Somebody asked me last fall if TheWay is charismatic. I said that depends on what you mean by the word, and we ended up in a parking lot for twenty minutes. Let me save you the parking lot.
TheWay believes all the gifts of the Holy Spirit continue. All of them. We haven't quietly retired any, we don't think the Spirit clocked out after the last apostle's funeral, and we don't think the Christian life is correct doctrine plus good behavior. The mature believer is a Spirit-filled believer. Walking in the Spirit is the key to the whole thing — anything done in the flesh, even the good-looking stuff, is sin.
So this isn't an argument against the Spirit's gifts. The differences are narrower than that.
What our Pentecostal neighbors hold
This county has five to seven Pentecostal or charismatic congregations — a couple of Assemblies of God, some independent classical Pentecostal, and one or two Oneness Apostolic bodies, which I'll take separately.
Classical Pentecostals hold Scripture as the inspired, infallible rule of faith and conduct. The Assemblies of God has a sixteen-article statement of fundamental truths about as clear as evangelical doctrine gets. They immerse believers and call the water a symbol, same as we do. They hold the Supper as a memorial. They're premillennial. They preach the blood. Their defining doctrine is baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience subsequent to conversion, with tongues as the initial physical evidence — an experience that doesn't save you, since you were already saved, but empowers you for witness. They're also Arminian: grace is resistible, and salvation can be forfeited.
And before a word about differences: the Pentecostal movement kept the church honest about the Holy Spirit through a century when a lot of respectable Christianity quietly wrote Him out of the building. They prayed when the rest of us made committees. If TheWay ends up a church where the Spirit of God is welcome and expected, some of the credit belongs to that tradition.
Is Spirit baptism a second experience?
Their case is built on Acts. Jesus tells the disciples to wait for the promise of the Father, and at Pentecost the Spirit falls. In Acts 8 the Samaritans believe and are baptized, and only afterward do Peter and John lay hands on them and they receive the Holy Ghost. In Acts 19 Paul asks the Ephesian disciples flat out whether they received the Holy Ghost since they believed — which sounds like it assumes a second thing.
TheWay reads it differently. Romans 8:9 — if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. Ephesians 1:13 — after you believed you were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise. 1 Corinthians 12:13 — by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. Not some. All. Acts is describing the gospel breaking into new territory, Jews and then Samaritans and then Gentiles, with God visibly signing off on each so the church couldn't argue about who was in.
But hear the part that matters, because they're chasing something real. Ephesians 5:18 says be filled with the Spirit. That's a command, and in the language it's continuous. Keep on being filled. Not once — over and over, same church, same believers, filled again in Acts 4 after they'd been filled in Acts 2.
You get hired once. You don't become an employee again every Monday. But you do show up every Monday. Indwelling is settled and permanent. Filling is daily, repeated, surrendered, and most believers I know are chronically under-filled, myself included. What our Pentecostal friends want is exactly right. We just don't locate it in a crisis moment.
Is tongues the initial evidence?
Tongues is a real gift and it continues. It isn't the meter for whether a person has the Spirit.
Paul asks a string of questions in 1 Corinthians 12 — are all apostles? are all prophets? do all speak with tongues? — and the answer he expects is no. His whole argument rests on the Spirit dividing to every man severally as He will. Different gifts to different people, on purpose.
The evidence Scripture hands us is fruit. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Harder test, too. You can learn a syllable in a weekend. You cannot fake longsuffering for twenty years.
Order in the room
1 Corinthians 14:26-40 is the most practical chapter in the Bible about a church service.
Paul says when you come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation — then the governing rule: let all things be done unto edifying. Then the traffic rules. Two, or at the most three, and that by course. Let one interpret. If there is no interpreter, keep silence in the church. God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Let all things be done decently and in order. And in the same passage: forbid not to speak with tongues.
Both halves. That's the point. This is not a cessationist chapter and I refuse to use it as one. It says the gifts are real and the gathering still has to be run like a place where a lost man could walk in off the street, understand it, and fall on his face and say God is in this place — which is exactly what Paul says will happen.
So at TheWay: no stage, no spectators, no performance, nothing that turns a gathering into a show. If a gift is exercised it's interpreted, or it's silent. My concern with parts of the charismatic world isn't that too much is happening. It's that what's happening is aimed at the room instead of at God. A fire in a wood stove heats the house. The same fire in the middle of the living room floor burns it down. It isn't the fire that's the problem.
The prosperity teaching
TheWay rejects the teaching that God has promised His people wealth and unbroken health and that faith is the lever that pries it out of Him. Paul warned Timothy about men supposing that gain is godliness. He told the Philippians he knew how to be abased and how to abound. He had a thorn God would not remove.
But be fair here, because this is where people get lazy. Prosperity teaching is not classical Pentecostalism. The Assemblies of God has formally rejected the prosperity excess. Most Pentecostal pastors I've met are bivocational, tired, and broke, and they'd be more offended by a private-jet sermon than you would. This is a difference we hold together with them, against a wing that attached itself to their movement. Don't hang it around the neck of a small-town church that's been feeding families out of a food pantry for thirty years.
Oneness Pentecostalism is a different question
Everything above is a family argument. This part is not, and I'll say it plainly and without pleasure.
Oneness or Apostolic Pentecostalism denies the Trinity. The teaching is that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three distinct Persons in one God but three modes of one Person. They baptize in the name of Jesus only and reject the words Jesus gave in Matthew 28:19. Most also teach the new birth requires repentance, plus Jesus-name baptism, plus Spirit baptism with tongues — so the experience isn't empowering, it's required to be saved at all.
That is not a secondary difference. It's a different God and a different gospel.
Scripture shows three Persons in one scene at the Jordan River: the Son in the water, the Spirit descending like a dove, the Father speaking from heaven. Jesus prays to the Father in John 17 about glory they shared before the world was, and a man does not pray to a mode of himself. And when salvation becomes repentance plus a formula plus an experience, it stops being by grace through faith and becomes a checklist — and Paul had one word in Galatians 1 for a gospel with items added to it.
Say this carefully. People in these congregations are often warmer, more serious about prayer, and more sacrificial than I am. The issue is not sincerity. Sincerity has never made a false thing true. And classical Pentecostals aren't in this boat — the Assemblies of God split from the Oneness movement in 1916 over exactly this.
One more thing, and it's the main thing
Everything here is an argument about the Spirit of God — when He comes, how He shows up, how a room handles Him. But there's a door before all of that, and only one.
If you've never come to Jesus, you don't need a second experience. You need the first one. He took your sin to a cross He didn't earn, He died there, and He came out of the tomb three days later alive on His own two feet. Everybody who calls on Him gets Him. Not the ones who feel the most, not the ones with the best story. Everybody who calls. Ask Him tonight in your truck if that's where you are. He won't be too busy.
Believer, one concrete thing. Ephesians 5:18 is present tense, so it's assigned to you today, not once in 2009. Before you get out of bed tomorrow, ask God to fill you for that day — the meeting, the shift, the kid who won't listen — then do it again the next morning. Seven mornings. See what a week of that does. That's not a second blessing. That's just Monday.