The Pentecostal and charismatic movements

Asking for Pentecost again

Around 1900 many earnest Christians were asking whether the power that fell on the disciples at Pentecost, with its signs, belonged only to the apostles' day or was promised to the church now. The holiness movement of nineteenth-century America had prepared the ground. Carrying on John Wesley's teaching of Christian perfection (Wesley and the Methodist movement), its preachers urged believers to seek a ‘second blessing’ after conversion that would cleanse the heart, and many called it the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929), a holiness preacher, opened Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, in the autumn of 1900, where his students, searching Acts for the sign of Spirit baptism, concluded that tongues accompanied the Spirit's coming. On 1 January 1901, as the story is usually told, a student named Agnes Ozman began to speak in tongues when hands were laid on her, and others soon followed. Parham taught that tongues are the initial evidence of Spirit baptism. He took them to be real foreign languages for missionaries to preach in, a view later Pentecostals mostly let go.

Azusa Street

William J. Seymour (1870–1922), born in Louisiana to parents who had been enslaved, was a holiness preacher who had sat under Parham in Houston, listening, it is said, from the hallway because of segregation. Early in 1906 he was invited to a small holiness church in Los Angeles, which shut its doors on him when he taught that tongues are the evidence of Spirit baptism. He carried on with prayer meetings in a Black family's home. In April people there began to speak in tongues, crowds came, and the meeting moved to 312 Azusa Street, a run-down former church lately used as a warehouse and stable.

For about three years meetings went on there almost daily, and many told of tongues, healings and conversions. In an age when law and custom kept the races apart, Black, white, Latino and Asian believers worshipped together under a Black pastor, and women preached. They believed they were seeing the promise of Joel come true: "I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy" (Acts 2:17).

From September 1906 the mission's own paper, The Apostolic Faith, carried to readers around the world the news that Pentecost had come The Azusa Street Mission, The Apostolic Faith. It taught three works of grace: justification, sanctification, and the baptism with the Spirit as power upon the sanctified life, witnessed by tongues. Parham, visiting that autumn, denounced the worship and the mingling of the races, and the two men parted. Many historians believe that Seymour came to stress love, more than tongues, as the true sign of the Spirit's baptism. Within a few years the fire died down, and the Pentecostal churches, sadly, divided largely along racial lines.

Power to be witnesses

Pentecostals turned first to Acts 2:

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like a mighty rushing wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw tongues like flames of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Acts 2:1-4

Peter ended his sermon that day: "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This promise belongs to you and your children and to all who are far off" (Acts 2:38-39). Pentecostals heard a promise for every generation, not for the apostles alone. They noticed that the believers in Samaria received the Spirit after their baptism (Acts 8:15-17), and that at Cornelius's house and at Ephesus the Spirit's coming was marked by tongues (Acts 10:44-46; Acts 19:6).

In 1914 Pentecostal ministers meeting at Hot Springs, Arkansas, formed the Assemblies of God, which in 1916 adopted a Statement of Fundamental Truths Assemblies of God, Statement of Fundamental Truths. Every believer, it teaches, should seek the baptism in the Spirit that the Father promised, the ordinary experience of the early church. Distinct from the new birth and coming after it, it brings power for life and service and the gifts of the Spirit, and its first outward sign is speaking in tongues, as in Acts 2:4. It also confesses the Trinity plainly, teaches that divine healing is provided for in Christ's atonement, and awaits the Lord's return.

This is not a second salvation. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone; Spirit baptism clothes those already saved with power to witness, as Jesus promised: "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be My witnesses" (Acts 1:8). In 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 Pentecostals read of healing, miracles, prophecy, tongues and interpretation, all "the work of one and the same Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:11), and they found no word that these gifts would be withdrawn before Christ comes. The doctrine course teaches these subjects in Who the Holy Spirit is and Gifts of the Spirit.

To the ends of the earth, and into the churches

Even before the fire at Azusa died down, people touched by it were at work in Africa, Asia and Europe, and many scholars, noting revivals with tongues about the same time in India and Chile, conclude that Pentecostalism had more than one birthplace. Across Latin America, Africa and Asia the movement grew fastest among the poor. In Korea a tent church begun in Seoul in 1958, today the Yoido Full Gospel Church, grew within the Assemblies of God tradition into what is often counted among the world's largest congregations (The Korean church in the twentieth century). Counts depend on whom one includes, but many scholars estimate more than half a billion Pentecostal and charismatic Christians.

In 1960 the experience entered the older churches. Dennis Bennett (1917–1991), an Episcopal rector in Van Nuys, California, told his congregation one Sunday in April that he had received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues. Amid the uproar he resigned and moved to a small Episcopal church in Seattle. The press took up the story, and Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians and others sought the same experience, mostly staying in their own churches and often not holding tongues to be the necessary evidence. In 1967 a retreat of students and teachers from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh began the Catholic charismatic renewal. The Second Vatican Council had already taught that the Spirit's gifts are to be welcomed gratefully, the extraordinary ones not sought rashly, and their reality weighed by the church's pastors Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 12.

Over the last thirty years the movement's centre of gravity has moved to the global South, and independent churches and networks have multiplied. The questions asked now, inside and outside it, include how to test prophecy and claims of healing, what to make of the prosperity message (that faith secures health and wealth), how to join fervent experience to sound theology, and what churches grown among the poor owe their societies.

Have the gifts ceased?

Evangelicals still answer this question in two ways. Cessationists hold that the sign gifts, such as prophecy, tongues and healing, ended with the apostolic age. B. B. Warfield of Princeton argued in Counterfeit Miracles (1918) that these gifts were the credentials of the apostles as God's authorised messengers, given chiefly through them, and so passed away with them once the church was built on "the foundation of the apostles and prophets" (Ephesians 2:20) Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles. Matthew Henry had read 1 Corinthians 12 the same way: "Spiritual gifts were extraordinary powers bestowed in the first ages, to convince unbelievers, and to spread the gospel" Matthew Henry.

On a baptism in the Spirit after conversion, with tongues as its evidence, many continuationists also part company with classical Pentecostals. They read "in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body" (1 Corinthians 12:13) of every believer at conversion, and take Paul's question "Do all speak in tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30) to mean that tongues cannot be every believer's sign. Wesley himself, from whom the holiness movement grew, wrote on Acts 2:38, "The gift of the Holy Ghost does not mean in this place the power of speaking with tongues" Wesley; he took it to mean the lasting fruit of faith, righteousness, peace and joy in the Spirit. Pentecostals reply that 1 Corinthians 12:30 speaks of the gift of tongues used in the assembly, which differs in purpose from tongues as the sign of Spirit baptism.

Continuationists, among them Pentecostals, charismatics and many other evangelicals, answer that Scripture nowhere says the gifts would end with the apostles: prophecy and tongues will cease when we see the Lord "face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12), at his return. Paul told the Corinthians, "do not forbid speaking in tongues. But everything must be done in a proper and orderly manner" (1 Corinthians 14:39-40), and the whole of 1 Corinthians 14 orders the gifts by interpretation, testing and the building up of the church.

Both sides confess that the Spirit gives new birth and makes believers holy, that he glorifies Christ, and that Scripture judges every experience. But each warns of a different danger. Continuationists point to "Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt" (1 Thessalonians 5:19-20) and fear a faith that expects nothing of God. Cessationists warn against claims of new revelation beside Scripture, excitement mistaken for the Spirit, blaming the sick who are not healed for their lack of faith, and the prosperity message, which many Pentecostals also reject. This lesson takes no side. Both can stand on the next words: "test all things. Hold fast to what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

The Pentecostal movement reminded the whole church that the Holy Spirit is not only an article of the creed but the living God at work today, and it showed the poor, women and people of many nations worshipping in one Spirit. Wesley saw in the tongues of Pentecost "an earnest that the whole world should in due time praise God in their various tongues" Wesley. To desire the gifts while remembering that love is "the most excellent way" (1 Corinthians 12:31) is the question and the gift this movement leaves to every church. On healing, see also Why doesn't God heal everyone?

Practice