Some years ago my wife and I were in another city and attended a Pentecostal worship service. It was a large church and the congregation was multiethnic, with many black faces scattered throughout. It has been said that the most segregated place in North America is a worship service on a Sunday morning; this congregation broke that mould. The pastor’s message was a good sound gospel message.

Near the beginning of the service a chorus was sung and the last verse repeated over and over with just a little more emotional emphasis each time until almost everyone in the congregation had both hands up in the air and they were speaking what sounded like two syllables repeated over and over and over. Finally the pastor waved his hands from side to side to slow things down, people’s arms dropped and the service carried on as normal. This was supposed to be evidence of the Holy Spirit coming down from above and people speaking in tongues. To me, it looked more like a group therapy session where people were releasing their tensions and emotions in common; it didn’t feel anything like a work of the Holy Spirit.

Some time later we attended another Pentecostal service, this time a much smaller church, yet much louder. I don’t remember anything about the message, or if there even was one. What I remember are the electric guitars, the drum set and the tambourines wielded by the female members of the congregation. At one point in that service the leader was down on his knees in front of the congregation with his arms outstretched, then suddenly went over backwards, his head hit the floor with a bang and he was waving his arms in the air and making sounds like an animal. That too was supposed to be evidence of the Holy Spirit coming down from above. I left that service with a splitting headache.

These manifestations were not anything like the examples of speaking tongues that we read in the Bible, neither on the day of Pentecost, nor when Peter went to see Cornelius. In those instances people were speaking actual languages that people could understand, they were not an exhibition. As I observed the above services, I wondered if the main purpose was to meet other people’s expectations of what should happen.

In 1 Corinthians 14 the Apostle Paul says “except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air” (verse 9). “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me” (verses 10-11). We can assume from the context that he is speaking of actual languages that people spoke. And it appears different people were getting up in the congregation at the same time, each one speaking a different language, and the result was confusion.

In the rest of the chapter, Paul gives three rules for speaking in an unknown language in church. First, he says that only one person should speak at a time; second, there must be somebody to interpret into the language that the rest of the people can understand. If not, the one who is speaking in an unknown tongue should remain silent. Third, he says that women should not speak in church. This again assumes that what was being said in another language was for the edification of the church. Paul’s instructions in a New Testament are that women are not to teach men; their role is to teach other women and children but not to be preachers in the congregation. If a woman was speaking in another language for the edification of the church, she should not be doing it when men were present.

Sometimes people try to turn the instances in Acts upside down, saying that the apostles at Pentecost and the family of Cornelius were making unintelligible sounds that other people heard as real languages. But the Bible calls the miracles in those two instances speaking in tongues, it does not speak of a miracle of ears. In all the instances that we read in the New Testament, what is being described are actual languages, languages that the speaker had never learned, yet they were understood by people who knew those languages.

In the days of John Wesley, there were sometimes outbreaks of strange behaviour while he was preaching, people crying out, making strange noises, or involuntary actions. Wesley observed this with interest and surmised that this could be the work of the Holy Spirit. The modern Pentecostal movement flows from this surmising of John Wesley. His brother Charles Wesley, on the other hand, did not think these sounds and actions had anything to do with the Holy Spirit. There was one instance where these manifestations happened when Charles Wesley was preaching. He stopped and said “If this does not stop, I will sit down.” It stopped and never happened again when Charles Wesley preached.

The three rules that the Apostle Paul gave for speaking in an unknown language put an end to meaningless demonstrations of speaking in tongues in the early church. It would do the same thing in our day. The emphasis in a worship service must be on edification, not on attention-getting manifestations. “Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue” (the apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14:19).