Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies: Reading the Movement from Outside the North Atlantic

The Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal published since 1998 by the faculty of the Asia Pacific Theological Seminary in Baguio City, in the Philippines. It appears twice each year, in February and August, and has now passed its twenty-eighth volume — making it one of the longest-running journals of its kind produced anywhere in the Majority World.

Its entire archive is freely available. For a Brazilian reader that combination (peer review, longevity, and no paywall), is rare enough to deserve attention on its own. But there is a stronger reason to read it, and it has to do with a habit in our own bibliographies.

What Is the Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies?

There is an uncomfortable fact behind most reading lists in Pentecostal studies, including the ones we produce in Brazil: we describe a global movement using almost exclusively North American sources. We speak of a Christianity that has grown fastest in the Global South, and we read about it in books written in the Global North.

The AJPS is one of the most direct correctives available. It is not a journal about Asian Pentecostalism written from outside; it is the journal in which Asian Pentecostal scholars publish their own work, in their own categories, addressing the questions their own churches actually face.

A Legacy of Over a Quarter Century

The journal was launched in 1998 by Wonsuk Ma, then Academic Dean of the seminary, together with William W. Menzies, its Chancellor. Since June 2012 the editor has been Dr. Dave Johnson. It carries ISSN 0118-8534 and is indexed in the standard theological databases.

The name Menzies should stop the Brazilian reader for a moment, because it appears at three separate points of our own bibliography — and the connection is worth drawing out.

A Connection Worth Noticing

William W. Menzies (1931–2011) was not merely a co-founder of this journal. He was one of the founders of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, alongside Vinson Synan and Horace Ward, the same society already presented elsewhere on this site. He served as President of the Asia Pacific Theological Seminary from 1989 to 1996, and as its Chancellor until his death.

He was also the father of Robert P. Menzies, whose Empowered for Witness is available in Portuguese as Empoderados para Testemunhar: o Espírito em Lucas-Atos, and whose work stands at the center of the debate over Lukan pneumatology and the normativity of narrative.

The reader who arrives here from the page on the Society for Pentecostal Studies is therefore not changing subjects. He is following a single thread: from the founding of Pentecostal scholarship in the United States, through Asia, to a book he can read in his own language.

Featured Authors and Scholarly Voices

The editorial board and the roll of contributors include names that any serious student of global Pentecostalism will already know:

• Wonsuk Ma: founding editor, author and editor of thirteen books, working on contextual theology and Pentecostal mission; his Toward an Asian Pentecostal Theology remains a point of departure for the field
• Simon Chan (Trinity Theological College, Singapore): one of the most respected systematicians in the movement, known especially for work on liturgical tradition and spiritual formation
• Julie C. Ma: long-serving book review editor, and author of studies on Korean Pentecostal spirituality, including a case study of Jashil Choi
• Hwa Yung: whose Endued with Power: The Pentecostal-Charismatic Renewal and the Asian Church in the Twenty-First Century is among the journal’s most cited essays
• Amos Yong, a recurring conversation partner throughout the journal’s theological discussions

Representative Content: A Snapshot of Recent Publication

Volume 28 (2025) gives a fair sense of the range. The February issue gathered essays under the heading Threads of Pentecostal Thought in Asia; the August issue included work on Chinese Christianity and its relation to the Communist Party. Recent volumes have also treated the ecumenical and inter-religious engagement of Asian Pentecostals and Charismatics.

Note the character of those questions. Pentecostal theology in dialogue with Buddhism and with folk religion; the relationship between the Spirit and ancestor veneration; churches under state restriction; conversion in societies where Christianity is a small and sometimes suspect minority. These are not our questions, and that is exactly their value. They force a theologian to distinguish what in his pneumatology is Scripture and what is inherited culture, which may be the most useful exercise available to any of us.

The AJPS and the Question of Pentecostal Origins

There is one more reason this journal belongs on a Brazilian Pentecostal blog, and it is historiographical.

The narrative most of us inherited makes the 1906 Azusa Street revival the single origin of the movement, from which everything else radiated outward. That account has been under sustained revision for decades, and Asia is among the principal reasons why: the revival at Pandita Ramabai‘s Mukti Mission, in Kedgaon, India, displayed Pentecostal phenomena in 1905 (a year before Azusa), under the leadership of an Indian woman. Korea followed in 1907; Chile in 1909.

Ademais, our own case argues against the diffusionist reading. The Congregação Cristã and the Assembleia de Deus emerged in 1910 and 1911 among immigrants and through ruptures with local Baptist congregations, not as branches of an organized North American mission. A Brazilian who takes his own history seriously has every reason to take polycentric origins seriously, and the AJPS is where much of that scholarship is produced by the people it concerns.

A Heartfelt Recommendation: Visit the Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies

The complete archive, volume by volume and article by article, is published by APTS Press at aptspress.org. A mirrored archive with tables of contents is also maintained at biblicalstudies.org.uk, covering volumes 1 through the present.

No subscription, no institutional login, no registration: twenty-eight volumes of peer-reviewed Pentecostal scholarship, produced outside the axis that has long dominated our bibliographies.

If our theology is to be genuinely global (and Pentecostal theology, of all traditions, has the least excuse not to be), then reading the Majority World in its own voice is not an act of curiosity. It is a matter of method.