Member
2.4 billion followers
2.38 billion worldwide 31.6% global
2.38 billion worldwide 31.6% global
According to the 2020 edition of The World Christian Encyclopedia, there are 644 million Pentecostals and Charismatics worldwide. This includes all members of Pentecostalism's 19,300 denominations and fellowships. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians together make up about 27% of all Christians and more than 8% of the world's total population.
Pentecostalism is a form of Christianity that emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit and the direct experience of the presence of God by the believer. Pentecostals believe that faith must be powerfully experiential, and not something found merely through ritual or thinking. The movement originally attracted mostly lower classes in the global South, but there was a new appeal to the middle classes.
Middle-class congregations tend to have fewer members.
Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. The movement's growth has been particularly dramatic since the era of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, Pentecostals now represent 12%, or about 107 million, of Africa's population of nearly 890 million people.
In Christian theology, baptism of blood (Latin: baptismus sanguinis) or baptism by blood, also called martyred baptism, is a doctrine that holds that a Christian can attain through martyrdom the grace of justification normally attained through baptism by water, without needing to receive baptism by water.
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