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The Assemblies of God, one of the largest Pentecostal denominations, is growing faster than the U.S. population. AG reported that its U.S. adherents increased four percent in 2010, which is several times higher than the U.S. population growth rate, which is about one percent a year. Adherents of the Assemblies of God USA have surpassed three million followers, 3,030,944 to be exact, in 2010. This is the largest annual percentage increase since 1983, according to AG records. In terms of official membership, AG reported a 2.5 percent increase, to 1.75 million members. Attendance at major worship service, water baptism, spirit...

In the past 10 days, Christian churches have been attacked in Egypt and Nigeria and improvised explosive devices have been placed on the doorsteps of Christian families in Iraq – which events, taken together, could mean a co-ordinated assault on Christians by Muslim holy warriors. …. [However] As U.S. political scientist Walter Russell Mead observed in a celebrated essay last year, Christianity is now “on its biggest roll” in its 2,000-year history. Many Christians, though, are only dimly aware of the faith’s phenomenal advance. You could call it the greatest story never told: the epilogue. “In absolute numbers of adherents...

TULSA, Okla. — Hundreds of people are waiting to get into the memorial service for evangelist Oral Roberts. Among the early arrivals for the afternoon service at Oral Roberts University were husband and wife Mark and Paula Sterns, alumni who flew from Dallas for the event. Mark Sterns says Roberts changed their lives forever, adding that 19 members of their families attended the university at some point. Roberts died last week in California at age 91. Roberts chartered ORU in 1963 as a place where Pentecostals could live, study and pray together. The school became the first Pentecostal university in...

Thousands who travelled to see Mr Hinn perform at a London rally have been were left disappointed after officials at Stansted airport would not let him in the country. Border Agency officials turned back Mr Hinn, who landed by private jet, because he had failed to bring a valid sponsorship certificate from his church, required under rules introduced last November. The Pentecostal preacher, who was due to perform at a three day rally in a Docklands exhibition centre this weekend, flew on to Paris, and attempted – and failed – to regain entry to Britain via Luton. Thousands of evangelical...

<p>Thousands who travelled to see Mr Hinn perform at a London rally have been were left disappointed after officials at Stansted airport would not let him in the country.</p> <p>Border Agency officials turned back Mr Hinn, who landed by private jet, because he had failed to bring a valid sponsorship certificate from his church, required under rules introduced last November.</p>

While the millions of Muslims in America are observing the month of Ramadan and concentrating on gaining as many blessings as possible in this noble month, we would be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be caught up in election fever. Every media outlet is giving non-stop coverage to the contest between the Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama and Vice-Presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden and the Republican candidate John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Given the unpopularity of President George W. Bush and the Democratic leads in polls, most observers have assumed it to be...

NOW NUMBERING OVER 500 million, and probably the fastest growing religious movement in the world, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians are transforming the global religious demographic, especially in Latin America and Africa. They comprise nearly half of Brazil's population, and 25 percent of the United States is Pentecostal or Charismatic. Are these religious, social conservatives replicating in the Global South political trends that are present among Republican-oriented evangelicals in the United States? A new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life tries to answer just this question. Pew estimated that Pentecostals and Charismatics account for about one fourth...

VATICAN CITY, JULY 20, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is the report "Catholics and Pentecostals: A Historical Overview," by Father Juan Usma Gómez, official of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. *** An April 2005 meeting in Los Angeles, U.S.A., commemorated the first centenary of the Pentecostal Movement. The chronicles recount that at the beginning of the 20th century, a group of believers was expelled from the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles because of its constant insistence on the need for a spiritual revival. The search for these revivals, a practice that has been more or less widespread in Protestant...

To those outside the movement, Pentecostals have always seemed exotic, a strange subculture with weird, even frightening, practices. How then to explain that according to the World Christian Database, it is now the second-largest and fastest-growing Christian group in the world, behind the Catholic Church, with about 580 million followers? Or that formal Episcopalians and contemplative Catholics include Pentecostal practices in their services? Or that nearly every mainline and evangelical denomination has been influenced by Pentecostal musical styles, as anyone who has been to a contemporary worship service can attest? Bishop John Howe of the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida,...

15 February 2006, 16:05 If a gay parade takes place in Moscow, about a million of believers will go out into the streets in protest Moscow, February 15, Interfax - Bishop Sergey Ryakhovsky, leader of the Russian Pentecostals, stated the readiness of the Pentecostals, together with the Russian Orthodox Church, Moslems and Jews, to file an official request for a march in defense of morality if a gay parade takes place in Moscow. ‘In my estimation, together we can summon at least one million people’, he said to Interfax on Wednesday. Speaking about it, the bishop underlined that ‘Russia has...

Daniel Stoddart sends this along.  Seems that Episcopal churches aren't the only ones draining members: Carlton Pearson, a high-profile pastor who lost 90 percent of his church’s 5,000 members after publicly teaching that everyone will eventually be saved, held the final service in his church building on New Year’s Eve.Higher Dimensions, founded by Pearson in 1981, was one of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s largest and most prosperous churches. Its high-energy, sharply dressed pastor appeared regularly on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and at national conferences, wrote several books, and hosted an annual Azusa Street conference that drew national figures such as T. D....

Happy clappy Christmas Swelling congregations have given two churches more to sing about on Sundays, mostly due to good old-fashioned recruiting drives, writes Jill Rowbotham OF the millions who will flock to church this Christmas, none have better cause to celebrate than the Pentecostals and the evangelicals, because they have the numbers - as well as the Lord - on their side. The growth rates in these two faith traditions are the envy of the rest. Pentecostals, the so-called happy clappers, take their name from the Jewish festival, the Pentecost, during which the earliest Christians were endowed with the gifts...

As a Pentecostal pastor and gay, the Rev. Douglas Clanton doesn’t blink when he says, "We absolutely believe the Bible is inerrant." He sees no conflict with that statement and being gay. "They say it like saying you are Republican and gay, which I happen to be also," said Clanton, who is pastor of the Reconciling Pentecostal Assembly in Scottsdale and the co-founder of Reconciling Pentecostals International (www.rpifellowship.com), which recently held its fourth annual conference in Scottsdale. Some suggest to the 41-yearold minister that it’s an oxymoron to declare oneself a "Pentecostal homosexual" given the 100-year-old conservative "Holiness" movement’s uncompromising...

If a global society forms during the Twenty-first Century, will it necessarily be a contract society, built upon reciprocal trade and agreement, as many people think? Or could it be constructed upon other principles, for instance the left’s dream of universal sharing, nonviolence, peace, and justice, or the Isalmists’ dream of the world converted to Islam by the will of God and His holy warriors? Or will it be a global bureaucracy, a United Nations writ large, the centralized rule of the international experts? When Sir Henry Maine wrote his famous dictum in Ancient Law that the movement of progressive...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Like other evangelical Christians, leaders of the Church of God in Christ want to limit abortion and bar same-sex marriage. But that doesn’t mean the predominantly black Pentecostal denomination considers itself part of the “religious right” or supporters of the Republican Party. “I’ve seen the tone of the religious right,” said G.E. Patterson, the church’s presiding bishop. “It seemingly was born out of the fact that African-Americans were making too many gains.” Patterson’s church, often referred to simply as COGIC, reports having more than 6 million members across the United States and in 57 countries. While COGIC...

Man shot in church Bombs found; pig farms attacked by Muslims. Christians in the Poso area of Indonesia have experienced renewed violence in recent weeks. This violence comes only a few months after many of the troops were withdrawn from the area, believing it was secure. Intermittent attacks by violent Islamists have threatened to re-ignite the tensions between Christians and Muslims. More than ten gunmen raided the village of Mauro on the night of 13 October. Going house-to-house, the gunmen would shout for help and wait for the occupants to come out. When the villagers would not come out, the...