Assemblies of God Beliefs Explained

1. What Is the Assemblies of God?

The Assemblies of God is a Pentecostal Christian fellowship formed in April 1914 at a general council held in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and it teaches a printed statement of sixteen articles known as the Sixteen Fundamental Truths. Those articles confess one God in three persons, the deity and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, salvation by repentance and faith, and a baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in other tongues. The World Assemblies of God Fellowship, the international body that links the national councils, describes itself as the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world.

The description of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship as the world's largest Pentecostal denomination is that organisation's own published self-description. This page cites no independent adherent count, because published totals for Pentecostal bodies vary widely depending on whether adherents, members, or affiliated congregations are counted, and whether autonomous national councils are included.

Why It Was Founded

The Pentecostal revival that spread from the Azusa Street meetings in Los Angeles after 1906 produced preachers, congregations and missionaries far faster than it produced any structure to hold them. By 1913 the practical problems were sharp. Missionaries had no reliable channel for support. Travelling evangelists carried credentials that no one could verify. Doctrine varied from one meeting hall to the next, and there was no agreed way to settle a dispute. A call went out through two Pentecostal papers, the Word and Witness and the Christian Evangel, inviting ministers to gather in Hot Springs.

The council that met there set five purposes: doctrinal unity, cooperation in evangelism, a credible system for credentialing ministers, an orderly base for foreign missions, and a legal identity that could hold property and charter schools. E. N. Bell, one of the conveners, was chosen as the first chairman. The gathering was careful to avoid the word denomination. It described itself as a cooperative fellowship of sovereign local assemblies, and that phrase still describes the legal shape of the body.

Its Shape Today

The United States body is properly called the General Council of the Assemblies of God, with headquarters in Springfield, Missouri. It is organised into districts, each with its own superintendent and presbytery, and the General Council elects a General Superintendent and an Executive Presbytery. Outside the United States the Assemblies of God is a family of self-governing national councils, some of them very large, joined in the World Assemblies of God Fellowship. The Brazilian body, the Assembleias de Deus, is among the largest Protestant bodies in that country, and national councils in Nigeria, the Philippines, Indonesia and across Latin America operate their own Bible schools, missions programmes and publishing houses.

The Assemblies of God is one fellowship within the wider Pentecostal movement, and the movement itself is much larger than any one body. For the movement's origins at Azusa Street, its shared theology of the Spirit and its many streams, see our guide to Pentecostalism and what Pentecostals believe. This page stays with one fellowship and its sixteen articles.

2. The Sixteen Fundamental Truths

The Sixteen Fundamental Truths are the doctrinal statement adopted by the General Council of the Assemblies of God in 1916 and amended since. Every credentialed Assemblies of God minister affirms them. Their preamble is unusually modest for a confession: the statement says it is not intended as a creed for the Church, and offers itself as a basis of unity for full gospel ministry, listing the doctrines it regards as essential to that ministry. That self-description shapes how the articles read. They are working boundaries for a fellowship of preachers.

The Sixteen Articles in Order

1. The Scriptures Inspired. The Bible is verbally inspired, and is the infallible and authoritative rule of faith and conduct (2 Timothy 3:15-17, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, 2 Peter 1:21).
2. The One True God. One God, self-existent and self-revealed, eternally existent in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The article carries a long appended defence of Trinitarian language.
3. The Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. His virgin birth, sinless life, miracles, substitutionary work on the cross, bodily resurrection and exaltation at the right hand of God.
4. The Fall of Man. Man was created good and upright, and by voluntary transgression fell, incurring physical and spiritual death (Genesis 1:26-27, Romans 5:12-19).
5. The Salvation of Man. Salvation is received through repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, with the inward witness of the Spirit and an outward life of righteousness as its evidences (Romans 8:16, Ephesians 2:8).
6. The Ordinances of the Church. Two: baptism in water by immersion for those who have believed, and the Lord's Supper, understood as a symbol and a memorial (Matthew 28:19, 1 Corinthians 11:26).
7. The Baptism in the Holy Ghost. An experience distinct from and subsequent to the new birth, promised by the Father, bringing power for witness (Acts 1:8, Acts 2:4).
8. The Initial Physical Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Ghost. Speaking with other tongues is the initial physical sign of that baptism, the same in essence as the gift of tongues in 1 Corinthians 12 and different in purpose and use.
9. Sanctification. An act of separation from evil and of dedication to God, wrought in the believer and worked out progressively (Hebrews 12:14, Romans 6:1-11).
10. The Church and Its Mission. The Church is the body of Christ. Its threefold mission is the evangelisation of the world, corporate worship of God, and the building of a body of saints into the likeness of Christ.
11. The Ministry. A divinely called and scripturally ordained ministry exists to carry out that threefold mission.
12. Divine Healing. Healing is provided for in the atonement and is the privilege of all believers (Isaiah 53:4-5, Matthew 8:16-17, James 5:14-16).
13. The Blessed Hope. The resurrection of those who have died in Christ and their gathering together with living believers to meet the Lord is the imminent hope of the Church (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52).
14. The Millennial Reign of Christ. The visible return of Christ with his saints to reign a thousand years, with the salvation of national Israel and universal peace (Revelation 20:1-6, Romans 11:26-27).
15. The Final Judgment. A final judgment in which the wicked are judged according to their works and consigned to everlasting punishment in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:11-15).
16. The New Heavens and the New Earth. A new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13, Revelation 21 and 22).

Read as a whole, the list is a standard conservative Protestant creed with two distinctively Pentecostal insertions, articles seven and eight on Spirit baptism and tongues, and one distinctively Pentecostal emphasis, article twelve on healing. Articles one through five and nine through eleven would be recognised by most evangelical bodies. Articles thirteen through sixteen set out a premillennial eschatology that the fellowship shares with much of American evangelicalism. What makes the statement Pentecostal is concentrated in a small part of it.

3. The Four Cardinal Doctrines

The Assemblies of God singles out four of the sixteen articles as its cardinal doctrines: salvation, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, divine healing, and the second coming of Christ. These four are the ones the fellowship regards as most in need of continual emphasis, and they organise its preaching, its Bible school curricula and its missionary programme.

Where the Four Come From

The pattern reaches back before 1914. Nineteenth-century holiness and healing revivalists preached a fourfold gospel of Christ as saviour, sanctifier, healer and coming king. The Assemblies of God inherited that structure and altered the second term, replacing entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace with the baptism in the Holy Spirit for power. That substitution is one of the clearest markers separating the Assemblies of God from the Wesleyan-holiness Pentecostal bodies, and you can see the older pattern in the holiness movement and in bodies such as the Church of the Nazarene.

How a Catholic Should Hear Them

Each of the four names something Catholic teaching also holds, and each is framed in a way Catholic teaching would qualify. Catholics confess salvation in Christ, receive the Holy Spirit in baptism and confirmation, anoint the sick and pray for healing, and profess at every Mass that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. Both bodies hold all four to be true. The disagreement runs on how each one is given, by what means, and through what visible signs.

4. The Trinity and the Oneness Split of 1916

The Assemblies of God is Trinitarian, and the second of its Fundamental Truths exists in the form it does because of a controversy that nearly broke the young fellowship apart. Between 1913 and 1916 a teaching spread through Pentecostal circles that came to be called the New Issue. Its advocates held that the one God is a single person, revealed successively as Father, Son and Spirit, and that Acts 2:38 requires baptism in the name of Jesus alone rather than in the threefold name of Matthew 28:19. Many of those who accepted it were rebaptised.

The Oneness Position Stated Fairly

Oneness Pentecostals do not describe themselves as denying the deity of Christ. They describe themselves as defending it. Their argument is that the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Jesus, citing Colossians 2:9, and that Father, Son and Spirit name the one God in his roles rather than three distinct persons. On their reading, John 14:9, where Jesus says that whoever has seen him has seen the Father, and Isaiah 9:6, where the child is called Everlasting Father, point to a single divine person. They read the apostolic baptismal practice in Acts, always given in the name of Jesus, as the apostles' own interpretation of the command in Matthew 28:19. Oneness believers regard themselves as the Christians who take the oneness of God in Deuteronomy 6:4 most seriously.

Trinitarian Christians answer that Scripture shows the three addressing one another and acting toward one another in ways that a single person cannot: the Son prays to the Father in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42), the Father speaks over the Son at his baptism while the Spirit descends (Matthew 3:16-17), and the Son sends the Spirit from the Father (John 15:26). The Church settled this in the fourth century, and the ancient name for the Oneness position is modalism, condemned in the teaching associated with Sabellius.

What Happened at the 1916 Council

The General Council meeting in St. Louis in 1916 adopted the Statement of Fundamental Truths specifically to settle the question. Article two, on the One True God, carries an unusually long set of sub-clauses defending the terms Trinity and persons, acknowledging that those words are not found in Scripture and arguing that they agree with it. Ministers who held the Oneness view withdrew or lost their credentials. The Oneness stream regrouped in bodies that remain Oneness today, among them the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, which had been founded before the split and became a principal Oneness home after it, and the United Pentecostal Church International, formed by merger in 1945.

The distinction still matters when a Catholic meets a Pentecostal congregation, because Trinitarian and Oneness churches can look identical from the pew. Both may worship with raised hands, pray for healing and welcome tongues. The difference is in the doctrine of God, and it carries a practical consequence: baptism administered with a formula that denies the Trinity is not recognised as valid Christian baptism by the Catholic Church, while baptism given in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with water and the intention to do what the Church does is recognised, including when an Assemblies of God minister performs it. For the Oneness bodies themselves and the Jesus name baptismal formula, see our guide to Oneness Pentecostalism. For the wider map of bodies that reject or revise the doctrine of the Trinity, see nontrinitarian churches, and for the doctrine itself see our guide to the Trinity.

5. Scripture, Inspiration and Authority

The first Fundamental Truth states that the Bible is verbally inspired and is the infallible, authoritative rule of faith and conduct. That single sentence carries the whole Assemblies of God doctrine of authority. Scripture rules, and no council, tradition or officer stands above it. In practice the General Council does interpret Scripture for its ministers, publishing position papers on contested questions, and those papers are binding on credentialed ministers while presenting themselves as expositions of Scripture rather than as an independent source of doctrine.

The Assemblies of God Canon

Assemblies of God Bibles contain sixty-six books, the Protestant canon. The seven books Catholics call deuterocanonical, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, along with the longer forms of Esther and Daniel, are absent. This is inherited from the sixteenth-century Reformation rather than argued afresh, and Assemblies of God writers rarely make it a point of controversy. Catholics who want the history of how those books came to be received, disputed and defined should read our guide to the deuterocanonical books.

The Catholic Response on Authority

The Catholic Church holds Scripture to be inspired and without error in what it affirms for the sake of our salvation, and the Second Vatican Council constitution Dei Verbum says so directly. Where the two bodies part is on whether Scripture stands alone. Catholic teaching holds that the written word, the apostolic Tradition that carried it, and the teaching office of the bishops in communion with the Pope form a single deposit that cannot be separated without loss. The practical argument is historical. The list of which books belong in the New Testament is itself a decision of the Church, reached over centuries, and a rule that admits only Scripture cannot produce the table of contents of Scripture. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and how it works sets this out at length, and how the Bible was assembled covers the canon.

Two things should be said in fairness to Assemblies of God practice. First, the fellowship reads Scripture in community, through its schools, its position papers and its ordination examinations, and is far less individualistic in practice than the phrase Bible alone suggests. Second, its ministers know the biblical text well. A Catholic who wants a serious conversation with an Assemblies of God pastor should expect the Scripture to be quoted accurately and should come able to do the same.

6. Salvation, Security and Sanctification

The fifth Fundamental Truth defines salvation as received through repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, with two evidences named: the inward witness of the Spirit, citing Romans 8:16, and an outward life of righteousness and true holiness. The article names no sacramental means. In Assemblies of God practice a person is saved at the moment of repentance and faith, water baptism follows as an obedient public confession, and the moment is often marked by an altar call.

Conditional Security, Not Calvinism

The Assemblies of God is Arminian on the question of whether a believer can fall away. Its ministers teach that a Christian retains free will after conversion and can, by persistent and unrepented sin or by abandoning faith, forfeit salvation. The texts most often cited are Hebrews 6:4-6, Hebrews 10:26-29, and the warning of 1 Corinthians 9:27 that Paul disciplines himself so as not to be disqualified. This puts the fellowship at odds with the perseverance of the saints taught in the Reformed tradition, and Catholics should not assume that a Pentecostal preacher holds once saved, always saved. Many Assemblies of God pastors argue against it directly. For the position they are arguing against, see the five points of Calvinism and our guide to Calvinist theology.

Sanctification as Progressive

The ninth Fundamental Truth defines sanctification as an act of separation from evil and dedication to God, and treats growth in holiness as ongoing. The Assemblies of God does not teach entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace that eradicates the sinful nature. This came from a controversy that preceded the fellowship's founding, in which the preacher William Durham argued for what he called the finished work of Calvary: sanctification is grounded in what Christ has already accomplished and is progressively applied, rather than received in a crisis experience. Durham's position carried among the ministers who formed the Assemblies of God, and the Wesleyan-holiness Pentecostal bodies kept the older teaching.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching agrees that salvation is by grace, that faith is necessary, and that a Christian can lose the state of grace through grave sin, which is a genuine and often unrecognised point of agreement with the Assemblies of God against Reformed teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1861 states that mortal sin causes the loss of charity and of sanctifying grace. Catholic teaching adds three things the fifth Fundamental Truth omits. Baptism is the means by which the grace of justification is ordinarily given, and the Church treats it as the instrument of that grace rather than as a sign of a decision already made. Sanctifying grace lost through grave sin is ordinarily restored through the sacrament of penance rather than through private repentance alone. And the works that flow from faith are the way a justified person cooperates with grace, which our guide to faith and works treats in full. On the reality of human freedom under grace, Catholic teaching and Assemblies of God teaching are closer to each other than either is to strict predestinarianism, a point our guide to free will develops.

Our page on what salvation means in Catholic teaching gives the full account, including justification, the state of grace and final perseverance.

7. Baptism in the Holy Spirit and Tongues

Articles seven and eight are what make the Assemblies of God Pentecostal. Article seven teaches a baptism in the Holy Spirit that is distinct from and subsequent to the new birth, promised by the Father, and given for power in witness. Article eight teaches that speaking with other tongues is the initial physical evidence that the baptism has occurred.

The Assemblies of God Case, in Its Own Terms

The argument is built from the narrative of Acts, and it is a real argument that deserves to be stated properly. At Pentecost the disciples, who already believed, are filled and speak in tongues (Acts 2:4). In Samaria, believers who had been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus had not yet received the Spirit, and Peter and John came down and laid hands on them so that they would (Acts 8:14-17), which the Assemblies of God reads as a reception of the Spirit separate from conversion. In the house of Cornelius the Spirit falls on the hearers and the Jewish believers know it because they hear them speaking in tongues and praising God (Acts 10:44-46). At Ephesus, Paul asks disciples whether they received the Holy Spirit when they believed, baptises them, lays hands on them, and they speak in tongues and prophesy (Acts 19:1-6). In three of these four episodes tongues are the reported sign. Assemblies of God theologians conclude that Luke is describing a normative pattern rather than a series of accidents.

Article eight makes a careful distinction that outsiders often miss. The tongues that evidence Spirit baptism are said to be the same in essence as the gift of tongues in 1 Corinthians 12, and different in purpose and use. The evidential tongues are for the individual at the moment of the baptism. The gift of tongues is a ministry gift, distributed as the Spirit wills, and Paul's question in 1 Corinthians 12:30, do all speak in tongues, expects the answer no. The Assemblies of God answers that question no as well, with respect to the ministry gift, while holding that all who are baptised in the Spirit initially speak in tongues.

What This Does Not Mean

Spirit baptism is not salvation in Assemblies of God teaching, and tongues are not a condition of being saved. A member who has never spoken in tongues is a Christian in good standing. In practice the fellowship requires the experience of those it credentials for ministry rather than of everyone in the pews. Catholics who have heard that Pentecostals think you are not saved without tongues have heard something the Assemblies of God statement does not say.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching holds that the Holy Spirit is given in baptism and that the gift is sealed and strengthened in confirmation, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1285 describes as bringing an increase and deepening of baptismal grace and rooting the recipient more deeply in divine sonship. The laying on of hands in Acts 8 and Acts 19, which the Assemblies of God reads as a pattern of Spirit baptism, is read in Catholic teaching as the origin of confirmation. The two traditions are looking at the same passages and drawing different conclusions about what rite they establish.

On tongues themselves, the Catholic Church has never taught that they are the required sign of receiving the Spirit, and 1 Corinthians 12:7-11 presents the gifts as distributed variously to different members. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 799 to 801 treats charisms as real, oriented to the building up of the Church, and subject to discernment by those who lead it. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which began among Catholics at Duquesne University in 1967 and has been welcomed by successive popes, prays for and practises these gifts within Catholic sacramental life. A Catholic who is drawn to what happens in an Assemblies of God service does not have to leave the Church to find it. Our guide to the Holy Spirit and our guide to the sacrament of confirmation lay out the Catholic account.

8. Divine Healing

The twelfth Fundamental Truth teaches that deliverance from sickness is provided for in the atonement and is the privilege of all believers. The texts cited are Isaiah 53:4-5, on the servant who bore our infirmities, Matthew 8:16-17, where that prophecy is applied to Jesus healing the sick, and James 5:14-16, on calling the elders to pray over the sick and anoint them with oil. Prayer for healing is ordinary practice in Assemblies of God congregations, offered at services and in homes, and the fellowship's missionary work has often grown around it.

The Assemblies of God Is Not a Prosperity Body

This needs stating plainly, because the confusion is common. The General Council has published position papers criticising the health-and-wealth teaching associated with the word of faith movement, including its doctrine of positive confession, and it has disaffiliated prominent televangelists over conduct, among them Jim Bakker in 1987 and Jimmy Swaggart in 1988. Healing in Assemblies of God teaching is a privilege sought in prayer and granted at God's discretion. It is not presented as an entitlement that a believer can compel by the right words. Catholics who want the distinction drawn out should read our guide to the prosperity gospel and what is wrong with it.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching reads James 5:14-16 as the scriptural basis of a sacrament. The anointing of the sick confers grace, unites the sick person's suffering to the passion of Christ, forgives sins, and where it is expedient for the salvation of the soul restores bodily health. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1499 to 1532 sets this out. The Church also prays for healing outside the sacrament, investigates reported cures with medical scrutiny, as the Lourdes Medical Bureau has done for well over a century, and canonises saints only after cures it judges scientifically inexplicable. Our guide to miracles and how the Church examines them covers the process.

Catholic teaching adds one thing the twelfth article does not develop: the redemptive meaning of suffering that is not taken away. Paul's thorn in the flesh was not removed, and the answer he received was that grace is sufficient and power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). A theology of healing that has no place for unhealed suffering will eventually wound the people it means to help. Our guide to suffering and why God permits it takes up that question directly.

9. The Two Ordinances

The sixth Fundamental Truth names two ordinances: baptism in water and the Lord's Supper. The word ordinance rather than sacrament is deliberate. An ordinance is a practice commanded by Christ and observed in obedience, and in Assemblies of God theology it signifies a grace already received rather than conferring grace by the act itself.

Water Baptism

Baptism is administered by immersion, to those old enough to profess faith, and after conversion. Infants are not baptised. Instead they are presented in a service of dedication, in which parents and congregation commit to raise the child in the faith, and the child is expected to seek baptism later on making a personal profession. Assemblies of God ministers baptise in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, following Matthew 28:19, which distinguishes them from Oneness Pentecostals.

Catholic teaching holds that baptism is the sacrament by which a person is freed from sin, reborn as a child of God and incorporated into the Church, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1213 states it in those terms. Christ tells Nicodemus that no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit (John 3:5), and Titus 3:5 speaks of the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. The Church baptises infants because the grace of baptism is God's gift and does not wait on the recipient's capacity to ask, and because Acts records whole households baptised together (Acts 16:15, Acts 16:33, Acts 18:8). Immersion and pouring are both valid forms. Our guide to baptism, including infant baptism and the biblical case for it answers this in detail.

The Lord's Supper

The sixth article describes the Lord's Supper as a symbol expressing the believer's sharing in the divine nature, citing 2 Peter 1:4, a memorial of Christ's suffering and death, and a prophecy of his second coming, citing 1 Corinthians 11:26. Assemblies of God congregations typically celebrate it monthly or quarterly with bread and grape juice, distributed by the pastor and by lay servers, and the table is generally open to any believer present.

Catholic teaching holds that the bread and wine become the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, that the appearances of bread and wine remain, and that the Mass makes present the one sacrifice of Calvary. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1374 states that in the Eucharist the whole Christ is truly, really and substantially contained. The Catholic argument is drawn from John 6:53-56, where Jesus refuses to soften the language when his hearers object, and from 1 Corinthians 11:27-29, where Paul warns that receiving unworthily makes a person guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord, a warning that fits a real presence and sits oddly with a memorial. Our guides to the Eucharist and the real presence and the Mass set out the case.

10. The Blessed Hope and Last Things

Articles thirteen through sixteen set out the Assemblies of God doctrine of the last things, and they are premillennial and pre-tribulational. Article thirteen, called The Blessed Hope, teaches that the dead in Christ will rise and living believers will be gathered together with them to meet the Lord, and calls this the imminent hope of the Church. Article fourteen teaches a visible return of Christ with his saints to reign on earth for a thousand years, including the salvation of national Israel. Article fifteen teaches a final judgment with everlasting punishment in the lake of fire for those not found written in the Book of Life. Article sixteen looks to a new heaven and a new earth.

The Pre-Tribulation Rapture

The Assemblies of God reads 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, where the Lord descends and the living are caught up together with the risen dead to meet him in the air, as an event distinct from and prior to the visible return described in article fourteen. On this reading the Church is removed before a period of tribulation, and Christ returns afterward with his saints. The word rapture comes from the Latin rapiemur, we shall be caught up, in the Vulgate of that verse. The framework was systematised in the nineteenth century and spread widely through the Scofield Reference Bible and later through popular fiction and prophecy writing.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching professes one return of Christ in glory, at which the dead rise and the living are gathered, followed by the final judgment. It does not divide that event into two stages separated by a period of years, and it reads 1 Thessalonians 4 as describing the Church going out to meet the returning Lord in the manner of a city going out to welcome an arriving king, a customary image in the ancient world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 676 rejects millenarianism, the expectation of a this-worldly messianic reign within history before the end, and treats that expectation as a form of the deception the Church must resist. Catholic teaching on national Israel follows Romans 11, holding that the gifts and call of God are irrevocable, without predicting a political restoration.

Our guides to the rapture and why Catholics do not hold it, the millennium of Revelation 20, the Second Coming and the final judgment take each of these up at length. The wider framework sits in our pillar guide to the end times.

One agreement is worth naming. Article thirteen calls the Lord's return imminent, and Catholic teaching holds the same expectation without any calendar attached. Jesus said that no one knows the day or the hour, not the angels, nor the Son, but only the Father (Mark 13:32). Both bodies teach readiness now and neither is entitled to a date.

11. Church Government and Ministry

Assemblies of God polity mixes congregational and presbyterian elements. The local assembly is self-governing: it calls its own pastor, holds its own property and sets its own budget. Ministers, however, are credentialed by the districts and the General Council, which examine, ordain and can discipline them. Authority over doctrine and over ministers is held above the congregation. Authority over the congregation's internal affairs largely is not.

Three Levels of Credential

The fellowship credentials ministers in stages, commonly certified minister, licensed minister and ordained minister, each with its own study requirements and examinations. Candidates typically train at one of the fellowship's endorsed colleges and seminaries. A credential can be surrendered or removed, and the disaffiliations of the late 1980s showed that the General Council will use that power against its best-known names when it judges the case warrants it. Ministers ordained in the Assemblies of God have included the evangelist David Wilkerson, who was ordained in 1952.

Women in Ministry

The Assemblies of God has credentialed women from its earliest years and ordains women to full ministry, including as senior pastors. It grounds the practice in Acts 2:17-18, where Peter cites Joel on sons and daughters prophesying, in Galatians 3:28, and in the women named as coworkers in Paul's letters, and the General Council has published a position paper defending it. This distinguishes the fellowship from most conservative Baptist bodies and from the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching holds that Christ established a visible Church governed by the apostles and their successors, that bishops hold the fullness of the sacrament of orders in unbroken succession, and that the Bishop of Rome exercises a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church. A fellowship whose local congregations own themselves and whose highest body is an elected council holds a different account of what the Church is, and the difference goes deeper than administration. Catholic teaching also reserves priestly ordination to men, on the ground that the Church is bound by the way Christ chose the Twelve and has no authority to alter it, a position stated by John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994. Our guides to the Catholic priesthood and the papacy set out those cases.

Something should be conceded here. Assemblies of God congregational life is often intense in ways Catholic parishes are not: small groups that actually meet, laypeople who can find a passage in their Bibles without the ribbon, converts who can say when and why they turned. Catholics who dismiss all of that as emotionalism are missing what draws people, and the guide to why people leave the Catholic Church takes the question seriously.

12. Growth Among Hispanic Americans

A large share of Assemblies of God growth in the United States has come through Spanish-speaking congregations, and a substantial number of the people in them were raised Catholic. The fellowship's own annual statistical reports, published by its Office of Statistics in Springfield, Missouri, have for years credited its ethnic minority churches with the greater part of its United States growth, and Hispanic congregations are the largest of those groups. The fellowship organises Spanish-language districts across the country and runs its own Spanish-language publishing and training.

Statements about the composition of Assemblies of God growth in this section reflect the fellowship's own published annual statistical reports. Survey findings about religious change among Hispanic Americans are from the Pew Research Center, whose studies of Latino religion, including its 2014 Religious Landscape Study and its earlier reports on Latinos and American religion, have repeatedly found substantial movement away from Catholic identification, with evangelical and Pentecostal churches receiving a large share of those who leave. This page cites no figure for either.

Why People Move

Studies of religious change among Hispanic Americans, and the accounts people give themselves, point at a consistent set of reasons, and none of them is doctrinal in the first instance. A small storefront congregation knows when someone stops coming, and a parish of several thousand often does not. Services are held in the language people pray in, led by pastors from the same neighbourhood. Lay members are given work to do within weeks of arriving. There is direct prayer for the sick, for a job, for a son in trouble. And conversion is marked by a moment a person can name and date, which a lifelong Catholic often cannot produce when asked when they were saved.

Doctrine usually enters afterward, as the explanation for a move already made. That order matters for anyone trying to respond, because an argument about the deuterocanon does not answer a person who left because nobody noticed they were gone.

What the Catholic Response Should Be

The honest answer is that everything on that list is available in Catholic practice and is often not offered. The Church has the sacrament of anointing for the sick, and many Catholics have never seen it given outside a hospital deathbed. It has a rich devotional life in Spanish, and Our Lady of Guadalupe at the centre of it, treated in our guide to Our Lady of Guadalupe. It has confession, where the moment of turning is spoken aloud and answered by name, which our guide to the sacrament of confession explains. It has the Eucharist, which is the thing a memorial supper is a memory of.

What the Church has often failed to do is put those within reach of a working family, in their language, in a community small enough to notice them. Catholics who are alarmed by the numbers should start there rather than with a rebuttal. For the broader picture of movement between Catholic and Protestant belonging, see Catholic and Protestant differences compared and the map of Christian denominations.

13. Assemblies of God and Catholic Teaching Side by Side

The table below sets the Assemblies of God position on each contested point beside the Catholic one. The left column states the Assemblies of God view as its own Fundamental Truths and position papers state it.

Two rows on that table deserve a second look, because they cut against expectation. On losing salvation, the Assemblies of God and the Catholic Church land in nearly the same place and both stand apart from Reformed teaching. On the doctrine of God they are identical. A Catholic who walks into an Assemblies of God congregation expecting to disagree about everything will be wrong about the two most fundamental questions on the list. For the doctrines in the last rows, see our guides to purgatory, the communion of saints and asking their prayers, heaven and hell.

14. Common Ground and How to Talk About It

Catholics and Assemblies of God believers hold a great deal in common, and a conversation that starts by naming it will go further than one that starts with the differences. Both confess the Trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the inspiration of Scripture, the reality of sin, the necessity of grace, the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, and the return of Christ to judge the living and the dead. Both baptise with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the Catholic Church recognises that baptism as valid.

What the Church Says About the Relationship

The Second Vatican Council decree Unitatis Redintegratio 3 teaches that those born into communities separated from full communion with the Catholic Church cannot be charged with the sin of separation, that the Catholic Church accepts them as brothers and sisters, and that many elements of sanctification and truth exist outside her visible boundaries. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 818 repeats the first point. The Church names these bodies ecclesial communities rather than particular Churches, because it does not find in them the sacrament of orders in apostolic succession and therefore does not find the Eucharist as Catholic teaching defines it. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what it does and does not claim sets out the framework.

Four Practical Rules for the Conversation

First, use their vocabulary correctly. Ordinance, not sacrament. Baptism in the Holy Spirit, not confirmation. Fundamental Truths, not creed. Getting the words right signals that you have actually read the statement, and it earns a hearing.

Second, do not attribute Oneness theology to a Trinitarian body. The Assemblies of God split over this in 1916 and takes it seriously.

Third, do not attribute the prosperity gospel to the fellowship as such. The General Council has published against it.

Fourth, be ready on the Eucharist, because that is where the real disagreement is. If you can only defend one Catholic doctrine well, defend the real presence from John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11, and be able to say why a memorial reading struggles with Paul's warning about profaning the body and blood of the Lord.

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