Reimagining Tongues
And Centering A Better Gift As Pentecostals
I believe in tongues, speak in tongues, pray for the manifestation of the gift of tongues in others, and don’t think tongues are going anywhere—nor should they, because the Believer needs them. Not just theologically, but existentially. Faith needs a tether, a marker, a moment that cleaves reality in two: the time before you encountered the Holy Spirit, and the time after.
Pentecostalism didn’t emerge in a vacuum; it was the Holy Spirit’s rude, supernatural interruption into Modernity’s secular brunch—a movement that had ordered an all-you-can-eat buffet of Empiricism, only to find itself unsatisfied and wondering why meaning still felt so unattainable. Pentecostalism wasn’t just a spiritual phenomenon; it was a crisis intervention. The academy—lost in a fever dream of German higher criticism—had decided the Bible was a poorly edited anthology of folklore and wish fulfillment, cobbled together by politically ambitious scribes with an agenda. The age of reason, having successfully gutted the sacred, was now throwing a dinner party for doubt. Enter the Pentecostals, this ragtag band of socially unremarkable people, collectively ruining the mood by actually experiencing God.
If every intellectual movement births a fictional archetype that embodies its values, then Sherlock Holmes is the perfect hero of the Modernist era—hyper-rational, militant in his empiricism, hostile to anything that smells like myth. Philip Marlowe, America’s noir-soaked response to Holmes, took this skepticism and filtered it through post-war existential dread, drenched in booze, disappointment, and the gut-wrenching realization that certainty is a myth and the “good guys” are often just the least bad ones. (And let’s not ignore the deep, delicious irony that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—father of the unrelentingly logical Holmes—spent his later years as a devout Spiritualist, proving that even the most committed rationalists eventually go looking for ghosts.)
And yet, despite the institutional stranglehold of rationalism, Pentecostalism exploded. Like some divine inside joke, it grew not in the theological ivory towers but in living rooms, rented theaters, and dirt-floor huts. It was a wildfire nobody could snuff out. It still is. John G. Allen, longtime Vatican correspondent, wrote in Future Church that Pentecostalism—not Hollywood—is the greatest American export of the 21st century. The numbers don’t lie. Nearly a billion people globally are Pentecostal or Pentecostal-adjacent, meaning they either explicitly belong to the movement or, at the very least, pray in tongues when no one is looking. While every mainline denomination (Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist—you name it) shrinks, Pentecostalism grows. And tongues—bizarre, ecstatic, scandalizing tongues—remain at the center of it all.
Which brings us here. To the tension. To the realization that while tongues are undeniably essential, they also need to be reimagined—because a gift that is powerful in private can become problematic when misapplied in public. The early Pentecostals took a wrecking ball to Modernist skepticism, but we now have our own house to keep in order. The future isn’t just Pentecostal—it’s a Pentecostalism that is both deeply experiential and theologically robust, a movement that knows the difference between encounter and exhibitionism, between faith and spectacle. So the question is not whether tongues are real or necessary.
The question is: how do we wield this fire without burning California down?
