This affirmation, known as continuationism, stands against cessationism, the position, held historically by many Reformed and other Protestants, that the miraculous gifts were given to authenticate the apostolic message and then withdrawn. It is central to Pentecostal and charismatic identity and flows directly from the doctrine of Spirit-baptism. The belief has spread far beyond classical Pentecostalism through the charismatic renewal, reshaping worship across many traditions, and it marks a sharp difference over how the New Testament accounts of the Spirit's gifts apply to the present-day church.
Much of the exegetical dispute turns on 1 Corinthians 13:8 to 10, where Paul says the gifts will cease "when the perfect comes": cessationists have argued that "the perfect" refers to the completed canon of scripture, so that the gifts' purpose ended once the New Testament was finished, while the more common reading among both continuationists and mainstream biblical scholars takes "the perfect" to mean Christ's return, in which case the passage does not predict an end to the gifts within church history at all. This exegetical disagreement underlies the wider institutional split between cessationist Reformed and Baptist bodies and continuationist Pentecostal, charismatic, and Third Wave churches, a division that runs through, rather than between, denominational families.