Pentecostal Power or Charismatic Chaos?

Pentecostal Christianity is exploding. It is the fastest growing segment of Christianity, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. But Wikipedia goes further, “Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world.” According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, when linked with Charismatic Christianity, the total number of adherents is more than 600 million. (Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity both affirm the continuation of the gifts of the Spirit—speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, etc.—but Charismatics don’t agree that the gift of tongues is for every believer.)

What are the driving forces behind this growth? Here are three thoughts:

1. People are hungry for a personal experience with God. They want to encounter God in a direct and immediate way. Pentecostal Christianity provides this through its teaching and practices. First, the active work of the Holy Spirit is affirmed. Pentecostal preachers encourage congregants to be baptized in the Holy Spirit—an experience separate from salvation in which congregants speak in tongues. Church services may also include the expression of other gifts of the Spirit. Second, Pentecostal Christianity emphasizes prayer. Services usually end with an extended time of informal prayer where people pray on their own or with others. Lastly, Pentecostal Christianity encourages people to share their experiences: “The Lord touched me,” “God told me . . . ,” “God is leading me . . . ” All of this fosters a highly experiential atmosphere.
2. People want less formality and more spontaneity and expressiveness in worship. They don’t want to read prayers; they want to pray from the heart. They want to lift up their hands in worship. They want time to cry if needed. If your goal is to encounter God, how can you plan out the nature of this encounter? Pentecostals are open to a degree of surprise or spontaneity in their meetings.
3. People want a God who still performs miracles. When Pentecostalism began in the early 1900s most Protestant churches affirmed cessationism—the belief that the gifts of the Spirit ceased when the apostles died or around the end of the first century. A core Pentecostal doctrine is that the gifts of the Spirit are still active and, even more, every believers can have the gift of speaking in tongues.

Are these desires legitimate? Yes, but everything can be taken to unhealthy extremes. For example:

1. Emphasizing the individual can cause us to lose sight of being part of the body of Christ.
2. Spontaneity can quickly turn into chaos and Paul says, “everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (1 Cor 14:40).
3. Emphasizing the miraculous can cause us to minimize the ordinary rhythms of life. Except for some episodes in Jesus’ life after he turned 30, miracles were not a daily occurrence even in the Bible.

Are complaints against the traditional church justified? According to the New Testament, the first Christians met in homes and their meetings were characterized by everyone being able to share. Paul writes:

What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up. (1 Cor 14:26)

Obviously, in this format, every part of the service, including its duration, could not be preprogrammed. Some components must have been unpredictable. So, the desire for spontaneity and freedom, may have been fulfilled in the earliest churches. Yet, there was still a leadership structure in place as attested by the New Testament words “elder” and “overseer.” (For more on the differences between the traditional church and house church, see this post.)

In what follows, I will share a bit of my upbringing, not merely to talk about myself. I hope it can help you think about your own life. In some ways we are all trying to come to grips with our past—a past we didn’t choose. Our background influences who we are, what we move away from, and what we move toward.

Independent Pentecostal Church 

My mom was raised in a Catholic church; my dad was raised in a Lutheran church. In their teenage years, they became disillusioned with church and Christianity as they knew it. In their early twenties, they met in a small independent Pentecostal church and eventually married in the same church.

We attended this Pentecostal church several times a week until I was about six or seven years old. If I remember correctly, the pastor was a mechanic who never went to Bible college or seminary. Sometimes during a weekday service, he would ask my dad to give the Bible message.

The music was played by my dad on the electric guitar. When I was about five, I started keeping a beat on the drums. I know what you’re thinking. What kind of church allows a kindergartener to play the drums? Independent Pentecostal churches are not interested in following tradition or formalities. It is all about the movement of the Spirit. Also, the church was very small so no one was trying to put on a professional production.

After the pastor died, his wife remarried. The new husband became the pastor then things started to get really strange. Allow me to interject: As noted above, Pentecostal Christianity is known for emphasizing the importance of personal experience. This fosters a highly emotional type of worship with people raising hands, some crying, others speaking in tongues, and still others lying on the ground. As you can imagine, the intensity of this experience often depends on the leader’s attitude toward it. If the leader believes these emotional expressions indicate “God is moving,” he or she can fan it into flames. In my parents’ opinion, the new leader took things too far. I was too young to understand what was going on, but I remember my parents talking about people making animal noises.

Origins of Pentecostalism

Intriguingly, extreme emotional experiences can be found even at the start of the Pentecostal movement. A core doctrine of Pentecostal Christianity is that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence of being filled or baptized with the Spirit. Since every believer should be filled with the Spirit, every believer should speak in tongues. (Speaking in tongues is the God-given ability to instantly speak a new language previously unlearned, whether that language is a foreign or heavenly language.)

American evangelist Charles Parham (1873-1929) was the first to identify speaking in tongues as the initial evidence of being filled with the Spirit. Parham’s student William J. Seymour (1870-1922) took this unique teaching to Los Angeles, where Seymour became the leader of the Asuza Street Revival (1906-1915). Anthony Thiselton writes:

Surprisingly, when Parham visited the Mission in October 1906, he reacted with disgust at “animal noises, trances, shaking, jabbering,” and so forth. In fact, Seymour himself disowned some of these phenomena, preferring to emphasize the fruit of love. Tragically, there began a series of power struggles and splits, which marred claims to the unity of the Spirit among Pentecostals from the earliest days of the movement. Parham founded a rival community only five blocks away from Seymour . . . (185)

Assemblies of God

After visiting a few churches, my parents settled on an Assemblies of God church. The Assemblies of God is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. And that means it has more structure than an independent, basically, family-run church. Yet, we still had altar calls at the end of sermons, where we often prayed on our own or with others for indeterminate lengths of time while the musicians played in the background, including my dad on the guitar. During the worship music, you could hear people speaking in tongues at a conversational level. In most services someone would raise their voice loudly and speak in tongues then everyone would become silent while waiting for the interpretation. Occasionally, a healing evangelist would come to town. The service would conclude with people lining up to receive prayer for physical healing.

Special Meetings

Around my senior year of high school, my parents took me to a service in Toronto to experience a revival called the “Toronto Blessing.” While we sat and listened to the message, a man sitting in the row in front of us started laughing uncontrollably. Someone else started making strange noises. The preacher acknowledged these sounds as a divine work so the distracting noises continued. After service, we went up to the front to be prayed for. Many people were “slain in the Spirit,” falling backward while others caught them then lying on their backs on the floor. I remember being told, “don’t pray, just receive.” Nothing special happened to me that night.

Around this time, we also attended a Benny Hinn meeting. Hinn is a famous TV evangelist, known for his healing crusades. After getting the standing crowd completely silent, he blew into the microphone then some people fell down. He claimed it was the Lord touching people, but I think the cause was human manipulation.

Bible College

Following high school graduation, I enrolled in a Pentecostal Bible college in Rhode Island. We had chapel several times a week with exuberant worship followed by a message, which was usually passionately delivered. In between songs, it was not uncommon for a teacher to speak in tongues then give a prophecy. Sometimes, the sermon would be canceled because the leader claimed the Spirit was moving so the singing and prayer would continue indefinitely. Once in a blue moon, we had a crazy speaker deliver a message. For instance, we had a healing evangelist who shouted while quickly pacing back and forth on stage, claiming that people were being healed of certain things but offering no proof.

In my second or third year, while reading in the school library, I became convinced that speaking in tongues is not required of all believers. When I shared this information with my parents, they weren’t too happy. While I moved away from the Pentecostal faith in Bible college, I did have some powerful experiences I can’t deny. I remember praying with a friend in the prayer chapel, just the two of us, and we felt intense power. We actually had to stop praying for each other and just worship the Lord.

In the summer before my senior year, I decided to get a better idea of Christianity. I visited a different church every weekend in Western New York. After Bible college I went to a non-denominational seminary, where I met people from various denominations, including my wife who was raised in a Presbyterian church.

Reflection

Ironically, I am still open to visiting different kinds of churches, but I am not keen on visiting a Pentecostal church. I have probably had too much of it. I don’t want to listen to someone shouting at me. I want to listen to someone who faithfully teaches the Bible and calmly reasons with me. Additionally, I think there is a human tendency to gravitate toward what we didn’t have. My dad was raised with the structure of traditional Lutheranism, but moved into the freedom of Pentecostal Christianity, which he still enjoys. I was raised in Pentecostal Christianity; I now crave structure and solid Bible teaching. In fact, I think the Bible is filled with so many amazing things that I don’t know why people bother listening to so-called evangelists or prophets, whether on TV or in person. The Bible is just too good. I don’t need all the hype and emotion. Good Bible teaching makes me worship.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a cessationist. I believe God continues to perform miracles. (See Craig Keener’s book Miracles for documented cases from around the world.) But we need to be cautious in this area. Healing evangelists can be deceptive. Speaking in tongues can originate from social pressure. And many modern-day prophecies are simply wrong. Additionally, out of all the prophecies I have heard that were not clearly wrong, none have edified me as much as sound Bible teaching.

I do think God is using Pentecostal churches to bring many people to himself. This movement is striking a heartfelt need. We are emotional and experiential beings and those things matter. And Pentecostal churches can teach mainline churches to inject more freedom into the structure of their services.

On the other hand, people should be aware of the dangers. A desire for freedom can lead to a disdain for structure. In other words, it is easy for Pentecostals to assume that if nothing unusual happens during a service, God wasn’t moving. Rather than working through the common means of planning and organization, there is an underlying belief that God primarily works in surprising or unusual ways. This makes sense if you name your movement after the dramatic events of Acts 2. But it doesn’t make sense if you are trying to discern between human emotion and God’s Spirit. Every unusual or spontaneous element is not necessarily God working. When I was a child, I heard my Lutheran grandmother pray a few times. Each time she would say the Lord’s Prayer. I remember looking down on her because I thought she was only praying a rote prayer rather than praying from her heart. The structure irritated me. I was taught to pray freely and conversationally. But in her defense, she was praying as our Lord taught us to pray.

A strength of Pentecostal Christianity is personal experience, but that also turns out to be a weakness. The Bible never encourages us to seek experiences. Experiences are temporary. The word of the Lord endures forever. Emotions are unreliable. The word of the Lord is trustworthy. The core of Christianity is not an emotional experience brought on by the Spirit. The Spirit and the Scriptures point to Christ—his life, death, and resurrection (1 Cor 15:3-8). Don’t get sidetracked: Christ is the core of Christianity.

If you want a biblical reflection on specific aspects of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity, here are three posts that may interest you:

A Problem with Pentecostalism: Speaking in Tongues in the Bible

Prophecy in the New Testament

Problems with the Prosperity Gospel

Les Bridgeman

After graduating from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I served as a high school Bible teacher in Asia. I enjoy traveling, writing, and playing the drums. My latest book focuses on Paul’s work as a tentmaker and what it means for today.