The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself

Bottled Lightning
Early American Pentecostalism

Week of Monday, October 14, 2002

In January, 1901 at tiny Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, a student named Agnes Ozman had the experience of speaking in tongues. Under the leadership of Charles Fox Parham, the head of the school whose only textbook for the students was the Bible, revival soon broke out in Topeka with many believers speaking in tongues. Christians had spoken in tongues all the way back in the book of Acts (see Acts 2:1–13), and also in England and America in the nineteenth century, but Parham developed an interpretation about speaking in tongues that had two special characteristics, and that, we might observe, had never been made in the history of Christianity. First, he believed that “baptism in the Holy Spirit” was an experience distinct from and subsequent to salvation, and that it should be normative for every believer. Second, Parham said that speaking in tongues was the “initial evidence” of this second baptism, that is, the proof that one had experienced true Spirit baptism.

Parham traveled to Houston in 1905, where a black pastor named William J. Seymour came under his influence. Seymour, who had only one eye and was known for his mild manner (one eyewitness described him as “meek, plain spoken, and no orator”), accepted Parham's message that speaking in tongues must always accompany baptism in the Holy Spirit, and took this message back to Los Angeles. There, in an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Church at 312 Azusa Street in an industrial section of downtown Los Angeles, revival and speaking in tongues broke out under his leadership. Seymour founded the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, and for the next three years there on Azusa Street he held daily meetings of spontaneous prayer, preaching, and healing. The meetings were also characterized by the unusual degree of inter-racial cooperation between blacks and whites and participation by women.

With Parham and Seymour, most scholars mark the beginning of what today we know of as the pentecostal or charismatic movement. And what a beginning. From these obscure and unlikely founders the movement has spread like wild fire all around the world. If you look at David Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia, you discover that in a little less than one hundred years Pentecostals have grown to about 525 million believers in virtually every Christian denomination and in every country of the world. They now constitute the largest distinct group of Christians except for Roman Catholics (and we should note that many Catholics are charismatic).

Enter Grant Wacker, a professor of history at Duke University who was raised in a pentecostal family and attended church in that tradition until he left for college. Today he identifies himself “simply as an evangelical Christian,” at least as far as his “head” is concerned, but he also admits that “in many ways my heart never left home. Pentecostals continue to be my people.”¹ As the consummate insider, but as a critical scholar that allows him to distance himself from his subject as an outsider, Wacker is perfectly poised to narrate the story of his people. He has done so in a fascinating book entitled Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Focusing on the early years of the movement from 1900 to 1925, Wacker wants to “rescue early Pentecostals from the shadowy fate that E.P. Thompson once called (in another context) ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’” (p. 266).

How and why did this obscure movement ever survive, much less flourish? Most outsiders scorned the Pentecostals as wild, anti-intellectual enthusiasts, and internally they had their fair share of schism, dissension and petty competition. In the past several decades, according to Wacker, most scholarly explanations for “pentecostalism's persistence” fall into one of three paradigms. The compensation model argues that pentecostal religion was a way to escape adversity, a spiritual substitute for the material and social deprivation that they experienced as a fringe group. The functional perspective suggests that instead of being a negative reaction to marginalization, pentecostal religion was a positive, stabilizing influence, a creative way to experience solace in the face of all the normal viscissitudes of life and death. Third, the mobilization paradigm points to creative, energetic leaders who marshaled people and resources around a cause and formed the social institutions necessary to give Pentecostalism staying power.

Wacker finds all three of these models helpful, but his entire book is an extended treatment of his own very specific thesis. He states his argument as follows (p. 10):

The genius of the pentecostal movement lay in its ability to hold two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tension. I call the two impulses the primitive and the pragmatic. ...(W)e might simply think of them as idealism versus realism, or principle versus practicality. Sociologist James Mathisen once remarked that the main challenge most religious movements face is figuring out how to capture lightening in a bottle. Pentecostals' distinctive understanding of the human encounter with the divine, which included both primitivist and pragmatic dimensions, enabled them to capture lightening in a bottle and, more important, to keep it there, decade after decade, without stilling the fire or cracking the vessel.

The primitive impulse describes Pentecostals' intense longing for a direct, unmediated experience of the living God, and to have that experience of God “without the distorting refractions of human volition, traditions, or speculations” (p. 11). Pentecostals were thus heavenly minded and otherworldly. Of course, at times this primitive impulse expressed itself in any number of negative ways, such as by relegating other believers to a second class status, ignoring and even disdaining Christian tradition (and remaining oblivious to their own), stretching faith to uncritical and anti-intellectual credulity, the tendency to construe all of life in extremes and never in nuances, fostering imperious authoritarianism on the part of those who so confidently claimed to know the mind of God without any trace of doubt, and so on. But by and large, who can fault any Christian for the desire to know and love God fully, immediately, purely and directly?

But Wacker also argues that Pentecostals were pragmatic. They made concessions and accommodations to serve their own causes. They were shrewd and worked hard. They produced schools, colleges, hospitals, newspapers, magazines, and, as we know today, billion dollar television empires that span the globe. This admirable trait also had its downside. Pentecostals could be mavericks, loners, workaholics, bold to the point of brash, social and cultural antagonists, and manipulative. “Again and again we see them holding their proverbial finger to the wind, calculating where they were, where they wanted to go and, above all, how to get there” (pp. 13–14).

Sometimes complementing and sometimes contradicting each other, Wacker argues that the primitive and the pragmatic explain the success of Pentecostalism's early years. In fifteen chapters he explores how these two traits expressed themselves in the various nuances of the everyday life of Pentecostal leaders and the ordinary faithful—their worship, their ideas of authority, the role of women, the place of speaking in tongues, their customs, their relationship to larger culture and society, and so on. In the end, I was struck by how deeply the Pentecostal movement has influenced all of Protestant Christianity in the last century. Wacker's book helped me to see afresh the promises and pitfalls of trying to follow Jesus in my own life, in the greater pentecostal movement, and in Christian traditions of whatever stripe.