This new translation took several years to refine through multiple revisions, re-readings, and new re-translate where needed in order to produce an interlinear with priority advantages and distinctive features as follows:
The pastors who kept looking back imagined a culture governed by Christian values and refused to see the world for what it was increasingly becoming.
Over the last decade, Christian America died.
As much as some Supreme Court decisions in the early 2020s made religious conservatives think they were winning the culture wars, any sense of victory was short-lived.
The overwhelming identification of Generation Z and Generation Alpha as having no religious affiliation transformed America into a thoroughly post-Christian culture.
All of this put Christian church leaders into one of two camps: Leaders who wanted to move forward and leaders who wanted to look back.
The pastors who kept looking back imagined a culture governed by Christian values and refused to see the world for what it was increasingly becoming. Churches led by those leaders saw a decline.
And the culture wars of the early to mid-2020s that conservative Christians believed they were winning by ensuring their candidates ran for Congress and Governor positions proved only to momentarily shore up a dying worldview. Power and coercion couldn’t reverse the tide.
In the process, that faction in the church alienated the next generation of unreached people from Christianity even more deeply.
The leaders who looked forward acknowledged they were in a post-Christian culture and decided to advance a decidedly alt-Kingdom centered around the Gospel. They saw renewal and growth.
Bottom line? The leaders who kept looking back never moved forward.
In the last decade, dying churches saw digital church as an obstacle. Growing churches realized it was an opportunity.
As little as 15 years ago, most growing churches were primarily physical organizations with a nominal or underdeveloped digital strategy.
Throughout the 2020s and early 2030s, the dual trend of declining church attendance and decentralized attendance changed everything for growing churches.
Growing churches stopped treating church online as an afterthought, realizing that since everyone they’re trying to reach is online, becoming a digital-first church made them more effective.
The paradox, of course, is that the more leaders built community online as a church, the more it resulted in growth in their physical locations.
Ironically, churches that focus primarily on physical attendance only saw declining attendance. Churches that focused on digital connection saw the opposite.
Over the last decade, dying churches saw digital church as an obstacle. Growing churches realized it was an opportunity.
Dying churches confined ministry to their buildings. Growing churches didn’t.
As the digital revolution exploded over the last ten years, almost everything shifted out of central locations.
Everything from work, to shopping, to food, fitness, and entertainment shifted to digital and distributed access (i.e., accessed by people when they wanted and where they wanted.)
Dying churches confined ministry to their buildings. Growing churches didn’t.
Pastors of expanding ministries long ago made peace with the idea that the number of people not in the building on Sunday now greatly outnumbers the number of people who are inside the building.
They got over their insecurity about smaller in-person crowds and saw the expansive potential of reaching people wherever they were and connecting them with each other.
Pastors of growing churches long ago realized that full rooms never guaranteed a fulfilled mission.
Another shift happened regarding how church leaders think about church buildings:
Pastors of dying churches kept using church online to get people into the building.
Pastors of growing churches used their buildings to reach people online.
On-demand sermon access reaches people when they’re ready, not when you’re ready.
Live events still have a great role in the life of a vibrant church, but they’ve long since been eclipsed by people who access content and schedule gatherings on demand.
Leaders who released control of a centralized calendar to allow people to figure out for themselves when they wanted to meet saw a far greater impact than leaders who didn’t.
And when centralized gatherings happen, leaders of growing churches quickly got over the fact that, despite a full room, far more people accessed their ministry at other times. And as a result, their mission kept growing.
Pastors of growing ministries quickly understood two underlying realities behind on-demand access.
First, they knew that on-demand access reaches people when they’re ready, not when you’re ready.
Second, when it comes to accessing messages and ministry content, they realized people don’t care if a message is new nearly as much as they care if a message is great. Hence, access to their message archive continued to grow, and they positioned it for that.
In the 2020s, churches that gathered people kept falling behind, while churches that connected people continued to grow.
In the 2020s, churches that gathered people kept falling behind, while churches that connected people continued to grow.
The shift wasn’t that hard once the pastors of effective churches realized that for years, the culture had increasingly relied on services that leveraged existing infrastructure.
For example, what small groups accomplished for churches in the 1990s and 2000s changed how churches approached gathering people mid-week. Essentially, a decade before Airbnb and ride-share services like Uber and Lyft emerged on the scene, innovative church leaders stopped building massive Christian education buildings and started ‘Airbnbing’ people’s homes for community.
The home-based small group model morphed into micro-gatherings and home-based gatherings for worship and other church events.
Leaders of growing churches never felt threatened by the fact that they couldn’t ‘see’ the people they were ministering to. They built the structures and systems that led to the church being ‘one’ wherever it met, much like multi-site churches have done for decades.
Connecting people eclipsed gathering people for the same reasons that on-demand content eclipsed live content. You gather people when they’re ready, not when you’re ready.
Insecure leaders, operating out of power and control and needing to ‘see’ the results of their ministry, could never make this transition. Healthy leaders did.
Growing churches made community and connection the goal of their ministry, not content consumption.
Growing churches made community and connection the goal of their ministry, not content consumption.
In a world that started drowning in content in the 2010s, adept church leaders realized that great content was no longer the compelling advantage it used to be. Sure, bad preaching could kill a church. But great preaching alone no longer guaranteed its growth.
Here’s what astute leaders realized in the 2020s. Scarcity drives value. The more scarce something is, the more value it has.
When something is scarce, it has enough value to make people change their patterns (physical, financial, or time patterns, to name a few). Conversely, mass availability drives down prices and perceived value.
For centuries, attending a local church was the only place most people could access a sermon. The 21st century changed that forever.
What became increasingly scarce were community and connection. So among growing churches, all of their content drove people to community and toward connection.
Growing churches made community and connection the goal, not content consumption. Declining churches continued to make in-person and online content consumption their main goal (Watch this!!! Don’t miss this!!!) and paid the accompanying price.
Make the goal of all staffing (digital or in-person) community and connection.
Because, after all, that’s far more at the heart of what the Christian church is all about than content consumption ever was.
A final but important point.
Dying churches kept staffing for a world that no longer existed. Obsessed with getting people into a building, they continued to make digital ministry an afterthought.
Growing churches didn’t abandon physical gatherings. They continued to make their in-person services deeply personal and meaningful and staffed accordingly.
But they also doubled down on digital, realizing that everyone they wanted to reach was online and that many they would reach wouldn’t live near a campus or, if they did, would be willing to drive to one.
So pastors of growing churches followed Craig Groeschel’s advice back in 2020: They went 100% in on digital ministry and 100% in on physical ministry.
Then they went a step further: They made the goal of all staffing (digital or in-person) community and connection.
Because, after all, that’s far more at the heart of what the Christian church is all about than content consumption ever was.
Change, Critics, and Coaches
The leaders we criticize today will be the leaders who coach us tomorrow.
Snap back to today. Will all of this happen? Who knows. But if even parts of this are remotely true, it’s clear that the next decade will involve massive change.
Change also comes with a lot of criticism. But as the wiser leaders realized, the leaders we criticize today will be the leaders who coach us tomorrow.
The sooner you start to change, the brighter the future becomes, and the more effective your ministry will be. Change is hard, but irrelevance is even harder.
CAREY NIEUWHOF
Brill’s Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism (BEGP) provides a comprehensive overview of worldwide Pentecostalism from a range of disciplinary perspectives. It offers analysis at the level of specific countries and regions, historical figures, movements and organizations, and particular topics and themes. The online version of the Encyclopedia is already available
For some of you it has been a long time ago that you submitted your article(s) for BEGP, for others it was a bit more recent, but I am very happy to announce that this Summer the print edition of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Global Pentecostalism will finally see the light. With this we can proudly close this chapter and proceed to see what the reception of the volume will bring! Thank you for being part of this great project!
To celebrate, we will organize an online symposium on September 16th, with presentations from the editors as well as 3 experts who will comment on BEGP: Amos Yong, Birgit Meyer and Néstor Medina. You can find more detailed information in the attached flyer. Please be welcome.
Registration is free (but necessary to receive a link); we will raffle one free copy of the print edition among the registered participants. For registration and questions, please send your message to begp@brill.com, mentioning Symposium in the subject line.
We hope to see you then!
1. What is meant by the term “full gospel” in Pentecostal Theology?What is meant by the term “full gospel”? Anyone know the answer? I don’t and that is why I’m asking! Michael Moore [09/13/2015 6:26…
What is a “full gospel” ? John Kissinger [03/31/2015 3:47 PM] W. Faupel defined Full Gospel within the doctrinal themes of: 1) justification by…
Pentecostal Detective Five-fold Gospel 1. Jesus the Savior 2. Jesus the Sanctifier 3. Jesus the Spirit-Baptizer 4. Jesus the Healer 5. Jesus the Soon-coming…
Do Pentecostals and Evangelicals Preach the Real Gospel? It seems like a lot of ‘evangelism’ these days is full of phrases and practices that…
The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought by D.W. Faupel follows the following outline: 1. The Pentecostal Message:…
March 1, 2023
There is a good reason we signed off our final 2022 newsletter with our slogan of 30+ years: “Revival must go on,” after our Revival Harvest Campaign was extended five times over a four-month period last year.
Revival runs deep in our family roots. During the Great Bulgarian Pentecostal Revival in the 1920s, my grandmother was miraculously healed on her death bed from tuberculosis, saved and filled with the Spirit along with our whole family five generations back.
Exactly 70 years (one generation) later, I was saved in the post-Communist Revival in Bulgaria prophesied by Danish journalist Johny Noer, who openly challenged the communist authorities with the words: “Let my people go!” I was filled with the Spirit and called to the Ministry within two weeks time. Having never seen anything like this before, without any prior theological training or spiritual experience, I witnessed over 300 students getting saved in the little mountain church where I began preaching.
In 1995, I saw another revival among the Bulgarian immigrants in Chicago, where within one short summer of organizing the Bulgarian Church there, some 100+ were saved and 64 of them became members of the Church of God where we held meetings.
I was blessed to preach multiple revival meetings again through the summer of 1999 in South Carolina and then again in the early 2017 in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas and across Europe in the fall of that same year. But all this did not happen until after the 2011 Tennessee tornadoes, when we saw the cloud of His glory over a youth camp we held in the mountains of Bulgaria in a grass-roots student revival that just could not be stopped by the establishment. It was then that we distinctly heard from the Spirit to move to our current location and wait for The Revival. And even after we gave a word at the Regional Church of God exactly nine months before the massive school revival of Delbarton, West Virginia broke out there in 2016, it just didn’t feel this was it.
A little bit over ten long years have now passed in this location of daily prayers for revival and if all the fasting through years was to be added, it will probably amount to a good fifth of that whole time. If we have learned one thing through this long period of fervent waiting, it is that revival cannot be faked. Oh, you can try of course, but you ain’t fooling God with it. Neither can you fake healing – and this word in particular should not be taken lightly in the new reality of our post-covid world.
And if the Spirit is indeed doing a new thing in our day today, it will not be tongues, gifts or offices, but a return to Biblical holiness. For holiness cannot be faked. It is transparent before both men and God. And just because people do not like the political church run by a corporate business-model any longer, it does not make them a mission field. But it does call for a harvest that no one has gathered yet! And for this reason, REVIVAL MUST GO ON…
2022: Revival Harvest Campaign
2021: Revelation Revival at Cookson Creek
2018 Revival Harvest Campaign: REBUILDING the WALLS
2017 Prophetic Revival in Bulgaria: The Search for Holiness Continues
2016 School Youth Revival Takes Over Delbarton, West Virginia
2016 110 Years ago, the Azusa Street Revival Began with a Fast
2016 The FORGOTTEN ROOTS OF THE AZUSA STREET REVIVAL
2015 Why Revival Came? by Dr. Charles Conn
2015 La France District Revival
2014 25 Year Revival Cycles in Bulgaria’s Protestant History
2014 Revival Harvest Campaign 2014 in Varna and Signing of the Scrolls
2013 End of Days Revival Series
2012 12.12.12. Revival at the End of the World
2012 Revival Harvest Campaign 2012: Revival Must Go On…
2011 WAR ON THE SAINTS: Revival Dawn and the Baptism of the Spirit
2011 Historic Pentecostal Revival Tour in Bulgaria Continues
2009 Revival Begins in Chicago
2008 Revival Bulgaria 2 Film Released
2007 Revelation Revival Continues
2007 Revival in Bulgaria Again
2006 Mission Maranatha in Revival
2006 Healing in the Midst of Revival
2005 Revival in Bulgaria Again
2004 Revival Harvest Campaign Results
2004 Is There Revival in Bulgaria?
2003 Postcommunist Protestant Revival in Bulgaria
2000 Celebrating 10 Years in the Ministry
2018 Revival Harvest Campaign: REBUILDING the WALLS
2017 Prophetic Revival in Bulgaria: The Search for Holiness Continues
2016 School Youth Revival Takes Over Delbarton, West Virginia
2016 110 Years ago, the Azusa Street Revival Began with a Fast
2016 The FORGOTTEN ROOTS OF THE AZUSA STREET REVIVAL
2015 Why Revival Came? by Dr. Charles Conn
2015 La France District Revival
2014 25 Year Revival Cycles in Bulgaria’s Protestant History
2014 Revival Harvest Campaign 2014 in Varna and Signing of the Scrolls
2013 End of Days Revival Series
2012 12.12.12. Revival at the End of the World
2012 Revival Harvest Campaign 2012: Revival Must Go On…
2011 WAR ON THE SAINTS: Revival Dawn and the Baptism of the Spirit
2011 Historic Pentecostal Revival Tour in Bulgaria Continues
2009 Revival Begins in Chicago
2008 Revival Bulgaria 2 Film Released
2007 Revelation Revival Continues
2007 Revival in Bulgaria Again
2006 Mission Maranatha in Revival
2006 Healing in the Midst of Revival
2005 Revival in Bulgaria Again
2004 Revival Harvest Campaign Results
2004 Is There Revival in Bulgaria?
2003 Postcommunist Protestant Revival in Bulgaria
Bulgaria’s early Pentecostals insisted on a spiritual fullness that included: (1) salvation, (2) water baptism and (3) baptism with the Spirit.[1] As a formula of spiritual experience, it satisfied the witness of blood, water and Spirit (1 Jn. 5:8) on earth; but also corresponded with the triune God in heaven (1 Jn. 5:7), from whom the believer’s spiritual experience originated. Many conservative Pentecostals in Bulgaria today still uphold “the fullness” teaching and would not use Bibles that exclude Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7) for these three “bear record in heaven.”[2]
However, even with the already present Trinitarian experience of the believer and the enormous theological Methodist influence, it is astounding that the doctrine of sanctification was not taught as a separate work of grace among Bulgarian Protestants. Even when after Pentecostalism spread in Bulgaria, it was not included in the tri-fold formula for “spiritual fullness” of the believer. During the persecution of the Communist Regime, speaking in tongues during Communion was done as a spiritual confirmation that the person has “fullness in the Spirit” or is not a government agent sent by the police to spy on the rest of the church. Interpretation often followed to confirm the spiritual stand of the believer. Early Bulgarian Pentecostals did not distinguish between the initial evidence and the gift of speaking in tongues. Even communist propaganda author Boncho Assenov, who categorized Pentecostals as a sectarian cult, defined this fullness as fundamental for the sacramental theology of the early charismatic communities in Bulgaria.[3]
[1] Mollov, 209.
[2] Zarev, 28.
[3] Boncho Asenov, Religiite i sektite v Bŭlgariia (Sofia: Partizdat, 1968), 167, 367.
See also:
The Practice of Corporate Holiness within the Communion Service of Bulgarian Pentecostals
Sanctification and Personal Holiness among Early Bulgarian Pentecostals
Water Baptism among early Bulgarian Pentecostals
First Pentecostal Missionaries to Bulgaria (1920)
Since the beginning of the 21st century, only 6-10% of new born believers in America receive the Baptism with the Holy Spirit, which by 2018 has resulted in:
For this reason, WE are re-committing ourselves and ministry to revival and restoration of the Pentecostal Message through praying, fasting and preaching:
Please consider the URGENCY of this generation!
Let us reason together what can we do to prevent this rapid decline in Biblical spirituality.
Revival will not come without preaching!
Revival of Pentecost will not come without preaching the Message of Pentecost.
February 10, 2023 by Cup&Cross
Filed under Featured, News, Publication
Since the beginning of the 21st century, only 6-10% of new born believers in America receive the Baptism with the Holy Spirit, which by 2018 has resulted in:
For this reason, WE are re-committing ourselves and ministry to revival and restoration of the Pentecostal Message through praying, fasting and preaching:
Please consider the URGENCY of this generation!
Let us reason together what can we do to prevent this rapid decline in Biblical spirituality.
Revival will not come without preaching!
Revival of Pentecost will not come without preaching the Message of Pentecost.
Speaking in Tongues in America Prior to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906
April, 1906 – The Azusa street revival swept the globe starting with California
January 1, 1901– The initial phenomenon of speaking in tongues occurred at Parham’s school in Topeka, Kansas
January 6, 1900 – Frank Sanford’s Shiloh school reported that “The gift of tongues has descended”
1896 – Over 100 people baptized in the Shaerer schoolhouse revival conducted by the Christian Union in the North Carolina mountains
1887 – People falling in trances and speaking in tongues were reported at Maria Etter’s revival meetings in Indiana
1874 – Speaking in tongues occurred during healing meetings reported in New York
1873 – William H. Doughty and the Gift People of Rhode Island spoke in tongues
1854 – V. P. Simmons and Robert Boyd reported tongue speaking during Moody’s meetings
FURTHER READING:
Church of God (Cleveland, TN)
Azusa Street Revival of 1906
Prior to Azusa Street Revival of 1906
