Established in 1991, the McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion has published close to eighty books. Although the series covers many topics beyond its borders, most of the works to date have centred on Canada and the result has been a rapid expansion and wide-ranging enrichment of Canadian religious history and historiography. Remarkably, Michael Wilkinson's edited collection, Canadian Pentecostalism: Transition and Transformation is the first book in this august series to focus specifically on pentecostalism, and it is likely the first produced by any university press in Canada. Have pentecostal studies finally come of age in Canada? Or does the appearance of this work simply mark a growing awareness of this major gap in the wider landscape of religious history north of the forty-ninth parallel?

There are no easy answers to either question in Canadian Pentecostalism, which pulls together contributions from scholars in Theological/Biblical Studies, Religious Studies, Sociology, and History. Encountering the influence of these disparate fields, their assumptions, and the deployment of different theoretical models is a jarring experience for the reader as the narratives shift disciplinary gears from chapter to chapter. No collection of essays can produce a single, consistent authorial voice, but more collaboration between authors would have certainly cut down on the duplication of material that seems to be repeated in chapter after chapter. On three separate occasions Harvey Cox is invoked, usually in reference to his well-documented shift from The Secular City (New York: MacMillan, 1966) to Fire from Heaven (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), as an introductory framework justifying the importance of studying pentecostalism (3, 123, 265). The Toronto Blessing also seems omnipresent, being the subject of one chapter and utilized in a variety of others (indeed the length of its entry in the index suggests that it is perhaps the third most important term in the book). Many chapters offer brief historical surveys of pentecostalism in Canada, which, if not always mirroring each other in content, certainly all turn to the same set of published church histories for material.

More than the question of voice and approach, this collection seems to embody an underlying tension between those scholars interested in placing pentecostalism within Canada and those tracing wider processes of globalization and “glocalization.” The historians seem to dominate the former category, with Bob Burkinshaw's exploration of Native pentecostalism on the West Coast and Bruce Guenther's analysis of Western Bible College notably standing apart in offering a sense of archival depth in their focused studies. However, by the time we reach Peter Beyer's concluding chapter, “Movements, Markets, and Social Contexts: Canadian Pentecostalism in Global Perspective,” the discussion of Canada is reduced to the question of “localizing” a global phenomenon, and Canada itself occupies less than half of the article. Wilkinson's own chapter on pentecostal migration does the best job of straddling this divide, connecting global networks to local practices that have been reshaped by cultural contact with immigrant communities. Too often, however, the connections between global and local seem to get lost somewhere between the high-level analyses of theory, social processes, institutionalization, and theologies and the underlying textures, experiences, and cultures of pentecostalism on the ground. Indeed, for a movement that once prided itself on a lack of ecclesiastical structure, it is remarkable how much this volume focuses on ecclesiastical organization and clergy. Even the sole chapter on women by Pamela M. S. Holmes concentrates on institutional debates regarding ministerial credentials.

Canadian Pentecostalism also points to a recurring problem for Canadian scholars in this field, namely the historiographical dominance of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC). Despite chapters on Anglican and Catholic Charismatics and Oneness Pentecostals, it is hard to escape the influence of the PAOC within this book or on our wider historical view. The PAOC archives, its back issues of the Pentecostal Testimony, and church histories produced by many affiliated with the denomination, form the bedrock of our understanding of the early roots of pentecostalism in Canada. The PAOC even provided a grant to support the publication of this book. As a historian who has used and benefitted from these materials in the past, the efforts of the PAOC are certainly to be applauded, but at the same time scholars need to be aware of how the very production of this archive has shaped a particular narrative understanding of pentecostalism's development in Canada.

Herein lies the crux of the problem in rushing to place Canadian pentecostalism within a global context before we actually understand the “place” of pentecostalism within Canada—historically, regionally, and culturally. This is an enthusiastic effort that certainly adds a great deal to our understanding of Canadian pentecostalism in “transition and transformation.” But let us hope that there is room in the McGill-Queen's series for more extensive cultural mappings of Canadian pentecostalism within the landscape of Canadian religious history.