ABSTRACT
Pentecostalism belongs to the modern era of global communication, though it reaches back through Methodist traditions of holiness to Pietist forms of devotion that initially arose in territorial churches before also operating outside them in ‘free churches’ (Stephens 2008). It represents the most recent phase of those missionary traditions that first emerged over three centuries ago in an earlier phase of globalisation in Germany and England, and then in North America. Effectively, it is the alternative mode of missionary action to the one inaugurated by mainstream religious bodies at the major Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910.
