Abstract
‘Origins and characteristics’ describes the account of the first Day of Pentecost in the New Testament's Acts of the Apostles where the Holy Spirit visits a room and touches everyone within it and enables them to speak in tongues. Multiple spiritual movements within the church trace themselves back to this story. The success of John and Charles Wesley's Methodism in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as its two-stage theology of salvation and sanctification, unwittingly prepared the ground for contemporary Pentecostalism. Added to this preparatory mix was the emergence of a doctrine of healing and an impending sense of events that signalled the end of time.
