Holiness and Pentecostalism

Holiness and Pentecostalism, related but distinct conservative Protestant movements, developed around the turn of the 20th century in an attempt to preserve experiential piety against the modernization of American life.

The Holiness movement began amid the Second Great Awakening when, beginning in 1837, Phoebe Palmer (1807—74) sought to renew Methodism’s original emphasis on “entire sanctification” (freedom from sin) in a weekly “Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness” held in her New York City home. These meetings inspired similar ones, first in other Northeastern cities and then nationwide. There were some 200 by 1886. Holiness groups initially remained within the Methodist denomination, but their schismatic potential erupted early and powerfully in New York’s burned-over district, where the Wesleyan Methodist Church emerged in Utica in 1843 and the Free Methodist Church in Pekin in 1860.

Holiness became more vigorous after the Civil War. A camp meeting held in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1867 sparked the formation of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, which organized fifty-two camp meetings by 1883. During the 1870s and 1880s, the association expanded from Eastern urban areas into the rural Midwest, South, and Southwest, where newer rural groups already mistrustful of Northeastern industrialism resisted attempts by Northeastern Methodist authorities to curb their emotional worship, faith healing, and premillennialism. Nor did poor and working-class urban converts warm to Methodist leaders’ middle-class decorum.

The first of these was the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), which emphasized faith healing and was established in 1880. Despite its early antidenominational thrust, it became a major denomination and now has more than 200,000 members, concentrated in the Midwest, southern Plains, and South. Another important denomination, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, emerged in 1922 when the International Apostolic Holiness Church merged with like-minded denominations. In 1968, it in turn merged with the Wesleyan Methodist Church to form the Wesleyan Church, which now has about 110,000 members, largely in the Midwest and South. The largest Holiness body is the Church of the Nazarene, formed at Pilot Point, Texas, in 1908 through a merger of two urban groups—an identically named church founded in Los Angeles in 1895 and the Eastern-based Association of Pentecostal Churches, established in 1896—with the Holiness Church of Christ, an organization of rural Southern congregations. Now based in Kansas City, Missouri, the Church grew from about 35,000 members in seventy-eight congregations in 1915 to about 575,000 members in 5,175 congregations in 1990. Its largest numbers are in the Midwest, the Plains, and the West.

Pentecostalism emerged from the Holiness movement in 1901 at the Bethel Bible College, founded in 1900 in Topeka, Kansas, by Holiness evangelist Charles F. Parham (1873–1937). Having decided that speaking in tongues, experienced by the apostles on the day of Pentecost, was the definitive indicator of what Holiness advocates called “Spirit baptism” and a sign of Christ’s imminent return, Parham encouraged the experience among his students. Parham’s doctrine was rejected by most Holiness advocates, but he sparked a brief revival in southeastern Kansas.

The oldest is the Church of God in Christ, founded in 1897 as a Holiness denomination but converted to Pentecostalism by Holiness-Baptist minister Charles H. Mason (1866–1961) of Memphis, Tennessee, after he visited Azusa Street. The world’s largest black Pentecostal church, it established early strongholds in the South and southern Plains and in 1993 claimed 6 million members in more than 15,000 congregations. Another large Pentecostal denomination, and the second-oldest, is the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee). Established in 1907, it originated as the Holiness Church of Camp Creek, formed in 1902 by revival-fired Baptist groups in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Its 1990 report of about 620,000 members in more than 5,800 congregations shows that the church has spread from North Carolina and Tennessee to broader regional reach in the South and Midwest. The sizable Pentecostal Holiness Church, International resulted from a 1911 merger between a North Carolina group of that name, led by another Azusa participant, and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, founded in South Carolina in 1898 as a union among several Holiness groups in the Southern and Plains states.

Indeed, Pentecostal and Holiness churches generally—especially the larger ones, and especially since about 1970—have acculturated toward normative middle-class American life and spread beyond their early regional bases to become national in scope. They have enjoyed growing appeal, often in store-front settings, among Latino Americans, Korean Americans, and other recent immigrant groups, and have achieved global reach through successful missionizing in Latin America, the Caribbean Basin, Africa, and Asia.