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Go one level deeper into Pentecostal culture—beneath the worship services and leadership style—and you find a more important and pervasive way that the movement is "Pentecostalizing" world Christianity.

In the 1990s, as a new graduate student, I attended several meetings of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. Organizers set aside time during these conferences for worship and testimonies, and at one such gathering, attendees came to the microphone to describe what the Pentecostal experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit had meant to them.

Until that moment, I had been dutifully following scholarly debates about whether baptism in the Holy Spirit was primarily about holiness or power. But these testifying scholars described Spirit baptism in terms of something deeper than either one. Indeed, they all put their finger on one main effect: a new, joyous sense of communion with a loving God who counted every hair on their heads and watched over them every minute. The central moment of their Pentecostal experience had opened them to a deep well of living water from which everything else flowed; it had opened them to the personal, relational presence of the Living God.

A quick check of history books confirms the centrality of divine encounter for Pentecostals. William Seymour and his co-leaders repeatedly told the Azusa Street faithful that their experience with the Spirit was not about speaking in tongues. It was about God's presence through the crucified and risen Christ. Early 20th-century leader Robert Brown, echoing the testimonies of thousands of other Pentecostals, said: "To abide in him means one continual round of revelation, blessing, and power. Oh, the grandeur of it, not a passing pleasure, nor a transitory joy, but an abiding presence; not it, but him. Glory to his name!"

Though it may discomfit the religiously buttoned-down, the rationalists, and the nominal, the Pentecostal God deigns to meet with us and care for us in immediate, experiential ways. We speak to him in a language of love, saying "Abba, Father," and he responds in kind.

This encounter has always been the open secret of Pentecostal spirituality. The belief in God's real, experienced care and the passion for union with Christ—often likened to the thirst of the psalmist's deer for the stream—may turn out to be Pentecostalism's chief contributions to Christianity.

To some critics, such "divine love" seems mawkish or even self-indulgent. Though there is room for self-indulgence in Pentecostalism, its emphasis on encounter puts God, not humanity, at the center. In an encounter with God, the believer cannot help but bow and worship. Duke historian Grant Wacker calls this trait "submissiveness … a deep-seated awareness that humans do not create themselves and therefore owe their lives to another source."

A seminary colleague gave me one of the best one-word definitions of charismatic church culture I have ever heard: expectation. Charismatics believe and expect that God will do great things among them, just as he did in the Acts of the Apostles. "Do it again, Lord," they say. "As it was in the apostolic age, let it be now."

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9