Assemblies of God (USA)

Heritage

About three hundred preachers of the Azusa Street revival stream gathered at Hot Springs, Arkansas in April 1914 to organize a cooperative fellowship — not a creed — for credentialing, missions and doctrinal steadiness; many of the white ministers present held their papers from Charles H. Mason's Church of God in Christ, a debt the Assemblies of God itself acknowledges. The Oneness controversy forced the 1916 Statement of Fundamental Truths and cost the young fellowship roughly a quarter of its ministers. From Springfield, Missouri it grew into a global movement, and in 1994 it joined the "Memphis Miracle," dissolving the whites-only Pentecostal Fellowship of North America to form an interracial association alongside the Church of God in Christ — a late payment on that founding debt. RCMS 2020 counts 12,739 US congregations.

Theological family

Trinitarian, evangelical Pentecostal: salvation through Christ, baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience distinct from conversion with speaking in tongues as its initial physical evidence, divine healing, and the imminent return of Christ — the four cardinal doctrines. Broadly Arminian in accent, and deliberately non-creedal beyond its Fundamental Truths.

Who decides what

A hybrid its members know well: fully sovereign local churches that own their property and call their pastors, inside district councils that hold real authority over ministerial credentials, under a General Council and an elected general superintendent. It calls itself both congregational and presbyterian, and means it.

What a first-time visitor would find

In most congregations, a contemporary worship service an evangelical visitor would find familiar — worship band, extended singing, expository or topical preaching, response time at the front. The distinctives surface in prayer: tongues are believed and practiced, more often in prayer meetings and altar services than from the platform, and prayer for healing is ordinary.

What it has always cared about

World missions above nearly everything — its indigenous-church missiology, classically stated in Melvin Hodges' writing, taught generations of evangelicals to plant churches that govern, support and propagate themselves; church planting at home; youth and campus ministry; and Teen Challenge, the addiction-recovery ministry begun by Assemblies of God pastor David Wilkerson.

Its gift to the wider church

It organized the revival without embalming it: the AG pattern — cooperative fellowship, sovereign congregations, missionary agency — became the most-copied institutional template in world Pentecostalism, and its missions culture helped make Pentecostalism the largest Protestant stream on earth.

Commonly confused with

With the Independent Assemblies of God International, a separate Scandinavian-descended fellowship; with Oneness "apostolic" bodies, from which it differs on the Trinity itself; with the various Churches of God, distinct bodies entirely; and with any congregation using "Assembly of God" informally, since the wording is generic in much of the world.

Range of views inside it

Wide range in worship expressiveness, from demonstrative Pentecostal services to contemporary-evangelical restraint; in how the initial-evidence doctrine is pastorally emphasized; across its many language districts, which give the fellowship one of the most ethnically diverse memberships of any large American denomination; and in culture and politics congregation to congregation.

Where Assemblies of God (USA) churches are on the map

2,400 Assemblies of God (USA) congregations appear on The Church Map, across 50 states.

• Texas — 222
• California — 180
• Pennsylvania — 127
• Florida — 123
• Missouri — 95
• New York — 95
• Minnesota — 89
• Washington — 89
• Michigan — 81
• Ohio — 80

Moments this body was part of

• 1914 — The Assemblies of God organizes

  About three hundred Pentecostal ministers met at Hot Springs, Arkansas in April 1914 to bring order and cooperation to the scattered revival — founding what became the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world, with a missions force that today serves in over 250 countries and territories.

• 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.

• 1942 — The National Association of Evangelicals

  Evangelicals from dozens of denominations — holiness, Pentecostal, Baptist, Reformed — formed the National Association of Evangelicals at St. Louis in 1942, choosing cooperative engagement over separatism. Pentecostals, long dismissed by other conservatives, were included from the start; World Relief and shared radio, missions and chaplaincy work followed.

  The NAE marked the moment America's revivalist traditions decided they were one family with many rooms.

• 1960 — Youth With A Mission and the deregulation of missions

  Loren Cunningham, the son of two ordained Assemblies of God ministers, saw waves breaking over the continents in 1956 and read them as young people carrying the gospel. His own denomination offered to fund the idea if he would start with ten or twenty young people a year; convinced the vision was larger, he left its structures and founded Youth With A Mission at Lausanne in 1960, working alongside his wife Darlene. YWAM took anyone, from any denomination, for short terms, self-funded — a shape of mission that barely existed before. The Discipleship Training School followed in 1974, a university in Hawaii in 1977, and Mercy Ships in 1979.

  YWAM belongs to no church and asks no one which church they came from — which is why staff from nearly every tradition on this map have served in it, and why the short-term mission trip it invented is now common property, run by congregations that agree on little else.

• 1994 — The Memphis Miracle

  The all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America dissolved itself at Memphis in October 1994 and was refounded the next day as the interracial Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America, with COGIC's leadership central to the new body. In the middle of the proceedings, a white pastor knelt and washed the feet of a Black bishop while the assembly wept — the moment participants themselves called the Memphis Miracle.

  The movement born interracial at Azusa in 1906, segregated for eight decades, publicly repented and rejoined itself in the city where COGIC was born.

• 2006–2021 — Global Legacy becomes the Bethel Leaders Network

  Bethel Church in Redding, California — an Assemblies of God congregation until it became independent in 2006 — grew a worldwide relational web of leaders and congregations through its Global Legacy network, renamed the Bethel Leaders Network in 2021. Alongside it, Bethel Music's songs entered the weekly worship of congregations across nearly every Protestant tradition.

  Whatever a tradition makes of Bethel's distinctives, on any given Sunday its songs are sung in thousands of churches that share nothing else with Redding — worship as the era's common currency.