Introduction: Australian charismatic movements as a space of flows

This introduction argues that Australia has made and still makes important contributions to the ways in which charismatic Christianities have developed worldwide. However, there has been little work done on the critical role Australians have played in the rise of healing, prophetic and experiential forms of Christianity, many of which have been propelled out of this first post-Christian country. Here, we explain how this book aims to fill a critical gap in two important scholarly literatures. The first is the Australian literature on religion, in which the absence of the charismatic and Pentecostal element tends to reinforce now widely debunked notions of Australia as a sort of Benthamite utilitarian paradise, stripped of the religious tendencies of old Europe. The second is the emerging transnational literature on PCMs (Pentecostal and Charismatic movements), which has (in the application of the work of Castells, Anderson and others) moved beyond national frameworks into more sophisticated local modelling of emergent religious revitalisations.