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Revd Professor William K Kay

BA MA MEd PhD DD
The Revd Professor William K Kay, Honorary Fellow of The Institute of Pentecostal Theology at Regents Theological College.

While William K Kay studied at the University of Oxford (Trinity College) he attended a Billy Graham crusade and walked to the front to commit his life to Christ. Six months later he was baptised in the Spirit and spoke with tongues. He became a school teacher within the maintained system in the UK, eventually becoming Head of Religious Education at a large Comprehensive School. Subsequently he taught for 10 years full-time at the Assemblies of God Bible School at Mattersey before moving to the University of Wales as a research fellow. Later he became a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College, London, and was the founding Director of the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at the University of Bangor. He has published widely on religious education, often using empirical methods to verify or challenge contemporary orthodoxies. Similarly, he has used empirical methods in conjunction with the study of Pentecostalism though he also wrote Pentecostal history. He edited The Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association for more than 10 years and has published widely on Pentecostalism including Pentecostals in Britain (Paternoster, 2000) and Apostolic Networks in Britain (Paternoster, 2007). Pentecostalism, a very short introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) gives an overview of global Pentecostalism while George Jeffreys: Pentecostal apostle and revivalist (CPT Press, 2017), provides the first in-depth biography of the founder of the Elim Pentecostal Church. Kay was funded by a Templeton grant to study Pentecostal-style church growth in South-east Asia including Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and taught for three months at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Pentecostal Studies in 2019.