What does it mean to be Pentecostal?

After being back in the Pentecostal Assemblies for 8 months now, I seem to get this question all the time? It seems that everybody affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies is asking this question from national and regional leaders, to pastors, to the people in the congregations.

I started writing on this topic for my blog and instead of a tight blog, I ended up with 5 pages. So instead of posting all 5 pages I am going to post this in a series. So this is part one. Who knows with any comments and feedback I get the series may grow.

We as a fellowship are celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the Azusa Street Revival which became the catalyst for the modern Pentecostal movement. If you follow Pentecostal history you will see that the signs and wonders that accompanied this revival were not embraced by the established church. People were forced to choose between their experience and their church. Like many people who experience God in a new and fresh way they couldn’t go back to the same old churches. This gave rise to the Pentecostal denominations including the Assemblies of God and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada.

The people in these churches embraced their salvation and the subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit and took the gospel to the world. These churches grew attracting non-Christians as well as Christians. Soon the Pentecostals went from a group of rejects to a major player on the western world church scene. There was a passion for reaching the lost both locally and around the world. Passion and purpose defined these churches not program and practice.

So what happened, Leonard Sweet said it best, “Where God sets up a church the devil sets up a chapel.”

Corruption began to appear. Swaggart, Roberts, Bakker three prominent Pentecostal leaders. Guys peddling books on end times, spiritual warfare and prosperity that at best use Scriptures out of context to proof-text their argument and at their worst are as fictional as Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.

Complacency the success of early Pentecostals in reaching the lost gave us big self sustaining churches, we didn’t need more people. Instead of seeing a lost and dying world needing a savior we saw a world going to hell and didn’t even blink.

Confusion began to creep into the lives of our people. Leaders were torn by this complacency in our churches and the solution was we needed to go back to our roots. We needed more Azusa experiences. Teaching focused around getting the fire. If you speak in tongues God can use you. This was the mantra of the day. I thank God that the first time I went up to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit that it happened instantly. I don’t know if I could have dealt with the feelings of failure by not getting it right away. I would have said God hates me and can not use me. Don’t get me wrong my “Pentecostal experience” was a benchmark of my journey of faith. I pray that everyone would experience the reality of God with the intensity that I did. The confusion came in because no one taught me how to live with the Spirit. My Pentecostal theology as a teenager was best summed up as. God fills you with his Spirit so that you can live for him, which meant not sinning. When you find that you are sinning more you needed to get refilled. This would take place at a Spiritual gas station, the altar at camp, youth convention or retreat, or if you were lucky the altar at a Sunday night service. Tongues and getting refilled became all you needed for Christianity. Tongues became the magic pill that made the bad go away.
The manual for living as Pentecostal teenager read like this.
What do I do when I am afraid to speak up for my faith? Pray in tongues.
What do I do when I tempted to have sex? Pray in tongues.
What do I do when I am nervous about taking a test? Pray in tongues.
What do I do when I mad at my parents? Pray in tongues.
How do I know my faith is real? Pray in tongues.
What happens if I have gas in an elevator and I’m afraid it will come out loud? Pray in tongues.
What happens when my biology teacher starts teaching on evolution? Pray in tongues; also pray that God will strike this person dead in front of class so that everyone will believe creation. And loudly disrupt the class by saying anyone who believes in evolution will go straight to hell.

No wonder we are facing a crisis in Pentecostal circles. We have made tongues more than it should be and have neglected what living in the Spirit really means.