Abstract
This chapter outlines the history and present shape of Australian PCC, together with the unique characteristics which help cultivate high levels of commitment and involvement from participants. Commencing from its Holiness Movement (HM) roots in the United States, I trace the arrival and subsequent development of Australian PCC. I describe the “realm” of the PCC worship service as a space centred on the ecstatic experience of God. I characterise PCC churches in terms of “greedy institution” which exert a higher claim on the allegiance of participants, who voluntarily devote enormous amounts of time and resources to church life. This allegiance is not coerced, but volunteered, and participants report being amply rewarded by a rich experience of ministry, service, and community.
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Notes
- 1.
I refuse to use the meaningless descriptor “Global South,” which simply reconfigures Eurocentrism latent in terms like “Western World” and “Third World.”
- 2.
Anne Pattel-Gray, 2014. “Spirituality.” In Another World is Possible: Spiritualities and Religions of Global Darker Peoples, 64–74, (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Tanya Riches, Worship and Social Engagement in Urban Aboriginal-Led Australian Pentecostal Congregations: (Re)Imagining Identity in the Spirit, ed. William K. Kay and Mark Cartledge, vol. 32, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 2–3.
- 3.
See Gary Bouma, Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 43–7.
- 4.
Ibid., 2.
- 5.
Mark Jennings, “An Extraordinary Degree of Exaltation: Durkheim, Effervescence and Pentecostalism’s Defeat of Secularisation,” Social Compass 62, no. 1 (2015): 70; also Natalia Vlas and Simona Sav. “Pentecostalism and Politics: Global and European Perspectives.” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 13, no. 37 (2014): 149; Ibrahim Abraham “Pentecostalism and Secular Youth Culture: Translatability, Ambiguity and Instability,” in Conservative Religion and Mainstream Culture: Opposition, Negotiation, and Adaptation, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan), 62.
- 6.
Mark Hutchinson, “The New Thing God Is Doing: The Charismatic Renewal and Classical Pentecostalism,” Australian Pentecostal Studies 1 (1998), https://aps-journal.com/index.php/APS/article/view/47/44.
- 7.
See discussion by Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10, 39–41).
- 8.
Allan Heaton Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity, ed. Lamin Sanneh, Oxford Studies in World Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47. See also Greta E. C. Wells, “Reaching the Next Generation? Reorienting Australian Pentecostalism as a Spiritual Expression for the Ageing,” Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging 28, no. 3 (2016): 141–2.
- 9.
Gastón Espinosa. William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014, 53–5.
- 10.
The Azusa Street origin story is undoubtedly more popular, even though it is later than the Topeka origin story, and this is possibly because Seymour (in contrast to Parham, who held to a theologically rationalised racial segregation) was an inclusive figure: “At Azusa blacks, whites, and other nationalities worshipped together in racial harmony in a black person’s home in the black section of Los Angeles” (ibid., 51–7).
- 11.
Joe Creech, “Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History,” Church History 65, no. 3 (1996): 405.
- 12.
Barry Mostyn Chant, The Spirit of Pentecost: The Origins and Development of the Pentecostal Movement in Australia 1870–1939 (Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2011), 3–4.
- 13.
Peter Elliott, “Four Decades of “Discreet” Charismata: The Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia 1863–1900,” Journal of Religious History 42, no. 1 (2018): 81–2.
- 14.
Mark Hutchinson, ““Going the Other Way Around”: Catholic Contributions to the Emerging Pentecostal Norm in Australia,” PentecostoStudies 12, no. 1 (2013): 37–8.
- 15.
Ibid., 39.
- 16.
Chant, Spirit of Pentecost, 107–9. Elsewhere, Chant notes the existence of “cottage meetings” led by Joseph Marshall in Portland, Victoria in 1870 calling these the “first Pentecostal meetings held in Australia,” (“The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Origins of the Australian Pentecostal Movement,” in Reviving Australia: Essays on the History and Experience of Revival and Revivalism in Australian Christianity, ed. Mark Hutchinson, Edmund Campion, and Stuart Piggin (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1994), 103).
- 17.
Riches, Worship and Social Engagement, 32, 106.
- 18.
Chant, “The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” 97.
- 19.
Chant, Spirit of Pentecost, 3; 221.
- 20.
Shane Clifton, Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia, ed. Andrew Davies and William Kay, vol. 3, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 27.
- 21.
Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987), 65–6; 76–7; 87–9.
- 22.
Chant, Spirit of Pentecost, 129.
- 23.
“History,” The Foursquare Church, Accessed 6 July 2022. https://www.foursquare.org/about/history/.
- 24.
Denise A. Austin and Jacqueline Grey, “The ‘Outback Spirit’ of Pentecostal Women Pioneers in Australia,” in Women in Pentecostal and Charismatic Ministry: Informing a Dialogue on Gender, Church, and Ministry ed. Margaret English de Alminana and Lois E. Olena (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 205.
- 25.
Including: Isabella Hetherington, whose itinerant ministry with Aboriginal Australians was supported by Lancaster and Good News Hall; a “Miss Flett,” who migrated to Perth in the late 1920s and gathered several other migrants together in a nascent Apostolic denomination; and other women leaders prior to 1930, including Ellen Mather, Stella Evans, Florrie Mortomore, and Annie Dennis. See Chant, Spirit of Pentecost, 3.; Denise A. Austin and Shane Clifton, “Australian Pentecostalism: From Marginalised to Megachurches,” in Asia Pacific Pentecostalism, ed. Denise A. Austin, Jacqueline Grey, and Paul W. Lewis (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 375.; Austin and Grey, “Outback Spirit” 208–12.; Frank Stockley, A Story Worth Telling: History of the Assemblies of God in Western Australia 1922–2000 (Perth: Australian Christian Churches, 2007), 18–9.
- 26.
Austin and Grey, “Outback Spirit” 205–6.
- 27.
Even so, there were significant female leaders in the inter-war and post-war period, including Emily Stott, Bernice Hall, and Marie Cartledge. See ibid., 210–13.; Mark Hutchinson, “Stott, Emily,” The Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Accessed August 19, 2022, https://sites.google.com/view/adpcm/q-t-top-page/stott-emily; Stockley, A Story Worth Telling, 28–9; 32–3.
- 28.
See Angelo Ulisse Cettolin, Spirit Freedom and Power: Changes in Pentecostal Spirituality (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016), 77.
- 29.
I have argued that this early inclusivity could be drawn upon as a paradigm for PCC’s current engagement with LGBTIQ people. (Mark Jennings, “Impossible Subjects: LGBTIQ Experiences in Australian Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches,” religions 9 (2018).)
- 30.
Mary Querro was ordained as a “worker” in the Assemblies of God in 1937. Querro’s granddaughter Desley Barba lead churches (together with her husband) in regional Queensland as well as Darwin. Austin and Grey, “Outback Spirit,” 210.
- 31.
Riches, Worship and Social Engagement, 32, 103.
- 32.
See Chant, Spirit of Pentecost, 193–7.
- 33.
Jon K. Newton, “Spiritual Explosion: A Review of the Literature on the Sudden Growth of Pentecostalism in Australia,” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 31, no. 1 (2018): 76. In contrast, Chant indicates that Lancaster was overseeing Pentecostal churches in five Australian states prior to 1925, so it would seem the influence of Good News Hall at least extended beyond Victoria (Chant, The Spirit of Pentecost, 111.).
- 34.
Newton, “Spiritual Explosion,” 80.; Hutchinson, “The New Thing.”
- 35.
Newton, “Spiritual Explosion,” 77–81. Latter Rain revivalism arrived in Australia through New Zealand, and prominent New Zealand-born PCC pastors such as Brian Houston and Phil Pringle have had a significant impact on Australian PCC (see Clifton, Pentecostal Churches, 140–1). In contrast, Sam Hey traces the Latter Rain movement to post-war Canadian Pentecostalism (Sam Hey, Megachurches: Origins, Ministry and Prospects (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 38).
- 36.
Clifton, Pentecostal Churches, 143–6.
- 37.
Ibid., 150–151.; also Hutchinson, “The New Thing”).
- 38.
Clifton, Pentecostal Churches, 155.
- 39.
Hutchinson remarked in 1998: “if we take the top 50 churches out of the picture, then growth is in fact negative in the movement as a whole” (Hutchinson, “The New Thing”).
- 40.
Hey, Megachurches, 75–9.
- 41.
See Tanya Riches, “The Evolving Theological Emphasis of Hillsong Worship (1996–2007),” Australian Pentecostal Studies 13 (2010).
- 42.
Mark Evans, Open up the Doors: Music in the Modern Church (London: Equinox, 2006), 77.
- 43.
Clifton discusses this trend specifically in relation to Frank Houston, Hillsong founder Brian Houston’s late father, who dispensed with congregational leadership, preferring authority to be concentrated in the senior pastor role (see Clifton, Pentecostal Churches, 156–7; 160).
- 44.
Marion Maddox, “‘In the Goofy Parking Lot’: Growth Churches as a Novel Religious Form for Late Capitalism,” Social Compass 59, no. 2 (2016): 148.
- 45.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2016 Census Data Reveals ‘No Religion’ Is Rising Fast,” last updated April 5, 2018, https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbyReleaseDate/7E65A144540551D7CA258148000E2B85.
- 46.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Religious affiliation in Australia: Exploration of the changes in reported religion in the 2021 Census,” accessed July 11, 2022, https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia.
- 47.
Bouma and Halafoff, “Australia’s Changing Religious Profile,” 131–132. For more on the problems with measuring PCC numbers, see Andrew Singleton, “Strong Church or Niche Market? The Demography of the Pentecostal Church in Australia,” in Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments from the Margins, ed. Cristina Rocha, Mark Hutchinson, and Kathleen Openshaw, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 90–2.
- 48.
As Singleton explains, “religious salience” attempts to measure the importance of religion in the life of respondents (Singleton, “Strong Church?” 96–7).
- 49.
Mark Jennings, Exaltation: Ecstatic Experience in Pentecostalism and Popular Music (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2014), 205–6.
- 50.
Mark Jennings, “‘Won’t You Break Free?’ an Ethnography of Music and the Divine-Human Encounter at an Australian Pentecostal Church,” Culture and Religion 9, no. 2 (2008): 163–65.; Mark Jennings, “Imagining Jesus Doing a Whole Lotta Shakin’: Pentecostal Worship, Popular Music and the Politics of Experience,” Culture and Religion 15, no. 2 (2014): 215–6.
- 51.
This concept owes an obvious debt to Howard Becker’s “art worlds:” See Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
- 52.
In 2011, the National Church Life Survey (NCLS) indicated that the ACC was third in weekly attendance, behind Catholics and Anglicans (Ruth Powell, Miriam Pepper, and Sam Sterland, “How many Australians attend church in an average week?” NCLS Research, last updated July 7, 2017, http://preview.ncls.org.au/research/australians-attending-church). However, as journalist John Sandeman said more recently “If all Pentecostals are counted as one denomination, they would be number two on our list of church attendance figures” (“How many people go to your church,” Eternity News, October 10, 2019, https://www.eternitynews.com.au/australia/how-many-people-go-to-your-church/).
- 53.
For a useful survey of such misapplications, see Christie Davies, “Goffman’s Concept of the Total Institution: Criticisms and Revisions,” Human Studies 12, no. 1/2 (1989).
- 54.
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 11.
- 55.
Wade is thus forced to impose too many caveats—for example, calling Hillsong “a distinctively contemporary form of Goffmanian ‘total institution,’” in an attempt to make the category applicable. (“Seeker-Friendly: The Hillsong Megachurch as an Enchanting Total Institution,” Journal of Sociology 52, no. 4 (2016): 663).
- 56.
Ibid., 668–9.
- 57.
Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1974), 2–3.
- 58.
Coser, Greedy Institutions, 6.
- 59.
Ibid., 4.
- 60.
Ibid., 6–7.
- 61.
Marianne de Campo is correct in assessing Coser’s work as “comparing apples to oranges,” though her generous application of the category shows how it can be useful nonetheless (“Contemporary Greedy Institutions: An Essay on Lewis Coser’s Concept in the Era of the ‘Hive Mind’,” Sociologický časopis 49, no. 6 (2013)).
- 62.
This is despite the fact, admittedly, that Coser specifically differentiates between the sect, which he regarded as an example of a greedy institution, and a church, which he did not (Greedy Institutions, 103).
- 63.
Ibid., 104–5.
- 64.
Ibid., 105–6. I will discuss this claim further in chapter seven.
- 65.
Ibid., 107.
- 66.
Ibid., 108.
- 67.
Coser is not referring to the Holy Spirit here, at least not as PCCs would mean it (ibid., 111).
- 68.
Jennings, “Imagining Jesus.”
- 69.
Jennings, “Impossible Subjects.”
- 70.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, et al., vol. 3 (New York, NY: Bedminster Press, 1968), 1121–3.
- 71.
Coser, Greedy Institutions, 115.
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Jennings, M. (2023). Ecstatic Church: Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Australia—Antecedents, History, and Present Shape. In: Happy: LGBTQ+ Experiences of Australian Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20144-8_2
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