What Happened Next

Words to Know

Pentecostal — named for Pentecost, the Jewish harvest feast fifty days after Passover, when the book of Acts says the Holy Spirit fell on my followers in Jerusalem and they began to speak in other languages (Acts 2:1–4). Pentecostal churches teach a baptism in the Holy Spirit after conversion. The Assemblies of God and many other Pentecostal bodies teach that speaking in tongues is its first sign. The largest include the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ.

Charismatic — from the Greek charisma, gift. The movement that carried Pentecostal worship and gifts into other churches, Protestant and Catholic, from the 1960s on.

Speaking in tongues — praying or praising aloud in a language the speaker does not know, or in speech that is not a known language at all.

The prosperity gospel — the teaching, closely tied to the Word of Faith movement, that God wants every believer to be healthy and wealthy, and that faith, positive confession and giving to the ministry will bring it.¹

Start at Azusa Street.

In April 1906, in a run-down building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a Black preacher named William Seymour began meetings that went on, almost without stopping, for three years. Seymour was the son of former slaves. He had been taught about the Spirit by a white preacher in Houston who, because of the laws of the time, made him sit outside the classroom door and listen.²

At Azusa Street, Black and white and Mexican worshippers knelt together, at a time when that was unthinkable, and often dangerous, in much of the country. Washerwomen and day laborers sat beside the few wealthy people who came. Women preached. One of the white men who was there wrote that the color line was washed away in the blood.³ The newspapers mocked them. The poor kept coming.

I know that room. It looked like the crowds that followed me.

Many of your churches trace themselves to it, directly or through someone who was there. Pentecostal and charismatic Christians now number in the hundreds of millions, about a quarter of all Christians in the world, most of them in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and many of them poor.⁴ Few church movements in history have grown so fast among the people I called blessed.

So I want to ask about your churches the same way I would ask about any other: are the things you built on the things I set down? Aimee Semple McPherson, one of your great founders, summed up her gospel in four titles for me: Savior, Baptizer, Healer and Coming King.⁵ Let me take the last three, and then one she did not name, which has grown up beside them.

The First Pillar: The Baptism

You were taught that tongues are the first evidence of the Spirit’s baptism. Acts tells you what else the evidence was.

Read Pentecost to the end of the chapter. Yes, they were all filled with the Spirit and began to speak with other languages (Acts 2:4). Then Peter preached that God was pouring out the Spirit on everyone, your sons and your daughters, servants and handmaidens alike (Acts 2:17–18). And then the chapter tells you what the people did:

All who believed were together, and had all things in common. They sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, according as anyone had need (Acts 2:44–45).

Two chapters later, when the Spirit shook the room again, it says it a second time: Not one of them claimed that anything of the things which he possessed was his own … For neither was there among them any who lacked (Acts 4:32, 34).

Acts does say new languages came with the Spirit (Acts 2:4; 10:46; 19:6). But that is not all it gives as evidence. It also says: nobody in need.

It is what I said about the Spirit myself. When I told the people of Nazareth why the Spirit was on me, I read it from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor (Luke 4:18). The first thing I named was the poor. Then came the captives, the blind and the crushed.

Paul, who spoke in tongues himself, put it as plainly as anyone has: If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1). And: in the assembly I would rather speak five words with my understanding, that I might instruct others also, than ten thousand words in another language (1 Corinthians 14:19).

The Second Pillar: The Healing

You were taught that I am the Healer, and that healing is for you today. I healed for free, and I did not put it on show.

I did heal. The gospels are full of it, and I sent my friends out to do it: Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. Freely you received, so freely give (Matthew 10:8).

Freely give. Nobody in the gospels ever paid me for a healing, or sowed a seed for one, or bought a bottle of anything.

And I did not put healing on a stage. Again and again I told people I had healed to tell no one (Mark 1:44; 5:43; 7:36). When the religious experts asked me for a sign from heaven to prove myself, he sighed deeply in his spirit, Mark says, and I refused: no sign will be given to this generation (Mark 8:11–12).

Your movement has been full of people who pray for the sick in kindness and expect nothing back. It has also been full of men who made healing a show and a business. In 1986 the television healer Peter Popoff was shown, on national television, to be receiving the names and illnesses of his audience through a hidden earpiece from his wife, who sent it by radio.⁶ He came back, and his ministry still sells “miracle” products on television.

The cruelest part is not the money. It is what some of the sick are told when they are not healed: that they did not have enough faith. My own disciples asked me a question like that about a man born blind: who sinned, this man or his parents? I told them: This man didn’t sin, nor did his parents (John 9:2–3).

The Third Pillar: The Seed

Many of you were taught that God wants you to prosper, and that giving to the ministry is the seed. I told you a camel would fit through a needle’s eye first.

McPherson did not name this one. It grew up after her. In the 1950s the Pentecostal healer Oral Roberts began asking his followers for gifts that he promised God would return, and by 1970 he called this seed-faith: give to God, through his ministry, and expect a harvest back, in money as much as in anything else.⁷ In January 1987 he told his television audience that God would call him home if he did not raise eight million dollars by the end of March, to pay for scholarships for medical missionaries.⁸ The money came.

The teaching has only grown since. In 2018 a preacher from Louisiana, Jesse Duplantis, asked his followers to believe with him for a fifty-four-million-dollar private jet, saying that God had told him to ask for it.⁹

Here is what I said about money, without any seed in it. Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20). Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man’s life doesn’t consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses (Luke 12:15). You can’t serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24). And: It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into God’s Kingdom (Mark 10:25).

The prosperity gospel turns those sentences upside down. In my teaching the poor are blessed. In that teaching poverty too often means someone did not have enough faith. Not all of you were taught this. The Assemblies of God, one of your largest bodies, said in an official paper in 1980 that this teaching conflicts with Scripture, and that trouble is not always a sign of weak faith.¹⁰

The Fourth Pillar: The Coming King

You were taught that I am coming soon. I told you the kingdom does not come with signs you can count.

The early Pentecostals believed they were the latter rain, the last outpouring before the end. Many of your churches still preach that the world is about to end, that the faithful will be taken up and the rest left behind. That idea is younger than you might think; most historians trace it in its modern form to the 1830s.¹¹

I was asked when the kingdom would come. I said: God’s Kingdom doesn’t come with observation; neither will they say, ‘Look, here!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ for behold, God’s Kingdom is within you (Luke 17:20–21). And about the end itself: of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Mark 13:32).

A church that is always waiting for the end can stop caring about the world. Why mend what is about to burn? But I taught you to pray for God’s will on earth (Matthew 6:10), and the first Christians in Acts did not wait. They sold their land and fed each other.

What Your Church Kept

Now, in fairness, look at what your church kept.

You kept the women. On the day of Pentecost Peter said your sons and your daughters will prophesy (Acts 2:17), and many of your churches believed him long before most others did. McPherson built one of the largest churches in America in the 1920s and ran a commissary that, by her church’s count, fed more than a million people in Los Angeles during the Depression.¹²

You kept the poor in your pews. In much of the world, yours is the church of the slums, the favelas and the villages, where people who were told they were nothing are told that the Spirit is poured out on them too.

You kept joy, and the expectation that God still acts.

And you kept the ability to repent. In 1994, in Memphis, the leaders of the Pentecostal fellowship that had been all white for decades dissolved it, publicly repented of their racism, and formed a new fellowship with the Black Pentecostal churches. A white pastor washed the feet of a Black bishop. People who were there call it the Memphis Miracle.¹³ The movement that spread from Azusa Street had split largely by color within a decade. Almost ninety years later it said so out loud.

So the question is not whether I am in your church. I am at Azusa Street, and in McPherson’s commissary, and in Memphis. The question is which part stands on top. In too many of your churches, on top, is a man on a stage with a jet.

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

“Tongues are the first evidence that you have been baptized in the Spirit.”

The Spirit has fruit you can check: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). Tongues are not on the list. And the evidence in Acts was that neither was there among them any who lacked (Acts 4:34).

“God wants you to prosper. It’s in 3 John 2.”

They mean: Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be healthy, even as your soul prospers (3 John 1:2). It comes right after the address on a short letter, the kind of greeting people put at the top of letters in that world, much as you might write I hope you’re well.¹⁴ It is not a promise, and it is not mine.

Mine was this: woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation (Luke 6:24).

“Give, and it will be given to you.”

That is mine (Luke 6:38). Read the verses around it. Just before it I said: love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing back (Luke 6:35). And: Don’t judge … Don’t condemn … Set free, and you will be set free (Luke 6:37). The giving I meant was to the needy and to your enemies, expecting nothing back, and what comes back to you is the same measure of mercy. A preacher who asks you to give to him, expecting a hundredfold, has taken the verse out of its own paragraph.

“If you had enough faith, you would be healed.”

I prayed in the garden, Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me (Mark 14:36). The cup was not removed. Nobody has ever had more faith than that prayer.

Paul begged three times for something to be taken from him, and it was not. He was told: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:8–9).

If you are sick, that is not proof that your faith was too small. Anyone who told you so was wrong.

“Touch not the Lord’s anointed.”

It is a line from a psalm, Don’t touch my anointed ones! Do my prophets no harm! (Psalm 105:15), and in the psalm it is about Abraham and his family, wandering among foreign kings. The phrase the LORD’s anointed also comes from the story of David refusing to kill King Saul (1 Samuel 24:6). In neither place was it a shield for preachers against questions.

I told you to question them: Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing … By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:15–16). Look at the fruit. Look at the jet.

“These signs will follow those who believe.”

They mean Mark 16:17–18: new languages, taking up serpents, drinking poison unharmed, healing the sick. You should know that those verses are part of an ending to Mark that is missing from the two oldest complete copies of the gospel. Most scholars think it was added later.¹⁵ It is the only place where I am quoted saying anything about tongues. A few small churches, mostly in the mountains of Appalachia, have taken it literally and handled rattlesnakes in worship, and people have died of the bites. Most Pentecostal churches reject the practice.¹⁶

The signs I actually pointed to were these: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk … and the poor have good news preached to them (Luke 7:22). And when people demanded signs, I said: An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign (Matthew 12:39).

If You Were Raised in It

You may remember the music, the hands in the air, the altar calls that went on for an hour, the people falling in the aisles, the prophecy over your life, and the feeling, in a good service, that God was right there. You may also remember being told to sow a seed you could not afford, or being prayed over for a sickness that did not go away, and wondering what was wrong with you.

Nothing was wrong with you.

Nothing here asks you to stop believing that God acts, or to give up the joy. It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read Acts 2 to the end of the chapter. Read Luke 4, where I said what the Spirit was for. Then look for the church where the Spirit’s evidence is that nobody in it goes hungry. That one is mine.

Check It Yourself

Read Acts 2:1–47, the whole chapter. Write down everything that happened after the people were filled with the Spirit.

Read Acts 4:32–35. Find the sentence about who lacked anything.

Read Luke 4:16–21. Write down why I said the Spirit was on me.

Read 1 Corinthians 13 and 14:18–19.

Read Mark 8:11–12, Mark 1:40–45 and Matthew 10:8. Write down what I said about signs, about publicity and about money.

Read Luke 6:27–38, then decide who the giving in verse 38 is for.

Look at the end of Mark in a modern Bible. Read the note printed before 16:9.

The Short Version

• Much of your movement spread from Azusa Street in 1906, led by William Seymour, a Black preacher, with Black and white and Mexican, rich and poor, women and men together.
• It is now a church of hundreds of millions, many of them poor, mostly in the Global South.
• Acts says the Spirit fell and they spoke in tongues. Then it says they sold their possessions and nobody among them lacked.
• When I said why the Spirit was on me, the first thing I named was good news to the poor.
• I healed for free, often told people to tell no one, and refused to give signs on demand. A famous healer was caught using a hidden earpiece in 1986.
• Being sick is not proof of a lack of faith. In the garden, my own prayer to have the cup removed was not granted.
• The prosperity gospel says the rich are blessed. I said the poor are blessed and a camel fits through a needle first.
• 3 John 2 is a letter greeting. Luke 6:38 is about mercy, expecting nothing back.
• Mark 16:17–18 is missing from the oldest copies of Mark.
• You kept women preachers, the poor, joy, and the Memphis Miracle of 1994.