A Challenge from Donald Gee: How to be Faithful to the Outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Pentecost

Abstract

I am grateful for the invitation to give the annual Donald Gee lecture. I became aware of the significance of Donald Gee when I was at Birmingham University studying under Professor Walter Hollenweger. Though my eventual Ph. D. thesis was on the origins and early development of the charismatic movement in Britain, I researched the origins of the Pentecostal movement, which later issued in some articles in the Dictionary of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements and an article on Cecil Polhill in Pneuma. I lived in the United States for many years becoming actively involved in the Society for Pentecostal Studies, which I served as executive secretary from 1988 to 1997. During my studies, I acquired many copies of Pentecostal and charismatic periodicals, including almost all issues of Pentecost,edited by Donald Gee from its origins in 1947 until his death in 1966, the whole period of its existence. Professor Hollenweger always spoke of the importance of Donald Gee, and had hoped - without success - to find a student willing to do a Ph. D. thesis on Gee's editorials in Pentecost. The key ideas developed in this lecture find their starting point in these editorials. My lecture is presented as /A Challenge from Donald Gee'. Gee's editorials were intended to be challenging - to Pentecostals. In these editorials, he consistently manifested a remarkable honesty in facing the weaknesses he saw within the Pentecostal movement, of which he probably had a better general knowledge than anyone else of his generation. But at the same time he was unmistakably Pentecostal - and Assemblies of God - in the convictions he expressed. At the heart of these convictions was his understanding of Pentecost, the term he often used to describe the whole movement, following a pattern that went back to Azusa Street in 1906. The weaknesses and deviations he identified within the movement he saw as endangering Pentecostal fidelity to the