LAUSR

Many scholars today see the Pentecostal–charismatic movement as moving in waves, thus adhering to Alan Anderson’s definition of “Pentecostalism(s)” as “churches with a family resemblance that emphasize the working of the Holy Spirit, sharing common experience of the Spirit and practice of spiritual gifts.” This article focuses upon the emerging and lesser known non-Western fourth wave, or neo-Pentecostals, that negotiate the universalizing or homogenizing influence of global Pentecostal liturgy within their own local or Indigenous cultural space. The theological underpinning for this exploration is the core Pentecostal belief that God’s Spirit is revealed within all cultures at all times. God leaves a witness in every context (as Paul declares in Acts 14:16–17), which is the precedent for God’s revelation through Indigenous cultural frames. More particularly, this article focuses on ways the Spirit is experienced in Ganggalah Church, an urban Aboriginal-led Pentecostal congregation in Australia, noting the postcolonial complexities in how worshipers conceive and construct their experience of the Spirit. This congregation will provide the case study for a distinctively Pentecostal use of the Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture, produced by the Lutheran World Federation in 1996, which identifies the four dynamics of Christian worship as transcultural, contextual, counter-cultural, and cross-cultural.