The Global Church Era · 1913-present · N. America, then global
Oneness Pentecostalism
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
In April 1913, at the Arroyo Seco camp meeting, R. E. McAlister preached on baptism and observed that the baptisms recorded in Acts are performed in the name of Jesus. The following year Frank Ewart and Glenn Cook baptized one another on that basis, and the question tore through the young Pentecostal movement. In October 1916 the Assemblies of God adopted its Statement of Fundamental Truths, an explicitly trinitarian confession, and the ministers who could not sign it left — so the rupture stands documented in each side's own words. Several bodies followed. The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World is the oldest, Oneness from 1916, and was interracial through decades in which other Pentecostal bodies separated by race; the separations of 1924, and the racial dimension of the 1945 merger, are part of its own telling, and G. T. Haywood was among its leaders. The United Pentecostal Church International was formed by a merger vote on 25 September 1945 and publishes its Articles of Faith in a Manual reissued each year.
Sources
- UPCI Articles of Faith, in the annually issued UPCI Manual (primary) — The UPCI's own confession, reissued annually — its own dated, own-voice statement of faith. The record runs unbroken well past any particular closing date sometimes given for this movement.
- Arroyo Seco camp meeting (Apr 1913, McAlister); Ewart's rebaptism (1914) and The Phenomenon of Pentecost (1947); the AG Statement of Fundamental Truths (Oct 1916) (primary) — The 1913-16 split is documented in confessional terms on both sides. Ewart's own account is a retrospective, insider one.
- The Black Oneness lineage: G. T. Haywood's writings and hymns; PAW records (sustained interracialism; the 1924 separations; the 1945 UPCI merger's racial dimension) (primary) — Part of the movement's own record, in the voices of Black Oneness leaders and congregations themselves.
- David A. Reed, 'In Jesus' Name': The History and Beliefs of Oneness Pentecostals (Deo, 2008); Talmadge French, Our God Is One (1999); Daniel Ramirez, Migrating Faith (UNC, 2015) (secondary) — Reed writes as an insider scholar; Ramirez covers the Apostolic borderlands wing specifically.
- Oneness constituency figures (reference) — The UPCI's and other bodies' self-reports should be read as self-reports; the World Christian Encyclopedia's 2019 figure is a more independently cross-checked aggregate, distinct from those self-reported numbers.