To read Part 1 of this series, click here.

As Pentecostals, we were taught that Pentecostalism could be traced all the way back through Christian history to the Apostles. But where did it really come from? Pastor Tom Nelson's sermon is a lesson on Christian history and the rise of the Pentecostal movement. Not only can it not be traced all the way back through history--but it is only slightly over a century old, and developed in the United States, plagued by scandal from its very earliest days.

The Rise of Pentecostalism (Part 2)

Tom Nelson, Denton Bible Church

Oral Roberts was a Holiness Pentecostal preacher in Oklahoma, and he did something that had never been done -- he began holding big crusades. All sorts of Christians could come in and imbibe from Holiness Pentecostal doctrine. Even if they don't say it -- and I'm not being critical here, it's just a fact -- the Pentecostal group and the Holiness group see themselves as recovering an ancient sanctifying truth unknown to Christianity for twenty centuries. Roberts was inviting groups to come in and listen to him. He also began, with a man called Demos Shakarian, the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship. How many of you fellows have ever heard of the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship?

Now let me ask you something -- why is it called the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship? If it is Full Gospel, what are you? Are you Third Gospel? Are you Half Gospel? I was asked to speak one time at the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship, and I said, "No, I won't speak." And they said, "Why won't you?" And I said, "Because you do something that bothers me." And they said, "What is that?" And I said, "You call yourselves 'Full Gospel'. 'Full' meaning that you had a second blessing and you have spoken in tongues. I have not done that. Am I junior varsity? Am I B-team? Don't I get to play with you guys? Don't I letter? Do I have to have your experience? Are you closer to God than me because you do this act of speaking in tongues?" And it bothered me - still does.

Oral Roberts started big healing services where everyone could come, and he shifted from being a Pentecostal. He left the Pentecostal denomination, and he became a Methodist because it was more socially acceptable. He did not like the idea that Pentecostals had to stay down there by the river and clap their hands and be exclusive. He wanted to be mainstream, so he took it into the Methodist Church. Are you with me? Do you see what happened with Oral Roberts in the 1940s? When this guy made that jump, the Pentecostal church jumped the barricade of exclusivity, and it flooded the mainstream.

A guy named Bennett in 1959 was an Episcopal clergyman, and his church received the 'blessing'. He spoke in tongues and had to leave, and he started another church in Seattle, so now it was in the Episcopal Church. In the 1960s, it got into the Catholic Church at Duquesne University and Notre Dame. They had conferences of Catholic Charismatics. It was by now called the Charismatic Movement. The Charismatic Movement supposedly rekindled the gifts of the book of Acts (tongues and healing) as the norm. And so it was no longer the Pentecostal denomination -- it was the Charismatic movement. Not a denomination, but a movement.

You began to see the arising of very visible personalities. Let me show you something interesting. The Charismatic Movement uses television, and the reason (and I don't know how to say this) is that they are more fun to watch. People have asked me, "Are you ever going to do television, Tom?" And I say, "No." And they say, "Why not?" And I say, "Because I am boring." It isn't much fun to see someone like me on TV -- you know, the talking head. I am just not that exciting, and I am not ready to go out and get me a horse or fly in or something like that. And so Christian teaching does not translate well to television unless you're Charismatic, and then you have some excitement. You have folks like Kathryn Kuhlman -- she was exciting. Who else? Pat Robertson, David Wilkerson ...

The Charismatics are user-friendly, unlike the Pentecostals. The Pentecostals are exclusive, the Charismatics reach out. The Pentecostals teach that you come to God for holiness, and the Charismatics teach that you come to God for happiness, joy, and power. It's more anthropocentric, it's not as much theocentric. The Charismatic movement does not have taboos. In the Pentecostal denomination, there was no makeup, so a woman couldn't heighten her beauty -- it was ungodly. And you dang well better not be wealthy because that was the mark of the beast --you gave your money away. The Charismatic denomination--it elevated beauty and it elevated wealth. And women have certain place in the Pentecostal movement, but in the Charismatic movement, it was all open and a woman could preach.

And here's something else about the Charismatic movement. In all other denominations, there are rungs of the letter that you ascend (usually academically and in faithfulness) to get the place of a pulpit. Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians-- you go to seminary, you get to a place, they give you a church, you are ordained, and you're recognized. In the Charismatic movement, and the beginning of Charismatic churches, there was no doctrinal statement, there was no denominational persona, there were no seminaries, there were no Bible colleges -- at least very few. And so, if you want to be a leader, all you have to do is supposedly hear the voice of God telling you to do something. And if you can get an empty building and put a sign up there and call it the Glory Barn or something like that, you can start preaching right now. You do not have to rise through the ranks. So the Charismatic movement was very vulnerable to all sorts of people getting out there, and they still are.

The Third Wave—now listen to this ... If you were a holiness fellow, and you listened to Charismatics, they would offend you. If you were a 1960s Charismatic, modern Charismatics would offend you. That movement has gone from the seeking of holiness to the seeking of power to the seeking of money and beauty and success. It is totally Americanized. And this is called the 'Third Wave'.

There was a guy was born in McKinney, Texas—a Baptist who became Assemblies of God. He got into confessionalism—that if you confess something, you can create your own reality, that God will do what you call Him to do, that you can believe Him for healing, and thus you should never be sick and you should never be poor. His name was Kenneth Hagin.

The next guy was Oral Roberts' personal pilot. He was a nightclub singer, and he got into Hagin, and his name was Kenneth Copeland, and he went into TV in an extraordinary way. And after him, it was like fifty million others followed. That's a little bit sarcastic, but not too far, because anybody can be a Pentecostal or Charismatic preacher. You can become one tomorrow if you want to. Jim Baker, Bob Tilton ... he had a charmed green jacket that he would take away your illness by hitting you with. It just became more and more absurd, and it became more and more fraught with scandal.

Emotion will not sanctify. Emotion will not deal with your sin. It will not remove your lust, and it will not remove your greed. You can try all you want to have emotional experiences to take it away, and you are still going to have to deal with it when that emotion goes away. And if you elevate emotion and relegate study and faithfulness and obedience, and your Christian life becomes just mystical, then in time, you are going to deteriorate morally and in the area of greed—and that's what happened. And it has been fraught with error.

The Third Wave movement—God wants you healthy and God wants you rich. Here are the premises of that movement ... and listen to me, because you are going to have to deal with this. This is where the movement is today. When you turn on the TV and watch these fellows, they have two messages: one on wealth and one on success. Their premise is based on the Old Testament conditional promises to Israel of blessing--if they would obey the law, then God would bestow blessing—none of these diseases would be upon you, the mildew and locust would not plague you, you will win your battles, all of these blessings in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. They are conditional promises to Israel. Israel never fully enjoyed them, because they were disobedient. Well, now, this movement feels that because Christ was completely obedient to God, then all of those conditional promises on physical things like wealth and success are now unconditional facts to Christians who are in in Christ. That is the logic. There are blessings for total obedience, Christ was totally obedient, blessings must flow, we are in Christ and are His ... ergo, Christians not be sick and they should not be poor. They are taking Old Covenant national ideas for Israel and bringing them into the New Covenant—not because the New Testament teaches that. You see all kinds of people suffer and be poor and be persecuted and die. It is a logical sequential idea, but it is not built upon exegesis and Bible study.

And I get kind of emotional about this because I have to clean up after this. People come to me and their faith has been wrecked because they couldn't make that money, they couldn't find that success, they did have loved ones get cancer, they did believe God to heal them, and they took them to these guys and nothing happed and they died. The great majority of these 'healers' have been sued. Did you know that? They have been sued by angered families who buried their loved ones after they believed for healing and wouldn't go to doctors and died. But what are they told? That they didn't believe strong enough.

There's also this idea that bad things can never be ordained by God—if it is bad, it was Satan, and if there is anything bad in your life, it is of the Devil. Do you believe that assumption that nothing good can come out of adversity? Do you raise your children like that? Do you say, “I will bestow upon them all the bounty and all the blessing that I have, and I will never put them through anything painful or injurious or any type of discipline.” If you raise your child like that, he or she will be the most worthless human being to have ever drawn a breath. So I don't buy either of those assumptions—they are non-historic, they are non-theological, they are bad hermeneutics.

And it is going more and more, because this movement has no cap on it. It keeps going further and further. to where now there's the idea that God created reality by His word, and we are in the image of God and we are His children, so we can create reality in our speaking. So you are starting to see not merely error in this movement, but downright blasphemy. It is getting really close to New Age pantheism—the idea of us being gods—because there is no doctrinal cap or boundary.

The results of the Pentecostal movement and neo-Pentecostal movements first of all are splits, and that is unavoidable. When you get people in your group who say that the body of Christ is divided vertically between the Christians who have and have not had the second blessing and speaking in tongues (the body of Christ is meant to be divided horizontally—different gifts that lean on each other and need each other in interdependence), when you start dividing them as closer to God than others, you are going to breed envy and jealousy and anger and pride. There is no way around it. No matter how piously you look at me and say, “It is my particular gift—my prayer language.” Well, why do you have it? “It brings me closer to God.” What's wrong with me? What's wrong with good old English? Why can't I have it? Why can't I be close to God? “I go into a certain kind of spiritual euphoria when I do this.” Euphoria is spirituality? Why can't I have this? ... I don't care how you cut it--it's going to divide your church. And it HAS divided the church.

And that's why sometimes I have to play the bishop in church. We do not keep Charismatics out of our church. If someone feels that he has this and he is going to do it, that is okay. But when he shows up at one of our Bible studies and he says, “I have this, and you can have it, too” ... well, now we have a problem and I have to play the bishop. I have to go talk to them about it and stop it because it will divide a church.

What would you do if I said to you, “I am glad that you all have your own relationship with God. Well, my personal spiritual gift is in the area of teaching. Come up to the front, and I will lay hands on you, and you can be like me, and you can be closer to God.” What would you think of that? You would think that was the most heinous, arrogant, erroneous, proud statement that I have ever made. Well, that's the Pentecostal movement—you are not as close to God as you could be, so have my experience and my particular gift, and you can be. Emotion raises you spiritually? No. It has altered our view of sanctification to an experience and event. It has altered our view of worship to raising the emotions. Music is now evocative and you are 'raised to a higher plane'. I don't mean to be nasty, but that's gnostic. That is gnosticism of the first century—the raising through mystic incantations of the soul to a higher spiritual plane. That is new to the Christian faith. Christian worship is not meant to be something that is an evocative thing. It is supposed to be deliberately focusing in on God and blessing His name. Any emotion that follows doesn't matter whether it is good or bad. There is a deep sense of piety to it and love. Music has changed.

No longer do people go to the Bible and seek within the confines of grammar, context, and language the truth of what God says. The Bible has become a touchstone that people rub to have a revelatory experience with God.

The focus of the Christian life is now often not to give, but to get—you get power, you get happiness by this event. People think that you don't have to study, you don't have to memorize, you don't have to deal with your flesh, you don't have to seek God—all you have to do is come forward, and I will touch you, and you pass out, and you go home happy. Who wouldn't like that? That is why the Pentecostal church has started and has taken off in America. We are the people of the microwave. We want it quick and we want it with no effort. I heard a commercial the other day that said, “Take these pills, and have that firm, taut body. Take these pills, go to sleep, and wake up taut.” They are making money off this! People think, “I don't want to sweat, I don't want to work out, I don't want to go to the gym. I want to bypass all of the ordained ways that God builds a body. All I want to do is take these pills and wake up looking like Arnold!” Well, I am sorry, but it is not going to work.

I will give you my opinions on what has happened. I think the Pentecostal movement was conceived in error and brought forth in heterodoxy. John Wesley was a marvellous evangelist, and he was an incredible organizer, but he was not a good theologian. And that's where they began their error. There is no second act that you go through. The idea of perfectionism is non-biblical. Paul said, “I have not laid hold of it. Forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward toward what lies ahead, I press.” Sanctification does not come by an experience. There is no subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit to a Christian. In the book of Acts, you have the beginning of the coming of the Spirit. People had obviously known of Christ historically and even believed in Him, but it had to come as a second act. But it is NOT taught as a second act in the epistles. It is assumed that we are all baptized by one Spirit into one body. The gift of tongues had a purpose and was significant in the first century to declare the preaching of the gospel. It was a miracle. Miracles do not continue—otherwise they would not be miracles. The tongues that are used today are gibberish. The tongues in the book of Acts were languages.

What about tongues being a prayer language? Jesus said that we should not babble like the gentiles and their many words. These things go around intelligence into an emotion. That's gnostic. To be really honest, that's Hindu, that's not Christian. You are told to love God with your mind. You should never circumvent your mind to have an emotional experience that would somehow make you 'holy'.

Now, I think those early Pentecostal fellows made doctrinal mistakes for a moral reason, and they were okay. But, as with all bad theology, it's always like a bullet—bad theology for a generation goes in small, but it comes out big. Wesley and the other early holiness guys (like Finney) made a mistake about the finished work of redemption. It was an honest mistake, and they were not intentionally misleading people. But it has come out now. And some guys using non-intelligent emotional mysticism to emotional people promise what they can't provide for the purpose of making big bunches of money and building empires. I think it is the worst thing of the 20th century, and I think it rivals liberalism.

Well, let's pray about it. And then go read your Bibles, and study.