Why I Left Pentecostalism and Joined the Presbyterian Church

Six Reasons I Left the Church of God and Joined the PCUSA

I recently joined a Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) congregation. For those who know my history, this is a significant move. I spent most of my Christian life in and around Pentecostal churches. It was the faith tradition I was raised in. It gave me my vocabulary for God, my first experiences of worship, and when I returned to church after a few years away, it was a Pentecostal church that welcomed me back. I owe so much of my formation to that tradition.

But I am no longer in it. And I want to tell you exactly why. I think a lot of people are sitting in similar pews, feeling similar things, and not sure they have permission to name them. Consider this my attempt to name them out loud.

Here are six reasons I made the move.

Photo by Zulian Firmansyah on Unsplash

1. I want to be part of a denomination that does not unilaterally discriminate against gay and lesbian Christians.

My shift toward the full inclusion of queer people in the life and work of the church was gradual, but there were several moments along the way that were real turning points.

This journey began as soon as I became a pastor in the Pentecostal church. Over the years I walked closely with gay and lesbian Christians, watched them wrestle with their faith and their identity, and saw firsthand what exclusion costs a person and a community. I cannot share those stories in detail. They are not mine to tell. What I can say is that what I witnessed in those years did not line up with what I was expected to believe and preach.

As a pastor I witnessed first-hand how they were always at war with themselves. When they felt they were “overcoming” their sexuality, they would show up, get involved, pour themselves into the church. When they felt they were losing that war, they would disappear. I watched them beg God to make them straight. God did not. And even in their struggle, they showed every evidence of the Holy Spirit working in their lives. Their gifts were real. Their faith was real. But their shame kept them from community, from one another, and from God.

It looked like Adam and Eve after the fall, hiding, ashamed, distant from God and distant from each other. If Jesus came to undo the curse, I cannot make sense of a theology that keeps people hiding in shame, their gifts withheld from the body of Christ because of who they love.

The second moment was supernatural, and I do not use that word lightly. I was at a Christian festival where gay and lesbian Christians were included and participating fully. I attended a worship event where gay and lesbian Christians helped lead the service. At the end of the service I had to leave and be alone. What I had just experienced left me with a lot of mixed emotions. I found a private place and stood there trembling and weeping, unable to explain what I was feeling. And in that moment, God spoke to me the way God speaks to me. The word was clear: “How long will you pretend that my Spirit is not working through gay and lesbian Christians?” I stopped pretending.

And then life brought it closer to home.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. I am not dismissing the traditional sexual ethic of the church as if it carries no weight. It is a serious theological position with deep roots, held by serious Christians across centuries and traditions, and it deserves honest engagement. But I have also come to believe, through Scripture, experience, and the work of the Spirit I have witnessed in gay and lesbian Christians, that God does not reject them. That they belong in the life and work of the church fully and without discrimatory conditions.

One of the things that pushed me away from Pentecostal denominations on this issue was not simply where they landed, but how they handled the question. The door was closed. There was no room for conversation, no acknowledgment that the Spirit might still be leading the church into deeper understanding. Pentecostal bodies I have been part of treated their position as settled and unchallengeable, which meant that anyone who even questioned it had no place at the table.

The PCUSA has handled it differently. As a denomination it is open and affirming, but individual congregations retain the freedom to wrestle with what inclusion and acceptance mean in their own context. I think this tension is healthy. It keeps the community in honest conversation rather than forcing everyone to choose a lane and stay in it. The final word of the denomination is welcome, and the local church is free to work out what that welcome looks like in practice. That is the kind of institution I want to be part of, one that holds a conviction with enough humility to keep the conversation alive.

2. I have always preferred Presbyterian polity.

Ecclesiology is not a small thing. How a church is governed shapes everything: who has power, how it is checked, what accountability looks like, and what happens when things go wrong.

I was ordained in the Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination that on paper operated with an Episcopal polity, meaning authority flows from bishops down through a hierarchy of leadership. But in practice it was anything but consistent. For instance, one bishop might appoint pastors to churches directly. Another might allow a congregation to elect their own pastor. Local churches were free to develop their own internal governance however they saw fit. Some operated with a church council not unlike a Presbyterian session. Others ran with a fully apostolic model in which the pastor was the final word, the bishop of the house, accountable to no one inside the local congregation.

What I observed over years of ministry is that this inconsistency makes the church vulnerable in at least three ways. It makes the local congregation subject to the whims of whoever is in the pulpit. It makes higher denominational leadership unpredictable and unreliable. And it creates the conditions for cults of personality to take hold, where a church rises and falls entirely on the strength of one person’s charisma. When that person is gone, so is the church.

I watched this happen up close. I once pastored a young church that had only been planted a little more than decade before I was installed. The founding pastor was sharp, charismatic, and well-intentioned. He had built something real. Even though the church had elders, he ran the church on a mostly apostolic model, and over time he had shaped the congregation mostly around his own personality and vision. He had also, perhaps wisely given his more progressive theology, kept his church at arm’s length from the larger denomination. The congregation was far more progressive theologically than the Church of God as a whole, so that distance made a certain kind of sense.

Then his personal life interrupted the life of the church with scandal. And when the house of cards fell, what was left was a congregation whose leadership had been shaped entirely to function under the pastor, not without him. They were not bad leaders. They simply had never been equipped or empowered to operate independently of his leadership. The denomination had no real relationship with the local church and did not know how to work with them, and the people discovered in the worst possible moment that they did not even share the beliefs and practices of the larger body they technically belonged to. The result was not just a decline in numbers and finances. It was real damage to real people whose lives got caught in the crosshairs. It was tragic.

That experience, more than anything else, convinced me that polity is not a bureaucratic afterthought. It is pastoral infrastructure. It is what holds a community together when the personality at the center can no longer hold.

Presbyterian polity distributes authority through elders, sessions, presbyteries, synods, and the General Assembly. Decisions are made by bodies, not individuals. Accountability runs in multiple directions. No single pastor can shape a congregation into their own image without checks. It is not a perfect system. But it is structurally designed to protect the congregation from the unchecked ambition or catastrophic failure of any one leader.

3. The liturgy and the lectionary are doing something to me.

I was first exposed to liturgical worship in seminary, where we spent entire classes crafting services around different liturgical traditions. For the first time I saw what structured, intentional worship could look like. As a Pentecostal pastor I tried to bring some of that sensibility to the churches I led, designing services with intention and flow. But I was always inventing the wheel as I went. There is no universal Pentecostal liturgy to draw from. Every week was a fresh construction project, and the result was that worship lived or died by the creativity and energy of whoever was putting it together.

What I have found in the Presbyterian Church is the opposite of that. Every week, we follow the same ancient order. We confess. We receive assurance of pardon. We hear Scripture read according to the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle that takes the congregation through the whole sweep of the biblical story. There is a rhythm to it that I love and need. I find it stabilizing.

The lectionary has changed the way I experience preaching. I find myself drawn to sermons where I can tell the preacher was forced to wrestle with whatever text was assigned that week, whether it was convenient or not, whether it fit a preferred theme or not. Without the lectionary, I noticed in myself during my years of preaching, and in others from the pew, a tendency to circle the same wagons week after week, returning to the same themes, the same pet texts, the same comfortable territory.

Pentecostal preaching is largely built around creating an emotional response, for better or worse. The sermon is a vehicle for producing a feeling, and the text is whatever gets you there. When there is no lectionary holding the preacher accountable to Scripture, the pulpit becomes a platform for whatever the pastor wants to talk about that week. Sometimes that is a soapbox. Sometimes it is a pressure valve, the pastor working out his own frustrations and grievances in front of a captive audience. Sometimes it is just a handful of bullet points dressed up with enough emotional intensity to feel like a word from God. The congregation leaves stirred up but not necessarily formed. They have been shaped by the personality and preoccupations of the person in the pulpit, not by the whole counsel of Scripture.

But there is something else the liturgy does that is so important. It shapes a sense of belonging. Knowing that on any given Sunday, Presbyterian congregations, and others using similar liturgies or the lectionary, across the world are hearing the same texts, praying the same prayers, moving through the same liturgical seasons, gives me a feeling of connection to something much larger than my local congregation. It locates me inside a tradition, inside a community that stretches far beyond the walls of the church I am sitting in. That is not something you find in free-church traditions, where what happens on Sunday morning is largely invented fresh each week. The common liturgy and the common lectionary mean we are all on the same page, and that shared foundation is something I had been craving.

4. Reformed theology is more hospitable to the way I actually believe.

I want to be upfront: I am drawn toward Christian universalism. I hold it as a hope rather than a certainty, the hope that the love of God is finally and thoroughly larger than any theological system’s account of hell. This conviction did not arrive all at once.

Even as a child, the idea of a punitive hell designed for eternal torment never really frightened me. It felt illogical. Do spirits have a nerve endings that feel pain? Wouldn’t eternal flames destroy the nerves anyway? Besides the illogical nature of eternal conscience torment, I could not reconcile the idea of a God who is fundamentally love with a God who burns and tortures people forever based on what they believed about Jesus. The logical and emotional case against eternal conscious torment was always there for me, but the theological case came later.

After September 11, I heard Rachel Held Evans share an experience she had watching events unfold in the Middle-East. She described watching footage, of an Islamic woman being dragged through the streets and stoned to death. As she watched, she thought about how this woman had probably been born Muslim, raised in a context where she never encountered the Gospel, or where Christianity was presented to her as the religion of the West and of empire. Evans could not accept that after being stoned to death, this woman would then be punished by God forever by fire for not believing in something she had never genuinely heard. I could not accept it either.

Later I discovered that many of the early church fathers, including Origen, held a more universal view of salvation. I encountered the doctrine of apokatastasis, the belief in the ultimate restoration of all things, and it made more sense to me than anything else I had read. It filled the gaps that both Calvinism and Arminianism left open.

I want to say something honest about Wesleyan-Pentecostal theology here, because I think it gets at why I am now finding Reformed theology a better fit. In the Wesleyan-Pentecostal world, God is impressionable. He is moved by impassioned prayer. He is reactive to human behavior. His will can be circumvented by human disobedience. I do not think we are in a position to make those kinds of claims about God. We are like ants on a table, in our own two-dimensional plane. God is the builder of the table, seeing above and below it, operating from a dimension we cannot access or fully describe. The Wesleyan framework puts too much weight on human decision and too little on divine sovereignty. And when salvation depends entirely on the human decision made before death, the scope of redemption becomes permanently limited by human failure.

Reformed theology, with its insistence on the sovereignty of God, gives me more room to hold my universalist hope. If God’s redemptive purposes are truly sovereign, then I can remain open to the possibility that those purposes are larger and more tenacious than any of our systems have imagined.

Now, I am not naive about the tensions here. The Westminster Confession of Faith, which sits inside the PCUSA’s Book of Confessions, affirms eternal conscious torment for the wicked. Strict Calvinism includes double predestination and limited atonement, neither of which maps cleanly onto universalism. I know all of this. And yet, I find the Reformers’ arguments on election genuinely compelling and biblically founded. Election is not a foreign concept invented by Calvin. It is embedded in the Jewish world Jesus was born into, and the biblical case for it is serious. The distinction between Calvinist and Arminian versions of limited atonement has always struck me as revealing: Calvinists say only those God chooses are atoned for, while Arminians say only those who choose God are atoned for. Both positions limit the atonement. They just disagree about who does the limiting.

What I appreciate about the PCUSA is that its Book of Confessions spans centuries of Reformed thought, from the Westminster Confession written in 1646 to the Brief Statement of Faith adopted in 1991. These documents were written in different eras, for different contexts, and they do not always seem to agree with one another. The PCUSA does not resolve that tension by elevating one confession above the rest. It holds them all and trusts its people to live inside the complexity. That kind of theological spaciousness is itself a confession of humility, an acknowledgment that we are ants on the table, and God is not obligated to fit inside our frameworks.

At the end of the day, I want to worship in a community that leaves the hardest questions where they belong: with God.

That is especially true in Pentecostalism, where eschatology is not just a doctrine but an identity. Pentecostals believe they are an end times movement, fully endowed with apostolic power and mandate like the first century church. The end times are not a distant event for Pentecostals. They are the whole point. That conviction shapes their mission, their worship, their politics, and their sense of purpose. When your identity is built around the end of the world, everything gets read through that lens.

5. I cannot accept Pentecostal beliefs about the end of the world.

I have written about this at length elsewhere on this blog, so I will not rehearse all of it here. If you want the full case, you can read it. What I want to talk about is something more personal: what it feels like to try to minister, preach, and use your gifts inside a dispensationalist/millenialist framework, and why I could no longer do it.

What you believe about how the world ends shapes how you act in the present. This belief affects all other beliefs. That is especially true in Pentecostalism, where eschatology is not just a doctrine but an identity. Pentecostals believe they are an end times movement, fully endowed with apostolic power and mandate like the first century church. Beliefs about end times are not just a part of Pentecostal theology, it is the whole point. That conviction shapes their mission, their worship, their politics, and their sense of purpose. When your identity is built around the end of the world, everything gets read through that lens.

It became impossible to have an honest conversation about Christian ethics inside that framework. Creation care, the sanctity of life, the ethics of nonviolence, our obligations to the poor and the earth — all of these conversations run into a wall when the underlying assumption is that God is going to destroy everything anyway. Why care for a world that is destined for the fire? Why work for peace when war is written into the script?

Jesus taught a message of peace, love, and reconciliation. The Sermon on the Mount is not ambiguous. But in dispensationalism, war is not a failure of human civilization. It is God’s will. Jesus himself returns as a warrior. He kills people. He wages a final campaign of violence before the millennium begins. Those beliefs are very hard to overcome when you are trying to preach the Prince of Peace to people who have been taught that the Prince of Peace is coming back with a sword to settle accounts.

Every election, every geopolitical development, every natural disaster becomes a potential sign loaded with prophetic meaning. Sometimes political events do carry theological significance. Sometimes they do not. But inside a dispensationalist congregation that distinction is nearly impossible to make. There is no corner of life it does not reach.

6. Pentecostalism has become too sectarian, too apocalyptic, and in some expressions, cultic.

There is a version of Pentecostalism that is genuinely beautiful. Spirit-filled, justice-oriented, rooted in the experience of marginalized communities who found in the Spirit a power that the powerful could not take from them. That version is real, and I respect it. But I want to talk about the version I have actually lived in and around for most of my life.

Pentecostals believe they are “full gospel.” The implication of that phrase is that everyone else is preaching a partial gospel, a lesser gospel, a gospel missing something essential that only Pentecostals have. The Church of God, the denomination I was ordained in, used to sing a song called “The Church of God is Right.” That song demonstrates the denominational psychology. It captures something real about how Pentecostals understand themselves in relation to the rest of the Christian world. Even among the most ecumenical Pentecostals I have known, there is an underlying belief that they are uniquely called, uniquely endowed, uniquely positioned to be the church in a world where everyone else has lost the plot. That is sectarianism. And sectarianism, left to develop on its own, curdles into something worse.

When you combine that theological superiority with the apostolic model of leadership I described earlier, you get the conditions for spiritual abuse. I have watched pastors verbally abuse their congregations from the pulpit. Berate them, humiliate them, and lord authority over them in the name of the Spirit. And here is the part that is hardest to explain to people outside of it: many Pentecostal congregations want that. The meaner the pastor, the more anointed he seems. The harsher the word, the more it feels like God is speaking. It is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, where the congregation becomes captive to the personality and demands of a charismatic leader. That leader then micromanages the daily lives of the members: what they wear, what words they use, what they eat and drink, who they spend time with. The boundaries between pastoral care and control dissolve entirely.

This pattern did not emerge in a vacuum. It has been accelerating, and it found its fullest political expression in the alignment of large segments of Pentecostalism with Donald Trump. The language of divine anointing, of God raising up a chosen vessel, of spiritual warfare against the enemies of the church, was deployed to baptize a political figure in apostolic authority. This was not a fringe development. It was mainstream. The New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that explicitly teaches a theology of dominionism, the belief that Christians are called to take control of the seven mountains of culture and society, provided the theological scaffolding. What resulted was a Pentecostalism so entangled with political power and authoritarian personality that it became, in many expressions, indistinguishable from a cult.

I did not leave because I stopped believing in the Holy Spirit. I left because I think the Spirit is grieved by much of what Pentecostalism has become. And I no longer wanted to be in a tradition where I had to spend my energy fighting that current rather than doing the work I am called to do.

I was ordained in a Pentecostal church. I gave a significant portion of my life to that tradition, and I do not regret all of it. But I repudiate a great deal of it, and I think honesty requires me to say so. I am not the same person I was when I started, and the tradition I am in should reflect that. Joining the Presbyterian Church is an honest account of where I am now.