Pentecostal Beliefs and Churches

1. What Do Pentecostals Believe?

Pentecostals hold the doctrines that historic Christianity holds in common, and then add one distinctive teaching about the Holy Spirit. They confess the Trinity, the divinity and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the authority and inspiration of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith, the necessity of personal conversion, and the return of Christ at the end of history. What sets them apart is the conviction that the events of the first Pentecost in Acts 2 established a pattern that continues: a believer already converted may receive a further outpouring of the Spirit, called the baptism in the Holy Spirit, which equips that believer for witness and opens the way to the spiritual gifts.

Most Pentecostal statements of faith organise this around four or five claims. Jesus saves. Jesus baptises in the Holy Spirit. Jesus heals. Jesus is coming again. The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel takes its name from exactly this list, teaching Christ as Saviour, Baptiser with the Holy Spirit, Healer, and Soon-Coming King. Bodies rooted more deeply in the Wesleyan holiness tradition, such as the International Pentecostal Holiness Church and the Church of God with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, add entire sanctification as a distinct work of grace between conversion and Spirit baptism, which is why their scheme is often called the three-blessing or three-work position.

Worship That Expects Something to Happen

Pentecostal worship is built around participation and expectancy. A service typically runs long, opens with extended sung worship, includes testimony from the congregation, allows space for spontaneous prayer aloud, and closes with an altar call inviting people forward for conversion, for Spirit baptism, or for prayer over a specific need. Preaching is usually extemporaneous and directly applied. Prayer for the sick, with the laying on of hands, is a normal part of the gathering rather than a special event. Congregational singing carries much of the theology, which is one reason Pentecostal and charismatic music has travelled so far beyond the movement itself.

Where Pentecostals Sit Among the Denominations

Pentecostalism grew out of the nineteenth-century holiness movement, which itself grew from John Wesley's teaching on sanctification, so its family line runs back through Methodism to the wider Protestant Reformation. Pentecostals share the Protestant commitment to Scripture as the final rule of faith and generally practise believer's baptism by immersion. Our guide to the Christian denominations and how they divide places the movement on the full family tree, and our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences covers the authority question they inherit.

2. Baptism in the Holy Spirit

The baptism in the Holy Spirit is the doctrine that defines Pentecostalism. In classical Pentecostal teaching it is an experience given by Christ, distinct from conversion and normally following it, in which the believer is immersed in the Holy Spirit and empowered for service and witness. Pentecostals are careful to say that a Christian who has never had this experience is genuinely saved and genuinely indwelt by the Spirit. What the baptism adds, in their account, is power: boldness in witness, freedom in prayer, and access to the charisms.

The Case Pentecostals Make From Acts

The argument rests on the book of Acts, read as a narrative that establishes a normal pattern. Four episodes carry most of the weight. At Pentecost the disciples, who already believed in the risen Christ, are filled with the Holy Spirit and speak in other tongues (Acts 2:1-4). In Samaria, Philip's converts believe and are baptised, and only later do Peter and John come down and lay hands on them so that they receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:14-17). In the house of Cornelius the Spirit falls on the hearers while Peter is still preaching, and they speak in tongues and praise God before they are baptised with water (Acts 10:44-48). At Ephesus, Paul finds disciples who have not so much as heard of the Holy Spirit, baptises them, lays hands on them, and they speak in tongues and prophesy (Acts 19:1-6).

From these passages Pentecostals draw the doctrine of subsequence: receiving the Spirit is a distinguishable event that can follow faith and water baptism. They connect it to the promise John the Baptist made about the coming Messiah, that he would baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3:11, Luke 3:16), and to the risen Christ's instruction to the apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the promise of the Father (Acts 1:4-5, 1:8). Seeking the baptism is therefore an act of obedience to a promise, and Pentecostal practice includes tarrying, praying and being prayed over until the experience comes.

What Other Christians Say in Reply

Most Reformed and evangelical readers answer that the episodes in Acts are transitional rather than paradigmatic. The Samaritan and Ephesian delays, on that reading, mark the extension of the gospel to new groups and the joining of those groups to the apostolic Church, so that no separate community could grow up outside apostolic communion. They point to St Paul's plain statement that anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Christ (Romans 8:9) and that all believers were baptised by one Spirit into one body (1 Corinthians 12:13), which locates Spirit baptism at conversion rather than after it.

3. Tongues as Initial Evidence

Classical Pentecostal denominations teach that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The Assemblies of God, whose Statement of Fundamental Truths is the most widely copied Pentecostal confession, states the doctrine in that exact language: the baptism of believers in the Holy Ghost is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues. Someone who has been baptised in the Spirit, on this teaching, will have spoken in tongues at that moment, whether or not the gift continues in regular use afterwards.

The Distinction Pentecostals Draw

Pentecostal theologians are careful to separate two things that outsiders often merge. Tongues as initial evidence is a sign given once, at the moment of Spirit baptism, and it is available to every believer who receives that baptism. Tongues as a spiritual gift, listed among the charisms in 1 Corinthians 12:10, is a ministry given to some believers for the building up of the congregation, exercised in public only when an interpreter is present, as St Paul requires (1 Corinthians 14:27-28). When Paul asks whether all speak in tongues (1 Corinthians 12:30), expecting the answer no, Pentecostals understand him to be speaking about the public gift rather than about the initial sign. Many Pentecostals also practise a private prayer language, praying in tongues devotionally, which they tie to Paul's own statement that he speaks in tongues more than anyone (1 Corinthians 14:18) and to the Spirit interceding with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26).

Where the Movement Itself Disagrees

The initial evidence doctrine is one of the few points where Pentecostals divide sharply from charismatics. Charismatic Christians inside the historic churches, and many independent charismatic congregations, accept tongues as a genuine gift and reject the claim that it is the required proof of Spirit baptism. Some Pentecostal bodies outside North America, including several in Europe and Latin America, have never adopted the initial evidence formula. Where the doctrine is held strictly, it can produce real pastoral pressure on believers who pray for the experience and do not speak in tongues, and Pentecostal pastors themselves write about that problem.

The Catholic Position on Tongues

The Catholic Church regards tongues as a genuine charism and declines to treat it as evidence of anything about a person's standing before God. St Paul ranks it below prophecy for the good of the assembly and subjects it to order (1 Corinthians 14:5, 14:40), and he insists that love outranks every gift, including the tongues of men and of angels (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). Catholics in the Charismatic Renewal do pray in tongues, with the Church's approval and under the discernment of pastors. The doctrinal difference is precise: the Church holds that a Catholic who has been baptised and confirmed has already received the Holy Spirit in full, whether or not any charism is manifest.

4. The Gifts of the Spirit

Pentecostals expect the spiritual gifts listed by St Paul to operate in ordinary congregational life. The primary list is 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, which names the message of wisdom, the message of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in different kinds of tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. Pentecostal teaching commonly groups these nine into three sets: gifts of revelation (wisdom, knowledge, discernment of spirits), gifts of power (faith, healing, miracles), and gifts of utterance (prophecy, tongues, interpretation).

How the Gifts Are Practised

In a Pentecostal service, a member may stand and deliver a prophetic word, understood as a spontaneous message of encouragement, exhortation or comfort given by the Spirit for that congregation on that day. Another may speak in tongues aloud, after which someone gives the interpretation. Prayer teams lay hands on the sick. A word of knowledge may name a condition or a circumstance the speaker has no natural way of knowing. Pentecostals also insist on discernment: St Paul commands that prophecies be weighed by the others present (1 Corinthians 14:29) and that the Spirit not be quenched while everything is tested and the good held fast (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21). Responsible Pentecostal churches take those tests seriously, and the movement's own literature contains sustained criticism of congregations that do not.

The Cessationist Objection

A substantial body of Reformed and conservative evangelical opinion holds that the revelatory and miraculous gifts ceased with the apostolic age. Cessationists argue that the gifts authenticated the apostles and the completion of Scripture, appealing to the passage where St Paul says prophecies and tongues will pass away when perfection comes (1 Corinthians 13:8-10), and pointing to the closing of the canon. Continuationists, Pentecostals among them, answer that the perfection Paul describes arrives when we see face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12), which means the return of Christ, so the gifts continue until then. That debate is internal to Protestantism, and the Catholic Church has never taken the cessationist side of it.

Seven Gifts and Nine Charisms

Catholics reading this page should note that the phrase gifts of the Holy Spirit carries two meanings in Christian usage. The seven gifts of Isaiah 11:2-3, wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord, are permanent dispositions given with sanctifying grace and strengthened in Confirmation (CCC 1831). The charisms of 1 Corinthians 12 are freely distributed graces given for the service of others. Both are the work of the same Spirit, and confusing the two lists is the fastest way to talk past a Pentecostal friend.

5. Divine Healing

Divine healing stands in the Pentecostal fourfold gospel as one of the things Christ does now. Pentecostals pray for the sick with the expectation that God heals, grounding the practice in the healing ministry of Jesus, in the commission to the disciples, and above all in the instruction of St James that the sick should call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord (James 5:14-15). Many Pentecostal bodies teach that healing is provided in the atonement, citing the words of Isaiah that by his wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:5) and Matthew's application of that prophecy to Christ's healings (Matthew 8:16-17).

The Range of Practice

Practice varies widely across the movement. In most Pentecostal congregations, healing prayer is quiet, pastoral and offered alongside medical treatment. A smaller and far more visible strand runs healing crusades and broadcast ministries, a style that reaches back through the American healing revivalists of the mid-twentieth century. Our profile of the healing evangelist Benny Hinn and his crusade ministry covers one of the best known examples and the criticism it has drawn. Pentecostal leaders themselves have been among the sharpest critics of showmanship in healing ministry, and several denominations have published guidance restraining it.

The Pastoral Danger and the Pentecostal Answer

Teaching that healing is guaranteed to those with faith creates a cruel problem when healing does not come, because the sick person is left to conclude that the failure was theirs. Careful Pentecostal writers reject that inference. They point out that St Paul left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20), advised Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach (1 Timothy 5:23), and was given no relief from his own thorn in the flesh, receiving instead the answer that grace is sufficient and power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). The strand of teaching that ties healing and wealth to the believer's confession is a separate development, treated in our guide to the prosperity gospel and what it gets wrong.

What the Catholic Church Holds

The Catholic Church has prayed for the healing of the sick without interruption for two thousand years, and it has a sacrament for it. The Anointing of the Sick, drawn directly from the passage in James, confers the grace of the Holy Spirit on the seriously ill, uniting their suffering to the Passion of Christ, and it can bring bodily healing when that serves the good of the soul (CCC 1499-1532, and CCC 1511 on the sacrament's scriptural basis). The Church also recognises miraculous healing, investigates alleged cures with medical rigour in canonisation causes, and maintains a medical bureau at Lourdes for exactly that purpose. Our guide to miracles and how the Church verifies them explains the process. Catholic teaching adds that redemptive suffering has its own value, so a Catholic prays for healing and also prays with the sufferer who is not healed.

6. Azusa Street and the Origins

Pentecostalism as a distinct movement began in the United States between 1901 and 1906, and its birth certificate has two addresses. The first is Topeka, Kansas, where Charles Fox Parham ran Bethel Bible School. On the first day of 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues after Parham laid hands on her, and Parham drew from the incident the doctrine that tongues is the biblical evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The second address is 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where the revival that carried the doctrine around the world broke out in April 1906.

William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival

The Azusa Street revival was led by William J. Seymour, a black holiness preacher and the son of former slaves, who had learned Parham's teaching in Houston while sitting outside the classroom door because segregation law barred him from the seats inside. Invited to Los Angeles, Seymour preached the doctrine of Spirit baptism, was locked out of the church that had invited him, and continued in a home on Bonnie Brae Street until the meetings outgrew it. The congregation moved into a former African Methodist Episcopal building on Azusa Street and held services almost continuously for about three years. Seymour published a paper, The Apostolic Faith, which was distributed free and carried news of the revival across the country and overseas.

What struck contemporaries most was the composition of the meetings. Black, white, Hispanic and Asian believers worshipped together, women preached and led, and one early participant wrote that the colour line was washed away in the blood. That integration was extraordinary in 1906 America and it did not last. Within a decade the movement had largely re-segregated along the lines of the surrounding society, a failure that Pentecostal historians describe frankly and that later reconciliation efforts, including the 1994 gathering in Memphis that dissolved the all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America and replaced it with the racially inclusive Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America, attempted to address.

The Holiness Roots

Pentecostalism did not appear from nothing. It grew out of the nineteenth-century holiness movement, which took John Wesley's teaching on entire sanctification and preached a second definite work of grace after conversion, often called the second blessing. Once believers were already expecting a distinct post-conversion experience of the Spirit, the step to a third experience marked by tongues was short. The Keswick conventions in England, the healing ministries of the late nineteenth century, and the widespread expectation of a latter-rain outpouring before the return of Christ all fed into the same stream.

The Finished Work Split

In 1910 William H. Durham of Chicago began preaching the finished work of Calvary, arguing that sanctification is accomplished in Christ's atonement and applied progressively, so there is no separate second work of grace. That teaching split the young movement in two. Bodies that accepted it, including the Assemblies of God formed in 1914, teach two stages: conversion and Spirit baptism. Bodies that rejected it, including the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church, kept the three-stage Wesleyan scheme of conversion, sanctification, and Spirit baptism. The division still marks the denominational map.

7. The Classical Pentecostal Denominations

The classical Pentecostal denominations are the organised bodies that formed in the first decades after Azusa Street and that still teach Spirit baptism with initial evidence. Five of them account for most of the classical Pentecostal population in the United States and carry large international fellowships alongside them. Each has a distinct origin, and the differences between them are mostly about sanctification, church government and race.

Assemblies of God

The Assemblies of God is, by its own reporting, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. It was organised at a gathering of ministers in Hot Springs, Arkansas in April 1914, adopted Durham's finished work position, and set out its doctrine in the Statement of Fundamental Truths in 1916, which also settled the Trinity question against the Oneness ministers. Its government is a hybrid of congregational and presbyterian forms, with autonomous local churches joined in districts. Its international arm, the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, links national bodies on every continent, and its largest single congregation is Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, founded by David Yonggi Cho.

Church of God in Christ

The Church of God in Christ is, by its own reporting, the largest predominantly African American Pentecostal body in the United States, with headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. Its founder, Charles Harrison Mason, had been preaching holiness in Mississippi and Tennessee before he travelled to Azusa Street in 1907, received the baptism in the Spirit there, and reorganised the body around Pentecostal doctrine. It keeps the three-stage Wesleyan scheme and an episcopal government under a presiding bishop. In the years when white Pentecostal bodies would not ordain black ministers, and in some states would not incorporate a black-led church, many white ministers held credentials from Mason's church.

Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)

The Church of God with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee traces its origin to a small holiness congregation formed in the Appalachian mountains in 1886, which adopted the name Church of God in 1907 after its members received the Pentecostal experience. A.J. Tomlinson led it through its formative decades. It holds the three-work-of-grace position, practises foot washing alongside baptism and the Lord's Supper, and governs through a General Assembly with a strong central structure. Several related bodies carry similar names as a result of later divisions, which is why the city is always attached to distinguish them.

International Church of the Foursquare Gospel

The Foursquare Church was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a Canadian-born evangelist who built Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, opened it in 1923, and incorporated the denomination in 1927. McPherson was one of the first women to lead a major American denomination and among the first religious broadcasters to own a radio station. The name comes from her fourfold summary of Christ as Saviour, Baptiser with the Holy Spirit, Healer and Soon-Coming King. Its government is more centralised than the Assemblies of God, with district supervisors appointed rather than elected locally.

International Pentecostal Holiness Church

The International Pentecostal Holiness Church was formed in 1911 by the merger of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church and the Pentecostal Holiness Church, both southern holiness bodies that had accepted Pentecostal teaching after Azusa Street. It is the most consistently Wesleyan of the classical denominations, holds the three-stage scheme, and governs episcopally. Oral Roberts, the healing evangelist and university founder, was ordained in this body before he later became a United Methodist.

Sources for the historical claims in this section: each denomination's own published history and constitutional documents, together with the standard reference literature on the movement, including the New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Membership figures are omitted here because the bodies self-report on different bases (members, adherents, affiliated churches) and the numbers are not comparable.

8. Oneness Pentecostalism and Why the Christology Is Decisive

Oneness Pentecostalism is the strand of the movement that rejects the doctrine of three distinct persons in one God. Also called Apostolic or Jesus Name Pentecostalism, it teaches that God is one person, and that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three modes or manifestations in which the one God has revealed himself. Oneness believers describe their position as the recovery of a strict biblical monotheism and as the fullest possible confession of the deity of Christ, since on their account the one God is himself present in Jesus. Jesus Christ, on this account, is the one God himself in the flesh, so the name of God is Jesus, and baptism should be administered in that name using the words of Acts 2:38 rather than the formula of Matthew 28:19.

How the Division Happened

The Oneness question, called the New Issue at the time, arose at a camp meeting in Arroyo Seco, California in 1913, where preaching on baptism in the name of Jesus set off a rapid controversy across the young movement. Ministers who accepted the new teaching rebaptised themselves and others. The Assemblies of God settled the matter in 1916 by adopting the Statement of Fundamental Truths with an explicit trinitarian article, and a substantial number of ministers withdrew. Those ministers reorganised, and after a series of mergers and separations, largely along racial lines, the two principal bodies today are the United Pentecostal Church International, formed by merger in 1945, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.

What Oneness Pentecostals Teach About Salvation

Most Oneness bodies teach that the new birth is completed in three elements drawn from Acts 2:38: repentance, water baptism in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues. Many also hold detailed standards of outward holiness governing dress, entertainment and appearance. Their sincerity, their love for Scripture and their care for the poor are real, and their members should be treated with the courtesy owed to any neighbour. Our dedicated guide to Oneness Pentecostalism and the Jesus name baptismal formula covers the United Pentecostal Church International, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the Apostolic Assembly and the True Jesus Church one by one.

Why This Is the Decisive Issue

The Christology is decisive because it concerns the identity of God. The modalist position, which the early Church associated with Sabellius and rejected in the third century, holds that the distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit are ways God appears rather than real relations within God. Scripture presents the Son praying to the Father (John 17:1-5), the Father speaking of the Son at the baptism of Jesus while the Spirit descends (Matthew 3:16-17), and the Son promising to send the Spirit from the Father (John 15:26). The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381 confessed one God in three persons, and that confession is the boundary of the historic Christian faith. Our guide to the doctrine of the Trinity sets out the biblical case in full.

The practical consequence follows immediately. Because Christ commanded baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church requires that formula for a valid baptism (CCC 1240). A baptism conferred with a Jesus Name formula alone is not recognised as valid, and someone entering the Catholic Church from a Oneness body is baptised rather than merely received. Trinitarian Pentecostals stand in an entirely different position: their baptism is valid, and the Church recognises them as Christians in a real though imperfect communion with it (CCC 838). Distinguishing the two is a matter of accuracy, and trinitarian Pentecostals are the large majority of the movement.

Some prominent preachers have moved between these positions over a career. Our profile of T.D. Jakes and the Potter's House covers a case where a minister formed in a Oneness body later stated his position in trinitarian terms, which is a reminder to ask what a given church teaches now rather than assuming from a label.

9. The Charismatic Renewal Inside the Historic Churches

The charismatic renewal is the movement that brought Pentecostal practice into the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and other historic churches without asking anyone to leave them. It is usually dated in the Protestant mainline to 1960, when Dennis Bennett, the rector of St Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, told his congregation that he had spoken in tongues. Similar experiences spread quickly through Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist congregations across the United States and beyond.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is dated to a retreat in February 1967 involving faculty members and students from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, after which participants reported experiences of the Holy Spirit including tongues and prophecy. The movement spread through Notre Dame and Michigan State, then internationally, taking the form of parish prayer groups, covenant communities, conferences and healing services. Pope Paul VI addressed an international congress of the renewal in Rome in 1975 and called it a chance for the Church. St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI both encouraged it, and in 2019 Pope Francis established CHARIS, a single international service body for the renewal, erected by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.

What Catholics Mean by Baptism in the Spirit

Catholics in the renewal use the phrase baptism in the Holy Spirit, and they mean something different by it than a classical Pentecostal does. The standard Catholic explanation, set out in the 2012 doctrinal statement of the renewal's international service body, describes it as a release or a stirring into flame of the grace of the Holy Spirit already given in Baptism and Confirmation. St Paul's instruction to Timothy supplies the image: fan into flame the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of hands (2 Timothy 1:6). Nothing sacramental is repeated or added. What changes is that a grace already possessed becomes conscious and operative.

The Official Dialogue

Formal theological conversation between the Catholic Church and Pentecostal churches began in 1972 and has continued in phases ever since, producing agreed reports on Spirit baptism, on Scripture and Tradition, on koinonia, and on the sensitive question of proselytism between the two communities. The dialogue is unusual because most Pentecostal bodies do not have a central authority able to sign an agreement, so the reports are offered for study rather than as binding accords. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what unity means explains the framework these conversations operate under.

10. The Global Neo-Charismatic Growth

The largest part of the movement today belongs to none of the classical denominations. Researchers use the term neo-charismatic for the independent churches and networks that practise Pentecostal spirituality without any historical tie to Azusa Street organisations: the African independent and Nigerian-founded churches, the Latin American megachurches, the Chinese house church networks, and the thousands of independent charismatic congregations in the West. Counted together, Pentecostal, charismatic and neo-charismatic Christians make up a large share of world Christianity, and their weight has shifted the centre of gravity of the faith toward the global South.

Source: the Pew Research Center's 2011 report Global Christianity estimated that Pentecostals and charismatics together, which the report calls renewalists, make up roughly a quarter of the world's Christians. The category definitions and the underlying counts come from the World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which classifies renewalists into classical Pentecostal denominations, charismatics inside historic churches, and independent neo-charismatics.

Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa carries some of the movement's largest bodies. The Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in Nigeria in 1952 and led for decades by Enoch Adeboye, holds mass gatherings on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and has planted parishes across dozens of countries. Living Faith Church Worldwide, known as Winners' Chapel and founded by David Oyedepo, built the Faith Tabernacle at Ota, which the church reports as one of the largest church auditoriums in the world. Independent African churches combine Pentecostal practice with local forms of worship, and the mix of genuine revival with prosperity preaching is a live argument inside African Christianity itself. Our guide to Christianity in Africa and its growth covers the wider picture.

Latin America and Asia

Latin America has seen the fastest transfer of allegiance. Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras and Chile all have substantial Pentecostal populations, drawn largely from historically Catholic families, and Brazilian bodies such as the Assembleias de Deus and the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus have exported congregations to Africa, Europe and North America. In Asia, South Korea produced Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, which the congregation itself reports as the largest single Christian congregation in the world, and Pentecostal practice runs strongly through Chinese house church networks, Indonesian and Filipino congregations, and the Singaporean megachurches, where preachers such as Joseph Prince reach international audiences by broadcast.

The Third Wave and the Worship Industry

In the 1980s a further development arrived, labelled the third wave by the missiologist C. Peter Wagner: evangelical churches with no Pentecostal identity that nevertheless practised healing prayer and prophetic ministry, the Vineyard movement under John Wimber being the best known. Out of this stream came the contemporary worship music that now fills evangelical and many Catholic parishes alike. Our profiles of Hillsong Worship and its Pentecostal roots, Bethel Music and Bill Johnson of Bethel Church in Redding cover the theology behind songs many Catholics sing without knowing where they came from. Our profile of David Wilkerson, the Assemblies of God pastor who founded Teen Challenge, covers a very different legacy from the same movement: street ministry to addicts and gang members in New York.

Why It Grows

Pentecostalism grows for reasons worth understanding rather than dismissing. It hands ministry to ordinary members and expects them to pray for each other out loud. It plants churches cheaply and quickly, because a congregation needs a room and a leader rather than a seminary-trained clergyman and a building fund. It preaches a God who acts now, in sickness, poverty and fear, which lands hard in places where those pressures are daily. It gives converts a clear moral code and a community that enforces it kindly. Catholic parishes that have lost members to Pentecostal churches usually lost them to those four things, and our guide to why people leave the Church examines the pattern honestly.

11. The Catholic Response

The Catholic response to Pentecostalism has two halves, and both are required. The first half affirms: the charisms are real, the Holy Spirit gives them today, and a Church that stopped expecting them would be poorer for it. The second half locates: the Spirit himself is given in the sacraments of initiation, so a Catholic who has been baptised and confirmed has already received the gift that Pentecostals seek in a later experience.

The Charisms Are Genuine

The Second Vatican Council settled the affirmative half plainly. The Holy Spirit distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank, making them fit and ready to undertake works for the renewal and building up of the Church, and these gifts are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation (Lumen Gentium 12). The Council adds that extraordinary gifts should not be sought rashly, and that judgment about their genuineness belongs to those who preside over the Church. The Catechism carries the same teaching: charisms are oriented to sanctifying grace and the common good of the Church, and no charism is exempt from being referred and submitted to the Church's shepherds (CCC 799-801). Nothing here dismisses tongues, prophecy or healing.

The Spirit Is Given in Sacramental Initiation

Where Catholic teaching differs from classical Pentecostalism is on where the gift of the Spirit is located. In Baptism the Christian is born of water and the Spirit (John 3:5), incorporated into Christ and made a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). In Confirmation the baptised are sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the Catechism describes the effect in exactly the language a Pentecostal would recognise: the special outpouring of the Holy Spirit as once granted to the apostles on the day of Pentecost (CCC 1302). Confirmation increases and deepens baptismal grace, roots the Christian more deeply in divine sonship, and gives strength to spread and defend the faith by word and action (CCC 1303). The apostolic practice that Pentecostals cite from Acts 8:14-17, where Peter and John lay hands on the Samaritans so that they receive the Holy Spirit, is the very passage the Church cites as the origin of Confirmation (CCC 1315).

The consequence is pastoral as much as doctrinal. A confirmed Catholic seeking a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit is asking for something the Church encourages, and the way in is prayer, the sacraments and surrender rather than a second reception of a gift already given. Our guides to the sacrament of Confirmation and what Baptism does explain both sacraments in full.

Where the Catholic Church Cannot Agree

Three Pentecostal positions the Catholic Church declines. Tongues as the necessary evidence of receiving the Spirit fails against St Paul's own question, asked expecting the answer no: do all speak in tongues (1 Corinthians 12:30). Most Pentecostal bodies understand the Church as the company of those who have believed and been born again, gathered visibly in local congregations and led by ministers the congregation or the denomination recognises. Catholic teaching holds that Christ gave his Church a visible sacramental and hierarchical form as well, so that the Eucharist, the apostolic succession of bishops and the unity Christ prayed for at the Last Supper (John 17:20-23) belong to what the Church is. Our guide to the Eucharist as the source and summit and our guide to the ministerial priesthood set that out. And the modalist doctrine of God held by Oneness bodies stands outside the trinitarian faith altogether, as section 8 explained.

Pentecostal and Catholic Teaching Compared

Pentecostal positions in this table are summarised from the published confessional documents of classical Pentecostal bodies, principally the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths, the Foursquare Declaration of Faith, and the Church of God Declaration of Faith. Practice varies between denominations and between congregations, and the independent sector is not bound by any of these statements. Catholic positions are cited to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and to the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

12. Talking With a Pentecostal Friend

Most Catholics meet Pentecostalism through a person rather than a doctrine: a cousin who left the parish for a lively church down the road, a colleague who offers to pray over a headache, a friend who asks whether you have been baptised in the Spirit. The conversation goes better when a few things are clear in advance.

Agree Where the Agreement Is Real

A trinitarian Pentecostal and a Catholic already share a great deal: one God in three persons, the divinity of Christ, his death and bodily resurrection, the inspiration of Scripture, the need for personal conversion, the call to holiness, and the expectation that Christ will return. Say so. The Catholic Church teaches that everyone validly baptised is in a real though imperfect communion with it (CCC 838), and Catholics should treat Pentecostal Christians as the brothers and sisters the Church says they are.

Answer the Spirit Baptism Question Directly

When a Pentecostal friend asks whether you have received the Holy Spirit, the Catholic answer is yes, in Baptism and in Confirmation, and it is worth being able to say why. The Church does not claim that a sacrament produces an emotion. It claims that the Spirit is truly given. The honest follow-up question, and the one a Catholic should ask of himself, is whether that grace is being used. A gift can be genuinely received and left largely dormant, which is exactly why St Paul told Timothy to fan into flame the gift of God given through the laying on of hands (2 Timothy 1:6).

Bring the Question Back to the Church

Where the conversation turns to what is missing, name what the Church has that no prayer meeting can supply: the Eucharist, sacramental absolution, the Anointing of the Sick, and a teaching authority able to settle a disputed question for the whole Church. A Pentecostal will answer that Scripture settles it, read in the congregation and summarised in a denomination's statement of faith, and that answer is held in good faith. The historical question worth putting gently is what happens when the reading itself divides, as it did over the Oneness controversy in 1916, when no body existed that could decide the matter for the movement as a whole. Our guide to Scripture and Sacred Tradition explains how the Catholic Church holds those together.

Do Not Answer a Living Faith With a Cold One

The strongest argument a Pentecostal congregation makes is the sight of ordinary people who plainly expect God to act. A Catholic who answers that with correct doctrine and no evident prayer life has lost the exchange, whatever the theology says. The Church's own saints, its mystics, its healing shrines and its charismatic prayer groups are the answer to the charge of coldness, and the answer only works when it is lived. Read your Bible daily. Go to confession. Receive the Eucharist. Pray to the Holy Spirit by name and ask him for the gifts he wants to give you.

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