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2.1 How Did the Pentecostal Movement Come to Canada?
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The unorganized spread does not surprise me. The Holy Spirit was poured out on those who prayed in earnest and sought deep relationship with Jesus. This was the invitation the Holy Spirit waited for. The Holy Spirit did not choose based on race, gender, age or status instead it was all about the heart. People have prejudices, preconceptions and presumptions of how things should be done, and this could have made it difficult to keep the focus on Jesus and off all of these other concerns. There are a few reasons they would begin to organize, one would be to keep it going. When you are excited about something, if you have another person that is excited about it too then it is easy to stay excited, but when you are excited and no one else is it dwindles. Others who experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit understood the experience and could encourage one another on. Another reason is we learn so much from each other organically without even realizing it, when we close ourselves off, we lose that. These connections strengthen us and build us up.
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I think that not organizing right away helped give more space for the Holy Spirit to move. Instead of being organizational with a system in place, Holy Spirit was able to direct people easier, and leaders were likely paying more attention to Holy Spirit and the voice of God than they might have if they were following a man-made plan or system.
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The unorganized spread doesn’t surprise me, it can be seen even in the early church. I think people would have been afraid of quenching what God was doing through organization, but with time they realized they would have a far bigger and better reach if some organization and structure was put into place
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I would say it does not surprise me that they were unorganized at first. It seems the whole nature of such a charismatic movement would generally be unorganized and flighty. Since it was new and fresh, also based on letting the Spirit interfere this open-minded perspective would have certainly affected the broader pace that the movement went about it.
I would think they began to organize things a bit more because ultimately people are drawn to order. When the movement grew and people all over the country were hearing about it, it’s only natural that they’re was an eventual push to organize things so that communication could be had more seamlessly.
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