Pentecostalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Pentecostalism begins with a specific moment: a watch night service in Topeka, Kansas, on the 1st of January, 1901, when students at a small Bible school started speaking in tongues and believed they had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That single night set off a chain of events that would, within a century, grow into the fastest-growing religious movement in human history. How did a gathering at a modest school in the American Midwest become a global force touching over 279 million people? What did these early believers actually believe, and why did it terrify so many of their fellow Christians? And how did a movement born in racially integrated revival meetings come to fracture along the very color lines it initially refused to observe?

• 2. Roots in Radical Evangelicalism

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  Before the watch night service in Topeka, a set of theological streams had been flowing for decades in American and British Christianity that made something like Pentecostalism almost inevitable. Historians Cecil M. Robeck Jr. and Edith L. Blumhofer trace the movement's origins to late 19th-century radical evangelical revival movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Within those circles, questions about spiritual power, healing, and the imminent return of Christ were urgent and daily. Dwight L. Moody and R. A. Torrey had already begun teaching that all Christians could receive a special empowering experience, which they called the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Their framing planted the seed that Pentecostals would later cultivate.

  Albert Benjamin Simpson, born in 1843 and died in 1919, founded his Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1887, and that organization would prove especially influential on what became the Assemblies of God. John Alexander Dowie, born in 1847 and died in 1907, founded his Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in 1896, and his teachings on healing were embraced by early Pentecostals alongside those of Adoniram Judson Gordon and Maria Woodworth-Etter. Edward Irving's Catholic Apostolic Church, founded around 1831, had already displayed many of the characteristics that the Pentecostal revival would later make famous. The Keswick and Higher Life movements contributed another load-bearing pillar: the essentially universal belief that all spiritual gifts continued to operate in the present church, not just in the apostolic era. That conviction, taken seriously and pushed to its logical conclusion, is where speaking in tongues was waiting.

• 3. Azusa Street and the Spread of Fire

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  Charles Fox Parham, who had been raised as a Methodist, opened Bethel Bible School near Topeka, Kansas, in 1900. He taught that speaking in tongues was the scriptural evidence of Spirit baptism, and after the New Year's service, he received the experience himself and began spreading the doctrine through a four-year revival tour across Kansas and Missouri. In 1905, he moved to Houston, Texas, where one of his students was William J. Seymour, a one-eyed Black preacher who would become the central figure of what followed.

  Seymour traveled to Los Angeles, and on Monday, the 9th of April, 1906, a revival broke out at 214 Bonnie Brae Street. By Friday, the 14th of April, it had moved to 312 Azusa Street, and it would continue for three years. Worship at the racially integrated Azusa Mission had no order of service. People preached, testified, spoke and sang in tongues, and fell under what believers called the power of the Spirit. Religious and secular press alike covered the events, and thousands of visitors carried what participants called the "fire" back to their home churches.

  The spread was rapid and deliberate. By 1907, American missionaries from the Azusa revival were established in Liberia, and by 1908, in South Africa. Alfred G. Garr and his wife were the first foreign Pentecostal missionaries; Spirit baptized at Azusa, Garr spoke in Bengali, a language he did not know, and traveled to Calcutta where he ministered at the Bow Bazar Baptist Church. The Norwegian Methodist pastor T. B. Barratt visited the United States, encountered Seymour's movement, and by December 1906 had returned to Europe. He is credited with introducing Pentecostalism to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and England. His convert Alexander Boddy, the Anglican vicar of All Saints' in Sunderland, became a founder of British Pentecostalism. In November 1910, two Swedish Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Belem, Brazil, and established what became the Assembleias de Deus.

• 4. Race, Women, and Power

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  The crowds at Azusa Street were unusual by the standards of early 20th-century America: African Americans and whites worshiping together, side by side. For nearly two decades, from 1906 to 1924, Pentecostals defied the racial segregation laws of the Jim Crow era. The Church of God in Christ, the Church of God in Cleveland, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World were all interracial denominations before the 1920s. But the pressure to conform proved too strong for North American Pentecostalism, and the movement eventually divided into white and African-American branches. Interracial worship as a widespread practice would not return until after the civil rights movement.

  Women were vital to the early movement in ways that stood out sharply from most Protestant traditions of the time. The first person at Parham's Bible college to receive Spirit baptism with the evidence of speaking in tongues was a woman, Agnes Ozman. Florence Crawford, Ida Robinson, and Aimee Semple McPherson each founded new denominations. Women edited Pentecostal papers, ran Bible schools, and served as pastors and co-pastors. The theology itself created space for them: if the Holy Spirit was the agent of empowerment, then gender was no barrier to its reception. The majority of early converts and churchgoers were female.

  As the movement matured and institutional structures settled in, that space contracted. A more socially conservative approach to gender roles took hold, and female participation was channeled into auxiliary organizations and into roles as evangelists and missionaries rather than senior pastors. When women did serve as pastors, it was usually alongside their husbands. The arc from Agnes Ozman's experience in 1901 to the establishment of auxiliary women's organizations tells a compressed story about how renewal movements negotiate between the energy that launches them and the structures that sustain them.

• 5. Schisms and New Doctrines

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  The early Pentecostal movement was fractious almost from the start. The first fault line ran through the question of sanctification. Early converts from the Holiness movement believed that entire sanctification was a second, definite work of grace following conversion, and that Spirit baptism was a third. In 1910, William Durham of Chicago articulated what he called the Finished Work doctrine: sanctification happened at the moment of salvation, not afterward. This split the movement into two camps, Holiness Pentecostalism and Finished Work Pentecostalism, and those camps have never fully rejoined.

  A second fracture opened in 1913 at a camp meeting when a speaker named R. E. McAlister observed that the apostles baptized in the name of Jesus Christ alone, not in the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Frank Ewart took this observation further, claiming divine revelation that there was only one person in the Godhead, Jesus Christ, and that the terms "Father" and "Holy Ghost" were titles for different aspects of Christ. Those baptized in the Trinitarian formula needed to be rebaptized in Jesus's name. Ewart's movement, known as Oneness Pentecostalism, spread quickly, and the Assemblies of God eventually rejected the teaching in 1916, forcing many churches and pastors to withdraw. Those who left gathered under the leadership of Garfield T. Haywood, an African-American preacher from Indianapolis, and formed the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.

  In 1914, a group of around 300 predominately white Pentecostal ministers and laypeople gathered in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to found the General Council of the Assemblies of God. That founding meeting conspicuously excluded Bishop C. H. Mason and other African-American leaders who had, until that point, been licensing white Pentecostal ministers under the Church of God in Christ. The creation of the Assemblies of God marked, as observers have noted, an official end to both Pentecostal doctrinal unity and racial integration in the movement.

• 6. Core Beliefs and Worship

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  Pentecostalism teaches what it calls the "foursquare gospel": Jesus saves, baptizes with the Holy Spirit, heals bodily, and is coming again. These four convictions are drawn from specific scriptural citations, including John 3:16, Acts 2:4, James 5:15, and 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. The movement's soteriology is generally Arminian rather than Calvinist, meaning salvation is understood as conditional on continued faith and repentance rather than secured unconditionally by election.

  Baptism with the Holy Spirit occupies a central place in Pentecostal theology and is understood as an experience distinct from water baptism and from the new birth. Most Pentecostal denominations teach that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence that the experience has occurred. The phenomenon of tongues has two distinct functions in Pentecostal practice: as evidence of Spirit baptism and as a personal prayer language, and separately as a public spiritual gift requiring interpretation when exercised in a congregational setting. A 2006 ten-country survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 49 percent of Pentecostals in the United States, 50 percent in Brazil, 41 percent in South Africa, and 54 percent in India said they "never" speak or pray in tongues, which means the practice is far from universal even within Pentecostalism itself.

  Worship carries the values that scholar Russell P. Spittler identified as governing Pentecostal spirituality: individual experience, orality, spontaneity, otherworldliness, and biblical authority. Being "slain in the Spirit," dancing in the Spirit, the "Jericho march" drawn from the Book of Joshua, and holy laughter are all recognized practices in Pentecostal congregations. The phrase "Quench not the Spirit," drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:19, captures the theology behind the deliberate openness to unpredictable services. Pentecostal musical culture has extended far beyond the movement itself, with artists such as Chris Tomlin, Darlene Zschech, and groups including Hillsong Worship shaping contemporary Christian worship globally.

• 7. A Movement Without a Center

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  Pentecostalism comprises over 700 recognized Christian denominations and a significant number of independent churches that belong to no denomination at all. No central authority governs the movement; the Pentecostal World Fellowship, founded in 1947, provides affiliation for many denominations but holds no doctrinal authority over them. According to a denomination census in 2025, the Assemblies of God alone has 442,000 churches and 85 million adherents worldwide. The Foursquare Church counts 67,500 churches and 8.8 million members. The Apostolic Church has 15 million members.

  In 1928, the World Christian Fundamentals Association had labeled Pentecostalism "fanatical" and "unscriptural." By 1942, American Pentecostals were involved in founding the National Association of Evangelicals. Since the 1960s, the movement has grown further still through its influence on the Charismatic movement, in which non-Pentecostal Christians in Protestant and Catholic churches adopted Pentecostal beliefs about Spirit baptism and spiritual gifts while remaining in their original churches. Together, worldwide Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is estimated at over 644 million adherents.

  The greatest growth today is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, which holds 44 percent of classical Pentecostals worldwide, followed by the Americas at 37 percent. The Pulitzer Center has reported that around 35,000 people become Pentecostal or "born again" every day. Scholar Peter L. Berger of Boston University observed that the spread of Pentecostal Christianity may be the fastest-growing movement in the history of religion. What began with Agnes Ozman speaking in tongues in Topeka in 1901 had, by 2011, grown to 4 percent of the total world population and 12.8 percent of all Christians on earth.