Pillar of Fire International
Pillar of Fire International belongs to the Wesleyan-Holiness family of churches.
Governance: hierarchical.
The holiness church founded and led by Alma Bridwell White — the first woman consecrated a bishop in the United States — with a history that includes both that first and a chapter its own members have since repented of.
Heritage
Alma Bridwell White, a Methodist preacher's wife whose own call to preach found no room in her denomination, founded her movement in Denver in 1901 (first called the Pentecostal Union) and renamed it Pillar of Fire in 1917; in 1918 she was consecrated bishop, the first woman in America to hold the office. The church built headquarters at Zarephath, New Jersey, schools, and pioneering religious radio stations, including KPOF in Denver. Its history carries a grave chapter: in the 1920s Alma White publicly allied the church with the Ku Klux Klan — an alliance later generations of the church have explicitly repudiated and publicly apologized for.
Theological family
Wesleyan-holiness: conversion and entire sanctification in the Methodist revival line, with a founding conviction that God calls women to preach and lead.
Who decides what
Hierarchical in the episcopal pattern of its founder: a general superintendent or bishop over its ministries, churches, schools, and stations.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor finds a small holiness congregation — hymns, prayer, biblical preaching — attached in several places to the church's schools and broadcast ministries.
What it has always cared about
Women's ministry and leadership, decades before most of American Christianity; holiness preached plainly; education and religious broadcasting.
Its gift to the wider church
Two instructive gifts: the demonstration, in 1918, that a woman could lead a church body in America — and the harder, humbler demonstration that a church can face the worst chapter of its own history, repudiate it by name, and continue.
Commonly confused with
With Pentecostal bodies, because of the abandoned early Pentecostal Union label — the church is holiness, not Pentecostal; and with other small holiness bodies of similar vintage.
Range of views inside it
A small body today; its ministries in education and radio are more visible than its congregations.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation, and this record's account of the 1920s is stated plainly because honesty is owed, alongside the church's own repudiation of it. No congregation count is stored — the body is verified absent from the RCMS 2020 national table. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Pillar of Fire ministries typically…".
Sources: Pillar of Fire International — our history (Pillar of Fire International) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
Where Pillar of Fire International churches are on the map
1 Pillar of Fire International congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.
- New Jersey — 1
More of the Wesleyan-Holiness story · Find these churches on the map