Apostolic / Oneness Pentecostal

Pentecostals who baptise in the name of Jesus alone and reject a trinitarian formulation of God.

Sources split: RCMS and ARDA count them within Pentecostalism; theological reference works often separate them as non-trinitarian. Recorded both ways here rather than chosen.

Pentecostals who baptize in the name of Jesus alone — a family whose very existence turns on how the church may speak of God.

Heritage

Born inside early Pentecostalism's "New Issue": beginning around 1913–1916, a stream of the young revival concluded that the apostles baptized in the name of Jesus (Acts 2:38) and that Father, Son and Spirit are titles of the one God revealed in Jesus. When the Assemblies of God adopted a trinitarian statement in 1916, roughly a quarter of its ministers withdrew, gathering chiefly in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World — deliberately interracial when the surrounding movement was segregating — and later the United Pentecostal Church International (1945).

Theological family

Oneness rather than trinitarian: one God, undivided, revealed as Father in creation, Son in redemption, Spirit in the church — with baptism in Jesus' name and Spirit baptism central to Christian initiation as most of the family reads Acts. Census-style sources count the family inside Pentecostalism; theological reference works usually separate it; the taxonomy records both.

Who decides what

Varies by body: the UPCI works through a General Superintendent and district structure; PAW and several historically Black bodies are episcopal, with bishops. Congregational life is strongly pastor-led across the family.

What a first-time visitor would find

Expect full-throated Pentecostal worship — music, tongues, prayer at the altar — and in many congregations visible holiness standards: uncut hair and skirts for women in much of the UPCI stream, less uniformly elsewhere. Baptism is by immersion in the name of Jesus, and it matters enormously here.

What it has always cared about

The name of Jesus; holiness of life made visible; a strong urban and working-class church-planting record; and in the PAW, an unbroken interracial witness running back to Azusa through decades when that was rare everywhere else in American religion.

Its gift to the wider church

A standing, serious question put to the whole church about what it means that God is one — asked not by liberal revisionists but by some of the most fervent revivalists in the country. And a demonstration, in the PAW, that Azusa's interracial fire could be institutionalized, not merely remembered.

Commonly confused with

With trinitarian Pentecostals constantly, since worship looks similar from the pew; the difference is confessed, not performed. "Apostolic" in a church name usually — not always — signals this family: the New Apostolic Church (Irvingite) and the Apostolic Christian Church (Anabaptist) are entirely different traditions, and the Apostolic Faith Church of Portland is trinitarian.

Range of views inside it

The family divides over how strictly holiness standards bind, over whether salvation strictly requires Jesus-name baptism and tongues (bodies and pastors within bodies answer differently), and over cooperation with trinitarian Christians — from full separation to warm fellowship.

A note from the mapmakers: Whether any specific "Apostolic" congregation belongs to this family cannot be read from its name; our field resolves only a minority of them to a body. Nothing here may be asserted of any congregation, especially its position on who is saved — a question on which this family itself holds a range. All sentences drawn from this record hedge as "churches in this tradition typically…".

Sources: United Pentecostal Church International — our beliefs (UPCI) · Pentecostal Assemblies of the World — history (PAW) · The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (Vinson Synan, Eerdmans)

Where Apostolic / Oneness Pentecostal churches are on the map

391 Apostolic / Oneness Pentecostal congregations appear on The Church Map, across 41 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1916 — The New Issue: Oneness Pentecostalism

    A dispute over the Godhead and the baptismal formula — "in the name of Jesus" versus the trinitarian formula — divided young Pentecostalism when the Assemblies of God adopted a trinitarian statement in 1916 and about a quarter of its ministers withdrew. The Oneness stream organized chiefly in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, which remained deliberately interracial when much of the movement segregated, and later the United Pentecostal Church.

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