Baptism in the Holy Spirit

Pentecostals affirm the baptism in the Holy Spirit, an empowering encounter with the Spirit, often understood as distinct from and subsequent to conversion, that fills the believer for holy living and service. In classical Pentecostalism it is characteristically marked by speaking in tongues as the initial evidence, and it is associated with the reception of spiritual gifts for ministry and witness. The experience is modelled on the outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost (Acts 2) and on later episodes in Acts, which Pentecostals read as a pattern for the church in every age.

The experience is dated by Pentecostal historiography to Agnes Ozman speaking in tongues at Charles Parham's Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, on 1 January 1901, and to its wider public emergence at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles (1906 to 1909), led by William J. Seymour, an African American preacher whose interracial meetings are widely credited with launching Pentecostalism as a movement. Pentecostals divide over how Spirit-baptism relates to conversion and sanctification: Wesleyan-Holiness Pentecostals hold it to be a third, distinct experience following a prior experience of entire sanctification, while Finished Work Pentecostals, following William Durham's teaching after 1910 and institutionalised in the Assemblies of God (founded 1914), hold sanctification to be gradual and Spirit-baptism a second, empowering experience following conversion directly.

This affirmation is the defining doctrine of the Pentecostal movement, which arose in the early twentieth century, and it gave the movement its name and much of its character of fervent, experiential worship. It distinguishes Pentecostalism from traditions that identify Spirit-baptism with conversion or baptism itself, and it is shared, in a modified form, by the later charismatic movement across the churches. The belief ties directly to the Pentecostal conviction that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit continue in the present. The doctrine crossed denominational lines further than Pentecostalism itself when the Catholic Charismatic Renewal began at a student retreat at Duquesne University in 1967, and Catholic charismatics adopted the language of baptism in the Holy Spirit while reinterpreting it, controversially for some Pentecostals, as an experiential release of a grace already given sacramentally at Christian baptism and confirmation rather than a wholly separate crisis experience.

Cessationist Reformed theologians, notably B. B. Warfield in Counterfeit Miracles (1918), had already argued before Pentecostalism's own rise that any doctrine of a post-conversion empowering distinct from ordinary sanctification lacked New Testament warrant, a critique classical Pentecostal theology directly rejects and that continues to divide Pentecostal and cessationist Protestants today.