The Manila Healing Revival and the First Pentecostal Defections in the Methodist Church in the Philippines
[Article]
Luther Jeremiah Oconer
Leiden
Brill
This article examines the arrival of the worldwide healing revival movement in Manila in the mid-1950s and its role in the first Pentecostal defections in the Methodist Church in the Philippines. It seeks to answer why, despite the presence of other Protestant denominations in Manila at that time, Philippine Methodism became a fertile seedbed for divine healing revivalism, I argue that Methodists' conspicuous participation in the healing revivals was part of a larger Holiness revival impulse that had pervaded their denomination decades earlier, when pneumatological language or, most specifically, emphasis on the baptism of the Holy Spirit was the central motif. Thus, the turn of Filipino Methodist schismatics to divine healing and eventually Pentecostalism did not emerge in a vacuum, but can be seen as a trajectory reminiscent of the birth of the modern Pentecostal Movement. This article examines the arrival of the worldwide healing revival movement in Manila in the mid-1950s and its role in the first Pentecostal defections in the Methodist Church in the Philippines. It seeks to answer why, despite the presence of other Protestant denominations in Manila at that time, Philippine Methodism became a fertile seedbed for divine healing revivalism, I argue that Methodists' conspicuous participation in the healing revivals was part of a larger Holiness revival impulse that had pervaded their denomination decades earlier, when pneumatological language or, most specifically, emphasis on the baptism of the Holy Spirit was the central motif. Thus, the turn of Filipino Methodist schismatics to divine healing and eventually Pentecostalism did not emerge in a vacuum, but can be seen as a trajectory reminiscent of the birth of the modern Pentecostal Movement.