“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.
