Race and the Assemblies of God Church: The Journey from Azusa St ...

The study of the history of the Pentecostal revival is relatively new. The earliest accounts were written by participant-observers such as Frank Bartleman, present at the Azusa Street Revival, and Agnes Ozman, reported to be the first person to speak in unknown tongues.⁸ Alice Reynolds Flower related how itinerant evangelists typically spread the Pentecostal message across the country in “How Pentecost came to Indianapolis.”⁹ Ministers in the movement, such as Charles Parham, William Seymour, B. F. Lawrence, and Maria Woodworth-Etter, wrote doctrinal and historical essays.¹⁰ Charles Parham’s autobiography, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, contains a mixture of biographic information and doctrinal discourse. Wayne Warner edited a collection of eyewitness accounts of the Pentecostal revival in Touched by the Fire, and Lester Sumrall’s Pioneers of Faith recounted the author’s personal experiences with many early leaders of the movement.¹¹ Objectivity was not the goal of these early personal accounts. Their primary purpose was to promote the Pentecostal message.

Historians began to investigate the historical roots of Pentecostalism in the 1960s. In Suddenly… from Heaven, Carl Brumback cast the history of the movement in a spiritual light and contended that Pentecostalism had no earthly founder.¹² Klaude Kendrick, The Promise Fulfilled, and Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States, explored the connection between Wesleyan-Holiness and Pentecostalism.¹³ William Menzies’ Anointed to Serve: The Story of the Assemblies of God, is a concise insider account of the denomination’s history, and Walter Hollenweger’s The Pentecostals, studied the spread of Pentecostalism around the world.¹⁴