On a foggy evening in April 1906, a handful of black saints gathered in a small house in Los Angeles to seek the baptism in the Holy Ghost. Before the evening was over, they were singing and shouting in strange languages. Several days later the group moved to an abandoned warehouse on Azusa Street in a run-down section of the city. Soon they were discovered by a Los Angeles Times reporter. The “night is made hideous … by the howlings of the worshippers,” he wrote. “The devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement.”

From these inauspicious beginnings Pentecostalism has mushroomed into the largest Christian movement in the twentieth century. No one knows how big it really is, but the statistics are staggering. David B. Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia lists more than 100 million adherents worldwide. The three largest Protestant congregations in the world are Pentecostal, including Paul Cho’s Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, Korea, which boasts 500,000 weekly attenders, 370,000 members, and 50,000 neighborhood prayer cells. A 1979 Gallup poll revealed that in the United States alone, 19 percent—or 29 million—adult Americans considered themselves “Pentecostal or charismatic Christians.” Of these, 5 million claimed to have experienced the hallmark of the Pentecostal tradition, speaking in “unknown tongues,” technically called glossolalia.

In this country, one-third of those who identify themselves as Pentecostal belong to one of the 300 or so historically Pentecostal denominations. Most are quite small, yet the two largest, the Church of God in Christ and the Assemblies of God, claim 3.7 and 2.1 million constituents respectively. The validity of the former figure has been disputed. But there can be little doubt that the Assemblies of God, which numbers an additional 14 million followers in overseas affiliates, ranks among the strong-gest, fastest-growing, and proportionately wealthiest denominations in the world.

Further, seven of the top ten TV preachers are Pentecostals. As a group, they reach a daily viewing audience of 13 million and garner $2 billion a year. Heritage USA, the 2,300-acre retirement and amusement complex outside Charlotte, North Carolina, attracts 6 million visitors annually and advertises itself as the third most-popular theme park in the nation. When Jimmy Swaggart Bible College opened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1984, 18 thousand students applied for 400 places.

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Respectability seems to have grown with numbers. David Edwin Harrell, an eminent historian of American religion at the University of Alabama, recently ranked Oral Roberts with Billy Graham as one of the two most influential religious leaders of the twentieth century. And when Pentecostal spokesman David J. DuPlessis died in February 1987, he clearly commanded a degree of esteem among world ecumenical leaders that would have been inconceivable a generation earlier.

What Is Pentecostalism?

Immensity breeds confusion. Contemporary Pentecostalism is so vast and sprawling it is sometimes difficult for outsiders to know exactly what the creature is. Like the beasts in Noah’s ark, Pentecostals come in a bewildering variety. Protestant, Catholic, Reformed, Wesleyan, Trinitarian, Unitarian, mainline, sectarian, white, black, Hispanic, nouveau riche, working class—the list of adjectives that describe one subgroup or another could be extended almost indefinitely. Perhaps more than any other segment of Christendom, the boundaries of the movement seem hopelessly tangled in a confusing maze of crisscrossing beliefs and practices.

There is, however, at least one conviction that all Pentecostals share, virtually by definition. Conversion to Christ must be followed by another life-transforming event known as baptism or filling by the Holy Spirit. Exactly how this experience is manifested in the life of the believer is a subject of endless dispute. In general, the older or “classical” Pentecostal groups insist that all Christians will speak in unknown tongues at the moment of baptism. They call this the sign or evidence of baptism, and believe that it always takes place when a person has been filled by the Spirit. Classical Pentecostals also maintain that a Spirit-filled person normally will manifest one or more of the nine gifts of the Spirit described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14. These include the gift of tongues, which may be used more or less at will for private or public prayer (as distinguished from the sign of tongues that accompanies the baptism in the Holy Spirit).

There are exceptions and differing emphases among Pentecostals even on these matters. Black Pentecostals are distinguished more by their music than by speaking in tongues, and Roman Catholic and some Protestant bodies in South America and Europe argue that tongues is one of many possible manifestations of the Spirit’s presence. Even so, Pentecostals in all denominations and in all parts of the world agree that baptism in the Holy Spirit ought to be the bare beginning of a triumphant Christian life. And in that life the supernatural power of the Spirit functions not as a deluxe edition of Christianity, reserved only for a few, but as part of God’s plan for all of his people.

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It should be noted that this description of Pentecostal ism focuses upon the beliefs that distinguish these from other evangelical Christians. The point here is that the movement is better described by its beliefs than by its practices. Contrary to stereotype, Pentecostals are deadly serious about correct doctrine. They habitually define themselves in doctrinal terms, and some of the deepest wounds they have inflicted upon themselves have come from brawls over technicalities of belief.

Nonetheless, a purely doctrinal definition is too thin. For many years Pentecostalism was a total style of life, a way of seeing and feeling and experiencing reality. The driving force was, as Perry Miller said of the Puritans, not in its beliefs but behind them, in the spirituality that sparked the movement and the certitude that sustained it.

Roots

Historians commonly trace the movement’s origins to the social and cultural crises of the late nineteenth century. As the stable structures of small-town society gave way and as mainline Protestantism grew soft and fat, the argument runs, Pentecostalism emerged as a plain-folks religion where simple virtues were practiced and the old-fashioned gospel preached. There is merit in this view, for it is undeniable that the movement initially flourished in regions suffering severe disruption of traditional ways. Nonetheless, the forces that gave birth to Pentecostalism were broader and deeper than the social and cultural shock waves of the 1890s.

To a great extent the movement grew from the confluence of five distinct theological currents that had been churning within the holiness and higher-life movements in Britain and North America for several decades. To begin with, Pentecostalism drew upon the Wesleyan idea of sanctification as it was hammered out in the Methodist holiness tradition. John Wesley had taught that conversion, or the New Birth, was the beginning of a lifelong process of moral perfection. Even so, corrupt desires persisted. This “inbred sin” had to be eradicated in a definable second moment of grace, or “second blessing,” in which the stranglehold of sin was decisively broken. “Be of sin the double cure,” it was phrased in a hymn long cherished by Methodists, “Save from wrath and make me pure.”

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Pentecostalism also drew upon a closely related tradition that was rooted in the teachings of evangelist Charles G. Finney and other Presbyterian and Congregationalist writers. These higher-life advocates, as they were known, similarly emphasized the importance of a life-transforming experience after conversion. However, they understood it not as a second moment of grace that eradicated sinful desires, but as an enduement of power that equipped the believer for witness and service. By the end of the nineteenth century, this second crisis experience in the spiritual life of the believer generally came to be called, in both the holiness and higher-life traditions, the baptism in (or of) the Holy Spirit.

The third and fourth streams that led to Pentecostalism were dispensational premillennialism and a new theology of divine healing. The former entailed the idea of an imminent secret rapture of the saints, immediately followed by seven years of great tribulation, the second coming of the Lord, and the millennium. It stemmed from the teachings of the Plymouth Brethren, and it was articulated by well-known preachers such as Reuben Archer Torrey.

The new theology of divine healing departed from historic Christian doctrine (which had enjoined elders to anoint and pray for the sick) by insisting that Christ’s atonement provided healing for the body just as it provided healing for the soul. This idea was popularized especially by A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and by independent divine healers such as John Alexander Dowie and Maria B. Woodworth-Etter.

The fifth, and probably the most important, current that influenced Pentecostalism was a great longing for restoration of the power and miracles of the New Testament church. Many expected that the “former rain,” the signs and wonders described in Acts, soon would be complemented by the “latter rain,” a final outpouring of the Holy Spirit’s power at the close of history. The origins of this influence are difficult to pin down, but nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism was peppered with restorationist ideas that strongly affected other indigenous groups such as the Churches of Christ and the Latter-day Saints.

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Denominations Formed

As the century drew to a close, these various notions collided, broke apart, and reassembled in unpredictable ways. But by 1900, many who sought a deeper Christian experience in one tradition or another became persuaded that the growing hunger for the baptism in the Holy Spirit was a token of the Lord’s imminent return. At the same time, the astonishing growth of divine-healing experiences in the 1880s and 1890s stirred expectations that other New Testament miracles soon would be restored.

And then there was the revival setting. In the “fire-baptized holiness” meetings of the late 1890s, one leader remembered, the “people screamed until you could hear them for three miles on a clear night, and until the blood vessels stood out like whip cords.” A newspaper reporter who visited Maria Wood-worth-Etter’s meetings wrote that one could not “imagine the confusion.” Another reporter judged that her services sounded like the “female ward of an insane asylum.” In contexts of this sort it was only a matter of time until some believers began to look for proof—palpable proof—that they truly had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and thus were ready for the Lord’s return.

No one knows when speaking in tongues first erupted. There is considerable disagreement among scholars about whether it was or was not a regular feature within holiness and higher-life circles (although there is no question that it was widely practiced among the Latter-day Saints). In any event, the distinctive claim of modern Pentecostalism—that the baptism in the Holy Spirit always is signified by unknown tongues—can be traced to a revival in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901. In that stirring, an itinerant healer named Charles Fox Parham taught that in Acts, tongues accompanied all instances of baptism in the Holy Spirit, either explicitly or implicitly, and therefore that pattern should be normative for Christians today. In 1905 Parham migrated to Houston, where he passed the torch to William J. Seymour, a black evangelist associated with a holiness and restorationist band called the Evening Light Saints. Seymour, in turn, carried the message to Los Angeles, where his preaching sparked the now legendary Azusa Street revival the following spring.

Between 1906 and 1911, several small but thriving Wesleyan sects in the Southeast were drawn into Pentecostalism through the influence of persons who had visited the Azusa Street Mission. These included, among others, the predominantly black Church of God in Christ, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), and the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Over the years these Wesleyan-based groups have remained strongest in the Southeast.

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After a slow start, the Pentecostal message caught fire among Reformed (that is, non-Wesleyan) Christians in the central states. In 1914 several thousand independent believers in the lower Midwest joined with converts in the Christian and Missionary Alliance in the upper Midwest to form the Assemblies of God. Two years later, a schism in that denomination over the nature of the Trinity prompted the formation of several Unitarian or “Oneness” groups. The largest of them are the United Pentecostal Church and the largely black Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. Aimee Semple McPherson also launched her ministry in the Assemblies of God, but she soon broke away to establish her own following in Los Angeles, incorporated in 1927 as the Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Traditionally, these groups have been strongest in the south-central states and on the West Coast.

The Charismatic Movement

One of the most remarkable and least predictable religious developments in the past generation has been the penetration of speaking in tongues and other Pentecostal distinctives into some of the mainstream Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic church. While classical Pentecostals remain clustered in the working and lower middle classes, there are no appreciable social or demographic differences between these newer “charismatic Christians,” as they usually call themselves, and the general population.

The origin of the charismatic movement is commonly traced to the ministry of Dennis Bennett, rector of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, who received the Pentecostal experience in 1959. From this nucleus it rapidly spread to other denominations, including the Roman Catholic church. Paradoxically, perhaps, the movement showed greatest success among “high church” bodies such as Catholic, Episcopalian, and Lutheran, and least among “low church” bodies such as Southern Baptist and Nazarene.

By the mid-1960s, charismatic prayer cells were dotting the nation’s campuses as well. Here, too, the movement seems to have grown most luxuriantly in the least likely places, first taking root in the prestigious colleges and seminaries of the Northeast, and in Catholic universities such as Duquesne, Fordham, and Notre Dame.

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Whether the charismatic movement stemmed from the soil of classical Pentecostalism or whether it represented an indigenous development within the mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions is debatable. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that groups such as the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship provided a bridge linking the older and newer forms of Pentecostal piety. Founded in Los Angeles in 1951 by a wealthy dairyman named Demos Shakarian, the fellowship’s nondenominational monthly meetings gave laypersons and ministers an opportunity for independent prayer and testimony. This arrangement proved attractive to believers who had received the Pentecostal experience yet wished to remain loyal to their own churches. By 1980, the fellowship posted 2,300 chapters in 27 countries. Mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics constituted the majority of its membership.

Recent Trends

Today the Pentecostal movement is more diverse than ever. Deep theological and cultural differences separate the newer charismatic from the older classical groups. And within the latter, the fractures are just as deep. The rift between Wesleyan bodies (such as the Pentecostal Holiness Church) and the Reformed bodies (such as the Assemblies of God) began to heal with the formation of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America in 1948 and the scholarly Society for Pentecostal Studies in 1970. But other rifts, such as that between the Trinitarian majority and the large Unitarian minority, persist. Each warily eyes the other with the suspicion that it is sub-Christian at best.

Yet the most intractable breaches are sociological and cultural rather than theological. Black and white Pentecostals are still mostly segregated. Fiercely independent outposts in skid-row missions and Appalachian hollows contrast with opulent suburban churches and, of course, even more opulent parachurch ministries. Since the 1950s, countless rank-and-file believers have strayed into other pastures, sharing their loyalties—and wallets—with independent “prosperity” evangelists such as Kenneth Copeland and Richard Roberts, who preach faith as an avenue to financial success.

Increasing internal diversity and spiraling numbers tell only part of the story, however. If there is a single message that emerges from an overview of the history of Pentecostalism, it is that the movement has come perilously close to shifting its focus from the “full gospel” with conservative social and political causes and adulation of such politically conservative celebrities as Pat Boone and James Watt. Still more striking is the development of an explicit commitment to the pursuit of health, wealth, and worldly success under the aegis of prosperity evangelism.

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Not surprisingly, denominational officials are acknowledging and lamenting that change: for example, in an interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, G. Raymond Carlson, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, condemned the “name it/claim it” teaching as being “steeped in a very humanistic, me-first, materialistic kind of orientation rather than an orientation on Christ and him crucified.” And Ray Hughes, former head of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), agreed. Said Hughes, “The people are so engaged in making money, subconsciously mammon has become their god until this has clouded, in many places, the real fervor, fire, and New Testament zeal that comes with Pentecostal experience.” Hughes believes Pentecostalism has a special calling to avoid materialism: “Most of us classic Pentecostals came from the blue-collar, working-class group. And the thing that made Pentecostalism grow was that they took the gospel to the poor. We must never forget our roots, regardless of how the gospel has lifted us materially.”

The historical record leaves little doubt that Pentecostals have not tried very hard to resist the temptations of the good life. Recent revelations about the lifestyle of Jim and Tammy Bakker illustrate the point. The problem is not their seven-figure annual salary. After all, they only took what was offered. The problem, rather, is that the yacht, the Rolls Royce, the multiple homes, and so forth, represent luxuries many Pentecostals clearly covet and think that the gospel entitles them to have. Describing the latter aspect of contemporary Pentecostalism as a “veritable spiritual Amway movement,” historian David Edwin Harrell notes that it offers not healing for the sick, but security for the well; not consolation to the poor, but confirmation to the successful.

Other observers have rightly pointed out that some Pentecostals maintain a quite different posture. Jimmy Swaggart, for example, is said to represent the austere, work-oriented ethic of the early days. And compared with the Bakkers, that may be true. But Swaggart’s own lifestyle—a million-dollar home for himself, a three-quarters of a million-dollar home for his son and associate, Donnie—hardly suggests rigorous self-denial. What it suggests, rather, is that Pentecostals tend to label as vices the things they cannot afford—until they can.

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All in all, Pentecostalism has paid a steep price for moving uptown. Its uncritical identification with the values of middle America represents a major loss of prophetic vision. In 1976, church historian Martin E. Marty perceptively noted that in times past Pentecostalism “was ‘true’ because it was small and pure, but now it is ‘true’ because so many are drawn to it.”

Prospects

Having said all this, it is important to add that the story of American Pentecostalism is not adequately grasped if we think of it only in sociological terms as a sect quietly drifting back into the mainstream of respectable Protestantism. For one thing, there are numerous exceptions. Every day countless Pentecostals put their lives squarely behind their ideals, giving a tithe or more of their time and money to the work of the church. In 1986, for example, the Assemblies of God alone devoted $135 million, or 74 percent of its total expenditures, to world ministries, outstripping the per capita giving of any of the mainline groups.

Moreover, while accommodation to the values of middle America may be the central trend of American Pentecostalism since World War II, it would be unfair to say that was true of the first and second generation. The work of the pioneers is best understood, not as compensation for poverty or low social status, but as a burst of radical perfectionism. Their faith was not an instrument for escaping life’s difficulties but a means for transcending them. Like all truly perfectionist movements in Christian history, early Pentecostalism tried to cope with sin and suffering by forging a new vision of what the gospel was all about. It was a faith to live by, not because it told the truth about this thing or that, but because for the true believer it proved to be, as G. K. Chesterton said of Christianity itself, a “truth-telling thing.”

In crucial respects, the Pentecostal movement is less mature today than it was in the early years. Modern Pentecostals do not need to romanticize their past in order to learn from it. The first generation resisted the blandishments of secular society in order to preach a gospel that challenged the culture in more than superficial ways. Modern Pentecostals might recover that vision. They might discover, as church historian George Marsden has put it, that grace is not cheap and that forgiveness is more than good manners. They might discover that in the beginning, the movement survived not in spite of the fact that it was out of step with the times, but precisely because it was.

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Grant Wacker, associate professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (Mercer, 1985), is a member of Resurrection United Methodist Church, in Durham. His father and grandfather were Assemblies of God ministers.

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