All with One Accord (Donald Gee) - Deal Pentecostal Church

as a matter of form. One of the supreme services that the
Pentecostal movement has rendered to the Church as a whole
has been its witness to the experience of receiving the Spirit.
By allowing room for the gifts of the Spirit in work and
worship, Pentecostal people have permitted the indwelling
Comforter to become more than a vague Helper or indefinite
Inspirer to virtuous thoughts and high ideals. By
incorporating divine healing in their testimony the Pentecostal
churches include something intensely experimental. In their
fervent evangelism, happily shared by other related
evangelicals that Mr. Newbigin doubtless had in mind as a
type, all "Pentecostal" groups stress the joy and peace that
come from forgiveness of sins and justification by faith. I
heartily agree with William Barclay in the British Weekly that
"It was the joy of the Moravians that showed Wesley what he
lacked. It may very well be that it is the melancholy
ecclesiastical drone of so much preaching with its pulpit voice
and its pulpit phrases which has driven so many people away
from the Church." The experience of Christian joy is
something essentially Pentecostal (Acts 13:52). Speaking with
tongues is more than the language of spiritual ecstasy, but it
certainly includes that.
The emphasis upon experience can nevertheless be overdone.
The blind man after he was healed by Jesus said emphatically,
"One thing I know that whereas I was blind now I see." That
was glorious. But after he had received a fuller revelation of
Christ he worshiped. That revelation was an experience also,
as real as the other, but of a higher order for it took him
beyond what Christ had done for him to who Christ was. It
took him away from self to God. The danger of becoming
too experimental in religion is that the soul becomes
introspective and gets taken up with nothing but its
14