A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ten Red Flags in Pentecostal Worship. I expected some pushback. Instead, the article became one of the most-read things I have written, largely because so many former and current Pentecostals recognized the world I was describing. They knew what it was like to chase the emotional high of a worship service, to hear someone say God had given them a word, to watch charisma get confused with anointing, and to wonder why God sometimes seemed easiest to find when the music was loud and everybody was crying.
I meant everything I wrote.
But leaving Pentecostalism has not only given me enough distance to see what troubled me about the tradition. It has also given me enough distance to name the things I appreciate. Pentecostalism formed me into the Christian I am today. Some of those things are so deeply woven into me that I did not realize what gifts they were until I started worshiping with Christians from other traditions.
I do not want to return to Pentecostalism, and this is not an attempt to balance ten red flags with seven compliments so everybody feels better. Some criticisms cannot be canceled out with a list of virtues. What I have discovered, though, is that some of the same instincts that produce Pentecostalism’s worst excesses can also produce some of its greatest gifts when they are practiced with wisdom, theological depth, consent, and accountability.
These are seven green flags I still see in Pentecostal worship.
1. Pentecostal worship invites the whole body to participate.
One of my favorite definitions of worship is that it is “the participatory retelling of the biblical story of the Triune God.” I like the word participatory because Christian worship has never been intended to be something that happens only in the mind. Our bodies participate in what God is doing, remember what God has done, and respond to God in the present.
That idea is ancient. The Shema begins with Israel’s confession, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” followed by the command to love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5, NKJV). Jewish prayer has long included bodily practices such as standing, bowing, and swaying. The familiar rocking motion sometimes seen in Jewish prayer, often called “shuckling,” has been interpreted in different ways over the centuries, including as a way of engaging the whole person in prayer.
The Bible is full of embodied worship. People kneel, bow, dance, clap, sing, lift their hands, fall on their faces, march in procession, eat, drink, embrace, and lay hands on one another. Psalm 35 even imagines the body itself testifying: “All my bones shall say, ‘LORD, who is like You?’” (Psalm 35:10, NKJV).
Pentecostals take that seriously. They worship unabashedly with their whole selves. I have seen people dance, run, kneel, clap, sway, raise both hands, fall flat on the floor, embrace one another, march around sanctuaries, and move with music until the entire congregation seemed to become a single organism. There is nothing quite like being in a room where everyone has stopped worrying about what they look like and simply moves together.
Friends of mine who have been to electronic dance clubs and raves have compared the experience to that. I cannot speak from personal experience there, but I understand the comparison. There is rhythm, collective movement, release, and what sociologists sometimes call collective effervescence: that strange feeling that happens when a crowd seems to become more than the sum of its individual members.
VIDEO: Speaking of electronic dance music, DJ Father Cristo Redentor performed live in Rio De Janeiro in a techno-fueled Christian concert for the youth of Brazil.
I no longer believe that a room becoming emotionally and physically charged is proof that God has suddenly arrived. That was one of the red flags I wrote about before. But I also do not want to swing so far in the other direction that I treat bodily freedom as spiritually suspicious.
There is a difference between saying, “My body moved, therefore God was here,” and saying, “God gave me a body, so my body is welcome in worship. Pentecostalism gets the second part right.
2. Pentecostal worship gives people permission to get in their feels.
For years, I was suspicious of the catharsis that happens in Pentecostal worship. I would sometimes watch someone cry uncontrollably, collapse at an altar, or spend half an hour being prayed over and think, “That person is not necessarily experiencing God. They may just be having an emotional release.”
An older minister I deeply respect challenged me on that. He had spent years ministering among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and he helped me see that I had created a false distinction. Even if someone was experiencing catharsis, why should I assume that made the moment less sacred?
Sometimes you need a good cry in the presence of God and your Christian community.
That conversation changed the way I think about emotional Pentecostal worship. It also influenced how I am present in chaplaincy settings, where emotions often run high. Emotion is not evidence that God is present, but emotion can absolutely be part of experiencing the presence of God. Those are not the same claim.
Pentecostal worship can create a sacred space where people are allowed to release what they have been carrying all week. Grief, fear, exhaustion, shame, joy, relief, anger, loneliness, and hope all have somewhere to go. Someone can kneel at an altar and cry while people gather around them, put hands on their shoulders, pray, cry with them, and stay there until they are ready to stand again.
That matters, particularly in communities and among minorities where people have historically carried enormous burdens with very few safe places to process them. Pentecostalism has often flourished among poor, working-class, racially marginalized, immigrant, and otherwise overlooked communities. I do not think emotional catharsis explains their attraction to Pentecostal churches by itself, but worship that gives people a voice, a body, and permission to release pain can be extraordinarily powerful.
It created a rare space for men too. Early Church of God history includes the wonderful description that, while considering the urgency of evangelism, “strong men wept.” The phrase appears in records of the denomination’s first General Assembly in 1906. In cultures where masculinity often teaches men to swallow grief, suppress fear, and keep moving, church could become one of the few places where a grown man could openly weep, and nobody thought less of him for it.
The red flag appears when we pursue the tears as evidence, manipulate people into producing them, or suggest that someone who remains quiet has somehow failed to encounter God. Healthy worship makes room for emotional release without requiring it. It invites rather than coerces.
Just as liturgical churches may preserve a ritual so carefully that the ritual remains long after its transformative meaning has been forgotten, Pentecostal churches can make the opposite mistake by preserving emotional reaction while forgetting that emotion is supposed to serve healing, communion, repentance, gratitude, and transformation. At its best, Pentecostal worship does not demand that people feel something. It gives them permission to feel whatever is already there.
3. Pentecostals put people inside the biblical story.
The Pentecostal church has always been unusually open to using the arts in ministry. Skits, drama teams, human videos, music, mime, illustrated sermons, and, yes, even clown ministry became part of the landscape. Some of it looks painfully dated now, and some of it probably looked painfully dated while we were doing it, but there was something formative about all of it.
I was in every Christmas play my church had when I was growing up. My mother directed several of them, and when I became old enough, I even had a hand in helping write scripts. We did not do the contemporary Christmas plays where someone has a family crisis at the mall and the nativity appears somewhere near the end. We did the story. All of it.
Elizabeth and Zechariah were there. John the Baptist was there. Ananias and Saphira. Gabriel was there. Mary and Joseph were there. Shepherds, angels, wise men, Herod, the whole cast. Even the innkeeper. We walked through that story year after year until I knew it almost as well as I knew the layout of my own house.
When I became a teenager, my mother directed drama ministries, which meant I had no choice about participating. I will admit that some of it was awkward, and participation provided ammunition for a little middle-school and high-school bullying, but I actually enjoyed drama ministry. We acted out worship songs, wrote skits, memorized lines, traveled, and performed. Looking back, I think the people being formed most deeply by those ministries were often not the people watching us. It was us. You learn something differently when you put your body inside the story.
That is one reason I have such an affinity for narrative theology now. Christianity is not merely a collection of propositions to believe. It is a story into which Christians understand themselves to have been incorporated. Creation, fall, covenant, incarnation, cross, resurrection, Pentecost, church, new creation. Good formation teaches people not merely to know those events, but to locate their own lives inside them. Pentecostals did that better for me than I realized at the time.
Where they sometimes struggled was helping me connect that biblical narrative to the messier parts of my actual life. We could tell the story brilliantly on a stage and then default to hyper-positive answers when someone was grieving, doubting, suffering, or discovering that life was not resolving according to the testimony formula.
Outside my family, my spiritual leaders were often present at church or in crisis, but the slow work of spiritual accompaniment was much rarer. A friend of mine from the same denomination once told me that when he entered Bible college, an academic mentor encouraged him to meet regularly with his pastor and learn from him. When he asked, his pastor declined and told him, “God called me to be your pastor, not your friend.”
That sentence illustrates the gap for me. Pentecostals could be excellent at putting people inside the biblical story while sometimes being less skilled at walking beside them as that story collided with real life.
4. Pentecostals know how to make the church sing.
There is nothing quite like Pentecostal music. The rhythm, commanding voices, collective energy, gospel harmonies, improvisation, and sheer volume can move you before you have consciously decided whether you want to be moved. It is rare for me to hear really good Pentecostal worship and not feel something physically, whether emotion, chills, nostalgia, or the nearly involuntary desire to move with it.
The music of my childhood was mostly hymns and denominational convention songbooks. We also did not reserve the platform exclusively for the talented. If someone had “a song on their heart,” they might sing it for the congregation. Sometimes that produced something beautiful. Sometimes it produced something memorable for entirely different reasons. That was part of the beauty of free worship. The congregation was allowed to contribute.
Then contemporary worship music arrived. The first worship song I distinctly remember entering our church was Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord.” Released in the 1990s through Hillsong, it became one of the defining songs of the emerging contemporary-worship movement and eventually appeared in dozens of hymnals. That song and the album surrounding it became part of the soundtrack of my first years as a committed Christian.
Over time, the musical style that Pentecostal and charismatic churches helped popularize spread almost everywhere. Contemporary worship teams, projected lyrics, extended singing, guitars, drums, keyboards, and worship leaders are no longer particularly Pentecostal. Baptist and Methodist churches sometimes offer a traditional service with hymnbooks and a contemporary service with a worship band. Even churches that disagree profoundly with Pentecostal theology have adopted elements of Pentecostal worship culture. Christianity Today was already describing contemporary praise music as a broad Pentecostal influence twenty years ago.
Of course, something else happened along the way. Worship became an industry. The songs became products. Worship leaders became celebrities. Churches discovered that a particular musical sound could attract people, create a brand, and help build large congregations. Even Darlene Zschech has spoken critically about worship becoming commodified as the genre exploded around the world.
At its worst, contemporary worship can feel like karaoke at a rock concert with a sermon afterward. That is why I was surprised when I opened the hymnal at my Presbyterian church to find songs I associated with the worship world I thought I had left behind. My first reaction was almost annoyance. “I came here to get away from this!”
Over time, I have reconsidered that reaction. Maybe the problem was not always the music. Maybe the problem was the worship theology into which the music had been placed. The pressure to draw crowds, stay current, produce emotional responses, and look culturally relevant could misuse songs that were actually beautiful prayers with rich Christian theology.
Pentecostalism helped teach the wider church to sing in a new musical language. Not everything produced in that language deserves to survive, but some of it probably deserves a place beside the older songs that preceded it.
5. Pentecostalism makes room for ordinary people to serve.
One of my favorite memories of the little church where I grew up is how ridiculous our collection of instruments became. We had fewer than fifty people, but at one point we had two saxophones, a trumpet, a trombone, drums, a flute, two guitars, an organ, and a piano all playing together. No paid music director coordinated this operation. And somehow, it sounded heavenly.
If you played an instrument in the middle-school band, someone at church was probably going to ask why you had not brought it with you yet. As soon as I learned enough trumpet to be dangerous, I was invited to play in church and eventually perform solos.
That instinct extended far beyond music. Young people could lead worship, teach, testify, pray, and sometimes preach. If a young person believed God had given them something to share with the congregation, people generally found room for them to share it.
Pentecostals had a low barrier to ministry. That is a double-edged sword, but the positive side is significant. Formal education, age, professional credentials, and social status were not necessarily prerequisites for usefulness in the kingdom of God.
The theology behind it was familiar to us. Ephesians 4 describes apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers as gifts to the church “for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:12, NKJV). Pentecostals often called this the “five-fold ministry.” Whatever disagreements Christians may have about how those particular offices or gifts function today, Pentecostals emphasized the second half of the text. The ministers were supposed to equip the saints so the saints could minister.
Combine that with the priesthood of all believers and the Great Commission, and “all” really meant all. We often said every Christian was a minister. Every Christian was called to make disciples. Every Christian could pray for someone, share the gospel, tell their story, encourage another believer, teach what they knew, and use whatever gift God had given them. That instinct also pushed against boundaries of age, race, gender, and class, even when Pentecostal institutions failed to live consistently with their own theology.
My grandmother and great-grandmother were both preachers and teachers. I grew up with women preaching as something completely normal. Some of the most respected preachers in my denomination were women. They could preach, pastor, evangelize, teach, and risk their lives on the mission field. But, sadly, my own Church of God (Cleveland, TN) tradition has historically maintained a ceiling at the highest levels of denominational authority even while credentialing women for ministry. While they can put their bodies on the line in ministry, they cannot make administrative decisions that affect the entirety of the church they serve.
Race produced another contradiction. As a teenager, my predominantly white church worshiped several times a year with a Black Pentecostal congregation. Sometimes they provided the music, and we preached. Sometimes we did the music, and they preached. We worked together in jail and prison ministry, and even though I was young, I was allowed to tag along and participate.
At the same time, I learned an entire catalog of racist jokes from men in my church. We even had a Sunday School leader who would tell us kids racist jokes after church with disturbing regularity.
That contradiction is unfortunately not unique to my childhood congregation. Early Pentecostalism carried an extraordinary interracial impulse while simultaneously living inside an American culture saturated with racism. At Azusa Street in Los Angeles, William Seymour led an interracial congregation where black and white worshipers, men and women, immigrants, laborers, and professionals worshiped together. The movement later fractured along racial lines, proving that having an egalitarian theology does not automatically cure people of their prejudices.
Still, there was something in Pentecostalism’s Acts-shaped imagination that kept pushing toward a bigger table. Sons and daughters prophesy. Young and old receive the Spirit. Servants receive the Spirit. People from many nations hear the gospel.
The instinct was that if God gave someone a gift, the church ought to make room for them to use it. That instinct is worth keeping, even if the church also needs the wisdom to remember that giving everyone permission to minister is not the same thing as pretending everyone is already equipped.
6. Pentecostalism taught me to expect God to be near.
I used to think this was one of the things that made Pentecostals unique. I do not anymore. Having worshiped with and explored several other Christian traditions, I have discovered that Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Baptists, Anglicans, and Christians of almost every stripe believe God heals, provides, guides, comforts, answers prayer, and sometimes makes His presence deeply felt. Pentecostals do not have a monopoly on a living God.
But Pentecostalism gave me this conviction in abundance.
My family prayed about everything. We did not pray because it was a nice religious ritual or because prayer made us feel better about situations we could not control. We prayed because we genuinely believed God heard us and would answer. Sometimes the answer was what we wanted. Sometimes it was not. Sometimes we waited. Sometimes nothing seemed to happen at all. But the assumption underneath our life together was that God was close enough to hear.
My understanding of divine guidance has changed. I do not believe God is standing at every intersection telling me which route to drive, whispering what food to order from a menu, or deciding what shirt I should put on that morning. I have known Christians whose spirituality became so saturated with divine instructions that ordinary human decision-making almost disappeared. That is not what I mean by God’s nearness.
I mean that when I seek God, I believe God meets me. Sometimes I believe God speaks through Scripture, prayer, another person, wisdom, or some quiet interior awareness. Sometimes God speaks through waiting. Sometimes through suffering. Sometimes through trials I desperately wish He would remove.
I believe God comforts me, and I still believe God heals. I have experienced it. For that, Pentecostalism gave me something I hope I never lose.
7. Pentecostals act like the gospel has something at stake.
Pentecostals have always seemed to know that something is at stake when it comes to ministry and the gospel of Jesus. Souls are at stake. Quality of life is at stake. Freedom from bondage is at stake. Whether someone eats tonight matters. Whether the prisoner has hope matters. Whether the senior forgotten in a nursing home knows somebody remembers them matters.
That sense of urgency sends Pentecostals into places where people have often been lost or forgotten: jails, prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, sidewalks, shelters, poor neighborhoods, and mission fields around the world. By the time I was twenty years old, I had already participated in ministry in every single one of those places. That seemed normal to me.
It did not matter whether the church had fifty people or five hundred. Ministry outside the church walls was supposed to happen. I later pastored small congregations that fed hungry people, visited those who had been forgotten, helped families through crises, and somehow found resources to meet real needs. We never lacked what we needed to meet a genuine need. Ever.
That evangelistic urgency was there from the beginning of my former denomination. At the Church of God’s first General Assembly in 1906, leaders spoke about “ripened fields and open doors for evangelism,” and the record says “strong men wept” because they were anxious to go. The same early assembly discussed using money that might otherwise have been spent on tobacco to clothe poor people and spread the gospel.
Pentecostalism carried that urgency around the world. Its global growth has been especially significant in Africa and Latin America. In Pew’s 2024 surveys of six major Latin American countries, Pentecostal Protestants ranged from 4 percent of all adults in Mexico to 19 percent in Brazil, where they represented about 65 percent of Protestants.
Numbers cannot tell the whole story of why Pentecostalism spread. Neither can I. Mission can become paternalistic. Evangelistic urgency can turn people into projects. Churches can become obsessed with counting conversions while neglecting the slower work of caring for communities. Those are real dangers. But the instinct underneath the movement was something I still admire: the gospel should go somewhere.
Faith should move toward the prisoner, the sick, the elderly, the poor, the addicted, the lonely, and the forgotten. If Jesus announced good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, and healing to the brokenhearted, the church ought to find itself among people who need good news.
One of the gifts of leaving a tradition is that you eventually stop needing it to be either all good or all bad.
For a while, leaving can require you to name what hurt you. That was part of what I was doing when I wrote about the red flags in Pentecostal worship. I needed language for experiences I once considered normal and later came to see differently. Some of those criticisms remain as strong for me now as they were when I wrote them.
But criticism is not the same thing as contempt.
Pentecostalism gave me a body that knows worship is more than thinking about God. It gave me permission to feel human. It put me inside the biblical story. It gave me music that still lives somewhere in my bones. It taught me that ordinary people have something to contribute to the church. It taught me to expect God to be near, and it put me in jails, hospitals, nursing homes, and on sidewalks before I was old enough to understand how unusual that was.
Some of those gifts were mixed with things I eventually had to unlearn. That does not make the gifts less real. Maybe that is the distinction I was not capable of making when I first began reconsidering the tradition that formed me. I thought I had to decide whether Pentecostalism had been good or bad for me, whether the experiences were real or fake, whether I should defend it or reject it. I do not feel that burden anymore.
I can say emotionalism is dangerous while remaining grateful that I learned not to be ashamed of emotion. I can reject manufactured manifestations while remaining grateful that my body learned to worship. I can criticize inadequate formation while remembering the biblical stories I acted out as a child. I can dislike much of the worship industry while still singing some of its songs. I can criticize Pentecostal institutions for racism and sexism while remembering Black and white churches worshiping together and women preaching from the pulpit. I can reject the need to find God in every coincidence while still believing God is close enough to hear me when I pray.
Perhaps that is what distance finally gives us. Not neutrality, and certainly not amnesia, but the ability to tell the truth about something without needing the truth to be simple.
I indeed left the holy-rollers for the frozen-achosen. But I did not leave empty-handed.