Pentecostalism

Origins

According to “Acts 2,” in The Bible, the apostles of Jesus gathered in Jerusalem to mark the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, “… and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” For centuries, Christians prayed for a New Pentecost, which many believed would herald the return of Christ and the beginning of a millennial kingdom of God on Earth, and there were occasional short-lived movements involving “speaking in tongues” and miraculous “gifts of the Spirit” such as prophecy and healing.

The Pentecostal movement of today is believed to be the product of a synthesis of the principally Methodist Holiness movement of the late1800s, which was concerned with personal purity and piety, and more ecstatic African American spirituality. It is generally said to have its immediate genesis in two events. First, Charles Fox Parham, a white Holiness preacher, taught that the Holy Spirit could enable a true believer to speak in another language, and several of his students did speak in “tongues,” in the Topeka Revival of 1901. Second, William Seymour, an itinerant African American preacher who had studied with Parham, initiated the Azusa Street Revival of 1906–1909 in Los Angeles. The revival was a sensational event, drawing crowds of people and inspiring ecstatic behavior, particularly speaking in tongues, which became the defining characteristic of Pentecostalism and was understood to be the sign that a convert had experienced a “baptism in the Spirit” as well as a water baptism.

Originally, those who received the “gift of tongues” believed it was a natural language that would enable them to serve as missionaries to other peoples. In addition, they saw it as a sign of the imminent return of Christ, lending urgency to their missions. Almost immediately, converts fanned out across the world, establishing Pentecostal missions in approximately fifty countries in the first 2 years. They quickly, and of course disappointingly, discovered they could not actually speak other natural languages, although that did not prevent them from spreading a new Christianity, founded on an ecstatic engagement with the Holy Spirit, to the sick, the weak, the poor, and the disenfranchised in particular. Today, Pentecostals understand “tongues” as a “heavenly language,” not a natural one.

Growth

The Azusa Street Revival collapsed in 1909, as principal figures quarreled and separated, generating the first of a rapidly and endlessly proliferating number [Page 1837]of Pentecostal churches, movements, sects, and denominations. Pentecostalism grew exponentially throughout the 20th century, tripling in adherents from 1970 to 1990. Today, estimates of the number of Pentecostals in the world range from 250 to 523 million people, accounting for at least 1 in 8, and possibly 1 in 4, Christians, and at least 1 in 25people in the world. It is predicted that Pentecostals will outnumber Catholics and become the main form of Christianity in the21st century. As two of three Pentecostals live in the nonwestern world, and over 70% are nonwhite, the rise of Pentecostalism is changing the global face of Christianity. Latin America has the largest number of Pentecostals, followed closely by Asia and Africa, then North America; Europe has by far the lowest number. Catholic Brazil has the largest number of Pentecostals of any country in the world.

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