Religion: Fastest-Growing Church In the Hemisphere

“We never want to go over the heads of the people,” says Jesus Perez, pastor of Puerto Rico’s largest Pentecostal Church. “We want to go directly to their hearts.” Never swerving from this philosophy, the Pentecostals have won converts almost faster than they can be totally immersed. Booming throughout the world, the Pentecostal movement has attracted the nominally Roman Catholic people of Latin America with a missionary effort that makes it the fastest-growing Protestant church in the Western Hemisphere.

Although the Pentecostals are not as adept at head counting as at soul saving, there is little doubt that they outnumber traditional Protestants by at least 4 to 1 in most Latin American countries. Pentecostals claim a million and a half members in Brazil. In Chile 700,000 of the country’s 835,000 Protestants belong to Pentecostal churches. One out of two Puerto Rican Protestants is a Pentecostal. There are 112 Pentecostal churches in Greater Buenos Aires, 1,200 in Mexico, including Mexico City’s 10,000-member Templo Central de Pentecostes. Spanish-speaking migrants have founded 250 Pentecostal churches in New York, 25 in Chicago, 39 in Houston.

Seven Days a Week. Most of these adherents are poor, few of them well educated. Their churches are simple—a storefront congregation in New York’s Spanish Harlem, a barren cinderblock rectangle on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The minister is likely to be a factory worker himself, secure in the Pentecostal belief that “a man of God with a Bible in his hand has had training enough.” Whether he calls his church Pentecostal or Holiness or Church of God, he emphasizes an event usually glossed over by mainstream Protestants: the Pentecost, 50 days after the Resurrection, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s apostles.

The Pentecostal minister preaches a simple theology: a fundamentalist belief in the Bible and in salvation through repentance and prayer; a fervent, emotional attachment to baptism of the Holy Spirit —the belief that the worshiper, like the apostles, can be instilled with a holiness that will meet the test of the Second Coming. Most of all, notes Henry P. Van Dusen, president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, the Pentecostals maintain “a life-commanding, life-transforming, seven-days-a-week devotion, however limited in outlook, to a living Lord of all life.”

Gift of Tongues. Many Pentecostals attend church every night for a two-hour service that would make the average Southern Baptist feel uncomfortably High Church. Loud Bible readings and spontaneous testimonials are part of every service, punctuated by shouts of “Aleluya” and “Gracias a Dios.” The hymns swell over a rhythmic clapping, generally accompanied by a guitar, drums, tambourines, a bass fiddle, piano or small combo.

The Pentecostals think their Oldtime Religion is truly oldtime—a return to the direct, untrammeled belief of the primitive Christians, a return to the original experiences of the apostles. They believe literally in the gift of tongues granted the apostles at Pentecost, and occasionally someone in the congregation feels called upon to rise and shout in a foreign language or a wailing gibberish unintelligible even to believers.

“Sheep Stealing.” Part of Pentecostal’s appeal—particularly to migrants—is this total, emotional participation. One Puerto Rican described the U.S. Catholic Church he rejected as “like a supermarket—cold and formal.” Says Presbyterian Rafael Martinez of Chicago’s interdenominational Casa Central: “When you walk into a Pentecostal service, you are likely to be asked, no matter who you are, your name, where you are from, and ‘Brother, do you have a word to say for us?'”

Many traditional Protestants regard the evangelical Pentecostals as an embarrassment or a threat. The complainers say that the only movement the strongly anti-ecumenical Pentecostals ever make toward a sister church is to set up camp near another church’s mission for what missionaries call “sheep stealing.” Their lack of community involvement is also resented. Says John Hobgood of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations: “These Pentecostal churches are, by and large, an unintelligent operation in the sense that they usually don’t encourage or equip the Puerto Rican to function in the larger community in which he must live.” Rejecting the social gospel, Pentecostals concentrate instead on a puritanical personal morality. Members shun cigarettes and whisky; women wear no makeup.

But more and more traditional Protestants and Catholics are acknowledging a similarity between the unsophisticated, unfashionable Pentecostals and the unsophisticated, unfashionable early Christians. Says Jesuit Scholar Daniel J. O’Hanlon: “We can learn from the Pentecostals that the central Christian message must be proclaimed in all its clarity and simplicity.” Admits William Elliott, chairman of the Presbyterian Board of World Missions: “We do not feel that they excel us in a theological point of view. But they often shame us in their zeal to proclaim our Lord as they understand him.”