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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.
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Q&A

What does the expression Full Gospel mean? Does it imply Catholics have only half the gospel?

Catholic Answers Staff

Question:

What does the expression Full Gospel mean? Does it imply Catholics have only half the gospel?

Answer:

Don’t worry. We have the entire gospel. A church describing itself as Full Gospel is probably Pentecostal.

The emergence of Pentecostalism at the turn of the century saw the rise of groups claiming to restore the Christian church to its primitive fervor by a renewal of the charismatic (Pentecostal) gifts mentioned in the Bible (Acts 2:3-13; 1 Cor 12:8-11). These gifts include speaking in tongues; interpretation of tongues; prophecy; gifts of healing, knowledge, and wisdom; and miracles.

Pentecostals regarded these gifts as signs of the Holy Spirit’s work in the last days, so churches which lacked them were viewed as deficient at best and apostate at worst. Christian bodies which accepted Pentecostal gifts, whether denominational entities or independent local churches, were considered to possess the fullness of biblical revelation, hence the name Full Gospel.

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