Evangelical vs Pentecostal Church: Pentecostals Are Evangelicals Who Seek Spirit Baptism

A Pentecostal church is an evangelical church. In Latin America “evangelical” means any Protestant church, and in most countries Pew surveyed, a majority of Protestants were Pentecostal. The difference lies inside that family: Pentecostal churches teach a baptism in the Holy Spirit after conversion, shown by speaking in tongues, and Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist churches do not.

Both kinds of church preach that a person must be born again through faith in Christ, hold the Bible as their final authority, and work to spread the gospel. Where they part is easiest to see in one scene from Acts. The believers in Samaria had already been baptized when Peter and John came down and prayed for them, “that they might receive the Holy Ghost” (Acts 8:15). Pentecostals see there a second experience every believer should seek. Baptists and most other evangelicals hold that every believer receives the Spirit at conversion. Around that one question gather the others: tongues, healing and prophecy, and what a believer should expect from God in worship.

What Pentecostal and other evangelical churches share, and where they part

Is a Pentecostal church an evangelical church?

In most uses of the word, yes. When the Pew Research Center surveyed 18 Latin American countries and Puerto Rico in 2014, it found that in the region “‘Protestant’ and ‘evangelical’ often are used interchangeably.” Its count of Protestants there takes in “members of historical Protestant churches (e.g., Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Methodists, Lutherans or Presbyterians), members of Pentecostal churches (e.g., Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal Church of God or the Quadrangular Evangelical Church) and members of other Protestant churches.”

And most of them are Pentecostal. Across the countries surveyed, a median of 65% of Protestants identified as Pentecostal Christians, either because their church belongs to a Pentecostal denomination (a median of 47%) or because they call themselves Pentecostal whatever their church (52%); the two groups overlap. In Panama 39% of Protestants, and in Brazil 33%, said they had spoken in tongues themselves. So in Latin America most evangelical churches are Pentecostal already. The real comparison there is between them and the Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist and Brethren churches beside them.

Outside Latin America the answer is the same. Pew’s 2011 study of world Christianity speaks of evangelicals as “a trans-denominational movement,” found in “numerous denominations and church traditions, such as Methodism and Presbyterianism; pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God; and denominations that are expressly and historically evangelical.”

What do evangelicals and Pentecostals believe in common?

The great truths of the Christian creeds, and the evangelical stress on conversion. The National Association of Evangelicals confesses “one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” and calls the Bible “the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.” The Assemblies of God teaches that “Salvation is received through repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.” They even baptize alike. The Southern Baptist confession says that “Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and the Assemblies of God also baptizes “All who repent and believe on Christ as Savior and Lord,” by immersion.

Both stand on the words of Jesus to Nicodemus: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). That is the ground they share before any question about tongues comes up. A free series of short lessons, Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years, walks through the faith that evangelicals and Pentecostals hold in common with Christians of every tradition.

What do Pentecostal churches teach about the Holy Spirit?

That every believer should seek a second experience after conversion. The Assemblies of God’s seventh article calls the baptism in the Holy Spirit “the promise of the Father” and says, “This was the normal experience of all in the early Christian church.” It comes “distinct from and subsequent to the experience of the new birth,” and it brings power for life and service, with the gifts of the Spirit.

Pentecostals find the pattern in Acts, and Samaria is the clearest case. The believers there had already been baptized when Peter and John came to them:

Who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: (For as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.

Acts 8:15–17

Jesus had promised that power: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me” (Acts 1:8). And when the Spirit fell on Cornelius’s household, the believers who came with Peter were astonished, “For they heard them speak with tongues, and magnify God” (Acts 10:46). From scenes like these the eighth article of the Assemblies of God calls tongues “the initial physical sign” of Spirit baptism.

What do Baptist and other evangelical churches teach about the Spirit?

That every believer receives the Spirit at conversion, and no second baptism is needed. The Baptist Faith and Message says that the Holy Spirit “cultivates Christian character, comforts believers, and bestows the spiritual gifts by which they serve God through His church.” Paul wrote, “Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his” (Romans 8:9). Read that way, everyone who belongs to Christ already has the Spirit.

Many evangelicals also point to Paul’s questions about the gifts: “Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?” (1 Corinthians 12:30). The answer Paul expects is no, so they do not make tongues the sign of anything every believer should have. The Assemblies of God answers with a distinction. The tongues that come with Spirit baptism, its eighth article says, are “the same in essence as the gift of tongues (1 Corinthians 12:4-10,28), but different in purpose and use”: a sign meant for every Spirit-baptized believer, beside a gift that, as Paul says, not all receive.

Taught badly, the Pentecostal hope can turn into pressure, and the Assemblies of God knows it. An article in Influence, its own magazine, warns: “There are Pentecostals who teach the promise as a demand rather than an expectation. What a sense of demand treats as an obligation, a sense of expectation sees as an opportunity.” If you have been told that without tongues you lack the Spirit, those words are for you. Whether tongues are needed for salvation, and which churches say so, is the subject of Protestant vs Pentecostal.

Do Pentecostal churches have rules about dress?

Some do. One is the Iglesia Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús, a Mexican Oneness Pentecostal church that baptizes in the name of Jesus Christ. It was founded by migrants who had met the Azusa Street movement in Los Angeles, and a 2015 study of it describes a discipline that forbids alcohol, tobacco, jewelry and makeup. The Assemblies of God’s statement asks for “a life of righteousness and true holiness” but sets no dress code, and the Baptist Faith and Message has none either. The reasons such churches give are set out in Why United Pentecostal women wear dresses and skirts.

What does evangelical mean in the United States?

In the United States “evangelical” names a movement that runs through many denominations, rather than every Protestant church. The National Association of Evangelicals describes it by the four marks named by the British historian David Bebbington: conversionism, “the belief that lives need to be transformed through a ‘born-again’ experience and a life long process of following Jesus”; biblicism, “a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority”; activism, “the expression and demonstration of the gospel in missionary and social reform efforts”; and crucicentrism, “a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity.”

Most American Pentecostal churches fit inside that movement. The Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) and the Foursquare Church all belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, whose community, it says, “brings together Reformed, Holiness, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, Charismatic and other traditions.” Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study puts the Assemblies of God and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) in the evangelical Protestant tradition. There are exceptions. Pew places the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal church, in the historically Black Protestant tradition, which it counts separately, and the Oneness United Pentecostal Church International is not a member of the National Association of Evangelicals. Mainline churches such as the United Methodist Church are Protestant without being evangelical in this sense; Evangelical vs Protestant explains that line.

Are evangelicals and Pentecostals different in Italy?

In Italy, as in Latin America, “evangelical” is the ordinary word for Protestant. The Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy even gives its own name in English as the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy. It unites almost all of Italy’s historic Protestant denominations and some Pentecostal and charismatic churches, about 65,000 people by its own count.

Pentecostals are by far the largest group of Italian evangelicals. In 2023 CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, estimated that of 366,000 Protestants who are Italian citizens, 250,000 (68%) were Pentecostal, against 61,000 in the historic Protestant churches. The Assemblies of God in Italy alone counted 120,000 of them.

Its full name translates as Christian Evangelical Churches Assemblies of God in Italy, and it describes its faith as Christian, evangelical and Pentecostal. Its articles of faith teach the baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience after the new birth, with speaking in other tongues as its first sign, and divine healing through prayer, anointing with oil and the laying on of hands. Its story has suffering in it. The churches trace their beginning to the Los Angeles revival of 1906 and to Italian emigrants who brought the message home from 1908. They were persecuted from 1935 to 1944, and they won legal recognition in 1959.

So an Italian Pentecostal is an evangelical too. What sets Pentecostals apart there, as in Latin America and the United States, is the baptism in the Spirit and the gifts they expect to follow it. On the rest they stand with their Baptist neighbors: the new birth, the Bible, and the work Jesus gave to all who follow him, “ye shall be witnesses unto me” (Acts 1:8).

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• Protestant vs Pentecostal
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• What it means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit