A New Year's Prayer Meeting
On the first day of January 1901, in a rambling stone mansion on the edge of Topeka, Kansas, a young woman named Agnes Ozman asked her teacher to lay his hands on her and pray that she would receive the Holy Spirit. What followed is remembered as the beginning of modern Pentecostalism. The story is worth knowing well, because the movement's first and most specific claim about tongues was tested in public, and it did not hold.
This study draws on the movement's own accounts and on historians who are friendly to it. We report what happened, credit what was sincere, and weigh every claim by Scripture. We judge teaching and its fruit, not the souls of the people involved.
Pentecostals look back to two founding moments: Topeka in 1901 and Azusa Street in 1906. Topeka came first, and it gave the movement its defining doctrine. There the teaching was born that speaking in tongues is the evidence that a believer has been baptized in the Holy Spirit. There, too, the movement first claimed that the tongues God was giving were real foreign languages, given so that missionaries could preach the Gospel without years of study. Everything that came later was shaped by those two claims.
When a movement's founding claim is tested and fails, should the claim be changed, or should it be given up?
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For Deeper Study
- Strange FireAmazon John MacArthurIncludes a chapter on Parham, Topeka, and the early claim that tongues were missionary languages.
- Charismatic ConfusionAmazon Ernest PickeringA short evaluation of the movement and its claims from a Baptist pastor.
- Fields White unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of PentecostalismAmazon James R. Goff Jr.The standard scholarly biography of Parham, by a sympathetic historian; useful for the facts.
- Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American CultureAmazon Grant WackerA detailed historical study of the early movement, including its belief in missionary tongues; for advanced readers.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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Tongues in Scripture
The tongues of the Bible were real human languages, given by the Spirit as a sign to unbelieving Israel and, when interpreted, to build up the church, under clear rules that put understanding first.
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