Pentecostal Memory Must Become Discipleship

A church marks an anniversary. Photographs of founders appear on a screen. A surviving elder describes nights of prayer, costly evangelism and an unexpected healing. Young believers applaud a past they did not experience, then return to a church whose discipleship, leadership and mission may remain unchanged.

Pentecostals are a remembering people. We testify because the God who acted can act again. We retell Acts 2, revivals, conversions, deliverances, missionary journeys and communities transformed by the gospel. Yet memory can serve revival or nostalgia. It can form humility and courage, or produce a heroic mythology in which famous leaders appear without coworkers, women, children, local congregations, institutional failure or the communities that carried the cost.

Pentecostal memory becomes faithful when it leads people to Jesus Christ, submits experience to Scripture, preserves evidence, invites correction and forms disciples. The archive is not a mausoleum for yesterday's anointing. It is a truthful inheritance through which the living Church learns how the Spirit empowered ordinary people, how institutions grew, where leaders failed and what obedience now requires.

On 27 August, Assemblies of God News republished a historical account of Welsh Pentecostal evangelist Stephen Jeffreys and his twenty-two-day Springfield revival in 1928. The account traces his conversion from coal miner and church-band musician during the Welsh Revival, his 1907 experience of Spirit baptism, his evangelistic ministry and his insistence…