Yesterday, I was in Topeka, Kansas with a group of enthusiastic pastors and church leaders. We gathered to think and pray together about multiplying the church in Kansas. The meeting was convened by Bo Melin, pastor of First Assembly of God Topeka. Bo has led First AG for the past 7 years. He’s helped the church transition from a traditional single campus church to one church in three locations (and possibly soon to be four). You can read more about Topeka First here. Topeka is not Bo’s first experience with multiplying the church. As a pastor in the state of Washington, Bo planted four daughter churches as offspring of the mother congregation. In spite of his experience and success at multiplication, Bo felt that it would be valuable to learn about what others are doing to multiply the church, so he invited me to serve as a facilitator and a consultant for the day.

Word got out and other pastors asked if they could come. Kansas District Superintendent Terry Yancey and some of this district team leaders showed up.  Before you know it, we had a room full of leaders from all over Kansas loaded with ideas and questions. It was a blast!

In the back of my mind, I remembered from my “History and Polity” class that something had happened in Topeka in the early 1900’s that many view as a catalyst for Azuza Street. But my memory was fuzzy, so I asked the leaders about the role that Topeka had played in the early years of the modern Pentecostal movement. One of them summarized the role of Topeka by exclaiming…”this was Ground Zero.” So I did some research and found an article from the “Council Today”newspaper published at the 49th General Council that convened in Kansas City in August 2001. I’ve cut and pasted the article below along with a link to it’s location on the AG website.

As the significance of Topeka dawned on me, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of providence about the meeting that took place yesterday. With an attitude reminiscent of the heart of the young people who had gathered in Topeka over a century before, these 21st century Spirit empowered leaders had gathered again to pray for God’s fresh anointing to build bridges to lost people. The 1901 meeting didn’t look like much when it initially happened. It seemed to mainly generate controversy and ridicule. But God orchestrated a divine chain of events that resulted in hundreds of millions experiencing a powerful Pentecost and an unprecedented wave of evangelism.

The meeting yesterday was unremarkable in many ways. But as we circled to pray at the end of the day I had a sense another wave was beginning to roll. It felt that we’d been called together “for such a time as this” and that God was going to use this 21st century seed to bring a fresh wave transformational Pentecost that will impact the destinies of many people. I’m excited about what’s next!

The birthplace of the Pentcostal movement
Remembering the place where it all began —Topeka, Kansas
(Tuesday, August 7, 2001)

By Wayne Warner

If you are familiar with the Midwest, you are probably acquainted with Topeka, Kansas, the capital of the state and less than an hour west of Kansas City on Interstate 70.

Although it is commonly said that the Pentecostal movement—of which the Assemblies of God has been a part since 1914—began at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles between 1906-09, we should take a new look at neighboring Topeka. Perhaps we’ll want to compromise: Topeka being the birthplace and Azusa the crib.

During the first 6 weeks of 1901, Topeka experienced two social and religious campaigns that would have international exposure. One by a nationally known temperance leader and the other by a 27-year-old Methodist dropout.

The temperance leader was the legendary saloon-busting Carrie Nation who stormed into town on a mission, determined to rid the city of saloons. Aided by her axe-wielding cohorts, the imposing 6’ Carrie pushed through the doors of Murphy’s Saloon on February 15, making short work of beer kegs, mirrors and bottles, and leaving the place in shambles.

Across town a month earlier in a make-shift Bible school, the former Methodist Charles F. Parham preached that it was possible to return to an apostolic lifestyle as found in the book of Acts. And he was ready to prove it—all for a quick evangelization of the world.

Carrie Nation’s crusade on the evils of alcohol helped fuel efforts to establish the Prohibition Movement between 1920-33. But the movement, despite all of its good intentions and support from Christians from coast to coast, was regarded as a failure. The other Topeka happening early in 1901, however, birthed the Pentecostal movement and is credited with sowing the seeds of what is now a worldwide constituency estimated at 500 million strong.

Charles Fox Parham

Muscatine, Iowa, is a Mississippi River city downriver from Davenport. Here Charles Parham was born June 4, 1873, but later with his family moved to a farm in Kansas. He was converted as a young teenager and soon began attending a Methodist church where he taught a Sunday school class. Feeling a call to preach, he began holding meetings at age 15 and then enrolled at Southwest Kansas College, in Winfield. After he received a minister’s license at age 20, he assumed a temporary appointment as supply pastor at the Eudora Methodist Church, some 20 miles west of Kansas City

But all was not well with Charles Parham and the Methodist Church. He believed the Holiness movement and certain independent ministers were closer to the New Testament theology and practice than were the old-line denominations.

Holiness leaders in the 1890s urged believers to pray for a “second blessing,” a sanctifying experience which most 19th-century Methodists rejected. Parham accepted this Wesleyan position and later surrendered his license, denouncing the Methodist Church as being far from God. Being independent, he reasoned, would free him of the “confines of a pastorate, with a lot of theater-going, card-playing, wine-drinking fashionable, unconverted Methodists.”

Perhaps the Methodist welcomed the parting as much or more than did the sometimes cantankerous Parham.

Topeka and radical strategy

Following the miraculous healing of their son, Parham and his wife Sarah moved to Topeka in 1898 and opened the Bethel Healing home, a socially active Christian center with a mission not unlike today’s Teen Challenge centers. They preached to sinners, taught a crisis view of sanctification, prayed for the sick, rescued prostitutes, helped the homeless, established employment and orphanage services, published the Apostolic Faith paper and opened a short-term Bible school.

Parham, along with several other ministers, became interested in signs and wonders and the baptism in the Holy Ghost to evangelize the world. Some distinguishing New Testament experience or sign, he believed, would allow the believer to know when he or she had experienced the Baptism.

Historian Gary McGee called the ideas “radical strategy” for reaching the world; and the more Parham studied the views of others who accepted the strategy, the more he made it part of his own teaching.

Parham believed that proof of his tongues theories came after he set up the Bethel Bible School in a rented mansion dubbed “Stone’s Folly” in west Topeka.

Urging his students to study the Scriptures for the evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, Parham left on a preaching trip to Kansas City. When he returned, the students were convinced that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence of the experience, citing Acts 2 as the authority.

One of the students, Agnes Ozman, asked Parham to lay hands on her and pray that she would receive the Acts 2 experience. She later wrote, “As hands were laid upon my head, the Holy Spirit fell upon me, and I began to speak in tongues, glorifying God. I talked several languages.” The ecstatic Ozman added, “It was as though rivers of living water were proceeding from my innermost being.”

Within a few days more than a dozen, including Parham, had spoken in tongues. The conclusion was that they had been baptized in the Holy Spirit, just as the 120 experienced on the Day of Pentecost.

The press and churches scoffed at Parham’s claims that God was restoring New Testament gifts and experiences. Some branded the group as fanatical, crazy over religion and even demon possessed.

But J. Roswell Flower, one of the founders of the Assemblies of God, looked back some 40 years later and called the Topeka conclusion a “most momentous decision.” Flower noted that believers had spoken in tongues throughout the previous 19 centuries but had not associated it with the fullness of the Spirit. Flower said, “These students had deduced from God’s Word that in apostolic times, the speaking in tongues was considered to be the initial physical evidence of a person’s having received the baptism in the Holy Spirit (See Acts 10:46—‘For they heard them speak with tongues….’).”

“It was this decision which has made the Pentecostal movement of the Twentieth Century,” Flower added.

The Parham era in Topeka lasted about 2 years, and as things began to wind down a few weeks after Agnes Ozman experienced her personal Pentecost, Parham’s ministry seemed to be in decline. The school closed its doors, and Parham subsequently conducted meetings here and there with limited success.

A jump-start for the Pentecostal movement

A physical healing in Eldorado Springs, Mo., in 1903 would change the lack of acceptance and exposure and bring Parham back to Kansas where a revival meeting exploded and enjoyed far-reaching results for the Pentecostal movement. While the Topeka experience was generally viewed negatively in the press and the organized churches, the welcome mat was out for Parham in the mining town of Galena in southeast Kansas. Galena would become the jump-start for Parham and the Pentecostal movement. Some would even call it the emergency room.

It all started when Mary “Mother” Arthur, a godly woman and the wife of a Galena businessman, went to Eldorado Springs suffering with chronic illnesses, near blindness and extreme pain. “I kept earnestly seeking God every day until one morning in February 1903, He gave me a promise—James 5:14, 15,” she wrote.

But when she asked her pastor to pray, he as much as told her that she was on her own and refused to pray. She was so desperate that she even contemplated suicide.

As she related her testimony numerous times throughout her life, Mary Arthur believed she was in God’s perfect timing when she left her home in Galena to spend time in Eldorado Springs. For here she heard Charles Parham conducting meetings in the park and inviting the sick to come to the house where he was staying.

Mary Arthur jumped at the opportunity. Parham and his workers prayed, and Mary’s eyesight was restored, and the pain vanished. “God’s mighty healing power surged through my body from my head to my feet, making me feel like a new person,” she exclaimed.

That stirred Galena like nothing had before. The Arthurs invited Parham to their home in Galena in October 1903, but happily the crowds forced them to move to a tent, and then to the 1,000-seat Grand-Leader Auditorium. Even this was not big enough as crowds poured in during the next 5 months for salvation, healing and the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Parham baptized about a hundred converts in nearby Spring River.

Now newspapers as far away as Cincinnati published largely complimentary stories.

The expanding Pentecostal movement

From Galena, Parham and the growing list of Apostolic Faith workers reached other towns. They planted churches in the Kansas towns of Columbus, Melrose and Baxter Springs as well as Joplin, Mo.

From the Midwest, Parham set his sights on Texas where he held meetings near Houston. Then the party moved into Houston where Parham set up another Bible school.

It was in this Houston Bible School that an African-American preacher, William Seymour, was allowed to participate despite the Jim Crow laws of the day. He listened and accepted Parham’s new teaching on the baptism in the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues. Seymour, of course, wound up in Los Angeles where the Azusa Street revival overflowed and spilled out around the world beginning in 1906.

But that’s another story.

Click here to read this article on the AG website.