A few months earlier, while on maternity leave with her third child, Rev. Hollaway had read How To Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s discourse-shifting 2018 book about the potential mental health benefits of psychedelic drug use. “My response to it was: there’s a question for the church on every page,” she says. “The fact that increased mystical-type experiences will result in better therapeutic outcomes ought to make us pay attention.” Keen to learn more, she signed up for training as a psychedelic facilitator at the California Institute of Integral Studies. “I was completely psychedelically naive, and I didn’t want to start this year-long program when I’d never experienced it,” she says. Hence, magic mushrooms in the tub.

Rev. Hollaway is not alone in believing that psilocybin and LSD may ask serious questions of the Christian church. In the last decade, progressive members of the clergy in many different denominations across the United States have begun to explore how they might support those in their congregations who wish to integrate their psychedelic experiences into their faith.

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Back in 2016, a minister at Emmanuel Episcopal Church just outside of Seattle named Hunt Priest was one of 30 religious leaders from a variety of backgrounds who took part in a groundbreaking study into psilocybin and sacred experiences at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. While the research project can’t help but sound like a joke (a Catholic priest, a rabbi and a Zen Buddhist roshi walk into a drug lab…), the impact that Priest’s first experience with psilocybin had on his life was very real.

“I went in thinking I would just see some weird colors and stuff,” Priest remembers when we speak over a video call from his home in Georgia. “But pretty immediately I started having a reaction that felt deeply Pentecostal.”

Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian denomination in the world, adding around 13 million new worshipers each year. The tradition places a strong emphasis on miracles and embodied experiences, emphasizing the direct relationship between the worshiper and God through the Holy Spirit — best exemplified by speaking in tongues. This was not at all how Priest had previously understood his faith. “That’s certainly not the Episcopalian, Anglican, way of thinking about Christianity,” he adds. “It was probably my first deep, embodied experience of the Holy Spirit.”

Other participants in the study reported similar effects: 96% of the religious leaders rated their psilocybin trip among the top five most significant spiritual experiences of their lives; 79% said they felt the experience had enriched their daily prayer, made them better at their jobs and increased their sense of the sacred in their everyday lives.

Priest, who had been feeling burned out and directionless prior to the experience, returned to his life with renewed vigor. He moved to a new church in Georgia, and in 2021 founded Ligare, a non-profit organization that takes its name from the Latin verb meaning “to bind”, the etymological root of “religion”. The group’s stated mission is to bridge gaps between Christian organizations, mental health advocates and the psychedelic community — and to “empower and educate religious leaders and communities about the profound opportunities and significant challenges within the resurgence of psychedelics”.

You may be surprised to learn that the idea of priests preaching the Gospel of hallucinogens has not always gone down well with church elders. Last August, a former Ligare intern named Joe Welker resigned from the group and reported Priest to his church diocese, who launched an investigation. It eventually found that Priest had engaged in “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy” by using his position to supposedly endorse the use of banned substances. Despite the opening up of medical research, psychedelics remain federally illegal across the United States. Only a trio of states — Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico — have moved to relax their local laws.

In Georgia, a bishop in the Episcopal Church gave Priest the choice to either resign from Ligare — or resign his ordination. He chose to continue his work with Ligare. “I don’t mean to sound haughty or anything, but it’s my ministry,” he tells me. “I still consider myself an Episcopalian. Obviously, I consider myself a Christian. I’m here for the church when it’s ready to learn about this. I hope their position will change, but I went with my calling. I’m not angry. I was disappointed and hurt, but it’ll turn around.”

Priest’s frustration is palpable. After all, the substance he consumed is produced naturally in a mushroom, and is it not written in Genesis 1:29 that God gave the plants “upon the face of all the earth” to humanity? Furthermore, in his Epistle to the Romans 12:2, Saint Paul instructs Christians to “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God”.

Renewing his mind is exactly what Priest felt he had done. To be told that his church has no place for what he believes was a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit is hard to comprehend. “It goes back to Genesis 1: ‘God saw that it was good,’” he argues. “There’s a reason we have receptors in our brains for psilocybin: an ancient evolutionary connection. That’s not to say that there isn’t a risk and you don’t have to be careful — but used with the right intention, in the right way, it’s beautiful.”

As far as Priest is concerned, the only people who should really be worried about psychedelics are atheists. “I’ve talked to so many people who say things like: ‘Holy shit, Mary Magdalene came to me… Who’s that?’” he says. “So many people have experiences of God, or Jesus, and it opens this awareness of spirituality or mysticism that we don’t often get in our waking lives or in our religious tradition. There’s definitely a vibrant Christian conversation going on right now, it just needs to be bigger. And it will be.”

* * *

When psychedelic drugs first began to permeate the American consciousness in the early Sixties, any spiritual or religious associations tended to be with Eastern religions, New Age philosophies or slightly indeterminate fusions of the two, such as the Hare Krishna movement. However, it didn’t take long before certain Christians were beginning to wonder whether they too might have something to learn from a hallucinogenic sacrament.

On Good Friday in 1962, at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, a graduate student in theology from Harvard Divinity School named Walter Pahnke ran a double-blind experiment with 20 divinity students in which half were given a placebo and the other half were dosed with psilocybin. The experiment, which was supervised by Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (today better known as Ram Dass), had a profound impact on many of its participants. The religious scholar Huston Smith later described the Good Friday experiment as “the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced”.

While for some this gave weight to the theory that psychedelics are entheogens, capable of reliably producing direct religious experiences, for others it suggested that Christianity may itself be a product of hallucination. In 1970, the archaeologist John Marco Allegro published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, making the dramatic claim that the gospels are coded stories written by a fertility cult, and that Jesus is in fact merely a metaphor for a psychoactive mushroom. The book and its theories are pet favorites of the podcaster Joe Rogan, and partly inspired Philip K. Dick’s 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, in which an Episcopal bishop travels to the Holy Lands to investigate whether mushroom use could help explain the resurrection.

In more recent times, historians and theologians have suggested various ways that biblical stories might be reinterpreted if it is accepted that Abrahamic prophets used psychedelics in their rituals. In the 2000s, the Israeli academic Benny Shanon advanced the theory that when Moses heard the voice of God from a burning bush on Mount Horeb he was under the influence of ayahuasca. Meanwhile, in his 2020 book The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku explored the possibility that what early Christians called “wine” was in fact a type of psychedelic brew. Could it be that when Jesus turned the water into wine he did so not by miraculous means, but simply by lacing it with psilocybin?

* * *

Whether or not early Christians took part in psychedelic rituals is a matter of speculation, but the influence Priest’s first hallucinogenic experience had on him is easily verifiable. When he walked out of Johns Hopkins a decade ago he was met by Reverend Timothy Tutt, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, who immediately recognized that something had changed in his companion. “I spent the next 24 hours with him, and what I saw was my friend of several years glowing and sparkling,” recalls Rev. Tutt when we speak via a call from his home in Washington, D.C.. “I don’t know any other way to say it.”

Sometime later, Rev. Tutt decided to pursue a psychedelic experience of his own in a group setting along with several other Christian clergy and congregation members. He, too, had a profound experience. He established a direct connection with the divine and says that this helped him to address a deep-seated trauma.

“I’ll just be quite honest: through one of my psychedelic experiences, I was able to come to terms with an event of childhood sexual abuse that happened in a church setting,” he says. “It is not uncommon for the American church or other churches to have those experiences. I had done a great deal of work around it with my therapist, but really, psychedelics helped me come to terms with it in a way that nothing else had.”

The potential for psychedelics to address and begin to heal trauma — which Pollan explored at length in his 2018 book — is a subject that many of the clergy people I spoke to for this story returned to. Reverend Molly Baskette is a longtime pastor in the United Church of Christ who has decided to retire from parish ministry to set up a legal ketamine clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I’ve been a working pastor for almost 30 years at this point, and there are a lot of hard things about serving a very diverse population,” Rev. Baskette tells me. “We have ex-evangelicals — queer people who have fled more fundamentalist queer-phobic traditions. We have homeless mentally ill people, and housed mentally ill people. We have people with substance abuse disorders who think we don’t know their secret. We have a lot of people with PTSD. In some ways, a pastor becomes an untrained — or badly trained — therapist. When I read How To Change Your Mind, I was like: ‘Thank Christ!’ Literally, not as an expletive. Here is a possible solution for people who are suffering and sick — and isn’t the church about relieving suffering?”

Rev. Baskette may be retiring from her parish, but she has no plans to leave her church. She remains part of a working group within the UCC that aims to normalize the concept of using psychedelics for healing and spiritual growth and intends to pass a resolution publicly affirming the church’s support for legislation. Another member of the group is Reverend Molli Mitchell, who recently became the first ordained minister to become a legally authorized psilocybin practitioner in Oregon.

Rev. Mitchell began her career as a social worker before her life was upended by a stage-three breast cancer diagnosis. After going through treatment and reassessing her life she entered a seminary, but not before heading out on a camping trip to the desert and trying mushrooms. She describes this as a “phenomenally powerful, life-changing experience.”

Today, she serves as a hospice chaplain, a local church pastor and a facilitator at the Portland-based psilocybin center 7 Gates Sanctuary. She sees all of these roles as different aspects of her ministry — and believes the church is well-placed to bring psychedelic healing into the mainstream. “The church can play a significant role in the same way that it played a significant role in increasing access to healthcare,” she says. “Churches founded hospitals, and founded hospices. They founded them because Jesus was a healer. We have hurdles to overcome in terms of stigma, and historic Christian ethics that said ‘all drugs are bad’. But this is not outside of the scope of what we care about and why.”

It makes sense that churches would want to ease the suffering of their congregations. Still, it’s also easy to imagine why those at the top of the church’s traditional power structures might not be so keen on throwing their weight behind psychedelics.

Allyssa Jomei, who works with Ligare as an Interfaith Spiritual Director, acknowledges that the spiritual experiences people have while taking psychedelics may not be recognizably Christian at all. “What folks are dealing with as they have these experiences and are curious about it is just a total dismantling of faith systems,” she says.

This is part of what makes psychedelics so challenging for traditional religions to truly embrace. While some people who take these substances may well have experiences that align with the theology they already understand, others may find themselves confronting something totally alien. “That’s a hard thing, and it really strikes us at the core of who we are,” says Jomei. “That’s why it’s useful to have someone with an interfaith background, because when people are grappling with something bigger than what they thought they were, it’s really helpful to have some different perspective and different language as they’re deconstructing and reconstructing.”

Back in Pasadena, Rev. Hollaway sounds a note of caution for Christians who believe rushing out to champion psychedelics might be a panacea to revive flagging interest in church services or offer a speed-dial to the divine. Although it might sound like an ingenious ploy to boost church attendance among the young — Come for the psilocybin, stay for the psalms — Rev. Hollaway suggests that the church would do well not to lose itself in a headlong rush to occupy ground it does not fully understand.

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“I would say the church can play a role in tempering enthusiasm,” she says. “Any religious tradition that has been around a good while has developed the resources to take a longer view. In psychedelics, when we talk about preparation and integration, we’re usually talking about three meetings before and three meetings after an experience. What about talking about lifelong spiritual formation, and what that actually means? A religious life and a religious experience are two different things.”

A looming question remains over how traditional churches might realistically integrate the regular or semi-regular use of psychedelics into their traditions. Certainly, it seems unlikely that any self-respecting priest will be swapping their communion wafers for acid tabs any time soon. Some of those I speak to advocate for annual retreats, where clergy and other committed congregation members could trip together and “reset” their spiritual connection. Others see psychedelics as primarily a therapeutic tool, a medicine to be used to treat trauma or ease anxiety for those fearful about dying.

Even among those who have had found themselves reconfigured by a mind-altering religious experience, there remains a significant amount of skepticism about exactly what role the church itself might have to play in all this. When I ask Rev. Hollaway what she believes the church embracing psychedelics would look like, she expresses that most fundamental of Christian instincts: doubt.

“I can picture it a lot of ways, and the truth is I don’t know,” she says. “I want to have enough humility to say that I don’t know how it’s going to play out. I don’t even know that it should.”

When you’re writing about religion, people tend to confess a lot of crimes to you. Some have done their time; others have a heavy weight on their souls. A former boxer, crook and ten-out-of-ten sinner — ten commandments, that is — Uncle John soon came clean. “I plotted a couple of murders, love,” he confided in me, our bond sealed as we faced down Arctic winds together. “Never went through with them, but I had murder in my heart, so in God’s eyes, I broke it.”

But Uncle John was born again on 16 January 1994 and has been spreading the word ever since. He spends his weekends pacing pavements, sporting Ugg boots and a worn bible covered completely in black gaffer tape, offering whomever will have him a kind ear — and a dire warning about the End Times.

His 37-year-old nephew, Bill Boswell, told me he thought his uncle “was punched in the head too many times when he said that he’d got saved”. But then Bill, too, was born again: his life changed forever on 15 May 2005 at 7:45pm; now he is the breathless preacher and leader of the Dartford branch. And while he always has a twinkle in his eye, Bill is deadly serious. His conversion wasn’t merely personal — he believes there’s something to the fact that the Spirit is moving in the Gypsy community. “God is calling His people now. It’s the most vague and most precise answer I can give,” he told me.

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This emphasis on the Holy Spirit is a hallmark of Pentecostalism. Exact figures are hard to come by, but it’s thought that the UK is home to around 3 million Pentecostals — including, by some estimates, up to 40% of British Gypsies. (It should be said that the Dartford boys refer to themselves as Gypsies: a word that has been reclaimed with pride.) Light and Life alone, with 33 congregations in Britain and a total of 20,000 followers, claims it is home to 10% of the nation’s Gypsy population.

Pentecostalism is, in short, “Evangelicalism plus”: after accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour, believers are filled with the Holy Spirit. This often involves speaking in tongues. The faith is defined by direct experience of — and personal interaction with — the presence of God, and all the miracles that come with it: success in matters of the mind, body, spirit and wallet. Pentecostalism is also notable for its lack of overarching authority, and its ability to look and sound like any local culture. Among the Gypsies, it often manifests as a mystical view of the world, and an embrace of what we might call “traditional values”. Music is central to worship.

Far from outliers, these Gypsies are part of a global movement. Pentecostalism is probably the fastest growing religion on earth. With 600 million followers worldwide, and counting, it’s estimated that by 2050, one in 10 — or one billion people — will be Pentecostal. In 1980, 6% of Christians were Pentecostal; now, over a quarter of the world’s 2 billion are part of the faith.

The appeal is, in many ways, obvious. From its earliest days, Pentecostalism has been the faith of the downtrodden — not that of the rich white Westerners with which it is so commonly associated: the red-faced, hellfire televangelist and his soft-focus wife. The denomination came into being in Los Angeles in 1906, led by the son of freed slaves; it spoke to the “negroes, poor, lowly, ignorant and despised,” as one early observer put it. Then seen as the bastard child of Evangelical Christianity, Pentecostals are now a force to be reckoned with no matter where you look, rapidly converting existing Christian believers, and taking hold among many peoples in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

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But, with considerable competition, Britain’s Gypsies appear to be among the fastest Pentecostalising groups on earth — along with many of their Romani cousins in mainland Europe. Up to a third of the 12 million Gypsies, Roma and Travellers across Europe are Pentecostal or have at least attended a Spirit-led church. Light and Life’s evangelicals mightn’t always do things by the book, but in two years of travelling the world exploring this fascinating and rapidly growing movement, they are the most of the book people I have encountered.

Recently, Bill invited me to return to Dartford for a meal and some music, in a church that was packed to the gills with young families on a wet Wednesday night. He likens the Gypsy conversion to the parable of the Great Banquet, told in the Gospel of Luke: no one turns up to a feast, so a servant is sent out to invite “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame”. The blessings of the Kingdom of God are available to all who will come and believe. The Gypsies, Bill believes, have gone hungry for too long, and it’s time for them to pull up a chair at the table.

Over roast potatoes and lemonade, Bill’s wife Becky — a fellow gorja but very much part of the culture she married into — believes there’s a reason why Pentecostalism is speaking so strongly to the world’s marginalised peoples: “we have the humility to submit ourselves before God.”

Recent history plays a strong part in explaining the mass conversion, too. An unwanted, stateless people no matter where they landed, Gypsies know all too well that, when events take over, they need someone in their corner. Indeed, they are often forgotten as victims of the Holocaust alongside the Jewish people; as Bill puts it, “it seems like whenever they get persecuted, we go through it at the same time.”

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In this context, the Spirit coming to their people immediately after World War II, in France, is significant. In 1950, in the Normandy region, a poor Gypsy woman named Madame Duvil-Reinhart turned to a Pentecostal church for help: one of her sons was dying from an acute illness. The doctors had told her to give up on him and focus on her other children. The church didn’t, though, and prayed for the boy until he miraculously healed. The entire family converted on the spot.

They ultimately formed a church called Vie et Lumière (Life and Light) — and, in the 1980s, set sail to convert their British cousins (Bill jokes that the English opted to call their church Light and Life, because “the French say everything backwards”). They’re looking to save anyone they can — hence Uncle John and the lads eyeing even my wretched soul — but during those long, cold days of street evangelism, I could see that the Gypsy lads have a soft spot for people they see their former selves in: the homeless; the bleary-eyed, hopeless men emerging from betting shops. They would lend them a patient ear, say a prayer for their souls, and buy them a sandwich and a warm drink if it helped.

Light and Life set the most store in saving their people. After all, as one churchgoer lamented to me, they were the last group to hear the good news. The appeal of the faith for Gypsies, then, is similar to its appeal to North Korean defectors, and increasing numbers of Latinos in the United States, among other groups: Pentecostalism affords marginalised communities a kind of spiritual citizenship — an acceptable way of being an outsider.

Yet Becky believes there’s much more going on than people turning to God at a time of crisis. “There’s rich Gypsies. There’s poor Gypsies. There’s people with healthy families and all the things that the world has to offer — but many still feel there’s a void, an emptiness in there,” she told me. “Coming to Jesus is just as powerful to them as it is to people who have hit rock bottom.”

Pentecostal conversion is a way of navigating both this life and the next — or, as a friend put it to me, it offers solution and absolution. Church is a place where Gypsies can belong, and a place where they can practice their culture away from the council signs hastily erected to stop people parking their caravans, the screaming tabloid headlines about your people’s “free-for-all”, the pub bans on your lot coming in for a drink. “God has made us more civilised than we were,” Bill once told me. “Gypsy culture used to be travelling, running to and fro. Now, once most of our people become saved, they stay put.”

Salvation is also a form of assimilation: this is what I’ve learned from spending time with the Light and Life Gypsies, and a host of other disparate peoples around the world. For all the raucous positivity of the Light and Life worshipers, I can’t help but feel that their practice has seen a retreat of the Gypsy culture to inside the church walls. With God’s help, they’re now “acceptable” in modern Britain.

My mumbled explanations would sometimes provoke a spark of recognition — “Oh, like one of those black gospel churches?” — to which I found myself responding that while there were perhaps some similarities, no, my church was not exactly like the famous James Brown scene from The Blues Brothers.

Thirty years on, I am not sure that Pentecostalism is much better understood than then, though the influence of the movement upon more traditional Christianity is now much more obvious and widespread both in the UK and beyond. The Pentecostal denominations (the first of which were founded in the early years of the 20th century) now account for around 300 million Christians worldwide, the single largest grouping within Protestant Christianity.

If we include the Charismatic Movement (members of mainstream denominations such as the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches who are influenced by Pentecostal theology and spirituality), and the second generation of churches who left the established churches in the 1970s and 1980s to form what became known as the ‘new churches’, then that figure probably more than doubles.

That’s around 650 million worshippers.  So what is its appeal?

The vast majority of Pentecostals are entirely mainstream in their core theology and believe pretty much the same as any other orthodox Christian worldwide about the nature of God. It is what they add to the mix that is distinctive. Pentecostals believe that the Holy Spirit empowers every aspect of their lives and that he may give them miraculous abilities or ‘charismatic gifts’ (hence the use of the word ‘Charismatic’ as another description of this Christian tradition).

These gifts might include the ability to heal the sick through God’s power by praying for them; ‘prophecy’ or the capacity to speak out specific new messages or promises from God; the ‘gift of tongues’ which enables them to speak new languages ecstatically under the Spirit’s power that they have never learned; or the skill to ‘interpret’ or translate the ‘messages in tongues’ that others have spoken.

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Pentecostals would say supernatural gifts such as these have been present throughout the history of the Church. And there is evidence of ecstatic prophecy in the life of the early church.

But it is also clear that after the era of the apostles, Pentecostal spirituality was not the norm. This was the case at least until, around the turn of the 20th century, perhaps partially in response to the emerging dominance of ‘liberal’ theology and the scientific challenge to the Bible posed by Darwinism, small clusters of Christians throughout the world began to gather together and pray for a renewal of what they saw as biblical Christianity and a restoration of the Charismatic gifts to the church.

Their prayers were answered in a series of great revivals through which many thousands were added to the Church.

Pentecostalism began in the USA, and beyond, as a religion for the poor, for the underprivileged and the otherwise unwelcomed. By and large it has retained that perspective. And that is one of the undeniable factors behind the movement’s huge global growth. While, in a sweeping generalisation, Charismatics have tended to reflect a slightly more prosperous, middle-class background, Pentecostal believers are particularly dominant in some of the world’s poorest regions. It has a message that clearly resonates with the poor.

Its adherents in South America and across Africa are drawn fundamentally by its energetic, uplifting tone and inspirational message. For the young single mum living in the barrios, the elderly widow in Kerala or the boy living on the streets of Nairobi, the religion teaches that they can overcome their circumstances to live lives of influence and significance; it shows them that God cares about them, and is able to meet their physical and emotional needs as well as the spiritual; it reveals that they have direct and immediate access to God through the Holy Spirit and don’t need to fight through class, gender and social barriers to be heard.

The joyful, exuberant music, congregational participation in prayer and song, experiencing the Holy Spirit while dancing and clapping certainly don’t hurt either. The worship is intended to bring about an experience of God’s presence and the gifts of the Spirit are often demonstrated, to dramatic effect.

It is an extrovert, engaging and community-focused faith which promotes conservative social mores. While at its worst it can become negative and judgmental, most frequently, right living is presented as a goal to aspire to and work towards.

True, the idea of ‘Prosperity theology’, that God will reward followers financially if they give generously to support the mission of the church, is taken to excess to detrimental effect in places. But where it is presented as an invitation to work hard to better oneself and improve one’s family circumstances, it has served as a useful tool to reshape individual and community priorities. It has helped bring families out of poverty, criminal behaviour and addiction. Pentecostalism worldwide is growing because it meets a very real and a very deep need.

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And it also has a willingness to speak out on important social issues. Some prominent church and denominational leaders have seen it as their responsibility to speak ‘prophetically’ to governments and presidents, commending them for decisions which reflect Pentecostal social and economic values and asking their congregations to support particular parties at the ballot box. They will criticise policies which are seen as promoting unethical behaviour, or restricting the churches’ freedoms in any way. Some have even stood for office, on anti-exploitation, anti-corruption tickets.

The story in Europe is somewhat different, though; except perhaps in Italy and in Scandinavia, Pentecostals in Continental Europe have struggled to make much headway, and while their numbers are growing in the face of broader decline in church attendance, the most substantial increase has come through immigration. Regretfully, the commitment to racial inclusion which was so markedly a feature of the early revivals and doubtless part of its initial appeal has not been universally sustained. Both in the US and the UK, Pentecostal denominations are divided upon broadly racial grounds.

The Windrush generation, reaching Britain in the 1950s, found a colder country, a colder spirituality and a colder welcome than they anticipated, and decided they needed to found their own churches to worship in the way they were accustomed to. The (black majority) New Testament Church of God, Church of God of Prophecy and Church of God in Christ, which together account for around 200,000 members in Britain, all have their origins in this period, while the white majority Elim, Assemblies of God and Apostolic churches comprise similar numbers of congregants and rather more individual churches, but trace their history back to the 1920s.

In the UK, however, it is the Charismatic Movement which has grown most rapidly, and more than matches the numbers of the Pentecostal denominations. A series of ‘new churches’ or ‘house churches’ grew out of the established denominations in the 1970s and 1980s, but many Charismatics stayed within the Church of England or Roman Catholic Church. Their influence has grown stronger in recent times with the appointment of one of their number, Justin Welby, as Archbishop of Canterbury and the rise to global prominence of the Alpha Course, which originated from the Charismatic Anglican Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, which has itself evolved under the ‘HTB’ brand into a significant network of large and growing churches.

All these churches, Pentecostal and Charismatic, reflect a distinctive spirituality: a passion for life, a contemporary approach to preaching and to sung worship in particular, which is often accompanied by a rock band rather than the organ. While there are those who would say that there is something ‘not very British’ about the energy and enthusiasm of Pentecostal spirituality, there are as many who find its directness and message of empowerment for life to be liberating and transformative. And the message is spread widely and enthusiastically.

Along with Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism emphasises the need for individual conversion, and expects congregants to share their faith. Most new converts come simply through being invited to church by their friends. In the UK, some of the growth has come from immigration, but the single biggest increase in Pentecostal numbers has come through the churches’ evangelistic activity among non-Christians and from those leaving quieter and arguably less engaging congregations. Don’t forget, these congregations have been known to fill Wembley stadium.

Can the church cope with such massive growth? All the signs suggest its influence will grow stronger in the global south, and while the most rapid growth of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the UK still seems to be coming from the black and minority ethnic community (whose churches are growing at, on average, around 15% a year), the style of worship is shaping the life and culture of more and more mainstream congregations here.

As social Christianity collapses and mainstream church attendance continues to decline, the proportion of churchgoers of Pentecostal persuasion steepens its rise and deepens its influence. This has already provoked some concern within the progressive wing of the Church of England. The conservative social and theological positioning of Pentecostalism is likely to lead to some measure of ecclesiastical and even sociopolitical conflict, as the committed biblicism of the Pentecostals encounters progressive attitudes in society at large.

But it is undeniable that there is a growing constituency out there seeking some security and stability amid life’s challenges. Pentecostalism has that to give and is, in this way, a premodern faith for a postmodern society.

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