Growing up in an Evangelical Protestant environment in the USA in the 1970s, my first encounter with the charismatic movement was the television evangelists who yelled and sweated and promised healing if only their viewers would place the affected part of their body on the TV set and send the preacher twenty dollars. It was not a promising start.
Later on I learned about classic Pentecostal churches where the faithful would speak in tongues and be ‘slain in the Spirit’ – passing out when the preacher laid hands on them or just tapped them on the forehead. I also learned about the snake handlers in Appalachia who (in literal obedience to Mark 16:18) would go into a trance and pass live rattlesnakes around the congregation. Things were now in the ‘ugly’ category.
