For Pentecostals, A Generational Split over Speaking in Tongues

November 6, 2009

STEELE, Mo. (RNS) -- At the beginning of an evening worship service at the First Assembly of God church, the Rev. Ryan Harris pitted teens against adults in a trivia game called Battle of the Generations.

Wednesday Night Alive is the church's outreach service to a swath of the city's troubled teenagers here in the southernmost tip of Missouri's Bootheel. After a few more games, worship began.

Harris, a husky 26-year-old wearing a sweater, untucked shirt and baggy jeans, led 20 teenagers and 20 adults in a few upbeat, contemporary praise songs, and then delivered the night's message.

"The gift of the Holy Spirit is placed upon you, it's placed inside you," Harris said, his voice thundering through his headset to the back walls of the tiny church. "The Holy Spirit gives you strength to stand up to those who don't want you to stay in school, who want you to try drugs, to try sex."

It's the Holy Spirit that provides Pentecostals with the practice that sets their movement apart from all other evangelical Christian churches: speaking in tongues, or glossolalia.

"The distinguishing feature of classical Pentecostalism is to say that unless you have spoken in tongues, you don't have this baptism in spirit," said Russell Spittler, emeritus professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in California.

But during an hour of worship at First Assembly, no one audibly spoke in tongues, and elders in the Assemblies of God are worried about what a younger generation's more practical theology might mean for the future of the practice.

Speaking in tongues is so central to the 3 million-member, Missouri-based Assemblies of God, that denominational leaders voted unanimously to reaffirm it as doctrine, at the church's General Council meeting in August.

Reaffirmation of one of Pentecostalism's central tenets was necessary, according to the resolution voted on at the meeting, because speaking in tongues "has come under certain scrutiny."

Glossolalia has become the church's real battle of the generations.

Some young pastors say that while they recognize the foundational importance of speaking in tongues, other features of their faith are more helpful for their flocks.

Harris, who began preaching when he was 12, is a fourth-generation member of the Assemblies of God. His great-grandfather was a church pioneer who founded a Pentecostal camp meeting in Southern Illinois.

Harris has pastored First Assembly for two years, and he said audible glossolalia was heard just "once every two or three months" at the church.

"We do stress that the initial physical evidence of the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues," Harris said. "But we do not encourage people to seek tongues. We encourage them to seek God and to seek the power of the Holy Spirit for witnessing. Tongues is just a byproduct of that."

Sentiments like that worry an older generation of Assemblies of God pastors.