Gracie History of the Assembly of God Denomination Gracie Bonds VVCS The First Assembly of God denomination of Christianity has captured the hearts and minds of people from all backgrounds for decades. This is because of the denomination’s strong beliefs, appeal to many cultures, and its doctrine singularity . The Assemblies of God, officially known as the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, is a pentecostal denomination of Christianity that was founded in 1914. The one hundred forty loosely associated national groupings of churches under the Assembly of God denomination together form the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world (Barrett, 1982). The denomination’s influence has reached into almost every corner of …show more content…
An African-American former student of Parham, William Seymour, led the revival at the Azusa Street Mission. The mission lasted for three years with continuous daily and nightly services. The revival was unprecedented in the sense that it united men and women from diverse ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds. Several publications- from around the world and in numerous different languages- spread the news of this revival and drew pilgrimages of people seeking to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Participants in the movement became known as Pentecostals, whose namesake was drawn from the Jewish feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was first given to the church and Jesus’ disciples first began to speak in tongues (Melton, n.d.). The movement was heavily criticized at the time by both the secular media and Christian theologians, who considered their teachings to be radical and outrageous. Today, the Azusa Street Revival is considered to be the key catalyst in the spread of Pentecostalism in the twentieth …show more content…
Missions became a defining feature of the Assemblies of God after the second General Council meeting, held in November 1914, when it was resolved to achieve “the greatest evangelism that the world has ever seen.” (Mcgee & Rogers, n.d., p. 15) Within the first year of the conception of this goal, about thirty missionaries gained membership in the General Council. Working mainly independently, the missionaries worked in Africa, India, the Middle East, Japan, and China. Later missionaries would serve in Europe, Latin America, and Oceania, after the Assemblies of God headquarters was founded. The Assemblies of God headquarters was officially established in Springfield, Missouri, in 1918, and largely served to channel funds to missionaries. The Missionary Department and the Home Missions and Education Department were later established at the Assemblies of God headquarters to accommodate the increasingly complex duties of its home and foreign mission efforts. Beginning in 1943, it started to heavily influence the strategies of the formerly independent missionaries. Initially, missionaries followed the paternalistic practices of their Protestant counterparts, despite aiming for the long-term goal of establishing independent, self-sustaining churches. In the 1950s, however, more