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

The primary motive for their action was a desire to create a properly chartered Pentecostal church organization that was devoid of African American leadership and influence. A difference over the doctrine of sanctification, or the God-given ability to live above the power of recurring sin, was a secondary factor. The Assemblies of God rejected the Wesleyan-Holiness understanding of entire sanctification as a distinct work of grace apart from salvation and the baptism of the Holy Ghost as the third experience for which all believers should seek. Seymour, Mason, and A. J. Tomlinson’s predominantly white Church of God (Cleveland, TN) held this view. Instead, the Assemblies of God taught that sanctification occurred simultaneously at salvation and continued throughout the life of the believer. Accordingly, the baptism of the Holy Ghost was only the second work of grace.

Soon after the church was organized, Assemblies of God publications reflected the denomination’s acceptance of segregation and the leadership’s lack of desire to address racism. From 1919 through the 1940s, African Americans were stereotyped as uneducated and simple minded in the pages of the denomination’s official magazine, the Pentecostal Evangel.²⁴ The denominational archive contains many letters, minutes, publications, and other documents that attest to the deliberate actions taken by denominational executives to prevent the ordination of African Americans, thus excluding them from participation in the church. Over the next 30 years, the Assemblies of God exhibited a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans as the church’s leadership struggled to cope with society’s changing racial mores.

The civil rights movement in the United States precipitated a change in the denomination’s racial policy. Beginning in the 1950s, several events occurred that awakened American society to the reality of the nation’s racial problems.