Right. This was a big point of contention in my then charismatic church, and I could not understand the insistence on tongues when people underwent the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And again, we can’t deny its inclusion or proper practice for the New Testament church, we can only be vigilant to make sure its not a sideshow or somehow used when “people seek after a sign”.
Signs and wonders are to follow believers; we are never to seek them. (And I know you know that!)
I’ve been told by more than one Pentecostal, people I am close to, that if I didn’t speak in tongues, I wasn’t really Spirit baptized/filled, no matter what I experienced.
Sure, God *did something* but when I get the baptism with tongues, it will be way better.
One person even told me that the evidence is different than the gift of tongues and that if the evidence of tongues wasn’t there, I wasn’t baptized in the Spirit.
Course, there’s always the confusion of what exactly the terms mean and since different people use it to mean different things, you have to figure out where they are coming from first, and when you try to pin down exactly what they mean by *baptism* they can’t even define it.
For some people it happens at salvation, when they receive the Holy Spirit. According to others, you can receive the Holy Spirit without being baptized in Him. But it seems that even people who use those terms do not do so with consistency and cannot often even figure out what they mean themselves.
Sigh......