Eilish Agnew tells of the journey of her understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit
My grandparents on my mother’s side were old-time Pentecostals.
They had their traditional theology of ‘baptism in the Spirit’ accompanied by ‘speaking in tongues’ and although our family eventually joined a Baptist church, after my parents’ conversion in the 1950s we attended a Pentecostal fellowship for some years. As a result I was exposed at an early age to Pentecostal teaching, although the word ‘charismatic’ was not part of my vocabulary until much later. However, in the early 1960s I became aware that members of many non-Pentecostal denominations were beginning to experience ‘speaking in tongues’ and other phenomena, linked for many of them with an experience identified as ‘baptism in the Spirit’. The term ‘neo-Pentecostalism’ initially used to describe their beliefs and experience was eventually replaced by the now-familiar term ‘charismatic movement’.
