In real Pentecostal church meetings, songs, testimonies and even sermons are pretty much impromptu, meaning that they are not premeditated but rather inspired by the Spirit of God from within. The first utterances from those filled with the Spirit of God on the Day of Pentecost and the non-Jews in the House of Cornelius, twelve years later, were impromptu and entirely unexpected.
Every truly Pentecostal meeting is impromptu in that only God fully knows where it’s going and what the end result will be. I think it is fair to say that liturgy, as practiced in many churches, is a series of rehearsed prompts and responses. It’s not patronizing to say that liturgy has its proper place, just that it’s rarely found in Pentecostal churches.
In the case of most Pentecostal churches, in the seventies, spiritual gifts were common in Sunday morning meetings, more often than evening meetings. In the morning meetings, prophecies and other vocal spiritual gifts were expressed, especially the gifts of prophecy, tongues and interpretation of tongues. Morning meetings were more for church members who, having been baptized in both water and in the Holy Spirit, had become members of the body of Christ, which is the Church.
At Christian Outreach Centre, West End, Brisbane, in the late 70s, an often-heard expression was “Church was never like this!” It was more of a slogan, really, since it described well the Sunday Evening meetings during the year that I was a staff member, and we as a family were in fellowship there.
The expectation was heaven-high, with up to a hundred decisions every Sunday evening. Scores of new converts were baptized in water on Wednesday evenings, and a part of my job was to baptize them. Spontaneity marked the presence of the Lord Jesus in power during the evening meeting, and people from all over came early. Members rarely missed a meeting, thinking that if they did, they might miss out on the Lord doing something special.
The expectancy that was normal in those meetings dropped in the 90s, as the spiritual gift of prophecy and other aspects of the Faith came to the fore. But the New Way of Living that thousands experienced in that Christian Outreach Centre warehouse church in West End, Brisbane, and the Great Expectations that were so much a part of worship there, moved on from there in the lives of those who found A New Way of Living in Jesus, which continues and is evident in the anointing of power that remains upon them and moves through them still, to the glory of God.