Originating from the United States, Pentecostalism (see Azusa Street Revival) has rapidly spread to other continents, giving birth to other churches, including the Assemblies of God. The great majority of those converted to Pentecostalism are (im)migrants, ethnic minorities, black people, Hispanic populations, and poor people in general. In this context, there is a close relation between Pentecostalism and the Gypsy people. Throughout its history, the Gypsies have always adapted themselves (without necessarily being converted) to the dominant religion of the country where they happen to settle. In Europe they took to Catholicism, the major confession.
Nevertheless, in 1945, in the North of France, the presence of Gypsies in the services of the Assembly of God was registered, and their religious enthusiasm was said to be remarkable. In 1950, a gypsy mother took her dying son to the pastor Clement Le Cossec asking him to save the boy. The miraculous cure of the young boy (believed to be due to God’s grace and the Holy Spirit) took place. The ‘miracle’ was widely publicized and led to a large number of gypsy conversions, thus giving birth to the Gypsy Evangelical Movement (GEM).
As a Pentecostal-protestant movement, the GEM depends in its ideological foundations on the authority of the Bible. It stresses the importance of the Holy Spirit; salvation as a gift of God; and the importance of evangelizing.
In 1968 Le Cossec founded the Gypsy Evangelical Mission as an independent body seperate from the Assemblies of God who refused to allow Gypsy pastors. The GEM started then forming its own gypsy pastors, who began to evangelize among their own community. Bible schools were started and his magazine Vie et Lumiere was launched.
From 1959, the Gypsy Evangelical Movement started to spread to other countries, mainly to Spain, where a large gypsy community is settled. The evangelization process in Spain started in 1963, and was led by a group of gypsies who had been converted in France. The expansion of the GEM in Spain is remarkable: in less than one decade, the number of converts amounted to 5,000. In 1969 the movement was given official recognition and became the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia. According to mo(Religious Movement)re recent data, this Church now has 900 pastors, and 31,000 members in Spain.
Due to the strong historical, cultural and family links among the gypsy communities in the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish Gypsy Evangelical movement began to enter Portugal towards the end of the 1960s. In 1974 the gypsy communities in Portugal formed an independent Church adopting then the name of Gypsy Evangelical Church of Philadelphia of Portugal. Today it has over fifty places of worship.
The reasons for this strong conversion process of the gypsies to Pentecostalism, not only in Europe but also in countries like Brazil or India, is very much linked to their situation of social, economic, and cultural deprivation. Pentecostal salvation also reinforces the social bounds and adapts itself to the ethnic and cultural specificities of minorities. Conversion to evangelical Christianity has minimized where the gypsies are concerned the most severe effects of marginalization.
Conversion to Pentecostalism has not, therfore, led to a loss of Gypsy identity. On the contrary, there seems to be a reinforcement of their ethnicity, a feeling of ethnic and cultural belonging in a group which wants to remain gypsy, while becoming evangelical.
