Pentecostal Tongues & Converts

The crowd of 25,000 packing Rio's Maracanazinho Stadium included favela dwellers and members of Brazil's lower middle class, their swarthy faces reflecting their country's racial mix. Decorously dressed in black suits and flowered dresses, they were moved by evangelical zeal: when a 2,000-voice choir began to sing, everyone joined in. Afterward, a trickle of shouted individual prayers grew into a waterfall roar. Last week's rally, at the Eighth Pentecostal World Conference, eloquently illustrated the power and missionary success of one of the century's fastest-growing religious movements.

Pioneered by a turn-of-the-century Kansas Methodist preacher, Charles F. Parham, Pentecostalism asserts as its basic tenet the need for baptism by the Holy Spirit, the supreme manifestation of which is glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Dissatisfied with the institutionalized quality of Methodist worship and spirituality, Parham took as his inspiration the message of Acts 2: 1-4, which tells how, as the disciples assembled on Pentecost, "there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues." Hoping to receive the spirit, Parham and a group of students at Topeka's Bethel Bible College spent an entire day in prayer; finally, after hours of supplication, a girl participant burst into an unintelligible babble. Modern Pentecostalism was born.

In a Trance. The movement, now worldwide, burgeoned to more than 12 million faithful belonging to a host of evangelical denominations, the largest of which is the Assemblies of God (U.S. membership: 572,000). Traditionally strong in the rural South, Pentecostalism has made notable recent gains among urban Negroes and Puer to Ricans, and has even taken root on U.S. college campuses. For those who have received the gift of speaking in tongues, it can be an ecstatic occurrence. Glossolalia usually happens at the climax of a Pentecostal service, when the revivalist "lays on hands"--places his hand on the head of a believer, who frequently enters a trance-like state, begins to utter a stream of glottal syllables that Pentecostalists regard as prophetic speech.

Abroad, Pentecostalism has spread to more than 90 nations from Australia to South Africa and South Korea to Finland. Nowhere has it found more ardent followers than in Brazil. There are now 2,600,000 Pentecostalists in that nominally Catholic country--a gain of 1,100,000 since 1962. A major reason for the harvest is that, despite the Brazilians' traditionally easygoing approach to religion, many seem to be drawn by the intimacy and fervor of Pentecostal services, the joyous and uninhibited hymn singing, and the upright rigidity of the church's moral standards (no smoking or drinking).

Delegates to the conference had another reason, provided by recent political events, for joy. As fundamentalists who interpret the Bible literally, and who confidently await the second coming of the Lord, they are almost as enthusiastic as Zionists about Israel's victory over Egypt. For that, the Pentecostalists claim, is a sign that God's kingdom is closer than ever.

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