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Living with Signs and Wonders: Parents and Children in Early Pentecostal Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Since in this essay I make the word Pentecostal do a lot of work, I too think it is only fair to pay it extra. I use the term to refer to a religious movement that emerged from the vast and amorphous radical evangelical subculture in the United States in the sunset years of the nineteenth century. Like other radical evangelicals, Pentecostals fervently anticipated the Lord’s imminent return, affirmed the miraculous healing of the body, and believed that the conversion experience should lead to another life-transforming event known as the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Unlike other radical evangelicals, however, Pentecostals also insisted that the baptism experience always manifested itself by speaking in ‘unknown tongues’.
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References
1 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, ed. Lancelyn Green, Roger (New York, 1998), 191, also available at www.sundials.org/about/humpty.htm (consulted on 7 December 2003)Google Scholar.
2 For the rich – and richly controverted – historiography of early Pentecostalism, see Augustus Cerillo Jr. and Grant Wacker, ‘Bibliography and Historiography’, in Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. Van der Maas, eds, The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), 382–405. I do not know of any sustained scholarly treatment of children in early Pentecostal culture.
3 Scattered passages in this essay draw from Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2001), esp. 5–8,128–9, 133, 271–2.
4 David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: toward a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ, 1997)1 vii-xiii (editor’s introduction).
5 Wacker, Heaven Below, 206.
6 Sunderland Daily Chronicle, 8 October 1907; South Wales Press, 15 July 1914; Apostolic Faith, September 1906,1.
7 See, for example, according to theme, PRAYER MEETINGS: Apostolic Faith, January 1907, 2 [as several early Pentecostal periodicals bore the title Apostolic Faith, unless otherwise noted, all references in this essay denote the one edited in Los Angeles, 1906–8]; Max Wood Moorhead, in Apostolic Faith, September 1907, 4; Apostolic Faith [Oregon], September 1908, 1; Glad Tidings, January 1927, 13; HEALINGS: Max Wood Moorhead, in Apostolic Faith, September 1907, 4; XENOLALIA AND ADMONISHING STRANGERS: R. J. Scott, in Apostolic Faith, February-March 1907, 7; SINGING IN TONGUES: Apostolic Faith, June 1907, 1; preaching: Apostolic Faith, April 1907, 4; LEADING REVIVALS: Apostolic Faith, October 1906, 3; PROPHECY: L. Adams, in Present Truth, December 1909, 3; HORTATORY ROLE: Houston Daily Post, August 27, 1906.
8 Glad Tidings, 1924, I(?), lead article; Uldine Utley, Why I Am a Preacher (New York, 1931); Wacker, Heaven Below, 105, 305 and n. 48.
9 Walter Brack, in Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, 10 January 1918, 3.
10 Robinson quoted in Harold Dean Trulear, ‘The Mother as Symbolic Presence: Ida B. Robinson and the Mt. Sinai Holy Church’, in James R. Goff Jr. and Grant Wacker, eds, Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders (Fayetteville, AR, 2001), 309–24, 319.
11 See editor’s introduction and various essays in Marcia J. Bunge, ed., The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001), esp. 12, 110, 162 and 302.
12 Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Growing up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 5.
13 Pearl S. Buck, Fighting Angel: the Portrait of a Soul (New York, 1936);Bendroth, Growing up Protestant, 3,21, 57–8.
14 Wacker, Grant, ‘Travail of a Broken Family: Radical Evangelical Responses to the Emergence of Pentecostalism in America, 1906–1916’, in Edith Blumhofer, L. et al., eds, Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (Urbana, IL, 1999), 23–49, esp. 33–5Google Scholar.
15 Upper Room, March 1910, 4.
16 See for example D. C. O. Opperman, manuscript diary, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, MO, Christmas Eve, 1905; Levi Lupton, in New Acts, 30 November 1905, 4.
17 Levi Lupton, in New Acts, 20 September 1906, 5.
18 Ibid.
19 Opperman manuscript diary, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center.
20 W. H. Piper, in Latter Rain Evangel, January 1910, 2.
21 Pentecostal Evangel, 1 November 1919, 5. The unnamed questioner in this ‘Question and Answer’ column asked about the souls of loved ones’, but E. N. Bell’s consoling answer – ‘turn the burden’ over to God – focused on parents and children. He distinguished acceptable desire from unacceptable anxiety.
22 May Law, E., Pentecostal Mission Work in South China: an Appeal for Missions (Falcon, NC, [1916]), 16–17 Google Scholar.
23 Ibid.
24 Howard Goss excerpted in Ethel E. Goss, The Winds of God: the Story of the Early Pentecostal Days (1901–1914) in the Life of Howard A. Goss as Told by Ethel E. Goss (New York, 1958), 10, 81.
25 Shirley Nelson, Fair, Clear and Terrible: the Story of Shiloh, Maine (Latham, NY, 1989), 218, 225. In the first instance the child was nineteen; in the second the context implies that the children were adults. The quotation is from Anne Blue Wills, ‘Imagination beyond Belief: the Cultural Sources of Hannah Whitall Smith’s Devotional Writing’, Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 2001, 154.
26 Arthur Watson, in Promise, March 1910, 7–8, 8.
27 Free Methodist, 2 July 1907, 417. The article implies that Smith’s mother instigated the incident in order to retrieve her child.
28 Levi Lupton, describing the incident, in New Acts, 11 January 1906, 7.
29 Higgins, Walter J., Pioneering in Pentecost: my Experiences of 46 Years in the Ministry (Bostonia, CA, 1958), 9, 16Google Scholar.
30 Nelson, Fair, Clear, and Terrible, 206.
31 Apostolic Faith [Oregon], no. 21 [about 1913], 2.
32 S. E. Easton, in The Ram’s Horn, repr. without citation in Triumphs oj Faith, April 1908, 96.
33 Frank M. Boyd, in Full Gospel Missionary Herald, January 1922, 3.
34 Apostolic Evangel, 23 August 1916, 4.
35 Law, Pentecostal Mission Work, 19–20.
36 Harry A Ironside, Apostolic Faith Missions and the So-Called Second Pentecost (New York, [c.1910]), 11.
37 Los Angeles Express, 20 July 1906,1.
38 Birmingham Age-Herald, 23 June 1907, 27.
39 Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders: God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years (Indianapolis, IN, 1916), 429; Apostolic Faith [Oregon], December 1908, 4.
40 Crews, Mickey, The Church of God: a Social History (Knoxville, TN, 1990), 74–5 Google Scholar.
41 A. Adams, in Spirit of the Word, June-July 1907, 36.
42 Apostolic Faith [Oregon], no. 21 [about 1913], 2. For biographical details, see Cecil M. Robeck Jr., ‘Florence Crawford: Apostolic Faith Pioneer’, in Portraits of a Generation, 219–36.
43 Apostolic Faith [Oregon], no. 21 [about 1913], 2.
44 Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, ed. Homer J. Tomlinson (Jamaica, NY, 1955), 144.
45 Haley Olive Tomlinson, Our Sister Haley: This Is Her Own Personaljoumal Written When She Was Fifteen 1906–1907 (Cleveland, TN, 1974).
46 Alice Reynolds Flower, Grace for Grace (Springfield, MO, [1961]), 23. Flower wrote autobiographically, but clearly she meant the comment prescriptively.
47 Daily Echo and Times, 4 October 1907, 2. On Pentecostals in Sunderland, see in this volume Tim Walsh, ‘“Signs and Wonders that Lie”: Unlikely Polemical Outbursts Against Early Pentecostals in England’, 410–22.
48 E. M. T. and R. B., in Christian Evangel, 8 February 1910, 15.
49 W.J. Seymour, in Apostolic Faith, November 1906, 3. Seymour was referring both to those who gave away all of their money and to those who abandoned their families in order to ‘go out and teach’.
50 Voice in the Wilderness, vol. 2 [1920], 15.
51 Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street, ed. Vinson Synan (Plainfield, NJ, 1980), 146 [originally published in 1925 as How ‘Pentecost’ Came to Los Angeles – How It Was in the Beginning].
52 Frank Bartleman, in Latter Rain Evangel, July 1910, 7.
53 F. M. Britton, Pentecostal Truth (Royston, GA, [1919]), 243–6, 243.
54 Ibid., 226.
55 Bendroth, Growing up Protestant, 53–5, 62–7 and 70; T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodemism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1020 (New York, 1981), 145–6.
56 Levi Lupton, in New Acts, 12 July 1906, 5; Midnight Cry [New York], March-April 1911,4.
57 San Jose Mercury, 17 and 20 August 1921.
58 Apostolic Faith, May 1907, 1.
59 Goss, Winds of God, 129.
60 A. C. Holland, in Apostolic Evangel, 23 August 1916, 2.
61 Apostolic Faith, December 1906, 3, which refers to ‘our Bible school up at Azusa St. Mission’.
62 Minutes of the General Council of the Assemblies of God..., 1917, 19.
63 Lewis Wilson, ‘Bible Institutes’, in The Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, 57–65.
64 [Church of God] Book of Minutes (1906), 16, quoted in Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army: a History of the Church of God, 1886–1976 (2nd edn, Cleveland, TN, 1977), 67.
65 [Church of God] General Assembly Minutes 1906–1914: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes (Cleveland, TN, 1992), 17.
66 Biographical data in Wayne Warner, ed., Touched by the Fire (Plainfield, NJ, 1978), 139, 142, and ‘Riggs, Ralph Meredith’, by Lewis Wilson, in New International Dictionary, 1022–3.
67 Winslow Taylor, Frederick, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911)Google Scholar.
68 Riggs, Ralph M., A Successful Sunday School (Springfield, MO, 1934), 15 Google Scholar.
69 Ibid., 47.
70 Ibid., 92.
71 Ibid., 73.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 12.
74 Ibid., 88.
75 Ibid., 88–9.
76 Ibid, 91.
77 Ibid., 30.
78 The quotation comes from Professor James A. Mathisen of Wheaton College (IL), personal conversation, March 1992. By 2001 the attorney general of the United States – arguably the third most powerful person in the nation – would be a Pentecostal. See Glenn Gohr, ‘J. Robert Ashcroft: a Man of Prayer and Faith’, Assemblies of God Heritage, Summer-Fall 1996,18–19, 23, 49; Gary B. McGee, People of the Spirit: the Assemblies of God (Springfield, MO, 2004), 537–9.