The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century

From the Catholic Charismatic renewal in the 1960s to the Pentecostal revival in Pensacola, Florida in the mid 1990s, the staggering growth of the Pentecostal-charismatic movement has impacted the world. Research data shows that in 1965 there were 50,000,000 Pentecostals throughout the world and that by 1995 the numbers had grown to 463,000,000. Because of this explosive growth, Pentecostals and Charismatics now constitute the second largest family of Christians in the world.

Vinson Synan’s book, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, accounts for the incredible growth and changes that have occurred in the church world over the past twenty-five years.

First published in 1971 as The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, this completely revised and enlarged edition includes five new chapters on the worldwide expansion of the Pentecostal Movement in the early part of the twentieth century. Synan’s revision enhances his already detailed history of the rise and development of the Pentecostal tradition which begins with John Wesley, founder of Methodism and spiritual and intellectual father of the modern holiness and Pentecostal movements.

First seen as simply a movement, Pentecostalism has grown far beyond this definition. “This could well be the major story of Christianity in the twentieth century,” writes Synan. “If what Peter Wagner says is true, that ‘in all of human history, no other non-political, non-militaristic, voluntary human movement has grown as rapidly as the Pentecostal-charismatic movement in the last twenty-five years,’ then Pentecostalism indeed deserves to be seen as a major Christian tradition alongside the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformation Protestant traditions.”

Synan’s revision will be an important handbook in shaping our understanding of the Pentecostal-charismatic tradition