Pentecostals believe the Holy Spirit gives gifts such as speaking in tongues today, as at the first Pentecost; the modern movement emerged in the early 1900s.
Pentecostal & evangelical1906grew out of Holiness movement
Speaking in tongues at Charles Parham's Bible school in Topeka (1901) and the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles (1906-09), led by William Seymour, a Black Holiness preacher, launched the movement. Interracial at first, it now includes hundreds of millions of Christians when charismatic movements are counted, many in the global South. Charismatic Catholics and other overlapping groups mean this is not a count of a single Protestant family.
Pentecostals believe the Holy Spirit still gives the gifts described in the New Testament, including speaking in tongues and healing. The movement began in the United States at the start of the twentieth century and is now the fastest growing kind of Christianity in the world.
At a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, on the first day of 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman asked Charles Parham to pray for her and began to speak in what those present took to be an unknown language. Parham concluded that speaking in tongues is the evidence that a believer has been baptised in the Holy Spirit 16,15,12. Five years later he taught a class in Houston that a Black holiness preacher named William Seymour was not allowed to sit inside, because of segregation law; Seymour listened from the hallway 14,12.
Seymour was invited to Los Angeles, and after being locked out of the church that invited him he began meeting in a house and then in a former stable on Azusa Street. From April 1906 the meetings ran day and night for three years, and people came from across the country and then across the world to see them 13,7. The revival printed its own paper and sent it out free, and archives of that period are kept by the movement today 8,13. What struck observers as much as the tongues was who was in the room: Black and white, Mexican and Chinese, women and men, poor people and a few rich ones, worshipping together at a time when American law and custom kept them apart. Frank Bartleman, who was there, wrote that the colour line was washed away in the blood 7,13. From Azusa the movement spread fast, and within a decade it had produced the Church of God in Christ, the Assemblies of God, the Church of God and, later, the Foursquare Church, each with its own page or place on the tree 3,2,4,6. The Church of God at Cleveland in Tennessee had begun as a holiness body in 1886 and became Pentecostal after Azusa 5,4.
The movement's founding promise about race did not hold, and that is why its denominations are shaped as they are. Parham taught Seymour from the far side of a doorway because Texas law would not seat a Black student with white ones, and when he came to Azusa Street in 1906 he condemned what he found there in openly racial terms and was refused the pulpit 15,14,13. Within a decade the movement had sorted itself by colour: white ministers, many of them credentialed by the Black-led Church of God in Christ, formed the Assemblies of God in 1914 as a separate body 12,2,3. In 1994, at meetings in Memphis, white Pentecostal leaders acknowledged that history, dissolved their whites-only fellowship and formed an interracial one in its place, and a white leader washed the feet of a Black bishop 18,12.
Pentecostals hold the historic Christian faith and add one conviction: what happened at the first Pentecost still happens. The Holy Spirit fills believers, gives gifts including tongues, prophecy and healing, and does it today rather than only in the Bible.
The Assemblies of God's Statement of Fundamental Truths sets out the pattern: Scripture as inspired, the Trinity, salvation through Christ, baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience after conversion, with speaking in tongues as its initial physical evidence, divine healing provided in the atonement, and the return of Christ 1,4. Many Pentecostals summarise their faith as the fourfold gospel: Jesus saves, baptises in the Spirit, heals and is coming again 6,4. Not every Pentecostal body ties the baptism of the Spirit to tongues in the same way, and charismatic Christians in older churches hold the gifts without the rest of the framework 12,11.
Two things follow in practice. Prayer for healing is ordinary, following the letter of James about calling the elders to anoint the sick, and Pentecostals will tell you stories of it 1,20,12. And the gifts are held to be given to anyone, which is why the movement has always had preachers who had no education, no ordination and no property, and why women preached in it from the beginning, decades before most other Protestant bodies allowed it 13,17,12.
Worship and practice
Pentecostal worship is loud, long and participatory. People sing with their hands raised, pray aloud all at once, come forward to be prayed for, and expect something to happen. Services do not run to a fixed clock.
A typical service has extended singing led by a band, spontaneous prayer, testimony from members about what God has done, a sermon that may be answered aloud by the congregation, and a time at the front for prayer for healing or for the baptism of the Spirit 12,4,6. Speaking in tongues may happen in private prayer or aloud in the meeting, where Pentecostals follow Paul's rule that a message in tongues should be interpreted 1,12. Music has been central and has flowed both ways: the movement drew on Black gospel and has since shaped worship music across the whole church 12,13. Most congregations baptise believers by immersion and keep the Lord's Supper as a memorial 1,4.
Scripture and Bible translations
Pentecostals read the Bible as a description of what God still does, not only of what he once did. They used the King James Version in the early years and use modern translations now, in a movement that is mostly not English speaking.
Because the movement grew through missionaries and migrants rather than through state churches, its Bibles are the Bibles of the global South: Spanish in Latin America, Portuguese in Brazil, Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa across Africa, and Korean in churches such as Yoido Full Gospel Church 10,19,12. Pentecostal churches usually have no lectionary and no authorised version, and preachers choose their own passages, most often from Acts, the Gospels and Paul's letters about the Spirit 1,12. Read here: the King James Version the first Pentecostals used, the Reina-Valera in Spanish, the Bíblia Livre in Portuguese, and the Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa Bibles. The versions guide sets out what Pentecostal churches read today.
Documented use
The Assemblies of God prescribes no version; its website presents the NIV, and its Fire Bible is published in several translations. The NIV, NLT, NKJV, ESV and KJV are encountered across Pentecostal settings, but the cited evidence does not establish representative rates of congregational use.
Worldwide
Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity has experienced substantial global growth. Its linguistic setting is predominantly non-English, so English-language translation preferences should not be generalized to the movement worldwide.
African churches
The African Initiated Churches, the Aladura, Zionist, Kimbanguist and Celestial churches among them, read the Bible in their own languages, Yoruba, Zulu, Lingala, Kikongo and Swahili, and several of those editions are here.
These passages illustrate themes discussed in this profile; they are not a survey of members' favorite verses. Each is quoted from the King James (Authorized) Version and links to its chapter. You can explore the text for study or personal reflection; memorization is optional.
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
The day of Pentecost. This is the passage the whole movement is named for, and the one Pentecostals expect to see repeated.
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Peter's quotation of Joel is why Pentecostals have always let women preach and have never required an education to do it.
Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.
Diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. Paul's list of gifts is read as a description of normal church life rather than of a closed past.
Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.
Let him call for the elders of the church. The plain instruction behind Pentecostal prayer for the sick, with oil and laying on of hands.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female. Azusa Street tried to live this out in 1906, and the movement has been measured against it ever since.
People
Charles Parham1873 to 1929 The holiness teacher whose Topeka school first tied speaking in tongues to baptism in the Spirit, and who later condemned the interracial worship his own teaching had helped begin.15
Agnes Ozman1870 to 1937 The student who spoke in tongues on 1 January 1901, the moment Pentecostals usually take as the movement's beginning.16
Lucy Farrowabout 1851 to 1911 Born into slavery, she introduced Seymour to Parham's teaching, prayed with many at Azusa, and then took the message to Liberia.21
William J. Seymour1870 to 1922 Son of formerly enslaved parents, blind in one eye, who led the Azusa Street revival and insisted that love across the colour line was the real evidence of the Spirit.14
Charles Harrison Mason1864 or 1866 to 1961 Went to Azusa Street in 1907 and brought the experience back to the Church of God in Christ, which he led for over fifty years into the largest Black Pentecostal body. Published church sources differ on his birth year: a 2014 commemoration uses 1864, while the Official Manual gives 1866 24,25.22
Aimee Semple McPherson1890 to 1944 Preacher and radio pioneer who founded the Foursquare Church, built the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles and fed thousands during the Depression.17
David Yonggi Cho1936 to 2021 Founded a church in a tent in Seoul after the Korean war and led it to become the largest congregation in the world, organised through small home groups.19
Today
Pentecostal and charismatic Christians together number in the hundreds of millions, and most of them live in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Counting is hard because the movement crosses denominations.
Pew, using figures from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, reported estimates for 2010 of about 279 million Pentecostals in Pentecostal denominations and about 305 million charismatic Christians in other churches, categories that overlap with evangelicals and so cannot simply be added to other totals 10,9. Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, Guatemala and Korea have some of the largest Pentecostal populations, and Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul is a prominent Pentecostal congregation 19,10,12. The movement has no central authority: it is thousands of separate denominations, networks and independent congregations, some of them in the World Council of Churches and many in no council at all 11,12. Pentecostal Christianity also reshaped older churches through the charismatic renewal from the 1960s, which has its own branch on the tree 12,11.
Words to know
ordinance
In Baptist and many other free churches, the word used for baptism and the Lord’ Supper: acts Christ commanded his people to keep, understood as obedience and remembrance. Churches that call them sacraments understand them as means through which God gives grace.
congregational government
Church government in which the members of each local congregation decide their own affairs, including choosing their own minister, with no bishop or presbytery above them. Congregations may join associations for fellowship and shared work, but those bodies advise rather than rule.
creed
A short statement of belief said together in worship. The Nicene Creed is shared by nearly every Christian tradition.
canon
The list of books a community counts as Scripture. Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox canons overlap almost entirely and differ at the edges.
sacrament
A sacred act Christians believe carries God's grace, such as baptism and communion. Traditions count and understand them differently.
martyr
Someone killed for refusing to give up their faith. The word means witness. The early Church honoured its martyrs and kept the days of their deaths.
justification
How a person is made right with God. Luther's teaching that this happens by faith alone, as a gift, was the heart of the Reformation.
confession
In the Reformation churches, a written statement of what a church believes, such as the Augsburg Confession. In Catholic and Orthodox use, also the sacrament of telling one's sins to a priest.
Pentecost
The fiftieth day of Easter, when the churches remember the Holy Spirit coming on the apostles as Acts 2 tells it; the Greek name of the Jewish Shavuot, on which Acts sets the event.
Prayer or praise in sounds the speaker has not learned. Pentecostals distinguish private prayer in tongues from a message in tongues given in a meeting, which Paul says must be interpreted. Many Pentecostal bodies teach that tongues is the first evidence of being baptised in the Holy Spirit, though not all of them do 1,12.
What is baptism in the Holy Spirit?
An experience Pentecostals hold to be distinct from and usually later than conversion, in which the Spirit fills a believer with power for witness and gives spiritual gifts. It is modelled on what happened to the disciples at Pentecost and to Cornelius' household in Acts 1,4,12.
Do Pentecostals believe medicine is wrong?
Almost all Pentecostal bodies pray for healing and use doctors, and their statements of faith do not forbid medicine 1,4. Some individual preachers have taught otherwise, and that teaching has caused real harm, which is one reason the practice is argued over within the movement 23,12.
What is the difference between Pentecostal and charismatic?
Pentecostals belong to denominations formed around this experience, from the Church of God in Christ to the Assemblies of God. Charismatics hold to the gifts of the Spirit while staying in older churches, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and others, a movement that began in the 1960s and has its own branch on the tree 12,11,10.
Why did the movement grow so fast?
It asked no education of its preachers, needed no building, translated easily into other languages and cultures, and offered ordinary people a direct experience of God and prayer for the troubles they actually had, sickness and poverty among them. It grew fastest where formal church structures were thinnest 12,10,11.
Sources
Numbered references link the account above to its sources. These include the tradition's own documents and outside reference works. The review status below distinguishes source checking from completed member and scholarly review.
BibleVerse. “Pentecostal: where they came from, what they hold, and the Bible they read.” bibleverse.site, version 2026-09-09, https://bibleverse.site/denominations/pentecostal/
Awaiting review by a member of the tradition. First published 2026-09-07; last changed 2026-09-09. Years before the common era are written BC, and later years plainly, as the site's Christian pages do.
Found something wrong? Send it through the contact page. A correction checked against two sources is made within a week and logged in this page's change history.
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:
