This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pentecostalism reached the twenty first century through a series of individual hops rather than one single spread. The 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles seeded the movement's earliest wave, which crossed to South Africa through the Apostolic Faith Mission, gained lasting American institutional form with the 1914 founding of the Assemblies of God, and reached Brazil through Swedish missionary work that established the movement there.
By 2006, the Pew Research Center set out to measure what those separate hops had added up to across a century. Its finding was striking: at least a quarter of the world's roughly two billion Christians belonged to Pentecostal and related charismatic renewalist movements, one of the single most influential developments anywhere in twentieth century global Christianity. The movement's greatest growth by that point sat not in the American South where it had begun, but in Latin America, Africa and Asia, regions its early missionaries had carried it toward rather than regions it had stayed confined within.
What the aggregate 2006 measurement changed was visibility for a pattern already well under way: a revival that started in one Los Angeles building had, within a century, become a quarter of world Christianity, its center of growth having moved almost entirely away from its own place of origin.