Topeka and Azusa Street

Affiliation

Canadian Presbyterian minister; founder of the Gospel Tabernacle, New York, and of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1887/1897)

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The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

A Presbyterian boyhood

Albert Benjamin Simpson was born on 15 December 1843 at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, Canada, to a Scottish Presbyterian family of farmers and shipbuilders, and grew up in Chatham, Ontario. His upbringing was strict and Calvinist; as a teenager he went through a long period of fear about his salvation, resolved by reading Walter Marshall's The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. He studied at Knox College, Toronto, graduating in 1865, and was ordained the same year.

A rising pastor

At twenty-one he became minister of Knox Church, Hamilton, Ontario, one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Canada. He married Margaret Henry in 1865. In 1873 he moved to the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where he led city-wide evangelistic meetings after the Civil War, and in 1879 to the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. Throughout these years he suffered from nervous exhaustion and heart trouble; he wrote later that he was "a nervous wreck" and had been told by a doctor that he would not live long.

Sanctification and healing

In Louisville, reading W.E. Boardman's The Higher Christian Life, he sought and claimed a deeper experience of Christ as his sanctification. In 1881, at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, he attended a meeting of the healing evangelist Charles Cullis and became convinced that healing is part of the gospel. Walking in the woods afterwards, he committed himself to accept Christ as his physician; he wrote that his heart trouble disappeared and that he was able afterwards to climb a 3,000-foot mountain. He lived another thirty-eight years of exceptionally hard work.

The Gospel Tabernacle

The same year he concluded that infant baptism was unscriptural and was immersed. He resigned from the Presbyterian ministry in November 1881 to work among the unchurched poor of New York, and founded an independent congregation that became the Gospel Tabernacle. He opened Berachah Home for the sick (1883), began a missionary training college (1883, later Nyack College), and published The Word, Work and World, later The Alliance Weekly.

The Alliance

In 1887, at Old Orchard Beach, he founded two societies: the Christian Alliance, for believers in many churches who held the Fourfold Gospel, and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance, for overseas missions. They merged in 1897 as the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). Simpson insisted it was a fellowship and missionary society, not a denomination. By his death it had missionaries in some sixteen countries.

Pentecostalism

When the Pentecostal revival reached the Alliance in 1906-07, especially at Nyack and in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Simpson investigated it with sympathy. His private diary shows that he sought the gift of tongues for himself without receiving it. He concluded that tongues might be a genuine gift but must not be made the evidence of the baptism in the Spirit. His policy became known as "seek not, forbid not". Several leaders and congregations left for the new Assemblies of God.

Key dates

• 1843 - Born at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, 15 December
• 1865 - Graduates from Knox College, Toronto; minister of Knox Church, Hamilton
• 1873 - Minister in Louisville, Kentucky
• 1879 - Minister in New York
• 1881 - Healed at Old Orchard Beach; immersed; leaves the Presbyterian ministry
• 1882-83 - Gospel Tabernacle; Berachah Home; missionary training college
• 1887 - Founds the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance
• 1890 - The Four-fold Gospel
• 1897 - The two societies merge as the Christian and Missionary Alliance
• 1906-12 - Pentecostal revival and division in the Alliance
• 1918 - Suffers a stroke
• 29 October 1919 - Dies at Nyack, New York

Teachings and claims

The Fourfold Gospel

Simpson summed up his message as Christ our Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. The emblem of the C&MA - a cross, a laver, a pitcher of oil and a crown - pictures the four.

Sanctification as union with Christ

He taught a crisis experience of sanctification after conversion, but understood it less as the removal of sin (as in the Wesleyan Holiness movement) than as the indwelling of Christ - "not the blessing but the Blesser" - received by surrender and faith, in the Keswick tradition.

Healing in the atonement

From Isaiah 53:4-5 and Matthew 8:17 he taught that Christ bore our sicknesses as well as our sins, so that bodily healing is provided in the atonement and may be claimed by faith. He did not forbid medicine outright, but he discouraged reliance on it and believed that a Christian fully trusting God would not need it. He taught that healing is a foretaste of the resurrection, not immunity from death.

Missions and the return of Christ

He believed that taking the gospel to every nation would hasten Christ's return (Matthew 24:14), and made world mission the centre of the Alliance.

Documented controversies

• Leaving the Presbyterian Church. His adoption of believer's immersion and divine healing, and his departure from his New York church in 1881, were criticised by fellow Presbyterians.
• Healing and medicine. Critics, including the Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield in Counterfeit Miracles (1918), attacked the faith-cure movement, of which Simpson was a leader. Deaths among those who refused medical care in faith-healing circles were widely reported, though Simpson was more moderate than Dowie.
• The Pentecostal division. The Alliance lost many members and workers to the Pentecostal movement after 1907; some Pentecostals accused Simpson of resisting the Spirit, while some Alliance members thought him too open.

He was personally modest, and no significant personal scandal is recorded.

Death

Simpson suffered a stroke in 1918 and died at his home in Nyack, New York, on 29 October 1919, aged 75. He was buried on the Nyack College campus.

Legacy

The Christian and Missionary Alliance became a worldwide missionary denomination, with several million members, the large majority outside North America. Nyack College (now Alliance University) and many other schools descend from his work.

He wrote more than seventy books and some 120 hymns. Through members who left for Pentecostalism - including leaders of the early Assemblies of God - his Fourfold Gospel shaped Pentecostal theology: Aimee Semple McPherson's "Foursquare Gospel" is a close adaptation.

Measured against the creeds

Simpson's devotion to Christ, his care for the poor and his missionary vision are admirable, and his "seek not, forbid not" was more cautious than many in his day. His teaching that healing is provided in the atonement in the same way as forgiveness, however, goes beyond what the Church has taught. The Church prays for the sick and anoints them, and believes God heals; but it has held that bodily healing in this age is a gift, not a guaranteed benefit of the cross like the forgiveness of sins, and that all will suffer and die until the resurrection (Romans 8:23). St Paul's own "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7-9) and Timothy's stomach (1 Timothy 5:23) show this.

His separation of sanctification as a second crisis, and his rejection of infant baptism, also depart from the historic faith, which places the gift of the Spirit and new life in baptism and holds sanctification to be a lifelong growth.

Major writings

• The Gospel of Healing (1885)
• The Four-fold Gospel (1890)
• The Holy Spirit, or Power from on High, 2 vols (1895-96)
• Wholly Sanctified (1890)
• Christ in the Bible (commentary series)
• Hymns including "Himself" and "Yesterday, Today, Forever"

Affiliation

Congregational minister in Australia; founder of the Christian Catholic Church (1896) and Zion City, Illinois

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

Edinburgh and Adelaide

John Alexander Dowie was born in Edinburgh on 25 May 1847, the son of a tailor and lay preacher. In 1860 the family emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia, where he worked in his uncle's business. In 1867 he returned to Edinburgh to study at the university, attending classes in arts and theology for about two years without taking a degree, and went back to Australia in 1870.

Congregational minister

He was ordained in the Congregational Union and served churches at Alma, near Adelaide, and from 1873 at Newtown, a suburb of Sydney. In 1876, during an epidemic (probably typhoid) in which he buried some forty of his parishioners, he became convinced from Acts 10:38 that sickness is the oppression of the devil and that Christ heals today. He prayed for a dying young woman in his congregation, who recovered, and from then on he taught healing by faith. He married his cousin Jane Dowie in 1876.

He left the Congregational ministry in 1878, criticising its ties to the world, and became an independent evangelist in Sydney and then Melbourne, where he built a Free Christian Tabernacle. He campaigned fiercely against alcohol and in 1885 was jailed for a month in Melbourne for holding unauthorised processions. ^† He founded the International Divine Healing Association in 1886.

America and the Chicago fair

In 1888 he left Australia for San Francisco and travelled the Pacific coast holding healing meetings. In 1890 he settled near Chicago. During the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 he set up a small wooden tabernacle opposite Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and held healing services that drew growing crowds. His magazine Leaves of Healing (from 1894) published testimonies, and he opened "Divine Healing Homes" where the sick could stay while being prayed for.

The Christian Catholic Church and Zion

In February 1896 he founded the Christian Catholic Church (later the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church), declaring himself its General Overseer. In 1899-1900 he secretly bought 6,500 acres on Lake Michigan, forty miles north of Chicago, and on 1 January 1900 announced the founding of Zion City. Lots went on sale in July 1901 on 1,100-year leases that forbade alcohol, tobacco, pork, oysters, theatres, doctors and drugstores. Dowie owned or controlled the land, the bank, the stores and the lace factory. By 1905 Zion had perhaps 7,500 residents.

Elijah and the First Apostle

On 2 June 1901 he declared that he was "Elijah the Restorer", the prophet foretold in Malachi 4 and Matthew 17:11, and appeared thereafter in elaborate robes. In October 1903 he took a party of some 3,000 followers by special trains to New York for a "visitation" at Madison Square Garden; hostile crowds and ridicule ended in a humiliating retreat, and the cost helped push Zion into insolvency. In September 1904 he consecrated himself "First Apostle" of the restored Church.

Collapse

Zion's industries were unprofitable, and the city went into receivership in 1906. Dowie, who had suffered a stroke in September 1905, was in Mexico when, in April 1906^†, his deputy Wilbur Glenn Voliva and the Zion leadership deposed him, accusing him of extravagance, misuse of funds and teaching polygamy. Dowie challenged the deposition in court, but the court gave the church's property to a receiver and an election confirmed Voliva.

Key dates

• 1847 - Born in Edinburgh, 25 May
• 1860 - Family emigrates to Adelaide
• 1867-69 - Studies at the University of Edinburgh
• 1876 - Embraces divine healing during a Sydney epidemic
• 1878 - Leaves the Congregational ministry
• 1888 - Moves to the United States
• 1893 - Healing services at the Chicago World's Fair
• 1894 - Leaves of Healing begins
• 1895 - Prosecuted in Chicago for practising medicine without a licence
• 1896 - Founds the Christian Catholic Church
• 1900-01 - Founds Zion City
• 2 June 1901 - Declares himself "Elijah the Restorer"
• 1903 - New York "visitation"
• 1904 - Consecrates himself "First Apostle"
• 1906 - Deposed by Voliva and the Zion leadership
• 9 March 1907 - Dies at Zion

Teachings and claims

Healing without doctors

Dowie taught that sickness, like sin, is the work of the devil, and that Christ's atonement provides healing for the body. To use doctors, drugs or surgery was to trust the arm of flesh; he called medicine "devil's work" and doctors "poisoners". A Christian who was not healed lacked faith or harboured sin.

Zion as the kingdom

He saw Zion City as a restoration of God's rule on earth: a holy city where every part of life, from business to food, was ordered by the law of God under the prophet's authority, and from which the gospel would go out to the world.

Restoration of offices

He held that the Church had lost its apostles and prophets through unbelief and that God was restoring them. His own claims - Elijah, then First Apostle - were the summit of this.

Other teachings

He taught triune immersion as the only valid baptism, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, the dietary laws against pork, and the coming restoration of all things. He denounced Freemasonry, the press and much of organised Christianity.

Documented controversies

• Prosecutions. He was arrested and prosecuted in Chicago in 1895 for practising medicine without a licence and for violations relating to his healing homes; he fought the charges and many were dropped.
• Healings questioned. Chicago newspapers alleged that some healings at his meetings were exaggerated or staged, and printed accounts of patients who died in his homes.
• Deaths without medical care. Deaths of followers, including children, who refused medical treatment drew public criticism and inquests.^†
• Financial control. Residents were urged to deposit their savings in Zion's bank and invest in its businesses, which failed; critics alleged that large sums were unaccounted for and that Dowie lived in luxury.^†
• The New York fiasco (1903) and his escalating claims to be Elijah and an apostle.
• The deposition of 1906, in which his own leaders accused him of extravagance and of advocating polygamy.^†

Death

After his stroke in 1905, Dowie lived on in Zion, partly paralysed and with a few remaining followers, in his house Shiloh. He died there on 9 March 1907, aged 59. He had suffered further strokes and was said to have died still believing in his mission.

Legacy

Zion was the seedbed of early Pentecostalism. When Charles Parham preached there in 1906, many residents embraced tongues, and Zion produced a remarkable number of early Pentecostal and healing leaders - John G. Lake, F.F. Bosworth, Gordon Lindsay's parents, Marie Burgess Brown and others. Missionaries sent by Dowie to South Africa helped found the Apostolic Faith Mission there and the "Zionist" churches, which today number millions across southern Africa. Under Voliva, Zion became famous for teaching that the earth is flat.

Through Lindsay, who wrote his biography, Dowie also became a model for the post-war healing revival.

Measured against the creeds

The historic Church has always prayed for the sick, anointed them (James 5:14-15) and honoured miracles of healing. It has never held that using medicine is a sin; the Fathers and the monastic tradition founded hospitals, and Scripture itself commends the physician (Sirach 38:1-15). Dowie's teaching turned prayer for healing into a law, with deadly results for some who obeyed it, and laid guilt on those who were not healed.

His claims to be Elijah and the First Apostle set his own person above the Church and the apostolic ministry handed down from Christ. The Church holds that Elijah's promised coming was fulfilled in John the Baptist (Matthew 11:14; 17:12-13), and that the foundation of the apostles is laid once for all (Ephesians 2:20). His theocratic city, ruled by a prophet who controlled land, money and conscience, is an example of what happens when such claims go unchecked.

Major writings

• Editor, Leaves of Healing (1894-1906)
• Published sermons and addresses in Leaves of Healing

Affiliation

Bradford plumber and mission leader; Pentecostal from 1907; for a time credentialed with the Assemblies of God

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Pentecostal celebrity evangelists, 1910s-1940s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

A Yorkshire childhood of labour

Smith Wigglesworth was born on 8 June 1859 at Menston, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a poor family. His father was a farm labourer. From the age of six he worked in the fields pulling turnips and from seven in a woollen mill, and he never went to school; he could not read until his wife taught him, and said afterwards that the only book he ever read was the Bible. His grandmother, a Wesleyan Methodist, took him to chapel, and he was converted at about eight. He was confirmed in the Church of England, and as a youth was involved with the Methodists and the Salvation Army.

Plumber and mission leader

He learned plumbing and in 1880 set up in business in Bradford. In 1882 he married Mary Jane "Polly" Featherstone, a Salvation Army officer and a gifted preacher, who taught him to read. Together they opened the Bowland Street Mission in Bradford in 1889, where Polly preached and Smith, shy and halting, made the altar calls. For some years his faith cooled while his business prospered, and Polly's prayers and example brought him back.

Healing

In the 1890s he was introduced to divine healing at the Leeds Healing Home, run on the model of the American faith-cure homes. He was healed, he said, of haemorrhoids and later of appendicitis without surgery, and he threw away all medicines. He began praying for the sick at Bowland Street.

Sunderland, 1907

In October 1907 he went to All Saints, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, where the Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy was hosting Pentecostal meetings after a visit from T.B. Barratt. Wigglesworth at first argued with those who were seeking tongues. On 28 October, as Mary Boddy laid hands on him in the vicarage, he had a vision of the empty cross and Christ exalted, and spoke in tongues. He returned to Bradford a changed man and began to preach with new confidence.

Polly's death and world ministry

Polly died on 1 January 1913. By the family's account Smith commanded death to give her back; she opened her eyes, told him her time had come, and he let her go. After her death he travelled widely as an evangelist, often with his daughter Alice and son-in-law James Salter. Between the wars he preached across Britain, in Scandinavia and Switzerland, in the United States and Canada, in South Africa, India, Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand. His campaigns in New Zealand (1922) and Australia were especially well attended and led to new Pentecostal churches. He held credentials for a time with the Assemblies of God in America and was associated with the British Assemblies of God and Elim.

His sermons, taken down in shorthand, were published as Ever Increasing Faith (1924) and Faith That Prevails (1938).

Key dates

• 1859 - Born at Menston, Yorkshire, 8 June
• c. 1867 - Converted; working in the mills
• 1880 - Plumbing business in Bradford
• 1882 - Marries Polly Featherstone
• 1889 - Opens the Bowland Street Mission
• 1890s - Healed at the Leeds Healing Home
• 28 October 1907 - Speaks in tongues at Sunderland
• 1 January 1913 - Polly dies
• 1914-39 - International campaigns
• 1922 - New Zealand campaign
• 1924 - Ever Increasing Faith
• 12 March 1947 - Dies at Wakefield

Teachings and claims

Only believe

His watchword was "Only believe!" He taught that faith is acting on God's Word without regard to feelings or circumstances, and that a believer who truly trusts God will see healing. "I am not moved by what I see. I am moved only by what I believe."

Sickness and the devil

He often treated sickness, especially cancer, as the work of a demon to be rebuked, and taught that the believer has authority to command it to leave.

Medicine

He refused medical treatment for himself and his family, including for painful kidney stones that he passed over several years, and told the sick that doctors and medicines showed a lack of faith, though he did not always forbid them to others.

Raising the dead

He claimed that God had used him to raise a number of people from the dead, including briefly Polly in 1913.

Documented controversies

• Rough handling of the sick. He struck, slapped and punched sick people where they were afflicted, saying "I don't hit them, I hit the devil." One account records him punching a man with stomach cancer hard enough to knock him across the room; the man was said to have been healed. Others were hurt or humiliated.^†
• Unsubstantiated claims of resurrection. Figures for those he is said to have raised vary from three to more than a dozen; none was documented at the time with medical evidence.
• Harshness to the unhealed. He prayed for the sick once and rebuked those who came back as lacking faith.
• Legend and later prophecy. Prophecies attributed to him - especially a "1947 prophecy" of a coming revival - first appear long after his death, and his biographer Desmond Cartwright found no contemporary record of them.

^†

• Legal trouble. He was prosecuted in England for practising medicine without a licence and was acquitted, and in Sweden in 1920 the authorities restricted his public meetings after crowds gathered for healing.

^†

Death

Wigglesworth died on 12 March 1947 at Wakefield, Yorkshire, aged 87. He had gone to the funeral of a friend, Wilfred Richardson, and collapsed in the vestry of the church while asking after the father of a sick girl he had prayed for. He was buried in Bradford.

Legacy

Wigglesworth is a towering figure in Pentecostal and charismatic memory, often called "the Apostle of Faith". His books of sermons remain in print, and later healing and Word of Faith preachers cite him as a model. The legend around him has grown far beyond the documented record; Cartwright's biography (2000), written from within the Pentecostal tradition, is the main attempt to separate the two.

He was also, by every account, a man of deep prayer, generosity and simplicity, who never sought wealth and lived plainly.

Measured against the creeds

Wigglesworth's devotion, his love of Scripture and his compassion for the sick are not in doubt. His teaching nonetheless carried several errors of the faith-cure movement: that healing is always available to those with enough faith, that sickness is commonly demonic, and that using medicine is a failure of faith. The Church has always prayed for and anointed the sick (James 5:14-15) and also honoured the physician (Sirach 38), and has recognised that God may permit suffering for His purposes, as with St Paul (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).

Striking the sick contradicts the gentleness Christ showed to the suffering, who "laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them" (Luke 4:40). And claims of raising the dead, made without witnesses or evidence, ask for a faith in the evangelist rather than in Christ, whose own resurrection the Church has always proclaimed on the testimony of witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

Major writings

• Ever Increasing Faith (1924)
• Faith That Prevails (1938)
• Sermons printed in Confidence (Sunderland), Redemption Tidings and The Pentecostal Evangel

Affiliation

Resident of Zion City (1901-07); Pentecostal missionary to South Africa (1908-13); co-founder of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; founder of healing rooms in Spokane and Portland

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

A full account of Lake's life has two layers: the story he told, which his admirers have repeated, and what independent records show. Both are given here.

Early life

John Graham Lake was born on 18 March 1870 at St Marys, Ontario, Canada, one of sixteen children; the family moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Lake said that several of his siblings died of illness and that he himself was sickly. In the 1890s he married Jennie Stevens and worked in Michigan and Chicago. He later said he had been licensed as a Methodist preacher, had founded newspapers, and had made a fortune in real estate and insurance, holding a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Zion

Lake said that his brother, sisters and wife were healed through the ministry of John Alexander Dowie, and he moved to Zion City in 1901, where he worked as a manager in its building department.^† After Dowie's fall, Parham's preaching in Zion (1906) won many residents to Pentecostalism, and in 1907 Lake received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues, with Thomas Hezmalhalch praying for him,^† and began to preach and pray for the sick in the Midwest.

South Africa

In April 1908 Lake, his wife, their seven children and several co-workers sailed for South Africa, with no mission board or salary. In Johannesburg they took over a meeting place and held revival meetings that drew Black and white South Africans. With Thomas Hezmalhalch and others, Lake helped organise the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) of South Africa, which took in many of the "Zionist" congregations planted earlier by Dowie's missionaries. Jennie Lake died in December 1908, while he was away preaching; he blamed her death on exhaustion and malnutrition. In 1909 he was elected president of the AFM. He returned to America in 1913, having married Florence Switzer in 1913.

Spokane and Portland

In 1914 Lake settled in Spokane, Washington, where he opened "healing rooms" in the Rookery Building and founded the Apostolic Church. He claimed that some 100,000 healings occurred there between 1915 and 1920 and that the U.S. government had declared Spokane "the healthiest city in the world". In 1920 he moved to Portland, Oregon, and then spent years in Texas and California before returning to Spokane in 1931.

What the records show

In 2012 the historian Barry Morton, working through census records, newspapers and South African archives, concluded that much of this story was invented. Census records list Lake as a carpenter or labourer, not a businessman; no evidence was found for his Board of Trade seat, his newspapers or his fortune; the "healthiest city" claim has no government source; and the healing figures were Lake's own. His sympathetic biographer, Kemp Burpeau, had also found no corroboration of the business career. The theologian Marius Nel (2016) has defended Lake's sincerity and ministry against parts of Morton's critique, arguing that Morton read the sources too uncharitably and judged him by standards foreign to early Pentecostalism.

Key dates

• 1870 - Born at St Marys, Ontario, 18 March
• 1890s - Marries Jennie Stevens
• 1901 - Moves to Zion City
• 1907 - Baptism in the Spirit
• 1908 - Sails for South Africa; Jennie Lake dies in December
• 1908-09 - Helps form the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; becomes its president
• 1913 - Returns to America; marries Florence Switzer
• 1914-20 - Healing rooms in Spokane
• 1920 - Moves to Portland, Oregon
• 1931 - Returns to Spokane
• 16 September 1935 - Dies in Spokane

Teachings and claims

Healing as God's will

Lake taught that sickness is from the devil and healing always God's will, provided in the atonement. Like Dowie, he regarded reliance on doctors as a lack of faith, though he later spoke more mildly.

Spirit-man and "God-men"

He taught that the baptism in the Spirit makes the believer a channel of divine power, even a "God-man" in whom Christ's own life is reproduced. In one sermon he said, "The real Christian is a God-man... God's intention is that every man be a God-man."^†

Restoration of apostolic power

He saw the Pentecostal revival as the restoration of the apostolic Church, with miracles as its normal sign.

Scientific claims

He described healing in quasi-scientific language, claiming that the Spirit's power could be seen killing germs under a microscope - a claim widely repeated in later healing ministries.^†

Documented controversies

• His biography. As set out above, Morton (2012) argued that Lake fabricated much of his career and inflated his results; Burpeau (2004) also found no corroboration for his business claims. Nel (2016) defends him in part.
• South African finances. Accusations of misusing AFM funds were made in South Africa; Morton reports that these were eventually disproved.
• Race in South Africa. Lake preached to mixed audiences at first, but the AFM soon segregated its work, and his later statements on race relations have been criticised.^†
• The "God-man" language, which critics have seen as anticipating the little-gods teaching of later Word of Faith preachers.
• His wife's death. Some critics have asked whether Jennie's death reflected the hardships of going to Africa with no support and the refusal of medical care.

Death

Lake suffered a stroke in 1935 and died in Spokane on 16 September 1935, aged 65.

Legacy

The Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, which he helped found, is one of the country's largest churches, with well over a million members. The Zionist churches it influenced are among the largest religious movements in southern Africa.

Lake's sermons and the stories of his healing rooms were revived by Gordon Lindsay, who published them in the 1950s, and by later charismatic ministries, which reopened "healing rooms" in Spokane in 1999 and spread them worldwide. He is often cited as a hero of faith in Word of Faith and healing circles, usually on the basis of his own account.

Measured against the creeds

The Church honours missionaries who went out in poverty and preached Christ, and there is no doubt that the movement Lake helped start in South Africa brought many to faith. His teaching on healing, however, carried Dowie's view that sickness is never God's will and that medicine shows a lack of faith, which the historic Church has never held. His description of believers as "God-men" also confuses two things the Church distinguishes with care: union with God by grace, which the Fathers call deification, and the one Person of Christ, who alone is God and man by nature (Council of Chalcedon, 451).

The serious doubts about his own account of his life are also a warning. Where a ministry's authority rests on the leader's testimony of wealth renounced and wonders done, that testimony must be true; St Paul insisted that "we have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty" (2 Corinthians 4:2).

Major writings

Lake wrote no books in his lifetime; his sermons were collected and published later.

• John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith (Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994)

Affiliation

Holiness preacher; pastor of the Apostolic Faith Mission, 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

Born to freed slaves

William Joseph Seymour was born on 2 May 1870 at Centerville, St Mary Parish, Louisiana, the son of Simon and Phillis Seymour, who had been born into slavery. His father had served in the Union army. The family were poor sharecroppers, and William was baptised as an infant in the Catholic church at Franklin; he grew up attending Baptist churches. He taught himself to read and, by his own account, had visions and dreams as a child.

Searching in the North

In his twenties he left the Jim Crow South, working as a railway porter and a waiter in Memphis, St Louis and Indianapolis, where he joined a Black Methodist Episcopal congregation. In Cincinnati around 1900 he came into contact with Martin Wells Knapp's God's Bible School and with the "Evening Light Saints" (the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana), an interracial Holiness movement that taught entire sanctification, divine healing and the coming unity of all true Christians. There he was sanctified, and during an attack of smallpox that left him blind in his left eye, he accepted a call to preach.

Houston

By 1903 he was in Houston, Texas, attending a Holiness church pastored by Lucy Farrow, a Black woman who had worked as a governess for Charles Parham's family. In late 1905 Parham opened a Bible school in Houston, and Farrow arranged for Seymour to attend. Because of segregation, Seymour sat in the hallway or at an open door. He accepted Parham's teaching that tongues are the evidence of the baptism in the Spirit, though he had not yet spoken in tongues himself.

Los Angeles

In January 1906 Neely Terry, a visitor from Los Angeles, invited Seymour to be pastor of a small Holiness mission led by Julia Hutchins. He arrived in February and preached on tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism. Hutchins locked him out. He continued holding prayer meetings in the house of Richard and Ruth Asberry at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street. On 9 April 1906 Edward Lee and then others there spoke in tongues; Seymour himself did so on 12 April. Crowds gathered in the street, and the meetings moved to a former African Methodist Episcopal church, later used as a stable and warehouse, at 312 Azusa Street.

The Azusa Street Mission

The Apostolic Faith Mission opened there in mid-April 1906. On 18 April, the day of the San Francisco earthquake, the Los Angeles Times reported "a weird babel of tongues". For three years meetings ran almost continuously, three times a day, seven days a week. Black, white, Hispanic and Asian worshippers knelt together. Seymour led with notable humility, often praying with his head inside one of the two wooden crates that served as a pulpit. The mission's paper, The Apostolic Faith (1906-08), edited by Clara Lum and Florence Crawford, reached some 50,000 subscribers worldwide, and visitors carried the movement across America and to Europe, India, Africa and Latin America.

Divisions

In October 1906 Parham came, denounced the meetings and was asked to leave. In 1908 Seymour married Jennie Evans Moore, one of the first at Bonnie Brae to speak in tongues. Shortly afterwards Clara Lum, who reportedly opposed the marriage, left for Portland with Florence Crawford, taking the national and international mailing lists of The Apostolic Faith, which Seymour never recovered. In 1911, while Seymour was away, William Durham preached at the mission and tried to take over its pulpit; Seymour locked him out. The mission's congregation shrank to a small, mostly Black fellowship.

In 1915 he wrote The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission, reserving the office of bishop to "people of color", after repeated experiences of white leaders taking over or leaving.

Key dates

• 1870 - Born at Centerville, Louisiana, 2 May
• c. 1900 - In Cincinnati; joins the Evening Light Saints; loses sight in one eye
• 1905 - Attends Parham's Bible school in Houston
• February 1906 - Arrives in Los Angeles; locked out of Julia Hutchins's mission
• 9 April 1906 - Tongues at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street
• April 1906 - Apostolic Faith Mission opens at 312 Azusa Street
• September 1906 - The Apostolic Faith begins
• October 1906 - Parham denounces the revival
• 1908 - Marries Jennie Evans Moore; Lum and Crawford leave with the mailing lists
• 1911 - Locks out William Durham
• 1915 - Doctrines and Discipline
• 28 September 1922 - Dies in Los Angeles

Teachings and claims

Three works of grace

Seymour held the Holiness pattern of conversion, then entire sanctification as a second work of grace, then the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a third, evidenced by tongues. "The Baptism with the Holy Ghost is a gift of power upon the sanctified life," The Apostolic Faith explained.

Love as the real evidence

Over time - especially after Parham's attack and the divisions that followed - Seymour came to say that divine love, not tongues alone, is the real sign of the Spirit's presence. "If you get angry, or speak evil, or backbite," he wrote, "I care not how many tongues you may have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit."^†

Unity across the colour line

Seymour saw the interracial character of the revival as itself a work of the Spirit. Frank Bartleman, who worshipped there, wrote that "the color line was washed away in the blood".

Healing and the return of Christ

He taught divine healing and the imminent return of Christ, and that the Pentecostal outpouring was the "latter rain" before the end.

Documented controversies

• The break with Parham (1906), who attacked the revival for its emotionalism and racial mixing.
• The loss of the mailing lists in 1908, when Clara Lum left for Portland, reportedly after his marriage, which some in the mission opposed because they expected the Lord's imminent return.
• The Durham episode (1911), in which Seymour locked Durham out after he challenged the Holiness teaching on sanctification.
• Excess at Azusa. Visitors and newspapers described trances, shaking, barking and other manifestations; Seymour and the paper sometimes warned against "wild fire" and counterfeit experiences.
• The 1915 Discipline, which some white Pentecostals read as racial exclusion, and which Seymour presented as a defensive measure.

No personal or financial scandal is recorded.

Death

Seymour died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on 28 September 1922, aged 52. Jennie Evans Seymour led the mission until it lost its building in 1931; she died in 1936. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Los Angeles.

Legacy

For decades white Pentecostal histories gave the leading place to Parham, but historians now generally recognise Seymour as the central figure of early Pentecostalism. Azusa Street was the hub from which the movement spread to the world: the Church of God in Christ, the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World and many others trace their origins wholly or partly to it. He stands out as a rare example of Black leadership of an interracial movement in Jim Crow America, who bore humiliation without bitterness.

Measured against the creeds

Seymour's humility, his love for his opponents and his conviction that the Spirit breaks down the walls between races reflect the gospel's own teaching (Ephesians 2:14; Galatians 3:28), and his later emphasis on love as the true mark of the Spirit echoes 1 Corinthians 13.

His teaching on the Spirit, however, carried the Holiness three-stage pattern and Parham's initial-evidence doctrine. The historic Church holds that the Spirit is given in baptism and confirmation or chrismation, and that no particular gift is the necessary sign of His presence (1 Corinthians 12:29-30). The expectation of an immediate second and third work of grace is unknown to the Fathers, who describe the Christian life as continual growth in grace through Word, prayer and sacraments.

Major writings

• Contributions to The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles, 1906-08)
• The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, Cal. (1915)

Affiliation

Methodist supply pastor (to 1895); independent Holiness preacher; founder of the Apostolic Faith movement and Bethel Bible College, Topeka

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street, The history of tongues

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Life

A sickly boy on the Kansas prairie

Charles Fox Parham was born on 4 June 1873 at Muscatine, Iowa, and moved with his family to Cheney, Kansas, in 1878. As a child he suffered from what he later called "fever" and a heart condition, and a tapeworm that stunted his growth. His mother died when he was twelve. He was converted at about thirteen in a Congregational church and began to lead meetings while still a teenager.

In 1890 he entered Southwest Kansas College, a Methodist school in Winfield, intending to become a minister. He nearly died of rheumatic fever there, and attributed his recovery to prayer; he left the college convinced that God was calling him to preach, not to study medicine.

Methodist supply pastor to independent healer

He served as a supply pastor for the Methodist Episcopal Church at Eudora, Kansas, from 1893, but left in 1895, objecting to denominational control and creeds. He married Sarah Thistlethwaite, a Quaker, in 1896. After the serious illness of their first son and his own renewed sickness, he renounced all medicine and doctors.

He moved to Topeka in 1898 and opened Bethel Healing Home, where the sick came for prayer, and published a magazine, The Apostolic Faith. In 1900 he toured Holiness centres in the east - including Dowie's Zion, A.B. Simpson's Nyack, and Frank Sandford's "Shiloh" community in Durham, Maine - where he heard reports of missionaries receiving foreign languages by the Spirit.

Bethel Bible School and 1 January 1901

In October 1900 he opened Bethel Bible School in a rented mansion in Topeka known as "Stone's Folly", with about forty students. Parham said that before leaving for a few days in December he set them to study what the Bible gives as evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that they concluded independently that it was speaking in tongues. On the night of 1 January 1901, a student, Agnes Ozman, asked Parham to lay hands on her and, by her own account, began to speak in what was taken to be Chinese. Over the next days Parham and others also spoke in tongues. Newspapers reported the event with curiosity and ridicule. The school closed within months.

Revival in Kansas and Texas

After lean years, Parham's healing meetings at Galena, Kansas, in the winter of 1903-04 brought large crowds and claims of many healings. He organised his followers as the Apostolic Faith Movement, with headquarters at Baxter Springs, Kansas, and in 1905 moved his work to Houston, Texas, where he opened another short-term Bible school. There a Black Holiness preacher, William J. Seymour, sat in on his classes - by most accounts in the hallway or doorway, because of Texas segregation laws and customs. Seymour carried the teaching to Los Angeles in 1906.

Zion and Azusa Street

In September 1906 Parham went to Zion City, Illinois, where Dowie's community had collapsed, and won hundreds of residents to Pentecostalism. In October he visited the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where Seymour had invited him as the movement's leader. He was appalled by what he saw - emotional worship, people falling and jerking, and above all Black and white worshippers mixing freely - and denounced it from the pulpit. He was asked to leave and held rival meetings nearby, which failed.

Arrest and decline

In July 1907 Parham was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, with a young man, J.J. Jourdan, on a charge of "the commission of an unnatural offense". The charge was dropped without trial and Parham always denied it, saying he had been framed by enemies, but reports spread quickly - promoted by his rival Wilbur Glenn Voliva of Zion - and his national leadership of the movement ended. He spent the rest of his life as a travelling evangelist from Baxter Springs, with a small loyal following.

Key dates

• 1873 - Born at Muscatine, Iowa, 4 June
• 1890 - Enters Southwest Kansas College
• 1893-95 - Methodist supply pastor at Eudora, Kansas
• 1896 - Marries Sarah Thistlethwaite
• 1898 - Opens Bethel Healing Home in Topeka
• 1900 - Visits Zion, Nyack and Shiloh; opens Bethel Bible School in October
• 1 January 1901 - Agnes Ozman speaks in tongues
• 1903-04 - Galena revival
• 1905 - Bible school in Houston; William Seymour attends
• 1906 - Revival in Zion; visits and denounces Azusa Street
• July 1907 - Arrested in San Antonio; charges dropped
• 1927 - Visits the Holy Land
• 29 January 1929 - Dies at Baxter Springs, Kansas

Teachings and claims

Tongues as the initial evidence

Parham's lasting contribution was the doctrine that speaking in tongues is the necessary initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is a third experience after conversion and sanctification. This "initial evidence" doctrine became the defining teaching of classical Pentecostalism.

Xenolalia

He held that tongues are real foreign languages, given so that missionaries could preach without learning languages. He reported that his students spoke Chinese, Swedish, Bohemian and other languages. Missionaries who went abroad expecting to preach in their tongues found they could not be understood (see A.G. Garr).

The bride and the sealing

He taught that only those baptised in the Spirit would form the "bride of Christ", caught up at His coming, while other Christians would pass through the tribulation.

Other teachings

He taught divine healing without doctors, the imminent premillennial return of Christ, the annihilation (not eternal punishment) of the wicked, and British-Israelism - the belief that the Anglo-Saxons are descended from the lost tribes of Israel. He held that races should remain separate and that intermarriage had caused the Flood.

Documented controversies

• Azusa Street. He denounced the revival in October 1906 as "a darky camp meeting", "spiritual power prostituted", and attacked its interracial worship, writing later of "white people imitating unintelligent, crude negroism".^†
• The 1907 arrest. As above. Historians are divided over what happened; the charge was dropped, and the evidence is not conclusive either way.
• Race. His biographer James Goff records that he praised the Ku Klux Klan for its "high ideals" and spoke at Klan gatherings, still commending it in 1927.
• Durham's death. He claimed the death of his rival William Durham in 1912 as divine vindication of his own teaching on sanctification.^†
• Holy Land expedition. He announced plans to find the Ark of the Covenant, and later raised funds for a trip to the Holy Land in 1927-28.

^†

Death

In January 1929 Parham collapsed while lecturing in Temple, Texas. He was taken home to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where he died of heart disease on 29 January 1929, aged 55. His gravestone is shaped like a pulpit, bearing John 15:13. ^†

Legacy

Parham is the doctrinal founder of classical Pentecostalism: the initial-evidence teaching he formulated is still held by the Assemblies of God and many other Pentecostal churches, which together with the wider Pentecostal-charismatic movement number several hundred million people. His own Apostolic Faith churches remain small.

Pentecostal historians now acknowledge his racism and the questions over his conduct openly, and generally give Seymour and Azusa Street the greater place in the movement's history.

Measured against the creeds

The four traditions confess that the Holy Spirit is given in baptism and in the laying on of hands (confirmation or chrismation), as in Acts 2:38 and 8:14-17. Parham's teaching that there is a later "baptism of the Spirit" that every Christian must seek, and that it is always shown by speaking in tongues, has no basis in the Church's tradition. St Paul asks, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), expecting the answer no. The Fathers - St John Chrysostom and St Augustine among them - regarded the tongues of Pentecost as a sign for the founding of the Church that was not expected to continue in the same form.

His claim that tongues are foreign languages for missionary preaching was tested by events and failed. His teaching that only the Spirit-baptised form the bride of Christ divides the one Church, and his annihilationism and British-Israelism depart from the creeds and from the apostolic teaching that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (Galatians 3:28). His racial teaching is incompatible with the gospel.

Major writings

• Editor, The Apostolic Faith (from 1899)
• A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1902)
• The Everlasting Gospel (1911)
• Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham (1930)

Affiliation

Baptist, then Holiness preacher; pastor of the North Avenue Mission, Chicago

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street

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Kentucky and Chicago

William Howard Durham was born on 10 January 1873 in Kentucky. Few details of his early life are recorded. He joined a Baptist church in 1891 but said he was not truly converted until 1898, while working in Minnesota, through a vision of the crucified Christ. He was drawn into the Holiness movement and, without formal training, became a preacher. In 1901 he became pastor of the North Avenue Mission in Chicago, a small Holiness congregation on the city's north side. He married Bessie Mae, and they had three children.

Azusa Street

News of the Los Angeles revival reached Chicago in 1906. Durham, who had long taught the Holiness doctrine that entire sanctification is a second work of grace, went to Azusa Street in February 1907 to see for himself. On 2 March 1907, after weeks of seeking, he spoke in tongues; William Seymour prophesied that wherever Durham preached the Spirit would fall. Durham returned to Chicago, and the North Avenue Mission became one of the most important Pentecostal centres in North America. Among those who received the Spirit baptism there were E.N. Bell, later first chairman of the Assemblies of God; A.H. Argue, who carried Pentecostalism to Canada; Luigi Francescon, founder of Italian Pentecostal churches in America, Brazil and Argentina; and Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, Swedish immigrants who went on to found the Assemblies of God in Brazil. Aimee Semple McPherson and her first husband Robert Semple also came under his influence.

The Finished Work

His wife died in 1909. In 1910, at a convention in Chicago, Durham publicly announced that the second work of grace was unscriptural: sanctification, he said, is received at conversion through faith in "the finished work of Calvary", and the believer then grows in it. This "Finished Work" teaching provoked fierce controversy, since most early Pentecostals - Parham, Seymour, and the Southern Holiness-Pentecostal churches - held the three-stage pattern.

Los Angeles, 1911

In February 1911 Durham went to Los Angeles. While Seymour was away on a preaching tour, he preached at the Azusa Street Mission, drawing large crowds; when Seymour returned and found that Durham was teaching against sanctification as a second work, he locked the doors against him. Durham set up a rival mission on Seventh Street, where hundreds followed him. Frank Bartleman, the chronicler of Azusa, sided with him.

Key dates

• 1873 - Born in Kentucky, 10 January
• 1898 - Conversion in Minnesota
• 1901 - Pastor of the North Avenue Mission, Chicago
• 2 March 1907 - Speaks in tongues at Azusa Street
• 1907-10 - North Avenue Mission becomes a Pentecostal centre
• 1909 - His wife dies
• May 1910 - Announces the "Finished Work" teaching
• February-May 1911 - Preaches at Azusa Street; locked out by Seymour
• 7 July 1912 - Dies in Los Angeles

Teachings and claims

The finished work of Calvary

Durham taught that the whole of salvation, including sanctification, is accomplished by Christ on the cross and received in a single act of faith at conversion. There is no second work of grace to eradicate the sinful nature. The Christian is identified with Christ in His death and must "reckon" himself dead to sin (Romans 6:11), growing progressively in holiness. "The work is finished," he wrote; it is not done again in two stages.

Tongues as evidence

He kept Parham's doctrine that tongues are the initial evidence of the baptism in the Spirit, which now became the second (rather than third) blessing.

Pentecost as the restoration of the Church

He saw the Pentecostal revival as God's restoration of apostolic Christianity at the end of the age, and denounced denominational organisation.

Documented controversies

• Division of the movement. His teaching split Pentecostalism into the Holiness stream (the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God of Cleveland, the Pentecostal Holiness Church) and the Finished Work stream.
• Azusa Street. His attempt to take over the pulpit while Seymour was away is remembered as a painful episode; Seymour's supporters saw it as disloyalty, Durham's as God's vindication.
• Harsh polemics. Both sides used strong language; Durham accused his opponents of denying the sufficiency of the cross.
• Parham's response. Parham prayed publicly that God would show which of them was wrong by striking the false teacher dead, and claimed Durham's early death as divine judgement.^†

Death

Durham returned to Chicago in 1912 and then came back to Los Angeles exhausted. He contracted pneumonia (some sources say tuberculosis) and died there on 7 July 1912, aged 39.^†

Legacy

Although he died within two years of announcing it, the Finished Work teaching won the majority of white Pentecostals. The Assemblies of God (1914), the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and the Oneness Pentecostals all descend from the Finished Work stream; through Francescon, Berg and Vingren, so do some of the largest Pentecostal churches in Latin America, including the Assemblies of God and the Congregação Cristã in Brazil. The controversy also opened the way to the Oneness "New Issue" of 1913, as some of Durham's followers pressed the logic of simplification further.

Measured against the creeds

On one point Durham's correction brought Pentecostals closer to the historic faith: by rejecting a second instantaneous work of entire sanctification, he returned to the view, shared by the four traditions, that the Christian is made holy in Christ and grows in holiness throughout life. Lutherans in particular will recognise his emphasis on Christ's finished work received by faith.

But he kept the separation of the gift of the Spirit from Christian initiation, and the claim that tongues are its necessary evidence, which the historic Church does not teach; the Spirit is given in baptism and the laying on of hands (Acts 2:38; 8:14-17; 19:5-6). His rejection of church order also left the movement with no way to settle disputes except division - as his own story shows.

Major writings

• Editor, The Pentecostal Testimony (Chicago, from 1909)
• "The Finished Work of Calvary", The Pentecostal Testimony (1911)

Affiliation

Zion City resident; Pentecostal pastor in Dallas; early Assemblies of God minister (resigned 1918); Christian and Missionary Alliance evangelist; later associate of William Branham

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street, The healing revival, 1947-58, and after

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Nebraska and Zion City

Fred Francis Bosworth was born on 17 January 1877 in Utica, Nebraska, and grew up on farms in Nebraska and Iowa. He left school early, worked at a variety of jobs, and was a gifted cornet player. As a young man he was converted at a Methodist meeting, and around 1900 he was seriously ill with a lung complaint, from which he said he was healed through prayer.^†

He was drawn to John Alexander Dowie's Christian Catholic Church and moved to Zion City, Illinois, where he led the town's band. In 1906, when Charles Parham came to Zion after Dowie's fall, Bosworth was among the many there who received the Pentecostal experience and spoke in tongues.

Dallas

By 1909-10 he was pastoring a Pentecostal congregation in Dallas, Texas, and in 1912 he invited the veteran evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter to hold a campaign there. The meetings ran for about five months and made Dallas one of the important early centres of Pentecostalism in the South. His church also drew Black worshippers, and in 1911, at Hearne, Texas, he was beaten by a white mob for preaching to a Black congregation. ^†

In 1914 he was among the ministers at the founding of the Assemblies of God in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

The evidence question

Bosworth came to doubt the Pentecostal doctrine that speaking in tongues is the necessary "initial evidence" of the baptism in the Spirit. He observed many people who had spoken in tongues without lasting change, and others who showed every sign of the Spirit's power without tongues. In 1918 he published Do All Speak with Tongues?, answering Paul's question in 1 Corinthians 12:30 in the negative, and resigned from the Assemblies of God before its General Council that year adopted initial evidence as a fundamental doctrine. He joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance, whose founder A.B. Simpson had welcomed tongues as a gift but never made it a test.

Christ the Healer

With his brother B.B. Bosworth he held large healing campaigns in North America through the 1920s, including in Ottawa, Toronto, Pittsburgh and Chicago. He began radio broadcasting in Chicago and was among the early religious broadcasters. In 1924 he published Christ the Healer, a set of sermons arguing that healing is provided in the atonement as surely as forgiveness, and that faith rests on the promises of Scripture rather than on feelings or symptoms.

With Branham

After a quieter period in the 1930s, Bosworth was drawn back into public ministry in 1948 when he met William Branham, and for some years he travelled with him as teacher and campaign associate, including on the South African tour of 1951. He defended Branham publicly, notably in the Houston debate of January 1950 with a Baptist critic, and described him as the most sensitive person to the Holy Spirit he had known. In his last years he held campaigns of his own in Africa and elsewhere.

Key dates

• 17 January 1877 - Born in Utica, Nebraska
• c. 1900 - Moves to Zion City; leads the town band
• 1906 - Receives the Pentecostal experience in Zion
• c. 1910 - Pastor in Dallas
• 1911 - Beaten at Hearne, Texas
• 1912 - Woodworth-Etter campaign in Dallas
• 1914 - Present at the founding of the Assemblies of God
• 1918 - Do All Speak with Tongues?; resigns from the Assemblies of God
• 1924 - Christ the Healer
• 1948 - Joins William Branham's campaigns
• 1951 - South Africa with Branham
• 23 January 1958 - Dies in Miami

Teachings and claims

Healing in the atonement

Bosworth's central argument was that Isaiah 53:4-5 and Matthew 8:16-17 show that Christ bore sickness as well as sin, so that healing is as much part of redemption as forgiveness. It is God's will to heal every believer who asks in faith. Faith comes by hearing the promise (Romans 10:17), so the sick should fix their minds on Scripture, "act" on the promise and thank God for healing before the symptoms disappear.

Faith and confession

He taught that believers should not speak of their symptoms as though the promise were untrue. This "confession" teaching, which drew on A.B. Simpson and E.W. Kenyon, passed through Christ the Healer into the Word of Faith movement.

Tongues and the Spirit

Against the Assemblies of God, he held that tongues are one of the gifts of the Spirit, given to some, and that the baptism in the Spirit is evidenced by power and holiness rather than by a single sign.

Documented controversies

Initial evidence

His challenge to initial evidence made him the centre of the first doctrinal controversy in the Assemblies of God, and his departure in 1918 confirmed that the doctrine would be a mark of classical Pentecostalism.

Endorsement of Branham

His support for Branham continued while Branham's teaching moved towards anti-Trinitarianism and other doctrines that Bosworth's own churches rejected. Historians note that he did not publicly distance himself, though he died before Branham's later teaching was fully developed.^†

Unhealed sick

As with every teacher of healing in the atonement, his theology left those who were not healed with the implication that their faith had failed - a pastoral criticism made of the movement from the beginning.

Death

He died on 23 January 1958, aged 81, at his home in Miami, Florida. Friends reported that he spoke of seeing those who had gone before him and died peacefully.^†

Legacy

Christ the Healer has remained in print for a century and is one of the most widely read books on divine healing; it shaped the healing revival of the 1940s-50s and the teaching of Kenneth Hagin and later Word of Faith preachers. His 1918 dissent remains the classic statement, within Pentecostalism, against initial evidence, and is cited by charismatics in the historic churches who hold that the Spirit's gifts need not include tongues. His courage at Hearne is remembered as an early instance of interracial Pentecostal ministry in the South.

Measured against the creeds

Bosworth's correction on tongues brought him closer to the historic churches, which have never made any single gift the evidence of the Spirit; Paul's rhetorical question, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), expects the answer no.

His doctrine of healing is another matter. The historic churches confess that Christ's death and resurrection are the ground of all God's gifts, including the final healing of the body in the resurrection, and they pray for the sick, anoint them and expect God to act (James 5:14-15). But they do not teach that bodily healing is guaranteed now to every believer who believes rightly. Matthew applies Isaiah 53 to Christ's healings during His ministry; Paul left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20) and told Timothy to take wine for his stomach (1 Timothy 5:23); and the apostle's own "thorn" was not removed (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Teaching the sick to deny their symptoms, and implying that continued sickness reveals unbelief, places a burden on them that Scripture does not lay.

Major writings

• Do All Speak with Tongues? (1918)
• Christ the Healer (1924; enlarged editions to 1948)