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Over the last two or three generations, a third major force has sprung up within Christianity. The Catholic and Orthodox have traditionally formed one strand of the Christian rope, with their stress on church and sacrament. Protestants have been a second strand, highlighting personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Now the Pentecostals, though originating from within Protestantism, have come to represent a third strand. Their emphasis is that we all need a liberating personal experience of the Holy Spirit. The name 'Pentecostal' refers to the apostles' experience on the Day of Pentecost, when they began to 'speak in other tongues' in what some call a 'baptism of the Holy Spirit'.

A 1982 survey put the number of Pentecostals worldwide at around 51 million - the largest distinct category of Protestants. Add to this around 11 million Protestants and Roman Catholics who follow Pentecostal practices (see Worldwide Renewal), plus the African Independent Churches (see An African Way} - most of which are Pentecostal in style - then the figure probably exceeds the 100 million mark; by the year 2000 their numbers may well top 200 million. In Christian terms, the twentieth century could certainly be called 'the Pentecostal Century': from nil to 200 million in 100 years is prodigious growth by any standards!

But how did it all begin?

The traditional starting-point of the Pentecostal movement was as the clock struck twelve on 31 December 1900 - the last seconds of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. The setting was Bethel Bible College in Topeka, a small town in Kansas, USA. Towards the end of 1900 the college principal, a Methodist called Charles Parham, asked his students to find out the biblical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Just after Christmas he went to Kansas City for three days of meetings and returned on 31 December to find the college positively electric with excitement.

The students had come to the unanimous conclusion that the answer was 'speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance'. Since none of them spoke in tongues they had to do something about it, so that very night they prayed for the baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. At midnight a female student, Agnes Ozman, asked Charles Parham to lay hands on her. As he did so she began to speak in tongues. The Pentecostal Century had begun.

The effect of these events in Topeka was minimal at the time. By 1906 barely 1,000 people in the entire United States had received this experience. Of course, there are records of others speaking in tongues before 1900. But the significance of Topeka was that baptism in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues were linked together for the first time.

But in 1906 in an old Methodist church at 312 Azusa Street in a poor area of Los Angeles, the Pentecostal movement burst into prominence. The catalyst for the Azusa Street revival was the outbreak of the Welsh Revival in 1904, and the man God chose to lead the Los Angeles revival was a black minister called W. T. Seymour. When he was thrown out of another church in Los Angeles for his Pentecostal beliefs, he moved to the old building in Azusa Street. It was here that a 'weird sect' became an international movement which sixty years later was to penetrate deeply into the Roman Catholic and other mainstream churches and transform millions of their members.

An eye-witness account of the events in Los Angeles is provided by the diary ofa man called Frank Bartleman. The revival lasted for about three years. During that period people came from all over the world to witness what was going on. Meetings at Azusa Street went on all night. Many thousands received their 'Pentecostal experience' and returned to their own cities and countries to share what had happened to them.

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