It comes down, more than anything, to the miraculous gifts. In Pentecostal teaching, tongues and prophecy and miraculous healing are still being given, and Christians are encouraged to seek them. Here at Christians In Honesdale, we understand the Bible to teach that those gifts finished their job once God's revelation was complete, so we don't seek them. Nearly everything else a visitor would notice grows out of that one point: the sound of the worship, what's expected of the people in the seats, and the way the Bible gets used.
Where We Start in the Same Place
People sometimes assume we think the Holy Spirit went silent after the first century. We don't. That picture of us is simply wrong.
When someone is baptized into Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit comes with it (Acts 2:38). The Spirit gives the Christian assurance: "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Romans 8:16). And He changes a person from the inside, slowly, over a whole life: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law" (Galatians 5:22-23). God still hears prayer. He still works in people's lives through His providence, often in ways nobody sees until later.
We'll say this about our Pentecostal neighbors, too. Their earnestness about God is real, and we respect it. So the question between us isn't whether the Spirit is at work. It's how He works now: through visible miracles, or through His finished Word and His quiet providence.
A Movement a Little Over a Century Old
Pentecostals tell their own story openly, and we'd tell it the same way. The modern movement traces to a Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, where students began speaking in tongues in January 1901, and to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, which began in 1906 and spread around the world. The Assemblies of God, now the largest Pentecostal body in the United States, organized in 1914. Today Pentecostal and charismatic churches number in the hundreds of millions worldwide, and plenty of independent congregations carry no Pentecostal name at all.
That history doesn't settle anything by itself. Something new can be a recovery of something old. So the only question that matters is what the New Testament says.
Then the Road Forks at the Gifts
In the first century there was no New Testament you could pick up and check a preacher against. Miraculous gifts filled that gap. They confirmed that the message came from God. Hebrews says so plainly: the message of salvation "was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will" (Hebrews 2:3-4).
A note on the Greek: "Was attested" is ebebaiōthē, from bebaioō, "to confirm" or "to make firm," a word used in ancient business documents for guaranteeing a sale. The signs were God's signature on the message. Notice that the writer already speaks of that confirmation as something that happened to his generation, through "those who heard" the Lord. He doesn't describe it as a gift that every generation should expect to repeat.
And Paul told the Corinthians those gifts had an end built in: "Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away" (1 Corinthians 13:8-10).
We take "the perfect" to mean God's completed revelation, what Jude called "the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). When the message had been fully given and confirmed, the signs confirming it had finished their work.
A note on the Greek: "The perfect" is to teleion. It's neuter, "the complete thing," not masculine "the perfect One," so it isn't naturally a title for Christ. Paul sets it directly against to ek merous, "the partial" or "the piece-by-piece." The partial things he names are prophecy and knowledge, which are pieces of revelation. The natural reading is that "the complete" is the whole of that same thing: revelation finished instead of arriving a piece at a time.
We should be fair here. Many sincere Bible students, including many who aren't Pentecostal, read "the perfect" as the return of Christ, because two verses later Paul says, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). We think the chapter itself points the other way, for two reasons.
First, look at how Paul finishes: "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13). After tongues and prophecy have stopped, faith and hope are still standing. But when Christ comes, faith gives way to sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and hope gives way to having: "who hopes for what he sees?" (Romans 8:24). So the time when the gifts end is a time when faith and hope are still needed. That's now, not the Second Coming.
Second, "face to face" has an Old Testament background that's easy to miss.
A note on the Hebrew: In Numbers 12, God contrasts the way He spoke to ordinary prophets with the way He spoke to Moses: "If there is a prophet among you, I the LORD make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses... With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles" (Numbers 12:6-8). The Hebrew is peh 'el-peh, "mouth to mouth," wəlō' bəḥîdōt, "and not in riddles." The Greek Old Testament rendered that last phrase ou di' ainigmatōn. Paul's word for "dimly" in 1 Corinthians 13:12 is en ainigmati, "in a riddle." He's echoing Numbers 12. And in Numbers 12 the contrast isn't between earth and heaven. It's between partial revelation in dreams and visions and clear, direct revelation. That's the same contrast as "the partial" and "the complete."
Acts adds a detail that's easy to skip. The gifts were handed on through the apostles' hands. Philip worked miracles in Samaria, but Peter and John had to come down before the new Christians there received those gifts, and "Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands" (Acts 8:14-18). Years later in Ephesus, "when Paul had laid his hands on them... they began speaking in tongues and prophesying" (Acts 19:6). Paul hoped to pass a gift along to the Romans in person (Romans 1:11). The apostles died. That line of passing the gifts on ended with them.
Does Everyone Filled with the Spirit Speak in Tongues?
This is where many of our Pentecostal friends have felt the most pressure. The Assemblies of God teaches that "the baptism of believers in the Holy Spirit is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues" (Statement of Fundamental Truths, #8). Many people have been told, kindly or not, that if they've never spoken in tongues, something is missing in them.
Paul answers that directly. Even in the first century, when the gifts were active, he asked, "Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?" (1 Corinthians 12:30). The Spirit gave different gifts to different people, "who apportions to each one individually as he wills" (1 Corinthians 12:11).
A note on the Greek: Paul's question is mē pantes glōssais lalousin? Greek uses mē at the start of a question when the speaker expects the answer "no." It's like asking, "Not everyone speaks in tongues, do they?" Paul wasn't leaving the matter open. He was teaching the Corinthians that tongues were never meant for everyone.
In Acts, the Holy Spirit falls directly from heaven, with no apostle's hands involved, only twice: on the apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4) and on Cornelius's household (Acts 10:44-46). The second time was so unusual that Peter had to reach back years to find something to compare it to: "the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning" (Acts 11:15). If it had been happening at every conversion, he wouldn't have needed to go all the way back to "the beginning."
Tongues in Acts Were Languages People Understood
When the Spirit came on the apostles at Pentecost, the crowd wasn't hearing sounds nobody could follow. Visitors from all over the world were stunned for the opposite reason: "each one was hearing them speak in his own language" (Acts 2:6). They asked, "How is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?" and said, "we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God" (Acts 2:8, 11). Real languages. Understood on the spot.
A note on the Greek: The word for "tongue" is glōssa, the ordinary word for a language. In Acts 2:6 and 2:8 Luke uses dialektos, "native language," the root of our word "dialect." When Paul says tongues in church need someone to "interpret," the word is diermēneuō. Luke uses that same word in Acts 9:36 for translating a woman's name from Aramaic to Greek: "Tabitha, which, translated, means Dorcas." Interpreting a tongue meant translating a language.
Paul ties tongues to the Old Testament, too. "In the Law it is written, 'By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.' Thus tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers" (1 Corinthians 14:21-22).
A note on the Hebrew: Paul is quoting Isaiah 28:11: "For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue the LORD will speak to this people." The Hebrew is bəla'ăgê śāpâ ûbəlāšôn 'aḥeret, "with stammering lips and with another tongue." Isaiah was warning Israel that because they mocked God's plain words, they'd soon hear Assyrian soldiers speaking a language they couldn't understand. In the passage Paul quotes, a "strange tongue" was a real foreign language.
Even When the Gifts Were Active, Paul Set Limits
Paul gave the Corinthians clear rules: "If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God" (1 Corinthians 14:27-28). His reason was simple: "For God is not a God of confusion but of peace" (1 Corinthians 14:33).
Pentecostal congregations differ a lot, and some work hard to follow these verses. But we'd gently point out that anyone who believes the gifts continue still has to take these limits seriously. Many people speaking at once with no interpretation is the very thing Paul told the Corinthians to stop.
What About Healing?
We pray for the sick, and we believe God answers. James told sick Christians to call for the elders to pray over them, and promised that "the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up" (James 5:14-15). We've seen God answer prayers like that, through doctors, through time, and in ways we can't explain.
What we don't find is a promise that miraculous healers would continue after the apostles. Even while the gifts were active, they weren't a personal medical service. Paul wrote, "I left Trophimus, who was ill, at Miletus" (2 Timothy 4:20). He didn't heal Timothy's stomach trouble either. He told him to "use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments" (1 Timothy 5:23). The miracles had a job to do: to confirm the message, not to keep every believer well.
Two Sundays, Side by Side
A Pentecostal service is often lively and expressive. There's usually a band. Hands go up, people may pray or speak out on their own, and sometimes there's a prophecy or a call for healing. Congregations vary a lot, so one Pentecostal church can feel very unlike the next.
Our worship is quieter and plainer, and we'll own that. We sing a cappella from hymnals, which means voices with no instruments at all, following the way the New Testament describes Christians singing: "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart" (Ephesians 5:19). We pray together and give. Then we listen to preaching drawn from the Scriptures. And every Sunday, on the first day of the week, we share in the Lord's Supper (Acts 20:7). There's an order to the hour, since Paul asked that "all things should be done decently and in order" (1 Corinthians 14:40).
If you'd like to hear it for yourself, worship here starts at 10am on Sunday in Suite D, in a Main Street building you enter from the rear.
Nobody Above the Local Congregation
Plenty of Pentecostal churches belong to a denomination, with leaders at the regional or national level. Some stand independent.
The New Testament pattern has nothing above the local church. Elders were appointed to oversee the congregation they belonged to (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5), and Paul spelled out what kind of men they must be (1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9). Peter kept their job close to home: "shepherd the flock of God that is among you" (1 Peter 5:2). Christ is the only head the church has (Ephesians 1:22-23). No convention. No headquarters.
We'll be honest about where we stand on that. We're a small congregation of fewer than twenty members, and right now none of our men meet the qualifications Paul lays out. So we don't have elders yet, and we won't appoint anyone just to fill the title. That isn't unusual in the New Testament. Paul and Barnabas planted churches and came back later to appoint elders (Acts 14:21-23), and Paul left Titus in Crete to "appoint elders in every town" where congregations were already meeting (Titus 1:5). Until the Lord raises up qualified men among us, we work together as a congregation under Christ and His word.
That's also why we can't speak for anyone but ourselves. We aren't part of a denomination, and no office anywhere hands us our positions. Other congregations that read the Bible the way we do don't answer to us, and some of them may do things a bit differently. What you're reading is what you'll find here.
An Open Bible Settles It Better Than a Feeling
Please don't decide this by which service stirs you most, or by how nicely we've described ourselves. Ask something the text itself can answer: how did the earliest Christians worship, and what reason did they give?
Then read 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14 straight through, the way the Corinthians first heard them. Add Acts 2, Acts 8 and Hebrews 2. Watch for two things in them, the purpose of the gifts and how long Paul expected them to go on, and hold every church you visit to that same reading, ours along with the rest. If questions come up, find somebody who'll show you chapter and verse instead of handing you an opinion.
Sit Down With 1 Corinthians and Us
If you've come out of a Pentecostal church, or you're just trying to sort this out, we'd be glad to open these chapters with you at whatever speed suits you. If you've ever been told something was missing in you because you never spoke in tongues, we'd especially like to read 1 Corinthians 12 with you. Your questions set the agenda, and nobody will push you. Set up a free Bible study, take a look at who we are, or reach us through our contact page.
Meeting times:
If you decide to visit, we meet at 416 Main Street, Suite D, Honesdale, PA 18431, with parking and the entrance both at the rear of the building.