The Romani Pentecostal revival
A Pentecostal mission founded among French Manouches in the 1950s grows into a Romani-led evangelical movement across Europe and the Americas, transforming daily life in many communities.
- Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender and the Performance of Identity — Paloma Gay y Blasco, Berg (1999)
- I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies — Yaron Matras, Allen Lane (2014)
- The Gypsies — Angus Fraser, Blackwell (1992)
Most Roma long shared the religion of the country they lived in, Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim, often mixed with their own beliefs and pilgrimages such as the gathering at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in France each May. In 1952, in Brittany, the French Pentecostal pastor Clément Le Cossec began a mission among Manouche travellers that grew into the movement Vie et Lumière (“Life and Light”). Unusually, it trained Romani preachers, and it spread from caravan to caravan: to Spanish Gitanos, whose Iglesia Evangélica Filadelfia became one of the largest Protestant churches in Spain, and to Roma in Romania, the Balkans, Britain and the Americas. For many families, conversion changed habits, gender roles and ideas of purity, and gave Roma a public space of their own.
- Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender and the Performance of Identity — Paloma Gay y Blasco, Berg (1999)
- I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies — Yaron Matras, Allen Lane (2014)
- The Gypsies — Angus Fraser, Blackwell (1992)
Why it matters today
In Spain, France, Romania, Bulgaria and the UK, a large share of Roma now worship in Romani Pentecostal churches, often led by Romani pastors and held in Romani language. Converts often speak of giving up drinking, gambling and feuds, and the churches have become a new form of community and leadership, sometimes alongside, sometimes in tension with, older customs.