Matti Wendelin: My ministry, Full Gospel for All Nations, was founded 1990 in Finland. I have been preaching the gospel since 1977. This is still a small ministry, but thanks to God we are wining many souls around the world, especially in Asia. My vision is to do mass crusades and I love when I see people being saved and healed. We often see that everyone attending our crusades wants to get saved.

PR: When did you sense that the Lord was calling you into ministry?

Matti Wendelin: When I was a child, the Lord spoke to me through many different ways about my calling to preach the gospel. I used to go alone to forest where I had collection of empty bottles. I preached to those bottles and at the end of the service, I pushed them down. When I grew up, I wanted to do something else with my life until Lord took me for a visit to Heaven. In Heaven, one angel took me to the room where there were a lot of crowns. He took one crown and came to me saying, “The Lord has prepared this for you.” I liked it and it was very beautiful in my eyes, but he put it back and took another crown and said to me, “This is for you.” Immediately I could see there was a big different between those two crowns, like night and day. He continued, “That first one was prepared for you, but because you did not want to do the will of God and you were not willing to go to Pakistan, India, Papua New Guinea, and wherever the Lord would send you to preach the gospel, so someone else is going to do what you were asked to do, and they will receive what was prepared for you.”

Timothy B. Walsh, Professor of Pentecostal and Evangelical History at Regents Theological College of West Malvern, UK, contributes another volume to the Studies in Evangelical History and Thought series. It is a thorough research thesis, written for an academic audience, which is much easier to follow when the chapter conclusions are read first. Equally, Walsh expects that his readers have an ability to catch subtle nuances of academic Latin and German terms and phrases. As the subtitle implies, it covers two decades of Pentecostal history, focusing most of its research on Alexander Boddy and his ministry in Sunderland, Smith Wigglesworth and his ministry in Bradford, William Oliver Hutchinson and his ministry in Bournemouth, and Pastor Inchcomb and his ministry in Croydon. The research is divided into three primary sections: the emergence of the Pentecostal ideals, their development, and their structures. It concludes with summation, “this study has been an endeavour to distinguish between fact and fiction, certainly between hagiographical wirings or episodic chronicles penned for personal edification and the bolstering of collective morale, and such primary source materials as can form the basis of recognizable historical investigation” (239).

In the first section, Walsh echoes the theme of Grant Wacker, who notices that Pentecostals tended to have an “extravagant assessment of their own importance” (25). Herein Walsh investigates the hagiographic habit and reports of ministry successes, written by those who were too close to the subjects to be reasonably objective in their telling of ministry events and successes. After providing multiple examples and evidences, Walsh concludes that the successes and spread of the Pentecostal message was largely responsible through the “face-to-face recruitment along lines of pre-existing social relationship” (84) rather than only on mystical, revivalistic, or special spiritual basis—alone. In several instances, he refers to the “sacred meteor” or “suddenly from heaven” phrases, or similar terms used in early Pentecostal historical narratives, in a nearly pejorative sense, providing a critique of those who have overemphasized supernatural nature of the Pentecostal movement.

The second section focuses on the ideological developments and the acknowledgement that the Pentecostal movement became a “third force in Christendom” (86). After working through examples and evidences from the lives of leaders like Smith Wigglesworth and the Jefferys brothers, Walsh concludes, “Initiation is, by definition, of primary significance… as a fundamental building block” for the Pentecostal movement (174). The key elements of initiation include a baptism in the Spirit experience, dynamic worship, pre-millennial eschatology, and dynamic and gifted leadership.