Pentecostal Assemblies of the World
Pentecostal Assemblies of the World belongs to the Apostolic / Oneness Pentecostal family of churches.
Governance: episcopal.
Pentecostal Assemblies of the World reports 108 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
The oldest organized body of Oneness Pentecostalism — and the American denomination that, when nearly every church of its era divided by race, would not.
Heritage
The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World traces to the first years after Azusa Street, organized on the West Coast in the revival's immediate wake and reorganized at Indianapolis, where Bishop Garfield T. Haywood's Christ Temple anchored it. When the Jesus-name teaching swept Pentecostalism after 1913, the PAW became its organizational home, holding Black and white ministers in one body. In 1924 most white ministers withdrew to form organizations of their own — the stream that later fed the United Pentecostal Church — and the PAW refused to follow them into segregation: it has remained interracial, under predominantly Black leadership, in unbroken continuity from that day to this. RCMS 2020 counts 108 congregations.
Theological family
Apostolic (Oneness) Pentecostal: one God, undivided, manifest in Jesus Christ; baptism by immersion in the name of Jesus; Spirit baptism evidenced by tongues; holiness of life. Haywood taught much of this theology in hymns his church still sings. Trinitarian bodies confess the Godhead differently — noted here once, adjudicated never.
Who decides what
Episcopal: a presiding bishop and board of bishops over episcopal dioceses, an annual summer convention that gathers the connection, and pastors serving under episcopal oversight. Women have long been credentialed to preach and pastor within the PAW.
What a first-time visitor would find
Apostolic worship in the Black church's full register — choirs, Hammond organ, congregational song, concerted prayer, tongues, holy dancing — carried by a hymnody of its own: Haywood's "I See a Crimson Stream of Blood" travels wherever the church does.
What it has always cared about
Interracial fellowship held as conviction rather than accident, through the hardest decades America offered; Haywood's hymn-borne theology; Indianapolis as a mother city; and the dignity of an episcopal church built and led by people the era refused to follow.
Its gift to the wider church
Its unbroken interracial history is a gift to every American church: the PAW is standing evidence that the color line in American Christianity was a choice, because one Pentecostal body — with every pressure to divide — chose otherwise and survived to say so.
Commonly confused with
With the United Pentecostal Church International, the largest body of the stream that departed in 1924 — same doctrinal family, divided history; with the Church of God in Christ, Black and Pentecostal but trinitarian; and with the many apostolic bodies, COOLJC among them, whose founders passed through the PAW's orbit.
Range of views inside it
Range from historic urban cathedrals to small congregations, in worship style across the gospel spectrum, and in how holiness standards are pastorally applied; the Oneness doctrinal core and the interracial identity are constants.
A note from the mapmakers: Counts for this body vary considerably by source; we publish only what RCMS 2020 reports — 108 congregations — and note that a census can miss congregations that report loosely. Nothing here may be asserted of an individual congregation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "PAW congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: Pentecostal Assemblies of the World — about (PAW) · Early Interracial Oneness Pentecostalism: G. T. Haywood and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (Talmadge L. French, Pickwick Publications) · Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Estrelda Y. Alexander, IVP Academic)
Moments this body was part of
- 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.
More of the Apostolic / Oneness Pentecostal story · Find these churches on the map