Pentecostals - An Introduction
Pentecostals
are Protestant fundamentalists who
believe that authentic religious conversion is an ecstatic experience
that should be accompanied by all the "signs" that attend the
outpouring of God's Holy Spirit, as it did with the first Christian
apostles. Pentecostals say this experience may include "the gift
of tongues," meaning that while filled with the Spirit, believers
may be able to speak and understand many strange languages that they never
learned. The common bond between various Pentecostal churches is their
intensely emotional approach to religion.
The Pentecostal movement was an outgrowth of the popular religious revivals that swept the world during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This movement comprises over twenty organized denominations plus thousands of independent local churches, predominantly within the United States.
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