International Journal of Pentecostal Missiology: Free, Peer-Reviewed, from Springfield
Pentecostal missiology has a peculiar problem: the movement that produced the largest missionary expansion of the twentieth century wrote comparatively little academic reflection about it, and much of what it did write sits in denominational archives rather than in journals.
The International Journal of Pentecostal Missiology exists against that. It is peer-reviewed, open access, free to read, and published by the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri. It has been running since 2013 and reached its tenth volume in 2024.
Why the address matters
Springfield is not a neutral location. It is the headquarters of the Assemblies of God in the United States, home of the Gospel Publishing House and of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, the movement’s principal archive. A journal published there has access to primary sources that outside researchers reach only with difficulty.
That shapes the content. Alongside contemporary missiological analysis, the journal carries historical work drawn from those holdings — studies of early Assemblies of God missionaries, of the women who went to the field, of practices that denominational memory had smoothed over.
What is in the archive
The tenth volume, published as an anniversary edition, is subtitled around exegesis, history and missiology, and the range of its articles shows the journal’s character: an exploration of word and deed in John, a study of 1 Timothy 3:16 as an early hymn, indigenous church multiplication in rural America, a missiological reading of carceral ministry, and a cultural and exegetical study of family obligation.
Two items deserve particular attention from anyone working on gender in pentecostal history. One studies the missionary wives of early twentieth-century Pentecostalism; another examines early Assemblies of God figures whose shoulders the later movement stood on. The historiography of Pentecostalism erased women systematically, and journals with archival access are where that erasure gets undone.
Where it sits beside the other journals here
The Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies, listed elsewhere on this site, reads the movement from Asia. Missionalia reads mission from southern Africa. This one reads mission from inside the North American classical pentecostal tradition, with the archive at hand.
For a Brazilian researcher the triangulation is the point: three centres, three sets of assumptions, and a Brazilian case that none of them describes. Reading all three is how you learn to see what your own context makes invisible.
Working method
- Download the full volumes, not single articles. Each is issued as a complete PDF, and reading a volume whole shows what the editors thought the field needed that year.
- Follow the archival footnotes. Articles drawing on the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center cite material that is itself partly digitised and reachable.
- Watch the confessional frame. This is an Assemblies of God seminary journal. That is a strength for primary access and a limit for scope, and both should be named when you cite it.
- Mind the rhythm. Publication is periodic rather than fixed, so gaps between volumes are normal and mean nothing about the journal’s health.
Open the journal
International Journal of Pentecostal MissiologyVolume 10 (2024), full PDF
