History of Pentecostalism Timeline

Parham closed his Topeka school after 1901 and undertook a four-year revival tour through Kansas and Missouri, spreading his teaching about Spirit baptism and initial evidence.

The Welsh Revival of 1904–1905 prompted intense speculation among radical evangelicals worldwide, especially in the United States, about an approaching outpouring of the Spirit that would renew Christianity.

Parham moved to Houston, Texas, in 1905 and started a Bible training school. His ministry there helped transmit Pentecostal teaching to future revival leaders.

William Seymour traveled to Los Angeles in 1906. His preaching there sparked the revival that became the central early event in the formation of modern Pentecostalism.

Seymour's preaching sparked a three-year-long revival at Azusa Street. The meetings drew participants from diverse backgrounds and helped disseminate Pentecostal practices and theology internationally.

From 1906 to 1924, Pentecostals often defied prevailing social, cultural, and political norms supporting racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. The early revival movement maintained a notable interracial character.

The revival first broke out on Monday, April 9, 1906, at 214 Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles. It moved five days later, on Friday, April 14, to 312 Azusa Street.

By December 1906, Durham had returned to Europe. He is credited with beginning Pentecostal movements in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and England.

Through Durham's ministry, Italian immigrant Luigi Francescon received the Pentecostal experience in 1907. He later established Italian Pentecostal congregations in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil.

After 1907, William Howard Durham, pastor of Chicago's North Avenue Mission, returned to the Midwest and laid groundwork for the movement's expansion across that region.

By 1907, American missionaries had established a Pentecostal presence in Liberia, making Africa one of the first regions outside the United States to receive the movement's message.

Florence Crawford, an associate of Seymour, brought the Pentecostal message to the American Northwest. By 1908, her work had formed what became the Apostolic Faith Church, a Holiness Pentecostal denomination.

American missionaries were established in South Africa by 1908, extending the early Pentecostal movement into southern Africa.

Giacomo Lombardi led the first Pentecostal services in Italy in 1908, helping establish the movement in the country.

John G. Lake, a follower of John Alexander Dowie who had experienced Pentecostal Spirit baptism, traveled to South Africa in 1908. His work contributed to the formation of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa and the Zion Christian Church.

In November 1910, two Swedish Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Belém, Brazil. Their work established the movement that became the Assembleias de Deus, or Assemblies of God of Brazil.

By 1911, many white ministers were distancing themselves from an existing Pentecostal arrangement under African-American leader Bishop Charles Harrison Mason. Mason and other African-American leaders were not invited to the initial 1914 fellowship.

Image source: Assemblies of God

The Oneness teaching emerged as a controversial new issue at a 1913 camp meeting. Amid the controversy, the Assemblies of God rejected it, and many churches and pastors withdrew or were forced to withdraw from the denomination in 1916.

In 1914, about 300 predominantly white Pentecostal ministers and laypeople gathered in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to create the General Council of the Assemblies of God, a national Pentecostal fellowship.

To avoid confusion, the church changed its name to the Church of the Nazarene in 1919.

Image source: Church of the Nazarene

One Pentecostal church maintained an interracial identity until 1924, when its white ministers withdrew and formed Pentecostal Church, Incorporated.

Image source: Church of God in Christ

In 1928, the World Christian Fundamentals Association labeled Pentecostalism “fanatical” and “unscriptural,” reflecting the movement's continuing rejection by many fundamentalists.

By the early 1940s, opposition to Pentecostals was giving way to cooperation with leaders of the new evangelicalism. American Pentecostals participated in founding the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942.

The Pentecostal World Fellowship was founded in 1947, giving Pentecostal denominations a mechanism for interaction at international as well as national levels.

In 1995, David Barrett estimated that there were 217 million denominational Pentecostals worldwide, illustrating the movement's extensive global growth.

Brian Houston, born in 1954, founded Hillsong Church and served as national president of Australian Christian Churches, the Australian branch of the Assemblies of God, from 1997 to 2009.

A 2006 ten-country Pew Forum survey found that 49 percent of Pentecostals in the United States, 50 percent in Brazil, 41 percent in South Africa, and 54 percent in India said they never speak or pray in tongues.

A 2011 Pew Forum study estimated that there were 279 million classical Pentecostals, representing about 4 percent of the world's population and 12.8 percent of the world's Christians.

In 2012, the National Council of Evangelicals of France published a document criticizing prosperity theology. It stated that prosperity may be possible for believers but warned that an extreme version leads to materialism and idolatry.

The National Council of Evangelicals of France published The Miraculous Healing in 2015. The document described medicine as one of the gifts given by God to humanity.

According to a 2025 denomination census, the Assemblies of God had become the world's largest Pentecostal denomination, with 442,000 churches and 85 million adherents worldwide.