Pentecostals derive their name from the feast of Pentecost, a Christian holiday taking place 49 days after Easter. The second chapter of the Bible's Book of Acts describes it as the time in which the Holy Spirit came down to the Apostles, endowing them with the ability to speak in sacred tongues not their own.
William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival
The Movement focuses on a baptism of the Holy Spirit - a moment in which one member of the Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) - comes down from heaven and inhabits the bodies of those praying, baptizing them through its presence. Pentecostals say that baptism can happen to and for everyone, and their goal is to save as many souls as possible.
Those following Pentecostalism engage in what they deem prophesying, divine healing and speaking in tongues.
Many Americans learned of the Movement only recently, after reports that 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin attended a Pentecostal-affiliated church for more than two decades.
Often misconstrued as snake-handlers, Pentecostals generally tend to shy away from that unusual practice. Those few who do uphold it do so to prove that God has made them immune to the reptile's bite. But the number of casualties and deaths associated with the snake-handling has encouraged the government to make it illegal, aiding in its disappearance in all but small churches of Appalachia and remote regions within the southeast of the country.
Little over a century old, Pentecostalism technically began in 1901 but attracted a significant following in Los Angeles five years later. Studying at Charles Parham-led Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kan., student Agnes Ozman later said she felt the Holy Spirit fill her during a prayer meeting in 1901 as she relinquished consciousness and began to speak in tongues.
The traditionally Methodist Parham moved to Houston, Texas, shortly after that where he continued to give sermons. William J. Seymour, a one-eyed African-American preacher, heard him speak in 1905; he is credited with transforming Pentecostalism into a movement rather than a fleeting set of principles.
Several days after witnessing a man named Edward Lee begin speaking in tongues during a prayer meeting held in Lee's Los Angeles home in April of 1906, Seymour experienced an "infilling" of the Spirit himself. It took a mere three weeks for word of the preacher's baptism to spread and for the Los Angeles Times to publish an article about this new movement titled "Weird Babel of Tongues."
The swelling ranks set up a prayer house in an older African Methodist Episcopal church no longer in use on L.A.'s Azusa Street.
Later dubbed the Azusa Street Revival, this flocking toward what had once been a dilapidated hall in downtown signaled the birth of a Christian Movement whose followers, along with those of other Evangelistic-like Movements, have since converted 8 percent of the world to its practices.
SOURCE: News21
Deborah Stokol
(Stokol, a Los Angeles-based multimedia journalist, reported this story as a Carnegie-Knight News21 fellow from the University of Southern California.)
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It seems that you imply that pentecostals believe that one must be baptized in the Holy Spirit to be saved. This is not accurate. Pentecostals believe as evangelicals, that an individual's salvation is obtained by placing their faith in Jesus Christ as Savior/Lord. Pentecostals believe that after one is saved they may also receive an endument of power that comes from the Holy Spirit as a separate (from salvation) divine work of God's Spirit in them. Although all believers may experience supernatural works of God in and through their lives, pentecostals believe that by experiencing this baptism in the Holy Spirit (Acts 1&2) one will have increased abilities to do so. Pentecostals do not consider themselves as the 'only ones' who are saved.