100 years of Freedom In the Spirit
Pentecostals Celebrate World's Fastest-Growing Religion
Published: Monday, April 24, 2006 at 12:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, April 24, 2006 at 6:15 a.m.
Someone's singing, and people are lined up at the front of the tiny church, hands out, palms up, waiting with expectant expressions. Pastor Herb Brown tips a bottle of olive oil onto his right hand, puts it on the forehead of a woman and begins to pray.
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A young woman worships during a service at Lakeland's Family Worship Center.
DAVID MILLS/The LedgerFacts
PENTECOSTALISM BY THE NUMBERS
5 Percent of the population in Polk County that was Pentecostal in 2000. 5 Number of Pentecostal churches in the 15 largest churches in America in 2005. 14 Percent of American Christians who say they are Pentecostal. More than one in three say they are "spirit-filled." 25 Percent of Christians around the world who say they are Pentecostal or charismatic. 28 Percent that the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) grew in Polk County between 1990 and 2000. The county growth rate was 20 percent during that time. 60 Percent that independent charismatic churches grew in Polk County between 1990 and 2000. 32,500 Weekly attendance at Lakewood Church in Houston, the largest church in America in 2005. 588,501,776 Number of Pentecostals and charismatics worldwide in 2005. Sources: Church Growth Today, Glenmary Research Center, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, World Christian Database.
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"Take your healing. Just let it go," he says. "God has come to deliver you. Somebody took your love. Today, God says you can be healed."
As Brown prays, her knees buckle and she begins to shake with weeping. The singing gets louder. Brown's voice rises in intensity, and suddenly he barks out a quick stream of syllables that aren't in any human dictionary. It might not make sense to a stranger, but for the eight or nine worshippers at the Lighthouse International Church, the meaning is clear. The Holy Spirit is here.
This service on a Sunday afternoon in Lakeland is a distant reflection of one that took place 100 years ago and 3,000 miles away. In April 1906, at a little house and later at a converted barn on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, there was a revival that many Pentecostals would say marks the birth of their movement.
Like the Lighthouse church service, it was small at first; there were different races present; and like its spiritual descendants here, at Azusa Street the worshippers practiced "speaking in tongues" as a sign they had been filled with the Holy Spirit.
Today, with a gala at the Los Angeles Convention Center, a weeklong conference gets under way that will bring as many as 60,000 Pentecostals from around the world to mark the centennial of the Azusa Street revival. Many of the renowned Pentecostal leaders in America will be there, including preachers like T.D. Jakes and Jack Hayford.
And because Polk County is a hub for Pentecostals in Florida, local Pentecostal leaders will be there, too. Paul van der Laan, professor of religion at Southeastern University in Lakeland, the largest Assemblies of God college in the United States, will moderate a panel at the conference.
Also, Paula White -- co-pastor of Without Walls International Church in Tampa, which has a satellite church in Lakeland, Without Walls Central -- will speak at one of the centennial conference sessions.
FASTEST-GROWING TRADITION
To those outside the movement, Pentecostals have always seemed exotic, a strange subculture with weird, even frightening, practices. How then to explain that according to the World Christian Database, it is now the second-largest and fastest-growing Christian group in the world, behind the Catholic Church, with about 580 million followers? Or that formal Episcopalians and contemplative Catholics include Pentecostal practices in their services? Or that nearly every mainline and evangelical denomination has been influenced by Pentecostal musical styles, as anyone who has been to a contemporary worship service can attest?
Bishop John Howe of the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, who once pastored a church with "charismatic" leanings, says the Pentecostal movement has been "a tremendous blessing" to all Christian churches.
"The whole point is to get to know the Lord more personally, and I think the Pentecostal movement has helped people do that," he says.
The movement has been transformed in a century from maligned to respectable, from poor and rural congregations to upwardly mobile suburban mega-churches, from a spontaneous grassroots movement to one that is more organized and denominational.
Yet the movement's basic principles have not changed since Azusa Street:
• The claim to have a direct experience of the presence of God. Pentecostals speak of the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" that are manifest in their services, primarily speaking in tongues, healing and prophecy.
• Exuberant -- some would say noisy -- worship services.
• Freedom, which Pentecostals say is essential to the way worship is conducted, churches are run and doctrines taught.
That freedom is evident at Lighthouse International. Dexter and Nova Brock and Judy Sklomeit lead enthusiastic gospel-style a cappella singing, concluded with shouts of "Thank you, Lord! Give him praise! Praise his name!" Later, shortly after Pastor Lydia Garcia gets up to preach, she says, "I feel like praising the Lord. Stand up and praise him!" Everyone responds by shouting out hallelujahs and other sounds that can't be identified.
PUZZLING PRACTICE
Speaking in tongues is probably the practice that puzzles and alarms non-Pentecostals the most. In some Pentecostal denominations, such as the more traditional Assemblies of God, the practice is downplayed and not much in evidence. Cecil M. Robeck, professor of church history at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said in a recent interview that only about 40 percent of Pentecostals speak in tongues, and the number is lower in Third World countries, where the movement is growing the fastest.
Woody Sprott, a financial adviser from Winter Haven, expresses reservations about the practice. Raised in the Episcopal Church, he began attending Without Walls Central with his wife and was turned off at first by the unpredictable worship services. Eventually though, he began to feel an emotional connection and wouldn't go back to the Episcopal Church, he says, but he's still skeptical about speaking in tongues.
"I'm not convinced everyone who prays in tongues has the gift. People tend to do what other people do -- they go along. But, how are you going to separate the wheat from the chaff?" he says.
Independent churches -- usually known as "charismatic," from the Greek word for gift -- embrace the practice more openly.
At a recent Sunday morning service at Family Worship Center in Lakeland, after 20 minutes of rousing praise songs have been sung, Pastor Reggie Scarborough takes the stage and encourages people to pray individually. For a few minutes, as music plays quietly, there is a murmur as people speak aloud, some in tongues, faces upturned, eyes closed. Scarborough is heard also over the sound system: "Marnaheya. Oh mareanya."
A few days later, in his office, Scarborough says that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are like charging up a car's battery.
"Spiritually it builds you up; it strengthens you," he says. "When you receive the Holy Spirit, you receive a language you didn't have. You do the speaking, but he gives you words to speak. I can't imagine being a Christian and rejecting one of the greatest gifts ever given to man."
DISAGREEMENT OVER SCRIPTURE
But some traditions are openly hostile to the practice. Earlier this year, the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board adopted a policy that forbids any of its future missionaries from having a "private prayer language." The new policy reflects a longstanding antipathy among Baptists for speaking in tongues, which they regard as based on a faulty interpretation of scripture.
As the New Testament book of Acts recounts, after Jesus' resurrection his disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit that he promised them. As they were gathered for Pentecost, a minor Jewish festival, "suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance."
Some theologians say this gift
and others exercised by the apostles, such as healing the sick and prophesying, ceased with the end of the apostolic age.
Pentecostals answer that there are recorded instances over the next 1,900 years to show otherwise. And, they say, in America, Wales, India and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the gift was given again, restoring the church to its New Testament foundations. The Azusa Street mission and some Pentecostal churches since have used the term "apostolic" to signify this.
CONTROVERSIAL HEALINGS
Another "gift," healing, has always been one of the more controversial practices of Pentecostalism. Claims of miraculous healings, with crutches of the crippled being thrown aside, and counter-claims by critics of fraud have raged back and forth.
Scarborough of Family Worship Center says healing goes beyond physical ailments and can include all kinds of problems.
"The same faith can meet a financial obligation, heal a marriage situation or help someone get a job. Jesus said all things are possible for those who believe," he says.
Most Sundays at Family Worship Center after the service ends, people come forward to have Scarborough pray for them. One by one, he touches them on the forehead, making a shushing sound as he does. Some are "slain in the Spirit" -- collapsing into the arms of attendants who gently place them on the floor.
One who has asked for these healing prayers on several occasions is Kathi Mathis, 46, of Lakeland, who was recently laid off from her job.
"The most incredible peace comes over you and warmth and a sense of love," she says of the sensation of receiving the prayer. "It's beyond description. Sometimes it fills you with joy, and you lie there laughing. Sometimes you weep."
Asked why some are healed and others are not, Scarborough says, "I just don't know. I believe it's God's will (for healing), but man has a part to play. . . . God allows man's will sometimes."
DESPISED TO RESPECTABLE
It has not been so long ago that Pentecostals were despised. Called "holy rollers" and worse, they were regarded as ignorant, sectarian and strange.
Larry Anderson, pastor of Abundant Life Church of God in Lakeland, says he was a good student in high school and college but when word got around in his hometown that he was entering the Pentecostal ministry, "teachers who used to associate with me treated me just like I had the plague or leprosy. It broke my heart."
Anderson says things have changed in the last 15 to 20 years. He credits TV ministries for educating the public about Pentecostal doctrines and generally demystifying the movement.
Others, such as Mark Rutland, president of Southeastern University, say that Pentecostalism became more respectable as a result of the charismatic movement, in which Pentecostal practices suddenly sprang up among upscale, well-educated mainline churches in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of those charismatics eventually left their Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches and made their way into Pentecostal denominations and independent churches.
Pentecostal churches became less isolated and more open to higher education, says Rutland, a former United Methodist pastor who was swept up in the charismatic movement in 1975 and turned to the Assemblies of God in 1990.
"The thing Pentecostals were afraid of -- co-opting their values -- did happen, but it wasn't bad," he says.
In spite of their newfound respectability, Pentecostals have had trouble shaking suspicions that their churches are run by shady characters, because of some high-profile failures.
A HARSH SPOTLIGHT
The movement has had its share of sexual and financial scandals, from Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s to Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the 1980s to, more recently, Robert Tilton and Earl Paulk.
Other personalities, such as Benny Hinn, have faced scrutiny about luxurious lifestyles and questionable claims of healing. All of which raises the question whether Pentecostalism is more susceptible to scandal than other, less tame, traditions.
There is disagreement about the answer, both within and outside the movement. J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma, a magazine for Pentecostals based in Orlando, has written critically of a tendency to glorify individual leaders. He finds agreement from Southeastern's van der Laan: "It has to do with a lack of denominational discipline. Also, our theology has not matured yet."
But Rutland says the prominent failures of some Pentecostal leaders are no worse than those of other traditions.
"Religion is susceptible to (cults of personality). I've never seen such devotion to a person as John Paul II," he says. "There's nothing unique about Pentecostals. Where ministries are the highest profile, the scandals are the highest profile."
Just why Pentecostalism has experienced such explosive growth is a matter of debate. Edith Blumhofer, professor of history at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois, says its grassroots nature allowed it to spread quickly but points to other factors as well.
"It happened among people already outside denominations who were dissatisfied with the drift of American Christianity. That explains its vigor, because nobody really controls it," she says. "And it did OK because people were really pragmatic. They used modern means to anti-modern ends. They used the radio to say, `The world is going to hell.' "
Rutland says Pentecostalism speaks to a sense of immediate spiritual need.
"It seems to me many of the things (in 1906) were similar to today. They were staring down the barrel of a new millennium. America was experiencing post- and pre-war tremors. The roles of men and women were beginning to change. People were saying, `I need God to meet me now,' " he says.
"Azusa Street was not about the gifts of the Spirit, it was about power for living today . . . the power to be Christian. Azusa didn't start that message, and the 21st century won't end it."
Cary McMullen can be reached at cary.mcmullen@theledger.com or 863-802-7509.
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