The Pentecostal Movement
In the eighteenth century, in the Church of England there were a group of students called the holy boys of Oxford who constituted the Holy Club. The most notable members were Charles Wesley, his brother John Wesley, and George Whitfield. John and Charles Wesley met the Moravians while on a missionary trip to the United States where the Moravians led them to accept Christ in 1738. They remained in the Church of England but formed a society, nicknamed the Methodists, whose open-air crusades were marked by fiery preaching.
Methodist churches began to decay with the formalization and institutionalization of Methodism and other traditions of Protestantism. In the latter part of the nineteenth century Churches began forming with the word ―Holiness‖ in their names to reflect their desire to get back to the foundational principles of Christianity.
In the USA, Charles Parham, a Holiness alumnus, founded a Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, and later in Texas, where together with his students they discovered by scriptural analysis what they believed to be a foundational principle of Christianity – speaking in tongues as evidence of the baptism by the Holy Spirit and the necessity to seek the Holy Spirit baptism. Consequently, they prayed for the Holy Spirit baptism and received the baptism with speaking in tongues. Another Holiness movement alumnus, William Seymour, attended Charles Parham‘s school. Even though he had not received the Holy Spirit baptism he believed and adopted it.
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William Seymour traveled to Los Angeles with this Holy Spirit baptism principle in addition to the other principles of the Holiness movement and started a ministry at an abandoned Methodist Church building on Azusa Street. At Azusa Street, they held daily prayer sessions with teachings on the overt acts of the Holy Spirit, especially Holy Spirit baptism with speaking in tongues. The Holy Spirit descended in a mighty way upon the prayer meetings and they experienced numerous Holy Spirit baptisms evidenced by speaking in tongues. William Seymour received the Holy Spirit baptism during these prayer meetings. People also received the nine gifts of the Holy Spirit presented in 1 Corinthians 12, and there were many miracles.
The Pentecostal renewal flared up in other parts of the world within the first ten years of the twentieth century: (1) Evan Roberts led the Welsh revival that engulfed England, Switzerland and Germany; (2) Pandita Ramabai of the Anglican Church led the Pentecostal revival in India; (3) T.B. Baratt of the Methodist Church brought the revival to Oslo; and (4) Pentecostal churches began to surface in Italy, Russia, Korea, Manchuria, and Chile. The Apostolic Church was born out of the Welsh revival in 1915 in Penygroes, South Wales, United Kingdom.
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