What should Christians think about Pentecostal and Foursquare churches?

Here’s Frank, and Frank asks, what are your thoughts on the Pentecostal churches and the four square church? I’ve done my share of research on Charles Parham. Oh, that’s good. And William Seymour good. Me too. Angie Osmond and Aimee Semple McPherson. Yes.

Well, if you’ve done your homework on those people, you can know the shift we had in the early 1900s. I mean, like the early like the 19 01A Street Revivals here in Southern California, and a lot of what came out of that, which was certainly a shift from a kind of thinking our way through Christianity to feeling our way through Christianity.

And as Jeremiah reminds us, our heart is deceitful, and a lot of the emotions that come from our interior feelings can lead us astray. We can blame a lot of things on the Holy Spirit, and sadly, we can also misinterpret Scripture to say that we have to have some kind of ecstatic experience to ever enter into real life with the spirit.

And when they say that by trying to hijack the concept of the baptism of the spirit and say, you’ve got to have this ecstatic experience with the spirit that leads you to to say things that you don’t even know what you’re saying. And they call it speaking in tongues, which I don’t think is the right definition of what we find in the Bible.

But they will say, you can’t worship, work or witness effectively without that. And that’s built right into the Pentecostal and Foursquare doctrinal statement. And because of that, at least it was last time I looked. Because of that, there’s certainly set up a have and have nots in the church where you’ve if you’ve had this experience, well, then, you know, we can, you know, in the back and say that you’re you’re good to go.

But if you haven’t, well, then you’re have not. And, you know, you really haven’t been baptized by the spirit. You haven’t reached this second blessing that God wants to give you, and therefore you’re not going to be effective at worship and witness and and working for the Lord. And I’m saying, well, that’s not the text of Scripture at all.

First Corinthians chapter 12 and 14 make really clear that, you know, not everyone is going to have the biblical gift of tongues in the church. And I would say, if you understand it in the three times we see it in function, in a narrative text, in the book of acts, it doesn’t look anything like what Parham, Seymour, and McPherson used to say that it was.

And out of that grew a lot of groups. When we talked about yesterday, William Branham, who claimed to be the Micah for profit that was to come. And because of that, they got a lot of people swayed into seeking some kind of experience that I think is a misunderstanding of some texts in the book of acts and sadly, has let let a lot of people not only to feel like I have not because they haven’t had some organic experience like others in their church say they have.

But it is certainly led to a lot of expectations that McPherson and others had put forth, and that was that. You know, if you’re really walking with God, then these miraculous signs that we see in three parts of the Bible, three particular rashes in the Bible, Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, and Jesus and the apostles. Well, you’re going to have those.

And if you’re sick, then God’s going to step in and miraculously fix that. And that’s led to a lot of expectations that were dashed by just the harsh realities of living under the curse and being in this life that God promised would be filled with tribulation and sickness and death. Our own, in particular, should be of some interest to us that God said, we are going to be appointed to die and then face our judgment.

You can’t just like, by the way, Charles Parham, William Seymour and all the rest have encountered themselves. We cannot say that the fault is in our faith. We really need to say our fault is in the exegesis that was done in a lot of the early days of the shift into what has become almost mainstream. Everyone thinks the charismatic Pentecostal, foursquare expectation of the Spirit’s work in such dramatic ways, in terms of speaking and utterances and all the rest, is normative.

It hasn’t been normative. But for about 124 years at this point, as what has been considered something that you should expect. And we saw the third wave come out of that at a fuller seminary up the freeway here, and people claiming that, you know, this more intellectually washed form of Pentecostalism, actually, what a lot of it was rewarded.

Yeah. This is our expectations were raised right as as it was said by the leaders of the organization, when do I get to do the stuff that’s in the Bible? Well, it’s not in the Bible everywhere. Actually, the breaking of natural law is only in there less than 100 times. And it’s not on every page of the Bible.

A matter of fact, most of the Bible and the Bible’s narrative from 1445, when it was started to be written, and what it spoke of before that in terms of Abraham, the patriarchs, I guess, from Adam, all the way through the end of the first century when we were having Paul writing, I’m sorry, John writing the book of Revelation on the island, the Patmos.

I mean, the very few times that we see the kinds of dramatic scenes that authenticated the writing of the law, the prophets, and the New Testament. So I don’t think the expectation, whether it’s by Wimber or Seymour or Parham, I don’t think any of those guys have set us up to expect the right things about normative Christianity. And that’s left a lot of people disillusioned.