Transformation: An

International Journal of
Holistic Mission Studies http://trn.sagepub.com/

The Azusa Street Revival and the Emergence of Pentecostal Missions in the Early
Twentieth Century
Allan Anderson
Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 2006 23: 107
DOI: 10.1177/026537880602300206

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tf views
The Azusa Street Revival and
the Emergence of Pentecostal
Missions in the Early
Twentieth Century
Allan Anderson
Dr Allan Anderson is Professor of Global Pentecostal Studies, University of Birmingham
This paper discusses the particular doctrines, ide-
ology and revival movements that combined to
precipitate the first international Pentecostal mis-
sions following the outbreak of the Azusa Street
revival in Los Angeles in 1906. The influences on
this unprecedented movement of missionaries
across the globe included a belief in ‘missionary
tongues’, a conviction that the Spirit had been
poured out in revival power causing the nations
of the world to be reached before the impend-
ing return of Christ, and the already established
international network of evangelical missionaries
who were prepared to listen to these radical new
Christian migrants. Finally, it discusses the stories
of some of the earliest Pentecostal missionaries.
Charles Parham and ‘Missionary
Tongues’
Charles Fox Parham (1873-1929) was an inde-
pendent Kansas healing evangelist who resigned
from the Methodist Church in 1895, experienced
healing from the consequences of rheumatic
fever and began his own healing ministry there-
after. He moved to Topeka, Kansas in 1898 where
he opened a healing home and began publishing
The Apostolic Faith in 1899.There are indications
that this periodical was influenced by that of the
better-known healer John Alexander Dowie in
Chicago. Apostolic Faith propounded his views
on healing in the atonement of Christ (accompa-
nied by abundant testimonies by people claim-
ing healing), premillennialism with the belief in
a worldwide revival known as the ‘latter rain’ to
precede the imminent coming of Christ, and a
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1
third blessing beyond ‘entire sanctification’, the
baptism with the Spirit.
Parham came to believe in ‘missionary tongues’
in 1899 through Frank Sandford (1862-1948), a
former Baptist pastor in Maine who had come to
an experience of sanctification through the Holi-
ness movement and a belief in divine healing.
Sandford established a large community called
Shiloh whose residents had to give over all their
possessions to the community, and he purchased
ships for the evangelization of the world. Like
Dowie, he believed that the end time would be
brought nearer by divine/human co-operation
and he motivated his followers into world evan-
gelization through ‘signs, wonders, and mighty
deeds’. In February 1900 Parham met some of
Sandford’s followers from Shiloh, and Sandford
himself came to Topeka in June that year. Parham
was so impressed that he decided to accompany
Sandford to Shiloh and enrol in his Bible school.
He accepted Sandford’s unorthodox views, includ-
ing a belief in Anglo-Israelism and the possibil-
ity of foreign tongues given by Spirit baptism to
facilitate world evangelization – doctrines that
remained with Parham for the rest of his life.2
The idea of ‘missionary tongues’ was not new,
nor unique to Parham and Sandford. A.B. Simpson,
founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance,
wrote the following:
We are to witness before the Lord’s return real
missionary ‘tongues’ like those of Pentecost,
through which the heathen world shall hear
in their own language ‘the wonderful works
of God’, and this perhaps on a scale of whose
vastness we have scarcely dreamed, thousands
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of missionaries going forth in one last mighty
crusade from a united body of believers at
home to bear swift witness of the crucified
and coming Lord to all nations.3
Parham formulated the ‘evidential tongues’
doctrine that became the hallmark of North Amer-
ican classical Pentecostalism, but unlike them, his
theology insisted on the belief that tongues were
authentic languages (xenolalia or xenoglossa)
given for the proclamation of the gospel in the
end times. These tongues were the second Pente-
cost that would usher in the end, achieve world
evangelization within a short period, and seal the
Bride of Christ, the Church.This was the doctrine
that was to be proclaimed by William Seymour at
Azusa Street in 1906, motivating scores of early
Pentecostal people to go out immediately as mis-
sionaries and speak in the tongues of the nations
to whom they had been called. It is no accident
that Parham’s biographer, James Goff, subtitles his
book ‘Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Ori-
gins of Pentecostalism’. For Goff, the essence of
Pentecostalism is contained in Parham’s ‘intense
millenarian-missions emphasis’.4
Early Pentecostalism was primarily and fun-
damentally a missionary movement from its ori-
gins to the present. But it is also necessary to see
Parham’s role in the light of earlier precedents
(especially that of Sandford), and ask how effec-
tive he was in actualising the outflow of these
missionaries. The indications are that he did not
succeed in taking the missionary potential of his
doctrine beyond an ‘initial evidence’ theory, and
that after his break with Seymour in 1906 his dif-
ferentiating between ‘true’ and ‘false’ tongues in
fact stopped any flow of missionaries from his
movement. This left Azusa Street and later cen-
tres of Pentecostalism to spearhead the American
missionary advance. Although some authors (like
Goff) consider Parham to be the founding father
of Pentecostalism, he was ultimately rejected as
such by almost the entire North American Pente-
costal movement. Some of Parham’s other beliefs,
like Anglo-Israelism and the annihilation of the
‘wicked’, were also at variance with generally
accepted Pentecostal doctrines.
Unlike his predecessors Dowie and Sandford,
Parham did not actively engage in world evange-
lization. His efforts did not constitute the driv-
ing force that resulted in Pentecostalism being
quickly transformed into an international mission-
ary movement. That role was filled by Parham’s
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one-time disciple, William Seymour.5 But despite
his many failures, there can be no doubt that it
was probably Parham more than any other per-
son who was responsible for the theological
shift in emphasis to tongues as the ‘evidence’ of
Spirit baptism given for the evangelization of the
nations in early Pentecostalism.
The Influence of International
Revivals
Two revivals in particular had a profound and
international influence on the beginnings of Pen-
tecostalism.The Welsh Revival (1904-5) made a far
greater impact internationally than did the revival
under Parham in Kansas. During this revival, the
Pentecostal presence and power of the Holy Spir-
it were emphasized, meetings were hours long,
spontaneous, seemingly chaotic and emotional,
with ‘singing in the Spirit’ (using ancient Welsh
chants), simultaneous and loud prayer, revelatory
visions and prophecies, all emphasizing the imme-
diacy of God in the services. Revival leader Evan
Roberts (1878-1951) taught a personal experience
of Holy Spirit baptism to precede any revival. The
revival was declared to be the end-time Pente-
cost of Acts 2, the ‘latter rain’ promised by biblical
prophets that would result in a worldwide out-
pouring of the Spirit.
Several early British Pentecostal leaders,
including George Jeffreys, founder of the Elim
Pentecostal Church, his brother Stephen, and
Daniel Williams, founder of the Apostolic Church,
were converted in the Welsh revival. The first
leader of Pentecostalism in Britain, Anglican vicar
Alexander Boddy also visited it. Although Evan
Roberts, influenced by his mentor Jesse Penn-
Lewis, later discouraged the use of tongues, and
although Pentecostalism’s emphases were found
in the radical and less common manifestations of
the Welsh revival, early Pentecostal leaders (espe-
cially in Britain) drew their inspiration from this
revival and saw their movement as growing out of
and continuing it. Interestingly, both movements
used an abundance of cultural forms to express
their experiences and liturgies, the Welsh revival
encouraging a resurgence of the Welsh language,
particularly in the singing of hymns and chants.6
During the Keswick Convention of 1905, the
emotionalism of three hundred Welsh delegates
influenced an unofficial all-night prayer meet-
ing that went, according to one observer, ‘out of
control’. American evangelical leader A.T. Pierson
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described the meeting and the manifestations of
speaking in tongues there as ‘disturbing anarchy’
and ‘a Satanic disturbance’.7 This appears to be
the first appearance of tongues in Britain in the
twentieth century.
Pentecostal-like revival movements with
speaking in tongues and other manifestations of
the Spirit’s presence had been known in South
India since 1860 in a CMS mission under the min-
istry of John Christian Arulappan. During a visit
to India in 1908, the pioneer of Pentecostalism
in Europe, T.B. Barratt discovered that his Indian
interpreter Joshua had received Spirit baptism
with tongues in 1897.8 The Welsh Revival spread
to other parts of the world through Welsh mis-
sionaries, and in 1905, revivals broke out in the
Khasi Hills in North-East India and in Madagascar,
both areas where Welsh Presbyterian missionar-
ies were working. According to the reports, these
revivals began with the local people rather than
with the missionaries, and were accompanied
by ecstatic phenomena and miracles of heal-
ing.9 Hot on the heels of these but unconnected
was the revival at Pandita Ramabai’s Mukti Mis-
sion for young widows and orphans in Kedgaon
near Pune, commencing in 1905 and lasting two
years. This revival made the Mukti Mission a very
important Pentecostal centre of international sig-
nificance. In 1905, western evangelical periodicals
reported on both the revivals in Wales and India,
heightening expectations of a world-wide reviv-
al.10 Elisabeth Sisson wrote of the Welsh revival
as the beginnings of a world-wide revival on ‘all
flesh’, the ‘latter rain’ prophesied by Joel.11 Frank
Bartleman, witness of the Azusa Street revival in
Los Angeles,12 documented the influence reports
of the Indian revivals had on their expectations
for Los Angeles, and the Azusa Street mouthpiece
was to declare only months after their own reviv-
al,‘Pentecost has come and is coming in India, and
thank God in many other places’.13
The ‘Korean Pentecost’ of 1907-8 commenced
at a convention in Pyongyang, and followed an
earlier revival that had begun among Methodist
missionaries in Wonsan in 1903, none of which
seemed to have had any direct influence on inter-
national Pentecostalism at the time.These revivals,
like those in Wales and India, were characterized
by emotional repentance with loud weeping and
simultaneous prayer. Eyewitness William Blair
likened the 1907 revival to the Day of Pentecost
in Acts 2. The ‘Korean Pentecost’ soon spread
throughout the country, Blair recording that
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‘Christians returned to their homes in the coun-
try taking the Pentecostal fire with them’.14 The
features of the revival still characterize both Prot-
estant and Pentecostal churches in Korea today.As
was the case in India, national evangelists, espe-
cially the Presbyterian pastor Ik Doo Kim, famous
for his healing and miracle ministry, probably took
the revival movement into a more ‘Pentecostal’
and ‘contextual’ direction than the western mis-
sionaries were comfortable with.15 Pentecostal
papers also reported on the Korean revival, one
comparing the revival to that of Wesley and not-
ing the ‘extraordinary manifestation of power’,
then quoting the interesting speculation that ‘it
would not be so very wonderful if the Korean
revival were to usher in such a religious awaken-
ing of the Orient as would transform the great
Chinese empire and change the face of the whole
missionary situation’.16 In today’s world, we see
this prophecy being fulfilled before our eyes.
Soon after the Korean revival, in 1908 a similar
revival broke out in Manchuria, north-east China,
and like Korea, at the time under Japanese occu-
pation. CIM Missionary James Webster reported
that a Chinese pastor, after thanking the mission-
aries for bringing the gospel to China, remarked
that ‘the Holy Spirit came down from Heaven.You
could not send Him to us’.The missionary replied
that they could now ‘take a back seat’ because it
would ‘not do any longer for us to exercise lord-
ship over God’s heritage in China’.17 The revival
movement was thus recognized as the means by
which the Spirit was creating an independent
Chinese church.These various international reviv-
al movements were the soil in which a locally
contextual Pentecostalism grew and thrived. Two
in particular, the revival in an African American
mission in downtown Los Angeles and the one in
the Indian mission near Pune, were to have global
significance for developing Pentecostalism.
The Azusa Street Mission
There was a direct link between the Azusa Street
revival and the Welsh revival. Key to this connec-
tion was Los Angeles Baptist Pastor Joseph Smale
(1867-1926), who Bartleman referred to as ‘God’s
Moses’ who had led God’s people to the brink
of the Promised Land, but had failed to enter in
himself – a role which was left to Seymour.18 The
Azusa Street revival in central Los Angeles (1906-
8) was the fire that spread to make it probably the
best known of the earliest centres of Pentecos-
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talism in North America and the one that imme-
diately sent out missionaries. This revival began
among the poorest of the poor in an interracial
and intercultural church led by an African Ameri-
can preacher William Joseph Seymour (1870-
1922), an African American holiness preacher and
the son of freed slaves. The revival in a shabby
two-storey building in a run-down part of the city
was instrumental in turning what was until then
a fairly localized and insignificant new Christian
sect into an international movement.19 Early Pen-
tecostals, like Wesley, saw the world as their par-
ish, the space into which they were to expand.20
They were convinced they would overcome all
obstacles through the power of the Spirit and
thereby defeat the enemy Satan and conquer his
territory, the ‘world’. This was the transnational,
universal orientation that was an essential part of
Pentecostalism from its beginning.
312 Azusa Street, a former African Methodist
Episcopal Church building, is where the Apostolic
Faith Mission began in April 1906. Daily meetings
commenced at about ten in the morning and usu-
ally lasted until late at night, completely spontane-
ous and emotional, without planned programmes
or speakers. Singing in tongues and people falling
to the ground ‘under the power’ or ‘slain in the
Spirit’ were common phenomena.21 The first par-
agraph of the first issue of the Azusa Street news-
paper Apostolic Faith, virtually bristled with the
excitement of the event:
It would be impossible to state how many
have been converted, sanctified, and filled
with the Holy Ghost. They have been and are
daily going out to all points of the compass to
spread this wonderful gospel.22
Clearly, this new ‘Apostolic Faith’ saw itself as
a missionary movement, whose main task was to
‘spread this wonderful gospel’ to ‘all points of the
compass’. For this reason, early Pentecostal mis-
sionaries worked with whoever was willing to
accept them, of whatever denomination or mis-
sion organization. The racial integration in the
Azusa Street meetings was also unique at that
time, and people from ethnic minorities discov-
ered ‘the sense of dignity and community denied
them in the larger urban culture’.23 The mission
saw its interracial and intercultural nature as one
of the reasons for its success, and this too was a
reason for Pentecostalism’s remarkable expansion
across the globe. Seymour’s core leadership team
was fully integrated with black and white women
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and men being responsible for various aspects of
the work (more than half were women), but Sey-
mour remained in charge. He was described as a
meek and gracious man of prayer, even allowing
his critics to speak to his congregation and adver-
tising the meetings of his rivals.24 Such was the
impression that Seymour made on people that
healing evangelist and Pentecostal missionary to
South Africa, John G. Lake, meeting Seymour for
the first time in 1907, commented that Seymour
had ‘more of God in his life than any man I had
ever met’.25 Seymour was spiritual father to thou-
sands of early Pentecostals.
For the next two years, the revival in Azusa
Street was the most prominent centre of Pente-
costalism in North America, further promoted by
Seymour’s periodical The Apostolic Faith, which
reached an international circulation of 50,000 at
its peak in 1908, the largest circulation of any Pen-
tecostal periodical at the time.The mission of this
new ‘Apostolic Faith’ was clear. Its purpose was to
stand for ‘the restoration of Apostolic faith, power
and practice, Christian unity, the evangelization of
the whole world preparatory to the Lord’s return,
and for all of the unfolding will and word of God’.
The followers of this new faith were convinced
that they had ‘the simple but effective Scriptural
Plan for evangelizing the world’.26 The going out
from Azusa Street was immediate, in ever-widen-
ing circles. People affected by the revival started
several new Pentecostal centres in the Los Ange-
les area, so that by 1912 there were at least twelve
in that city. Hundreds of visitors from all over the
continent and from other continents came to see
what was happening and to be baptized in the
Spirit. Many of these began Pentecostal centres
in various US and Canadian cities and eventual-
ly further abroad. The Apostolic Faith reported
receiving letters ‘from all over the world request-
ing prayers’ for Spirit baptism and healing.27 Hos-
tile press reports helped further publicize the
revival.28
By November 1906 in a paragraph titled
‘Spreading the Full Gospel’, the Apostolic Faith
reported that sixteen ‘Spirit filled’ workers had
recently gone out to nine different American cit-
ies, some of whom (including Thomas Junk and
Tom Hezmalhalch) were to later move out to ‘for-
eign’ fields. The paper suggested that there was a
little coordination of these early efforts: ‘We wish
to keep track of the workers in the field and be
united together in prayer for each other and the
work in the different fields’.29 Missionaries soon
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were heading for India and China, Europe, Pales-
tine and Africa, and on their way to embarking
from the eastern seaboard they visited several cit-
ies and started new centres there. Despite early
opposition and bitter division by 1911, at least
twenty-six different denominations trace their
Pentecostal origins to Azusa Street, including the
two largest: the Church of God in Christ and the
Assemblies of God. In a real sense, the Azusa Street
revival marks the beginning of classical Pentecos-
talism as an international movement.
The Azusa Street revivalists also acknowledged
earlier, ‘other Pentecostal saints’, such as those in
New England, Minnesota and Manitoba.30 They
never saw themselves as first cause or headquar-
ters of Pentecostalism; rather, they were one part
of a widespread outpouring of ‘Pentecost’ that
they believed would reach the whole world. As
Apostolic Faith put it, ‘Azusa Mission is not the
head of this movement; we are a body of missions
with Christ as the Head’.31 But what cannot be
denied is that for three years, Seymour’s Apostolic
Faith Mission was the most prominent and signifi-
cant centre of Pentecostalism on the continent.
It was also an important sending centre for many
of the first Pentecostal missionaries. Bartleman
believed that Los Angeles was the new Jerusalem
for the global expansion of the ‘restoration of the
power of God’.32
Pentecostal Migrants and
‘Missionary Tongues’
From its beginnings, Pentecostalism, more com-
monly known as the ‘Apostolic Faith’ at that time,
placed emphasis on evangelism and missions as a
result of the experience of Spirit baptism. People
came to the USA from far away and went back
with the baptism, including the founder of Pen-
tecostalism in Europe, T.B. Barratt of Oslo, and
especially various evangelical missionaries from
different parts of the world. From Azusa Street
and other centres (including those in other conti-
nents),‘Apostolic Faith’ missionaries were sent out
to places as far away and diverse as China, India,
Japan, Egypt, Liberia,Angola and South Africa with-
in two years.33 This was no mean achievement
and the beginning of what is arguably the most
significant global expansion of a Christian move-
ment in the entire history of Christianity. These
missionaries were convinced that they had been
given ‘missionary tongues’ through the baptism
in the Spirit, and that when they reached their
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from entecostal
destinations they would be able to speak miracu-
lously to local people without having to undergo
the arduous task of language learning. Apart from
isolated instances when it was claimed this had
happened, most admitted that they were unable
to speak in the languages of the nations, and some
returned to the USA disillusioned—but by no
means all.
The early twentieth century migrants who car-
ried the Pentecostal message all over the world
were most often poor, untrained and unprepared
for what awaited them; but they sometimes left
comfortable homes for lives of relative depriva-
tion to spread their newfound faith. One of the
first, Andrew Johnson, writing to Azusa Street in
August 1906 on his way to Palestine via Sweden,
expressed this for many when he wrote poign-
antly, ‘I would like to say good-bye to you before
I leave this land, it may be never to return in this
life’. 34 Many did not return. Some missionar-
ies went out ‘by faith’ without any income. The
disasters that befell the Batman family in Liberia
and the team that went with M.L. Ryan to Japan
without financial support are now legendary.
John G. Lake wrote an exasperated letter home in
1909 about sending missionaries to South Africa
without funds, as one of them, Theo Schwede,
had arrived in Cape Town without the necessary
minimum of $100 and a guarantee of support. To
get him through to Johannesburg had cost them
‘a great deal of trouble and expense’, Lake com-
plained.35 These early Pentecostal missionaries
went out to live ‘on the faith line’, to bring ‘light’
into ‘darkness’, and in some cases they had no
fixed plans for their arrival – for they were led
to their destinations by the Spirit, and the Spir-
it would show them what to do when they got
there. As one of them, May Law, put it, speaking of
her team in Hong Kong:‘Three young women, and
one of mature years, left their homes of wealth,
and comfort . . . and their beautiful native State
of Washington, for dark S. China’.36 Two of these
three young women died there soon afterwards
from tropical diseases – and this was the fate
of many of these unprepared missionaries who
would refuse to take medicines.
Many of the first missionaries were independ-
ent, without organizational backing, and related
only in a loose way to fledgling Pentecostal con-
gregations in their home country. As Antoinette
Moomau in Shanghai in 1909 put it,‘Jesus is doing
much more for us than any board could do and
we are happy to know that we are free creatures
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in Him’.37 However, these Pentecostal migrants
did remain in regular contact with their home
countries and sending organizations – as much as
they were organizations – with letters going back
and forth between missionaries and home church-
es, the latter producing periodicals often issued
free of charge to these missionaries, keeping them
abreast with the developing movement both at
home and around the world. Often the only link
with any form of organization was through these
periodicals, which served the threefold function
as home bases for the missionaries, the means of
disseminating information about them, and for
raising funds to support them. The periodicals
were also important vehicles for internationaliz-
ing and creating norms for Pentecostal beliefs and
values. They were perceived by the missionaries
as being the primary sources of both their own
identity and that of their converts. Later, Bible
schools were established to further normalise
Pentecostal identity.
There were at least three factors creating impe-
tus for the international movement of hundreds of
early independent Pentecostal missionaries. First
was their premillennialist eschatology that posited
the urgency of the task of world evangelism at the
end of time before the imminent return of Christ.
Second, they had a firm belief in their experience
of Spirit baptism by which they had been given
‘foreign languages’ to preach their gospel to the
nations of the world. Pentecostalism, in common
with other Christian revivalist movements at the
time, held that their ecstatic manifestations were
evidence of the end-time outpouring of the Spirit
given to evangelize the world within the short-
est possible time. The Pentecostals would seek
to identify which particular language they had
been given (usually through some member of the
assembly who would be ‘familiar’ with a foreign
language) and then they would make arrange-
ments to go to that country as soon as possible.
And third, these missionaries often met up with
other, more experienced missionaries once on the
field, especially when they discovered that God
had not given them the ability to speak the lan-
guages of the peoples to whom they had gone.
The missionary networks were very significant
in the spread of Pentecostal ideas throughout
the world and in particular (but certainly not
exclusively), that of the Christian and Missionary
Alliance, and especially in Asia. The Atlanta Pen-
tecostal periodical The Bridegroom’s Messenger
reported the astonishing news in December 1908
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that in India, sixty missionaries had received Spir-
it baptism and fifteen missionary societies had
‘witnesses to Pentecost’ in twenty-eight stations
throughout the country.38
Following the earlier ideas of Parham, the
first Pentecostals almost universally believed that
when they spoke in tongues, they had spoken
in known languages (xenolalia) by which they
would preach the gospel to the ends of the earth
in the last days. There would be no time for the
indeterminable delays of language learning. Early
Pentecostal publications were filled with these
missionary expectations, often referring to the
gift of tongues as the ‘gift of languages’. In the first
issue of Azusa Street’s Apostolic Faith (September
1906), the expectations of early American Pente-
costals were clear. They fully expected through
Spirit baptism to be able to speak ‘all the languag-
es of the world’ in order to preach the gospel ‘into
all the world’.39 When ‘the Holy Ghost fell on a
preacher’ at Azusa Street, reported this paper, he
was able to speak ‘Zulu and many tongues more
fluently than English’.40 In keeping with common
practice of Pentecostals at that time, this unnamed
preacher probably turned up in South Africa to
work among the Zulu. On another occasion, a mis-
sionary from Central Africa recognized some of
the languages spoken at Azusa Street as being Afri-
can ‘dialects’, confirming his need to return there
with these new linguists.41
The Azusa Street Missionaries
As the first North American Pentecostals believed
that they had been given foreign languages
through Spirit baptism to preach the gospel
throughout the world, many were said to be doing
just that.42 Ensuing issues of Apostolic Faith in
1906 and 1907 mention the experience of xeno-
lalia, linking Spirit baptism with the ability to
speak the languages of the nations.‘God is solving
the missionary problem’ it declared, because God
was ‘sending out new-tongued missionaries on the
apostolic faith line’. Spirit baptism not only ‘makes
you a witness unto the uttermost parts of the
earth’, it continued, but it also ‘gives you power to
speak in the languages of the nations’.43 George
Batman, writing en route to Liberia, believed he
could ‘speak in six foreign tongues given me at
God’s command’. 44 Apostolic Faith carried a
report from Liberia that one of the missionaries
from Los Angeles ‘had been able to speak to the
people in the cru [sic] tongue’ and continued to
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give testimonies of people who spoke ‘the lan-
guages of the nations’.45
The practical experiences of these missionar-
ies made xenolalia gradually disappear. A report
by Hezmalhalch, a year before he left for South
Africa, of a man hearing someone speaking in
‘Marathi’ indicates that the idea of xenolalia
was still prevalent in 1907 but noticeably, less
frequently mentioned. In this issue of Apostolic
Faith much more reference is made than in pre-
vious issues to ‘unknown tongues’ and tongues
that are interpreted, as this eventually became
the predominant view of Pentecostals.46 The first
reports from Pentecostal missionaries in the field
began to be published in the April 1907 issue of
Apostolic Faith, from Liberia, India and Hawaii.
The reports abound with hints of the frustra-
tions these missionaries felt because they could
not communicate in the languages of the people.
Some resorted to spending time with other mis-
sionaries and bringing them into the experience
of Spirit baptism, which often became their main
occupation.47
The first American missionaries that went out
only five months after the Azusa Street revival had
begun, many of whom were women and African
Americans, were self-supporting and did not have
the financial backing of an organization.They usu-
ally went in teams of as many as a dozen or more
at a time. Apostolic Faith reported that African
American evangelist Lucy Farrow, who had first
accompanied Seymour to Los Angeles from Hou-
ston, had returned to Houston and would then go
on to her home in Norfolk, Virginia. After that, she
was to be in the first party of Azusa Street mis-
sionaries to Africa who left in December 1906.
Farrow returned after seven months in Johnson-
ville, Liberia, where she reported that twenty had
‘received their Pentecost’ and that she had been
able to speak and preach two sermons in the Kru
language. Farrow continued to minister at Azusa
Street on her return, but had an itinerant minis-
try. Another early African American missionary to
Liberia was Edward McCauley, leader of the Apos-
tolic Faith in Long Beach, California, who by May
1908 had established a thriving work in Monro-
via.48
Bartleman recollects that ‘it seemed that eve-
rybody had to go to ‘Azusa’’. He recorded that ‘mis-
sionaries were gathered there from Africa, India,
and the islands of the sea . . . an irresistible draw-
ing to Los Angeles’.49 Samuel and Ardell Mead had
been Bishop William Taylor’s Methodist mission-
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aries in Angola for 21 years when they came to
Azusa Street to be baptized in the Spirit.50 Ardell
Mead believed that she herself had been given ‘an
African dialect’, but Samuel Mead was more hesi-
tant about whether ‘these tongues will be used
in a foreign field’. The veteran missionary said
simply, ‘As for myself I cannot say. My God is able,
this I know.’51 Another African American preach-
er, Julia Hutchins, left that September for Liberia
with her husband and niece Leila McKinney. By
October 1906 there were eight missionaries from
Azusa Street going out to ‘the foreign field’ and
thirty ‘workers’ to various parts of the USA.52 The
party of missionaries to Africa met up with T.B.
Barrett in New York, and helped lead him into
Spirit baptism. After this, he returned on the same
ship with them to Liverpool in December 1906,
to begin the Pentecostal movement in Europe.
He pastored a large congregation in Christiana
(Oslo), and gave oversight to the establishment
of Pentecostal centres in many parts of Europe.
The Batmans, Hutchinses and Farrow sailed from
Liverpool to Monrovia, Liberia, while the Meads
and the Shidelers left on another ship bound for
Benguela, Angola. The Batmans and their three
children went to Liberia, where they all died of
tropical fever within a few weeks.
Alfred G. and Lillian Garr, pastors from the
Burning Bush holiness movement and baptized
in the Spirit at Azusa Street, were reported to
have received ‘the gift of tongues, especially the
language of India and dialects’. The Garrs were
both supposed to be able to speak Bengali and in
the case of Lillian, also Tibetan and Chinese. They
left Los Angeles in July 1906 going via Chicago
and Danville, Virginia, where they held a series
of meetings in their Burning Bush church. From
there they would go on to India,53 arriving in Cal-
cutta in December 1906. Although disillusioned
with their language abilities, they persevered
and were invited to conduct services in William
Carey’s old Baptist church. Lillian Garr wrote her
first report to Azusa Street in March 1907, saying
that thirteen or fourteen ‘missionaries and other
workers’ had received Spirit baptism. 54 Quite
independently of this event and only five miles
away, a Pentecostal revival broke out in a girls’
orphanage run by Fanny Simpson, a Methodist
missionary from Boston, who was thereupon dis-
missed and sent back to the USA. She returned to
India as a Pentecostal missionary in 1920 and set
up another orphanage in Purulia.
The Garrs continued to work in the Indian sub-
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continent amid controversy because of their dog-
matic stance on Spirit baptism, and by September
1907 were in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka). By this
time the focus of their ministry was on reaching
missionaries with their message, as they put it:
Reaching the missionaries is laying the axe at
the root of the tree, for they know all the cus-
toms of India and also the languages. The only
way the nations can be reached is by getting
the missionaries baptized with the Holy Ghost.
Missionaries are receiving and praising God
for letting them hear this Gospel and receive
this great outpouring of the Spirit.55
This became a strategy for many of the expa-
triate Pentecostals in foreign countries, and the
main reason for the rapidly developing network
of interconnected missionaries who spread the
Pentecostal message wherever they went.
George Berg, a former Brethren missionary in
India, was baptized in the Spirit at Azusa Street in
1906 and went back to Bulsar, India as a Pentecos-
tal missionary in February 1908. From there he
moved to Adheri, near Bombay, where he wrote of
an open door among ‘native Christian preachers
and workers’. He mentioned that Indian preach-
ers (23 on one occasion) came to his house once
a week for prayer and Bible study, and that on Sun-
days and other days he went to the city to preach
in two or three different places. Later he spent
time in Telugu, and wrote from Coonoor about his
desire to work among the ‘jungle tribes of South
India’, before moving to the Bangalore area.56
B. Berntsen, a Swedish American missionary
in China, received Spirit baptism at Azusa Street
and returned with a team of thirteen missionar-
ies and their ten children mostly from a Swed-
ish Pentecostal mission in Los Angeles to spread
Pentecostalism in an area south of Beijing called
Cheng Ting Fu. There they held regular meet-
ings and cared for the poor and orphans (feed-
ing 50-100 ‘beggars’ every day for seven months
of 1908); they lived in community in one house,
learned Chinese and made evangelistic forays to
surrounding villages, distributing Christian tracts.
The Hanson and Hess families later moved from
this mission to Shanghai to work there. Bern-
tsen had co-operation and encouragement from
neighbouring CIM, American Board, and Presby-
terian missions in their work. Four of their chil-
dren died in the first year, two of them from the
Berntsen family.The mission expanded with some
missionaries leaving and others coming, and by
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1909 another mission had been opened in Pao
Ting Fu, a hundred miles further north.57 Antoi-
nette Moomau, a missionary in China originally
from Nebraska, went to Azusa Street while on
furlough and spent several weeks ‘tarrying’ there
until she received Spirit baptism. She returned to
Shanghai as a Pentecostal missionary in 1908 and
soon reported several influential Chinese Chris-
tians becoming Pentecostals. Beginning Pentecos-
tal meetings in a ‘Door of Hope’ rescue mission
for girls, she and her assistant Miss Phillips were
given a six-roomed house from which to work
(furnished by Chinese Christians), although a let-
ter hints at how little they had in possessions or
support.58 Other missionaries from Azusa Street
went to Central America and Mexico.
Many of these missionaries did not stay long
in one place, but had travelling ministries. One
of the earliest and most remarkable itinerating
ministries was that of Lucy Leatherman, a doctor’s
wife and former student at A.B. Simpson’s mission-
ary training school. She had received Spirit Bap-
tism at Azusa Street and believed she had been
sent to the Palestinian Arabs. She travelled from
country to country sending back reports to sev-
eral Pentecostal papers. She was among the first
group of missionaries reported as having left Los
Angeles for Jerusalem via the east coast in August
1906. Among the languages they were reported
as being able to speak through Spirit baptism
were Turkish and Arabic. On arrival in Jerusalem,
Leatherman reported that a ‘native minister’ from
Beirut and a missionary had ‘received the baptism’
there. Later, when the McIntoshes from Macao
joined her, she reported that there were five oth-
ers who had received Spirit baptism.59 The work
seems to have had a boost, as one report speaks
of a convention Leatherman organized in Ramal-
lah with about three hundred present. Leather-
man herself was less optimistic, speaking of ‘a
few’ who had received Spirit baptism. One was a
Syrian named as ‘Brother Zarub’, who was ‘turned
out’ of his denomination when he started preach-
ing about Spirit baptism.Another who received in
Jerusalem was Ghali Hanna from Assiout, Egypt,
the person who invited the first missionaries
there.60 Leatherman then undertook alone an
arduous journey, sometimes by mule in mountain-
ous regions, through Syria (including meetings in
Beirut) and Galilee, then she proceeded to Assiout
to see the work of Ghali Hanna. There she report-
ed a ‘great revival in Egypt’ and that ‘multitudes
have been saved, sanctified and baptized with the
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Holy Ghost and fire’. Later she reported one hun-
dred conversions in Assiout in two weeks. One
of those five baptized in the Spirit, a ‘great big
lion of a fellow’ was leaving for Khartoum, Sudan,
to preach the Pentecostal message there. Ghali
Hanna also wrote of the effects of Leatherman’s
visit there. Leatherman planned to go to Arabia
after expected American missionaries had arrived
in Egypt.61 She left Egypt in February 1909 and
moved eastwards through Arabia to India, visit-
ing the missions in the Pune area, and meeting up
with the Montgomerys on their round-the-world
tour.62 She then moved via Hong Kong and Shang-
hai (where she visited Moomaw and Phillips, and
the Hansons) to Yokohama, Japan to Manila in the
Philippines preaching to the US military there
by the end of 1909. The Bridegroom’s Messen-
ger called her ‘this brave woman whom God has
made a pioneer in the Gospel’. She planned to
visit the USA before returning to Palestine, as she
always saw mission work in the Middle East as her
first priority and calling.63
Martin L. Ryan first appeared in November
1906 as a ‘holiness evangelist’ and editor of Light
(soon changed to Apostolic Light) in Salem, Ore-
gon. He too had received Spirit baptism at Azusa
Street. His letters from Oregon reveal a zealous
worker for Pentecost, holding regular meetings in
which remarkable healings are reported. By Janu-
ary 1907 his offices had moved to Portland, Ore-
gon, and by March he was working in Spokane,
Washington.64 By the beginning of 1908 he was
leading a party of fourteen ‘Apostolic Light’ mis-
sionaries from Washington State to Japan and
North China, and his periodical was thereafter
published in Japan.65 Twelve of these mission-
aries went with him to Japan, and May Law and
Rose Pittman went directly to Hong Kong, to
arrive there soon after the Garrs. Ryan went to
Yokohama and set up a preaching house there,
with schools for teaching the Bible in two places.
Japanese and missionaries were attracted to the
meetings, and a Quaker missionary couple, the
Taylors, became Pentecostals.66 But Ryan found
life as a missionary in Japan tough from the start.
He wrote that the younger generation were losing
faith in ‘idol worship’, but were also rejecting ‘any-
thing that is miraculous or supernatural’, whereas
the older generation were ‘seldom turned’ from
their beliefs. China, he thought, was ‘a much bet-
ter field’.67
Ryan corresponded regularly, and excerpts
from his Apostolic Light were reproduced. By
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August 1908 he reported ‘several healed, but no
one baptized with the Holy Ghost’, and opposi-
tion from missionaries in Japan.68 Later he report-
ed a Japanese student, Mr Ito, who had ‘received
his Pentecost’ and that ‘others were earnestly
seeking’. Ryan even purchased a small boat for
evangelistic and literature work in the bay, and
called it ‘Pentecost’. The missionary team moved
from the fishing village where they were based in
Tokyo itself and worked among students of Eng-
lish there with a school and mission, with the co-
operation of the YMCA. There, several Japanese
students were converted but most were ‘earnest-
ly enquiring the way of life’, and Ryan reports
the presence of Chinese and Korean students
there too. As an indication of the great difficul-
ties Ryan’s team had experienced, the team was
now only four, ‘all the rest having left Japan’, and
Ryan had been unable to produce his Apostolic
Light, presumably through shortage of funds. 69
Later, although Ryan’s reports indicated a number
of individual Japanese receiving Spirit baptism,
there are darker hints about ‘the kind of Christian-
ity that leaves its missionaries to struggle along
meagrely, if not almost altogether unaided’ and
the ‘unconcern’ that would lead more Japanese to
‘go down in sin and darkness forever’.70 One of
Ryan’s last letters to his supporters yields no hint
of his increasing difficulties, but consists entirely
of quotations from Pauline letters.71 Ryan’s mis-
sion ended in failure, but perhaps his team’s most
lasting achievement was their influence on other
Christians, especially their Japanese converts and
a few foreigners who were open to their teach-
ing. Ryan was the last of his group to leave Japan
in 1910, but new Pentecostal missionaries had
begun to arrive.72
Thomas Junk, a German and another early con-
vert who had joined Florence Crawford’s team
in Oakland, was later holding meetings in Seat-
tle, then in Honolulu, and he and his wife Helen
went to Tsao-Hsien, Shantung, China in July 1908.
There they discovered poverty of such dimen-
sions that they were determined to do some-
thing about it. Junk wrote of the ‘self-righteous’
missionaries who lived ‘in fine houses with every
comfort, but allow no Chinese around them but
their servants’.73 After less than six months, Helen
Junk died. An elderly Chinese preacher, Lee Wang,
worked with Junk at his mission and appears to
have done most of the preaching. They operated
a home where children were rescued from star-
vation, and by October 1910 it had 55 residents
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of which 25 were children. Fascinating letters
from Junk described his unusual ability to iden-
tify with the people, to ‘be a Chinaman’ and not
conform to common ‘missionary’ behaviour. His
letters sometimes contain searing criticisms, writ-
ing of the disadvantages of several missionaries
‘flocking’ together in mission homes,‘having what
they call a good time together, but caring very lit-
tle for the Chinese’.74 He also reported remark-
able healings and casting out demons. He began
ministry in prisons three times a week, where he
described the most awful and dehumanising, life-
threatening conditions meted out to men whose
crimes were sometimes very petty. In one of his
reports in 1910 he had visited 52 different towns
and villages preaching, and all but seven of these
places had never heard the Christian message.75
The measure of the commitment to China of this
missionary is poignantly expressed in these words
from his letter in 1910:
One brother asked if I would not come over
to the home land and tell personally of the
work and the need here if he, the brother, paid
the expenses. No, dear brother, no, I cannot
afford to waste the time and money that way.
My work is here till Jesus comes or I am called
home. I never shall see the home land again
till I see it from the clouds.76
Ansel H. Post, who had been a Baptist minister
for over thirty years, received Spirit baptism in
June 1906, was numbered with the ‘Spirit-filled
workers’ from Azusa Street in Santa Barbara, and
then was in charge of the work in Pasadena. He
was reported as having left for South Africa in
August 1907, but did not end up there. He first
travelled to Ceylon (where he spent three months
in Kandy) and then to India where he ministered
(among other places) in Conoor, travelling mainly
to CMA missions during several months in India,
where he reported that ‘a very blessed Pentecostal
work has been going on in many of the Alliance
stations’. While in India he met up with Daniel
Awrey on a round-the-world tour. Post also report-
ed ‘fully a thousand or more’ Indian Christians
who had ‘received the baptism’. Awrey and Post
travelled from there to Egypt together, where Post
remained in Assiout, perhaps in response to a call
from Egyptian Christians for Pentecostal workers
to come there.77
The controversial Garrs had only spent a few
months in India, went on for a short time to Cey-
lon, and arrived in Hong Kong that October 1907,
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the first Pentecostals there, to be followed three
days later by women missionaries from Seattle:
May Law and Rose Pittman – both soon to con-
tract smallpox and survive.They were joined later
by Cora Fritsch and Bertha Milligan, who had
spent a year with Ryan’s team in Japan. In Hong
Kong, the Garrs began preaching in the American
Board (Congregational) mission with the aid of a
capable Chinese interpreter, Mok Lai Chi. Here,
Apostolic Faith reported,‘a glorious revival’ broke
out.78 The Garrs and the four women were the
only Pentecostals among the missionaries in Hong
Kong, and by January 1908 all their converts were
Chinese. They were encouraged by fellowship
with the McIntoshes from Macao, who visited
them regularly.79 Their first services were attend-
ed by between 400 and 700 people, but oppo-
sition from the missionaries mounted and they
were ‘ejected’ from the American Board building.
Writing three years later, they said that since then,
‘the work has been rather floating around as far
as a permanent place of meeting is concerned’.80
Nevertheless, within six months there were some
one hundred people in South China who had
become Pentecostal.81 Garr wrote that although
they would love to remain in China ‘until Jesus
comes’, they now believed ‘that God is going to
take us to the states [sic.] in a few months’. 82They
lost their African American assistant Maria and
their three-year-old daughter Virginia to smallpox
in 1908, after which they returned to the USA for
fifteen months, when they did itinerant ministry
on behalf of the Chinese church there and in Can-
ada. They returned to Hong Kong in late 1909 to
open a missionary home before eventually return-
ing permanently to the USA to pastor a church in
1912.83 Their philosophy was simple, Alfred Garr
explaining why they did not expect to spend long
in Hong Kong:
As the Lord has put Evangelistic work upon
myself and wife, we cannot tell how long we
will remain in China. We are working to get
them established as much as possible, and we
are seeing the fruit of our labour already, praise
His name.84
Within three years of the beginning of the
revival in 1906, Apostolic Faith missionaries who
had received their experience of Spirit baptism at
Azusa Street were found in at least three African
and six Asian countries. But the impact of these
missionaries went much further than that, as the
rest of the twentieth century was to prove.
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Notes
1  This lecture was given at the Oxford Centre for
Mission Studies on 20 December 2005. It is adapted
from the author’s forthcoming book, Spreading Fires:
The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (Lon-
don: SCM, 2007).
2  James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White unto Harvest:
Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of
Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas
Press, 1988)
3  Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street (S. Plainfield, NJ:
Bridge Publishing, 1925, 1980), 65-6.
4  Goff, Fields White, 15.
5  D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The
Significance of Eschatology in the Development of
Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 1996), 158-80, 185; Goff, Fields White, 157.
6  Eifon Evans, The Welsh Revival of 1904
(Bridgend, UK: Evangelical Press of Wales, 1969), 190-6;
D.D. Bundy,‘Welsh Revival’, New International Diction-
ary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, 1187-
8; Dana Robert, Occupy Until I Come: A.T. Pierson and
the Evangelization of the World (Grand Rapids, MI &
Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2003), 260.
7  Robert, Occupy Until I Come, 261-2.
8  T.B. Barratt, When the Fire Fell and an Outline of
my Life (Oslo, 1927); in Donald W. Dayton, (ed.), The
Work of T.B. Barratt, ‘The Higher Christian Life’ Series,
(New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1985), 162-3.
9  Bridegroom’s Messenger 5 (1 Jan 1908), 1; Bride-
groom’s Messenger 9 (1 Mar 1908), 1.
10  Triumphs of Faith 25:11 (Nov 1905), 251-3.
11  Triumphs of Faith 26:3 (March 1906), 57-60.
12  Bartleman, Azusa Street, 35; Gary B. McGee, ‘
“Latter Rain” Falling in the East: Early-Twentieth-Centu-
ry Pentecostalism in India and the Debate over Speak-
ing in Tongues’, Church History 68:3, 1999, (648-665),
649, 653-9.
13  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 1.
14  William N. Blair & Bruce Hunt, The Korean Pen-
tecost and the Sufferings which Followed (Edinburgh:
The Banner of Truth Trust, 1977), 71, 75.
15  Young Hoon Lee, ‘The Holy Spirit Movement in
Korea: Its Historical and Doctrinal Development’ (PhD
thesis,Temple University, 1996), 80-90.
16  Bridegroom’s Messenger 7 (1 Feb 1908), 1.
17  Triumphs of Faith 29:8 (Aug 1909), 181.
18  Bartleman, Azusa Street, 62.
19  Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 182-6, 208-9, 212-6.
20  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 1.
21  Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 194-7, 200-2.
22  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 1.
23  Robert M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited:
The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 1979), 69.
24  Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., ‘Azusa Street Revival’, NID-
PCM, 344-50; Robeck, ‘Seymour, William Joseph’, NID-
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PCM, 1053-8.
25  John G. Lake, Adventures in God (reprinted,
Tulsa, OK: Harrison House, 1981), 19.
26  Word & Work 29:4 (Apr 1907), 117
27  Apostolic Faith 4 (Dec 1906), 1.
28  Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 202-5, 208.
29  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 1.
30  Apostolic Faith 4 (Dec 1906), 3.
31  Apostolic Faith 8 (May 1907), 3.
32  Bartleman, Azusa Street, 90.
33  Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 182-6, 208-9, 212-6.
34  Apostolic Faith 2 (Oct 1906), 3.
35  Pentecost 1:7 (June 1909), 3.
36  E. May Law, Pentecostal Mission Work in South
China: An Appeal for Missions (Falcon, NC: The Falcon
Publishing Co., 1915), 2.
37  Pentecost 1:7 (July 1909), 5.
38  Bridegroom’s Messenger 27 (1 Dec 1908), 2.
39  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 1.
40  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 2.
41  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 3.
42  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 4.
43  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 2.
44  Apostolic Faith 4 (Dec 1906), 1, 3, 4.
45  Apostolic Faith 6 (Feb-Mar 1907), 1, 3, 4.
46  Apostolic Faith 7 (Apr 1907), 1, 2.
47  Apostolic Faith 9 (June-Sept 1907), 1.
48  Apostolic Faith 13 (May 1908), 1.
49  Bartleman, Azusa Street, p53.
50  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 2.
51  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 3.
52  Apostolic Faith 2 (Oct 1906), 1.
53  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 4; 2 (Oct 1906),
2.
54  Apostolic Faith 7 (Apr 1907), 1; Word & Work
29:6 (June 1907), 184.
55  Apostolic Faith 9 (June-Sept 1907), 1.
56  Bridegroom’s Messenger 13 (1 May 1908), 2;
Pentecost 1:4 (Dec 1908), 2-3; 1:9 (Aug 1909), 5.
57  Apostolic Faith 10 (Sept 1907), 1; 11 (Oct 1907-
Jan. 1908), 2; 12 (Jan 1908), 3; Word & Work 30:7 (July
1908), 218-9; Bridegroom’s Messenger 26 (15 Nov
1908), 4; 34 (15 Mar 1909), 4; 51 (1 Dec 1909), 3; Pente-
cost 1:5 (Jan 1909), 2.
58  Apostolic Faith 11 (Jan 1908), 3; Pentecost 1:8
(July 1909), 5; Bridegroom’s Messenger 44 (15 Aug
1909), 2; Word & Work 31:12 (Dec 1909), 302.
59  Apostolic Faith 1 (Sept 1906), 4; 13 (May 1908),
1.
60  Bridegroom’s Messenger 23 (1 Oct 1908), 1;
Word & Work 30:10 (Oct 1908), 311; 30:11 (Nov 1908),
346-7.
61  Pentecost 1:5 (Jan-Feb 1909), 5; Bridegroom’s
Messenger 29 (1 Jan 1909), 1; 32 (15 Feb 1909), 1;
Bridegroom’s Messenger 33 (1 Mar 1909), 2.
62  Word & Work 31:8 (Aug 1909), 168; Triumphs
of Faith 29:6 (June 1909), 125.
63  Upper Room (Feb 1910), 54; Pentecost 1:8 (July
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1909), 6; 1:10 (Sept 1909), 4; Bridegroom’s Messenger
44 (15 Aug 1909), 2; 48 (15 Oct 1909), 2; 50 (15 Nov
1909), 1.
64  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 3; 5 (Jan 1907), 4;
6 (Feb-Mar 1907), 2.
65  Apostolic Faith 11 (Jan 1908), 2.
66  Bridegroom’s Messenger 11 (1 Apr 1908), 1; 13
(1 May 1908), 1; Word & Work 29:9 (Oct 1907), 267.
67  Bridegroom’s Messenger 17 (1 July 1908), 4.
68  Word & Work 30:11 (Nov 1908), 345.
69  Bridegroom’s Messenger 22 (15 Sept 1908), 4;
27 (Dec 1908), 1; Pentecost 1:4 (Dec 1908), 3-5.
70  Bridegroom’s Messenger 35 (1 Apr 1909), 4;
Pentecost 1:6 (Apr-May 1909), 5.
71  Bridegroom’s Messenger 46 (15 Sept 1909), 3.
72  Paul Tsikidu Shew, ‘Pentecostals in Japan’, in
Allan Anderson & Edmond Tang (eds.), Asian and Pen-
tecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia
(Oxford: Regnum, 2005), 489.
73  Bridegroom’s Messenger 26 (15 Nov 1908), 4;
Upper Room (Jan 1911), 7
74  Bridegroom’s Messenger 57 (1 Mar 1910), 1.
Use of New Testament
Metaphors in Mission
Jey J. Kanagaraj
Dr Jey J. Kanagaraj is professor of New Testament at the Union Biblical Seminary in Pune, India
Introduction
Use of metaphors is an important aspect of all
communication. This is significant too in mission.
We live at a time when almost all religious groups
are experiencing a sort of revival. The religions
which did not proclaim their faith are becoming
more and more ‘mission’ conscious. Christians
are suspected of desiring to establish a political
kingdom through the spread Christianity.The very
act of leading people to Christ is labelled as the
means to reviving the colonial power. This per-
ception has led to conflicts and violence. Need-
less to say, therefore, that words such as ‘crusade’,
‘triumph of Christ’, ‘winning people for Christ’,
and ‘building up his Kingdom’ cause strong resist-
ance.Thus, choosing the right language in mission
is essential.
P Rathnaswamy, while speaking of the ‘Rules
118 Transformation 23/2 April 2006 U
Downloaded from trn.sagepub.com by vlas natalia on April 26, of
75  Bridegroom’s Messenger 32 (15 Feb 1909), 1; 38
(15 May 1909), 3; 41 (1 July 1909), 2; 48 (15 Oct 1909),
1; 51 (1 Dec 1909), 1; 53 (1 Jan 1910), 1; 54 (15 Jan
1910), 2; Bridegroom’s Messenger 59 (1 Apr 1910), 2;
Latter Rain Evangel 2:10 (July 1910), 14; Upper Room
(Nov 1910), 8.
76  Bridegroom’s Messenger 59 (1 Apr 1910), 2.
77  Apostolic Faith 3 (Nov 1906), 1; 4 (Dec 1906),
4; 5 (Jan 1907), 4; 11 (Jan 1908), 2; 13 (May 1908), 4;
Word & Work 30:10 (Oct 1908), 312; 30:11 (Nov 1908),
346; Bartleman, Azusa Street, 61; Bridegroom’s Mes-
senger 13 (1 May 1908), 4; 25 (1 Nov 1908), 1; 38 (15
May 1909), 4.
78  Apostolic Faith 11 (Jan 1908), 1.
79  Bridegroom’s Messenger 9 (1 Mar 1908), 4.
80  Upper Room (May 1911), 5.
81  Bridegroom’s Messenger 12 (15 Apr 1908), 2;
Apostolic Faith 13 (May 1908), 1.
82  Bridegroom’s Messenger 7 (1 Feb 1908), 1.
83  Bridegroom’s Messenger 14 (15 May 1908), 1;
51 (1 Dec 1909), 2.
84  Upper Room (Feb 1910), 54.
1
of Communication’, says that the words used in
communicating with people should be clear and
simple.2 Since the NT is the source of our mission
theology, it is worth posing the question: does
the NT contain words and concepts which we
can adopt or adapt in our mission? In this paper,
I survey the NT to suggest some terms that are
relevant for use in mission today.
What is Metaphor?
The word ‘metaphor’ comes from the Greek noun
metaphora and the Greek verb metaphorein,
meaning ‘to transfer’. The Oxford English Diction-
ary defines ‘metaphor’ as ‘the figure of speech in
which a name or descriptive term is transferred
to some object different from, but analogous to,
that to which it is properly applicable’. For exam-
New Testament Metaphors in Mission
se 2011