The Origins of the Pentecostal Movement

After his African missionary tour of 1908-1912, Lake returned to the United States where he founded churches and healing homes in Spokane, Washington and Portland, Oregon before his death in 1935. Throughout the rest of the century, pentecostal denominational missionaries from many nations spread the movement to all parts of Africa. In addition to the AFM and ZCC churches, the Pentecostal Holiness Church in South Africa was founded in 1913 under the leadership of Lehman who had come with Lake in 1908. In 1917, the Assemblies of God entered South Africa when the American church accepted the mission already established by R.M. Turney. The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) came to the country in 1951 through amalgamation with the Full Gospel Church. In retrospect, the work of Lake was the most influential and enduring of all the South African pentecostal missions endeavors. According to Cecil Rhodes, the South African “Empire Builder,” “His (Lake’s) message has swept Africa. He has done more toward South Africa’s future peace than any other man.” Perhaps the highest accolade was given by no less a personage than Mahatma Gandhi who said of Lake, “Dr. Lake’s teachings will eventually be accepted by the entire world.”

Soon after Lake returned to the United States, the movement reached the Slavic world through the ministry of a Russian-born Baptist pastor, Ivan Voronaev who received the pentecostal experience in New York City in 1919. Through prophecies, he was led to take his family with him to Odessa in the Ukraine in 1922 where he established the first Pentecostal church in the Soviet Union. Although he was arrested, imprisoned and martyred in a communist prison in 1943, Voronaev’s churches survived incredible persecution to become a major religious force in Russia and the former Soviet Union by 1993.

 

Neo-Pentecostals and Charismatics

This first wave of pentecostal pioneer missionaries produced what has become known as the “Classical Pentecostal Movement” with over 11,000 pentecostal denominations throughout the world. These continued to proliferate at an amazing rate as the century came to an end. In retrospect, the pattern established in South Africa was repeated in many other nations as the movement spread around the world. That is, an enterprising Pentecostal pioneer such as Lake, broke the ground for a new movement which was initially despised and rejected by the existing churches. This phase was followed by organized pentecostal denominational missions efforts which produced fast-growing missions and indigenous churches. The final phase was the penetration of pentecostalism into the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches as “charismatic renewal” movements with the aim of renewing and reviving the historic churches.

Strangely enough, these newer “waves” also originated largely in the United States. These included the Protestant “Neo-pentecostal” movement which began in 1960 in Van Nuys, California under the ministry of Dennis Bennett, Rector of St. Marks Episcopal (Anglican) Church. Within a decade, this movement had spread to all the 150 major Protestant families of the world reaching a total of 55,000,000 people by 1990. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement had its beginnings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1967 among students and faculty of DuQuesne University. In the 26 years since its inception, the Catholic movement has touched the lives of over 70,000,000 Catholics in over 120 nations of the world. Added to these is the newest category, the “Third Wave” of the Spirit which originated at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1981 under the classroom ministry of John Wimber. These consisted of mainline Evangelicals who moved in signs and wonders, but who disdained labels such as “pentecostal” or “charismatic.” By 1990 this group numbered some 33,000,000 members in the world.

Tags: featured, movement, origins, pentecostal

Category: Church History, Fall 2000