Tongues as Initial Evidence
of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit

n the first day of 1901, in a drafty Bible school on the edge of Topeka, Kansas, a small group of students returned from a New Year’s assignment their teacher had given them: search the book of Acts and report, without conferring, what evidence accompanied every recorded instance of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Independently of one another, the students came back with the same answer — tongues, every time. Their teacher, Charles Fox Parham, took the conclusion and built a doctrine on it.^[1]

That evening, one of Parham’s students, Agnes Ozman, asked him to lay hands on her and pray. She began to speak in a language she had never studied — the school identified it at the time as Chinese. Within days, most of Bethel Bible College had the same experience. Parham gave the pattern a name that would outlast his own school by more than a century: the “Bible evidence.” For Parham, tongues was not one gift among several. It was the required, initial, physical sign that a person had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit — an experience he taught as distinct from, and subsequent to, both conversion and entire sanctification.

Parham’s doctrine might have stayed a regional curiosity if not for a Louisiana-born Holiness preacher who arrived at Parham’s next Bible school, in Houston, two years later. Because Texas law forbade Black and white students from sitting in the same classroom, this preacher took Parham’s lectures from a chair in the hallway, through an open door. His name was William Joseph Seymour.

Azusa Street & William Seymour

William Joseph Seymour was born May 2, 1870, in Centerville, Louisiana, to Simon and Phyllis Seymour, both formerly enslaved.^[2] Raised Baptist, he moved through Indianapolis and Cincinnati around 1900, where he joined a radical Holiness stream — the “Evening Light Saints” — and survived a bout of smallpox that cost him the sight in one eye. In 1903 he settled in Houston, searching for family, and joined a small Holiness congregation led by a Black evangelist named Lucy Farrow. It was Farrow who introduced Seymour to Parham.

Listening from that Houston hallway, Seymour accepted Parham’s Bible-evidence teaching as sound — though he had not yet spoken in tongues himself. In February 1906, on the recommendation of a member named Neely Terry, Seymour was invited to help pastor a small Holiness mission in Los Angeles led by Julia Hutchins. Two days after he arrived, he preached the new doctrine from Acts 2:4. Hutchins rejected it outright and, when Seymour returned the following Sunday, found the church door padlocked against him.^[3]

Undeterred, Seymour kept teaching in homes — first at the house of Edward S. Lee, then at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street, home of Richard and Ruth Asberry. On the night of April 9, 1906, during prayer at the Asberry house, one person and then several others began speaking in tongues. Word spread through the neighborhood within hours. Crowds grew so large that the group secured a run-down former AME church building, which had also done time as a livery stable, at 312 Azusa Street. Meetings opened there around April 14, 1906, and continued almost around the clock for roughly three years.^[4]

“Don’t go out of here talking about tongues: talk about Jesus.” — William Seymour, cautioning Azusa Street worshippers against letting the sign eclipse the message.

What drew as much notice as the tongues was who was in the room. In the heart of the Jim Crow era, Azusa Street services were led by a Black pastor and attended, side by side, by Black, white, Latino, and Asian worshippers, men and women alike given place to minister. Eyewitnesses like Frank Bartleman described the racial barriers of the era as genuinely dissolved inside that building — a claim historians still weigh carefully, since the interracial character of the revival would not survive Seymour’s own lifetime. Seymour published a newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, mailed free around the world; more than the building on Azusa Street itself, it was this paper that carried the Bible-evidence doctrine to readers who never set foot in Los Angeles.

Hot Springs, 1914: A General Council Is Called

On December 20, 1913, five ministers — Eudorus N. Bell, Howard A. Goss, D. C. O. Opperman, Archibald P. Collins, and Mack M. Pinson — published a call in the periodical Word and Witness for a general council of Pentecostal ministers. All five were part of loosely organized networks that traced, directly or through Parham, back to the doctrine Seymour had carried out of Houston. Roughly 300 ministers and laypeople answered the call, gathering April 2–12, 1914, at the Grand Opera House in Hot Springs, Arkansas — a resort town whose mineral baths had, by coincidence, already made it a magnet for itinerant healing evangelists. Delegates came from seventeen states, with missionaries present or represented from Egypt and South Africa.^[7]

The delegates were wary of forming a denomination — restoring the primitive, undivided church was the whole point, and denominational machinery felt like the opposite of that. What they wanted instead was a workable way to agree on doctrine, coordinate missionary support, charter local assemblies under one recognized name, and stop competing periodicals and independent Bible schools from working at cross purposes. Eudorus N. Bell was elected chairman — the title would later become “general superintendent” — and J. Roswell Flower was elected secretary. The body incorporated itself as The General Council of the Assemblies of God.^[9]

The Founders’ Debt to Seymour

Two men presided over the Hot Springs meeting. Both had received the very experience the new fellowship would soon enshrine as doctrine — and both had received it through a direct line back to Azusa Street.

Eudorus N. Bell · elected chairman

A former Southern Baptist pastor, Bell traveled to Chicago in August 1907 to seek the experience under William Durham’s ministry. Durham had received his own tongues baptism at Azusa Street under Seymour just months earlier, on March 2, 1907. Bell tarried for nearly a year before receiving it himself on July 18, 1908.^[6]

J. Roswell Flower · elected secretary

Flower received his Spirit baptism in Indianapolis under Glenn Cook and Mary Moise. Cook had been an evangelist sent out directly from Seymour’s Azusa Street mission.^[8]

Howard A. Goss

Converted under Parham at Galena, Kansas in 1902 and received the tongues experience in 1906 — the same Parham-Houston stream that had first taught Seymour the doctrine.^[8]

D. C. O. Opperman

Received his Spirit baptism under Parham in Houston in 1906 — in the same circle of ministers Seymour had come out of before ever reaching Los Angeles.^[8]

Every one of the first General Council’s executive presbyters had a documented tie to Parham, to Azusa Street, or to both. The men who organized the Assemblies of God did not invent the initial-evidence doctrine at Hot Springs; they arrived already carrying it.

1916: The Doctrine Becomes Creed

The young fellowship had deliberately avoided writing a creed — the Bible, delegates said, was “all sufficient rule for faith and practice.” That changed fast. A controversy over baptizing believers in the name of Jesus alone, rather than the Trinitarian formula, split the movement badly enough that the Fourth General Council, meeting in St. Louis in October 1916, felt it had no choice but to adopt a formal Statement of Fundamental Truths. Among its articles, one sentence did more than any single biography to carry Topeka and Azusa Street into settled denominational doctrine: the baptism in the Holy Spirit, it declared, is “witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues.”^[10]

A hundred and fifty-six ministers left the fellowship rather than sign it. Those who stayed built what has since become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world — a body that today numbers in the tens of millions, still holding, largely unchanged, the doctrinal sentence its founders wrote in St. Louis a little over a century ago.

Why This Chapter Opens the Book

Every chapter and topic that follows in this book — the Wishing Well Motel, The Rabbi From Tarsus, the Orthodox Jewish Bible, the Yiddish Triglot, the applied linguistics school AFII is building for missionary Bible translators — sits downstream of the settlement described in this chapter. Whatever a reader concludes about the initial-evidence question itself, the institutional world of Pentecostal and Charismatic missions that later made projects like these possible traces its family tree back to a hallway in Houston, a house on Bonnie Brae Street, and an old opera house in Hot Springs, Arkansas. This book begins there and addresses the major challenges of missions today, which is the worldwide pauperization of Scripture access (which is what chapter 7 is all about, namely the race toward Shavuos (Pentecost) 2033. Then the other major world missions challenge is addressed, namely, the Islamization of the West, a matter David Irwin was burdened about. Before his untimely death, David founded the Springfield Missouri A/G Global Initiative: Reaching Muslim Peoples and co-authored Phil Goble's book, The New Creation Book for Muslims in English and Arabic. Finally, this book deals with a third challenge, which is the fundamental corruption of the Matthew 28:19-20 Great Commission starting with the Jewish people first, which is the Lubavitcherization of the Messianic World Outreach itself, something addressed by the Orthodox Jewish Bible translation.