Globalisation and “British” Neo-charismatic Christianity: The Transnational Community of the Newfrontiers Network of Churches, 1979–2011

This chapter has at its core one central argument; that British Christianity can only be fully understood through a global lens, especially in the period under consideration here. The compression and growing interconnectedness of the world through globalisation is by no means unique to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but the decades that straddled the turn of the millennium saw an intensification of this process that has been as formative for religion as for any other sphere of life. Newfrontiers, the neo-charismatic network of churches that is the subject of this essay, is a case in point. Emerging as a loose network of congregations in the late 1970s that spanned the unlikely locales of East and West Sussex, Kent, the southeastern boroughs of London, Mumbai, rural Telangana state, and Hyderabad, India, its leaders were aware that globalisation was shaping their ministry. In late 1983, the British men who comprised the “apostolic team” around which the network was coalescing reflected that they were operating “in days when motorways, jets, cassettes and telephones have made the world shrink.” Divine guidance was needed, they wrote, to interpret the Bible and especially the New Testament in “a world of extraordinary swiftness of communication.” Indeed, the compression and interconnectedness of the world would shape their teachings and trajectory more than they could have realised. As Newfrontiers reached across borders to an ever-growing number of Christians, the organisation of the network, its expansionist trajectory, and the approach of its British churches to social engagement would all evolve as a result.