The Latter Rain Movement and the phenomenon of global return

History, as David Martin has noted, is volatile. Just when the world seems to be irrevocably secular, religion pushed off the world stage by the events of the 1960s, its comes bounding back again through another door. As some scholars were watching France for a lead in the way that moderization treated religion, the Middle East brought religion back to everybody else's attention. The flashpoints of the world seemed to be increasingly aligned along the frontiers of religious and cultural difference. This has led to a renewed concentration on the movement of ideas and cultural influences on a global scale. For both scholars of religion and for sociologists interested in global emergence, Pentecostalism has thus been a particularly important subject. The fact that Pentecostalism has proven to be inveterately fissiparous, mobile and adaptive raises the possibility that for the first time there is a form of Christianity which cannot be studied solely in the local, regional, and/or national frames. Indeed, the effect of the new scholarship is to suggest that perhaps Christianity was always part of a univeralist project, and that it needs to be studied as part of a process of worldwide reticulation, feedback and reinforcement. It is the latter which, in this chapter, will be called the phenomenon of 'global return'.