What are the similarities and differences in Pentecostalism 100years ago compared to today?

Question

As far as I know it started off in prayer meetings at Azuza Street by a black preacher William J Seymour with the outpouring of the spirit like the day of pentecost in the book of Acts. People started speaking in tongues and were falling to the floor. I think in the beginning it was the lower class people mainly who were involved. Today people from all walks of life are pentecostals. Could you please give me some more similarites and differences of pentecostalism today to how it was 100 years ago. Please Please Please give me links. PLEASE!

Answer 1

100 years ago it wasn't done on TV, that's the only difference. Rolling around on stage like a fish out of water, babbling and yelling, pushing elderly people out of their wheelchairs, swindling people out of their paychecks. I think it's great. Pwaise da Lo'd!!!

Answer 2

It started about 6 years prior to Azuza street, with Charles Fox, who coached a woman Agnes Osmond, into the present day psychic experience of tongues. I challange you to produce anything that verifies your statement that it was "like the day of Pentacost." Sit down with Acts chapter two and see if you can come up with one single similarity between what happened in the 1st century and what is happening today in Pentacostalism. As far as the differences between 1906 and today there are many. The doctrine has been revised numerous times. Pentacostals now claim that what they do was not what happened at pentacost but is a whole new thing where you are talking to God in a language that no one understands. Find that one in the Bible!

Answer 3

It started with Charles Parham, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. After seeking the ability to speak in tongues all night, a 16 year old girl named Agnes started speaking in a foreign language that no members present could identify. She laid hands on the others and they followed suit. They also practiced writing in tongues. The congregation believed that they were speaking actual foreign languages (not some "prayer language"). None of them fell on the floor - everything was done at will, in good order, one at a time. Parham moved to Texas and opened a church. The other members of his congregation in Kansas started collecting money for mission trips, believing that God had given them the ability to communicate with the languages of their target groups. Of course, they were mistaken. When Pentecostal missionaries arrived in foreign countries, the natives were just as confused as everyone else. Not a single missionary was able to communicate with native speakers in the mission field. The church later retracted all of its former statements claiming that Speaking in Tongues were actually real languages.

Parham, meanwhile, went to Texas, where he preached at a segrgated Church. Blacks were forced to remain at the back of the church, and were not allowed to go foward until after all the whites had left the building. Seymour liked what he heard, and decided to take the Pentecostal message to California. He never did go foward and receive "the gift of the Holy Spirit" from Parham - in fact, Parham didn't even know that Seymour had left the state.

Seymour started the Azuza Street revival that lasted some 3 years. It took place in an old warehouse, with the participants divided into three ethnic groups: White, Black, and Hispanic. Contemporary accounts of the revival describe quite a scene. Seymour spent most of his time on the stage with a wooden crate over his head. Occassionally he got up, took out his pocket New Testament, opened at random, and then went around the congregation screaming random words in the faces of the faithful. Many groups conducted seances and other spiritualistic practices in the corner, men and women spontaneously engaged in kissing and light petting, woman fell on the floor, hiked up their skirts and gyrated vulgarly. In short, the entire thing was a madhouse, with no order and no rhyme or reason. One contemporary theologian described the scene as "the last vomit of Satan."

When Parham heard about the Azuza Street revival, he went to see for himself. As he walked through the door, a man ran up to him with a crazed look in his eyes and screamed, "The Holy Spirit doesn't want you here!" When Seymour saw Parham, he invited Parham to speak to the congregation. Parham took the stage, looked out at the crowd, and declared, "Today, God is sick to his stomach." He then left the building and renounced the entire Pentecostal movement. A few years later he was arrested for sodomizing a boy in Texas, but he was never convicted.

At Azuza, Seymour declared that only blacks were allowed to hold church offices, leading to a schism between the different ethnic groups. Opposing racial factions started meeting at different times of day, with some occassionally locking the others out of the building. Eventually these groups formed the Church of God (black), Assemblies of God (white), and the Hispanic Pentecostal Church. The Pentecostal Holiness Church, which had been founded decades before anyone had spoken in tongues, adopted the practice years later.

Later in life, Seymour continued to insist that speaking in tongues was a gift from God, but he discouraged its practice on the grounds that it fostered sexual immorality.

Answer 4

Like a lot of "religions" Pentecostals has changed with the times and because they got rid of the old dead wood in Springfield, Mo. (headquarters for the Assemblies) their numbers just keeps growing.

Old Pentecostals used to tell you what you could and couldn't do as opposed to today they'll tell a lot of good things they stand for and they dropped the racial barriers of the old days causing them to be one of the fastest growing, most aknowledged givers in the religious realms of today.

Answer 5

You are on the right track. Check out the Assemblies of God. It is the largest pentecostal denomintaion. There is also the Church of God, mostly southern white and the Church of God in Christ, mostly black. Hope this helps.

Answer 6

Well, I do not know much about 100 years ago, but nowadays Penticostal believers wash each others' feet and pray in a loud voice.