Pentecostalism is the youngest of the major Christian traditions and the fastest growing. It did not exist in 1900. Within a century it counted adherents in the hundreds of millions across every continent.
Its origins are unusually well documented, unusually recent, and unusually American, and the story is more complicated than the single date it is often reduced to.
The Holiness Background
Pentecostalism did not appear from nothing. It grew out of the Wesleyan holiness movement of the nineteenth century.
John Wesley had taught that after conversion a believer might receive a further work of grace, which he called entire sanctification or Christian perfection. American holiness teachers through the 1800s developed this into the expectation of a definite second experience, often called the baptism of the Holy Spirit, subsequent to conversion and evidenced by holiness of life.
By the end of the century, camp meetings across the American South and Midwest were teaching that such an experience was available and should be sought. What was not settled was how a seeker would know it had occurred. Pentecostalism supplied an answer to that question.
Topeka and Azusa Street
Charles Fox Parham (1873 to 1929) opened Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1900. He set his students the question of what biblical evidence accompanied the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Their conclusion, drawn from the accounts in Acts, was speaking in tongues. On 1 January 1901 a student named Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues after prayer, and others followed.
The doctrine that emerged, and that distinguishes classical Pentecostalism, is that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence of Spirit baptism.
The movement became global through Los Angeles. William J. Seymour (1870 to 1922), the son of formerly enslaved parents, had heard Parham teach in Houston, where segregation laws required him to listen from outside the classroom door. Invited to Los Angeles in 1906, he began meetings that moved to a former African Methodist Episcopal building at 312 Azusa Street.
The Azusa Street revival ran from April 1906 for roughly three years. Services were long, unstructured, and racially integrated at a time when almost nothing in American life was. Visitors came from across the country and abroad, and returned home carrying the teaching. Within two years Pentecostal missionaries were at work on five continents.
The interracial character of Azusa Street did not survive. American Pentecostalism divided along racial lines within a generation, a division that later Pentecostal leaders have acknowledged and formally repented of.
Denominations Form
A movement that emphasises direct experience of the Spirit does not organise easily, and early Pentecostals were suspicious of denominational structure. Practical necessity overcame the suspicion.
The Assemblies of God was constituted at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in April 1914, when around three hundred ministers gathered to address credentialing, missionary support, and doctrinal consistency. The Church of God in Christ, under Charles Harrison Mason, had been organised earlier and became the largest predominantly African American Pentecostal body. The Church of God with headquarters at Cleveland, Tennessee, and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923, followed.
A significant doctrinal division appeared almost immediately. From 1913 a substantial group came to reject the traditional formulation of the Godhead in favour of a unitary understanding, baptising in the name of Jesus alone. The Assemblies of God adopted its Statement of Fundamental Truths in 1916 in part to define its position, and those holding the Oneness view formed separate bodies, of which the United Pentecostal Church International is the largest today.
This division is genuine and it is not minor. Readers should understand that Pentecostalism is not doctrinally uniform on this point, and that the bodies concerned regard the question as important.
The Later Waves
Two later developments carried Pentecostal practice far beyond Pentecostal denominations.
The charismatic renewal of the 1960s and 1970s introduced the gifts of the Spirit into Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian congregations, whose members generally remained in their own churches. Dennis Bennett, an Episcopal rector in Van Nuys, California, announcing his experience of tongues to his congregation in 1960, is commonly taken as the marker.
The third wave from the 1980s brought similar practice into evangelical churches that declined the Pentecostal label and often rejected tongues as the necessary initial evidence while affirming the continuing operation of spiritual gifts.
Together these account for why Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity is now the largest Protestant grouping in the world, and why the boundaries of the category are so difficult to draw.
What Pentecostals Actually Hold
The common core is a conviction that the events of Acts are normative rather than merely historical. The gifts of the Spirit described in the New Testament did not cease with the apostles and are available now.
Classical Pentecostal bodies teach Spirit baptism as an experience distinct from conversion, evidenced initially by tongues. Divine healing is expected. Worship is participatory and expects the immediate activity of God in the meeting.
The tradition is generally Arminian, holding that grace can be resisted, which reflects its Wesleyan parentage. There are Reformed Christians who affirm continuing gifts, and they are not usually called Pentecostal.
What the Story Actually Shows
Three observations follow from the record.
The first is that Pentecostalism answered a question the holiness movement had raised but not settled. A movement teaching that a definite experience is available will eventually be asked how a person knows it has happened. Tongues supplied a criterion.
The second is that its explosive growth owes much to structure. Early Pentecostalism required no seminary, no ordination process controlled from a distance, and no permission to begin. A converted layman could start a congregation. That is why it spread fastest among the poor and in places where established churches had little presence.
The third is that the tradition began interracial and did not remain so, and that historians of the movement, Pentecostal and otherwise, treat this as its most serious early failure.
For readers tracing their own tradition, the Pentecostal case is the reminder that church history did not end in the sixteenth century. The largest development in Protestant Christianity since the Reformation began in a rented building in Los Angeles within living memory of people still alive when it started.
