Tweed Heads (nsw), pentecostal churches 266 Ukraine 172 See also Hillsong Church Kyiv (Kiev) 284

Index United Aborigines Mission (uam) 257 United Kingdom, cultural influence 81 See also Britain United States 5, 32, 46, 70, 78, 197 Atlanta, GA 131–133 Boston, MA 244 California 36, 172 Catholic Charismatic Renewal (ccr) in 43, 70, 77, 78 cultural influence 69, 75–81 See also Americanisation Florida 244 Kansas 53 materialism 177 megachurches 226, 248 See also by name migration 15, 221, 248, 275 missionaries from 41 See also Jackson, Ray; Southern Baptist Convention pentecostalism in 3, 53, 221, 93, 277 religion and culture 6, 148, 151, 153, 153 South Bend (IN) 70, 72 Texas 42, 132 Vineyard Churches 208 Uniting Church in Australia, Bundjalung people 261 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (uckg) ix, 18, 225, 236–256 asceticism 241–48 Australia 236, 237, 239, 240–48 Brazil 224 Campaign of Mt Sinai 236, 237, 245–48, 251, 252 corruption 244, 245 criticism 244–45 demographics 240, 241, 245, 250 “double work” 238, 239 finances 245, 249, 250 foundation 240 globalization 237, 240, 247–51, 252, 280 Ireland 236 material culture 239, 246–48 migration 250, 280 Mozambique 245 poverty 240, 243, 244, 245, 250, 280 prosperity theology 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 246, 248, 249, 280 sacrifice 245, 249

303 South Africa 245 spiritual capital 237, 238, 246, 251 spiritual warfare 242, 243, 244 spirituality 236, 237, 240, 241, 242, 245, 246, 249 Temple of Solomon 237, 240, 248, 252 United States 244, 248 volunteerism 246 University of Edinburgh 55 University of Notre Dame (usa) 72, 77 conferences 78, 79, 82 ccr at 77 See also by personal and institutional name University of Sydney 43 St Michael’s College 43, 72 Vanuatu 46 Vatican ii (Church Council) 27, 71, 74, 93 Veggie Tales (TV show) 136 Victoria, Melbourne 58 See also by church, personal and institutional name Portland 53, 61, 64 Western District 11 Vietnam, War 71 Vincent de Paul 73 Vineyard Churches 93 United States 208 Waldner, Nettie 32 Wallis, Arthur 35 Warren, Rick 135 Watchtower Society (see Jehovah’s Witnesses) 261 Waters, Roger 45 Watson, Beth 44 Weber, Max 17, 180–82, 230 Wentworth, William 8 Wesley, John 7 The Use of Money (sermon) 182 Wheeler, Robert Bertram (Rob) 33, 39, 46 White, Ellen Gould 9 Whitestone, Percy 59 Whitlam, Edward Gough 35 Whittaker, George 10 Wigglesworth, Smith 10 Wilkinson, Alfred 7, 58, 59 Williams, John Rodman 75

304 Wood, James William 12 Woodfield, Owen 35 Woodhouse, Francis Valentine 61 Word of Faith movement 177 Word of God Community (Ann Arbor) 17, 70, 77–82 World Church of the Power of God (Brazil) 224 World Vision (ngo) 180 World War i 30 World War ii 30, 93, 149, 276 air raids; 149 Pacific 277 Worship See also Contemporary Congregational Song; Music; and ‘liturgy’ under relevant subheadings

Index Wright, Ken 34 Xenophon, Nicholas (Nick) 152, 153, 157, 158 Yamba (nsw) 258 Yoido Full Gospel Assembly (South Korea) 151 Young family 32 Young, David 36 Zoroastrianism 262, 268 Zschech, Darlene 116 Zwartz, Morag 25