Free Republic

Despite an increase in the overall number of atheists worldwide, new research reveals that the population of religious people is growing at a faster pace than that of their secular counterparts. Lifeway Research has identified “7 Encouraging Trends of Global Christianity in 2022” based on data collected by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at the Massachusetts-based Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Specifically, the data titled the 2022 Status of Global Christianity report, demonstrates that “religious faith is growing faster than the irreligious.” The 2022 Status of Global Christianity report includes statistics about Christianity from 1900, 1970, 2000 and mid-2022...

A new Barna poll points to a dramatic drop in biblical beliefs among American Pentecostals and Charismatics. If the findings are accurate, what are the likely causes?According to the poll, “although we proclaim ‘In God We Trust’ on our currency, a slim 51% majority of Americans believe in a biblical view of God – down from 73% thirty years ago. Increasingly, the research finds mounting evidence that Americans are both redefining – and rejecting – God.“Stunningly, Americans are more confident about the existence of Satan than they are of God. Overall, 56% contend that Satan is an influential spiritual being,...

Pentecostals began in the early 1900's.  They sprung out of the Baptist and Methodist denominations. There are many splinter groups that refer to themselves as Pentecostals, but lack the criteria to be truly Pentecostal.  Even as with other denominations there are some basic key points that must be held to in order to be considered Pentecostal.  These basic tenets are referred to as the Pentecostal Pillars. First, all true Pentecostals hold to the Fundamentals of the Christian Faith.  This means that they affirm the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, The Deity of Christ, the Authority of the Scriptures, the Trinity,...

The Charismatic-Pentecostal movement finds itself at a critical juncture. On the one hand, our movement is arguably responsible for the greatest ingathering souls in Church history, with well over 500 million new converts in the last 50 years. On the other hand, abuses abound in our midst, from sexual scandals to financial impropriety and from unaccountable prophecies to doctrinal deviances. It is high time that we do some self-policing. Better that we judge ourselves than be judged by the Lord (see 1 Peter 4:17; 1 Corinthians 11:31-32). I recently signed up to receive emails from a well-known "prophet," curious to...

A former Pentecostal Church in rural North Carolina was turned into an Islamic center on Saturday where an Episcopal priest and pastors from other denominations took part in a joint service to dedicate the facility. The Raleigh News & Observer reported Friday that while the Islamic Center of Smithfield is not the first to exist in Johnston County, it's currently the only one in the area after another mosque was closed. The new Islamic Center is now housed is what once was the Pentecostals of Smithfield church building. On Saturday, local Christian leaders took part in a joint service at...

Pope Francis has invited thousands of Catholic charismatics and members of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches to Rome to celebrate Pentecost and mark the 50th anniversary of what became the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The pope will lead a prayer vigil June 3, the eve of Pentecost, at Rome's Circus Maximus, an open field that was the site of an ancient Roman stadium used for chariot races. Participants will join the pope the next morning for Pentecost Mass in St. Peter's Square. In 2014, Pope Francis had invited charismatics and Pentecostals to Rome in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the...

Pentecostals Come Home to Rome — Eastern Rome, That Is. Through studying the Church Fathers, an Arizona pastor leads part of his congregation into Catholicism. TUCSON, Ariz. — The phrase “Swimming the Tiber” has been used to describe Protestants coming into the Catholic Church. But a group of Pentecostals in Arizona are coming “home to Rome” through Constantinople, leaving their Assembly of God church for the Byzantine Catholic Church.

RONALD REAGAN was intensely interested in the fate of individuals in trouble. He wanted to do everything in his power to help them. His harsh judgment of the Soviet leaders was based, more than any other single factor, not on the ideology he talked about so much, but on his perception of the way they treated their own people. When I first met him in November I981, I had just come from several months in Moscow in charge of our embassy and was on my way to Prague as U.S. ambassador. My family and I were invited to join the...

Increasingly the word that came to Peter Vashchenko's mind early in the 1960s was Doroga-- "the road." He must find a road out of the atheistic Soviet Union... Years before, Peter's father, Paul Vashchenko, was converted to Christianity during World War I. Back in Russia, he told others about his faith. When he married and had children, he passed his belief on to them. Peter married Augustina, a non-Christian. They moved to Chernogorsk in Siberia. While visiting Peter's family, Augustina read the Bible. It became her favorite book. She was impressed with her in-laws' loving home. What a contrast it...

A controversial Christian evangelical leader whose endorsement is being proudly trumpeted by Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz works energetically to convert Jews to Christianity and has predicted that there will be a new period of concentration camps for Jews before the return of Jesus. Mike Bickle is also notorious for having said that God sent Hitler to hunt Jews for not accepting Jesus as the messiah. Bickle, the founder and director of the International House of Prayer, a Kansas City-based Pentecostal Christian missions organization, runs the Israel Mandate project, an effort to “mobilize an international prayer movement that would pray...

As Christians mark Pentecost Sunday on May 24, various Assemblies of God district leaders responded to questions posed by PE News Editor John W. Kennedy. Those participating in the discussion are Tom Jacobs, superintendent of the Iowa Ministry Network; Stephen Tourville, superintendent of the PennDel Ministry Network; and James Braddy, superintendent of the Northern California and Nevada Assemblies of God. PE NEWS: How old and where were you when you received the baptism in the Holy Spirit? TOM JACOBS: I received the baptism in the Holy Spirit on my 14th birthday during a small Sunday evening youth service. Our...

(Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images) Tens of millions of Latin Americans have left the Roman Catholic Church in recent decades and embraced Pentecostal Christianity, according to a new Pew Research Center survey on religion in 18 Latin American countries and Puerto Rico. Indeed, nearly one-in-five Latin Americans now describe themselves as Protestant, and across the countries surveyed majorities of them self-identify as Pentecostal or belong to a Pentecostal denomination. Pentecostals share many beliefs with other evangelical Protestants, but they put more emphasis on the “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” such as speaking in tongues, faith healing and prophesying.With...

In Latin America, they're pulling millions of faithful away from the Catholic Church. But the pope has only words of friendship for them. This is his way of doing ecumenism, unveiled here in two of his video messages by Sandro Magister ROME, November 19, 2014 - With the mastery for which it is known all over the world, the Washington-based Pew Research Center has conducted a survey on a massive scale that gives substance to a fact that was already known in general terms, the startling decline of Catholic membership in the Latin American subcontinent:> Religion in Latin America. Widespread...

A grand jury in Tennessee has exonerated Pastor Andrew Hamblin, the star of the National Geographic reality show "Snake Salvation," but wildlife officials say that doesn't mean he will get back the 53 snakes they seized from his church last November.

A Charismatic Response to “The Growing Crisis Behind Brazil’s Evangelical Success Story” Julio Severo addresses misconceptions and missed targets on article by Brazilian Presbyterian theologian By Julio Severo In his The Gospel Coalition blog, Brazilian Calvinist theologian Augustus Nicodemus Gomes Lopes said, “When Paulo Romeiro wrote ‘Evangelicals in Crisis’ in the mid-1990s, a book that has remained a bestseller among Brazilian evangelicals, he addressed just one of the many ways in which evangelicalism had collapsed in Brazil, namely, its inability to halt the spread of prosperity theology.” (Link: http://archive.is/hjNXb) He mentions “Prosperity Theology” three times. Strangely, Liberation Theology and its Protestant...

Many Vatican-watchers interpreted the election of Pope Francis as Rome’s counter-offensive against the rise of neo-Pentecostalism in the global South. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing sect in the Latin America, where a third of the world’s Catholics live, and is giving the established Roman Church a run for its money — so to speak. The latest figures show that the numbers of Pentecostals throughout Latin America has soared since 1970 — when they represented a mere 4 percent of the population — to nearly 30 percent. In Guatemala it is estimated that four in ten are Pentecostals. Reasons for the...

Brazilian Pentecostals: Church Growth Endangered by Socialist Embrace By Julio Severo The Associated Press published a curious report on Brazil this week. The report said, Pentecostalism was once seen as a major threat to Brazil’s Catholic Church. Pentecostal churches, many of them founded by U.S. evangelicals, saw their membership double to more than 12 percent of the country's population over the 1990s, with about half of the congregants estimated to be former Catholics. During the 1990s, Brazil’s economy suffered from hyperinflation and other woes, and Pentecostal churches aggressively recruited in the slums and poor outskirts of Brazil’s cities by...

Associated Press defends Umbanda as an “Afro-Brazilian religion under threat” By Julio Severo Lying in a pentagram is Rosa Cardoso, a woman that has practiced the Afro-Brazilian religion of Umbanda most her life and, according to the Associated Press (AP), has been “hiding her faith from the rest of the world”. Umbanda house of worship “Century-old Afro-Brazilian religion under threat”, the AP report by Juliana Barbassa, makes no mention of animal sacrifices, a practice not uncommon in the Afro-Brazilian religions. And, because her article obviously intended to portray Umbanda in a positive light as a threatened, poor religion, this omission...

Researchers say Pentecostals and charismatics - Catholics and others who share in Pentecostal practices - make up one-quarter of the world’s Christians, with the greatest numbers in the developing world. A new study finds the fastest-growing Pentecostal churches are tackling social problems in their communities...Professor Donald Miller of the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture said churches like this are booming around the world. He has visited many, from a Catholic charismatic congregation in India to a Pentecostal assembly in Singapore.This Catholic charismatic congregation in Brazil is part of a huge movement in the country, where...

Though the United States has a tradition of separating church and state, the 2012 presidential campaign may test the limits of that tolerance. Not only do some Republicans continue to question Barack Obama’s Christianity, but GOP front-runner Mitt Romney is a Mormon and other contenders, such as Sarah Palin, are Christian fundamentalists, as the Rev. Howard Bess explains. Many religious Americans have an ambivalent view toward the separation of church and state, wanting political figures to be religious but to leave their religion out of political encounters. The reality has been that for most of U.S. history, American politics at...