The name derives from Pentecost , the Greek name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which falls on the fiftieth day after Passover.
Ecstatic experience remains the unifying element of the movement.
Pentecostal churches are also strong in Indonesia, sub-Sahara Africa, and parts of Latin America and Europe. What is sometimes called classical Pentecostalism grew out of the late 19th-century Holiness Movement in the United States. Over the next two decades the movement split along doctrinal and racial lines. Following Bennett's confession the charismatic movement appeared in nearly all the Protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic church, and, to a lesser extent, in Eastern Orthodox communions. A third type of Pentecostalism consists of independent schismatic offshoots of the mission churches and wholly indigenous sects which adopt or tolerate beliefs and practices such as ancestor worship and polygamy.