Pentecostal (Trinitarian)

Baptism in the Holy Spirit with spiritual gifts, from the Azusa Street revival of 1906 onward.

The revival that broke out on Azusa Street in 1906 and became the fastest-growing form of Christianity on earth: baptism in the Holy Spirit, gifts expected, and the amen out loud.

Heritage

Holiness expectation met Spirit baptism: Charles Parham's Topeka Bible school in 1901, then the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles (1906–09) under William J. Seymour, a Black holiness preacher whose mission drew Black, white, Latino and Asian worshipers to one altar. From that fountainhead: the Church of God in Christ, reorganized as a Pentecostal body under Charles Harrison Mason in 1907; the Assemblies of God, formed at Hot Springs in 1914; the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), whose roots predate Azusa; and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. The early interracial worship largely re-segregated within a generation — said plainly, because the family itself now says it; the 1994 "Memphis Miracle" began the repair.

Theological family

Trinitarian evangelicalism plus the distinctive: baptism in the Holy Spirit as an experience beyond conversion, with speaking in tongues — in several bodies doctrinally the initial evidence; divine healing; and expectancy as a theological posture. Oneness Pentecostal bodies, which baptize in Jesus' name and hold a different doctrine of the Godhead, are treated separately in this taxonomy.

Who decides what

The full range: episcopal government with bishops in the Church of God in Christ, a blend of sovereign local churches with district and general councils in the Assemblies of God, and everything between across the family.

What a first-time visitor would find

Expressive and participatory: extended sung worship, prayer aloud and all at once, testimony, altar ministry with laying on of hands, and spiritual gifts exercised under pastoral order. The service is built on the expectation that God will do something.

What it has always cared about

World missions on a vast scale; divine healing; the holiness inheritance of consecrated living; gospel music — the Church of God in Christ alone shaped American gospel profoundly; and relentless church planting.

Its gift to the wider church

The re-centering of world Christianity: the Pentecostal and charismatic stream now numbers in the hundreds of millions and traces to this family's revival — the largest Christian growth of the modern era. Add embodied, expectant worship that renewed even its critics, and Azusa Street's original picture of races and classes at one altar, which remains both gift and unfinished assignment.

Commonly confused with

With the Wesleyan-Holiness family, its parent — the most contested boundary in this whole taxonomy; with the post-1960s charismatic networks, a separate family here; "Apostolic" in a church title usually signals Oneness bodies, filed separately; and "Church of God" is a many-family name collision.

Range of views inside it

Enormous: quiet suburban congregations and all-night services in the same family; bodies differ on initial evidence, on women in ministry — the Foursquare Church was founded by a woman, while the Church of God in Christ reserves the pastorate to men — and prosperity teaching is contested within the family, not a family doctrine.

A note from the mapmakers: Pentecostal practice varies congregation by congregation more than in almost any family: assert nothing about a specific congregation's worship, gifts practice or teaching. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Pentecostal churches characteristically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.

Sources: The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Vinson Synan, Eerdmans) · The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (Cecil M. Robeck Jr., Thomas Nelson) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where Pentecostal (Trinitarian) churches are on the map

16,681 Pentecostal (Trinitarian) congregations appear on The Church Map, across 51 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1897–1907 — The Church of God in Christ

    Charles Harrison Mason founded the Church of God in Christ as a holiness body in 1897; after receiving Spirit baptism at Azusa Street he reorganized it in Memphis in 1907 as a Pentecostal church. Because COGIC was for years the only incorporated Pentecostal body able to credential clergy, hundreds of white ministers — including many future Assemblies of God founders — held ordination under Bishop Mason.

    For nearly a decade, much of white American Pentecostalism was ordained by a Black bishop — a fact both streams are still learning to remember together.

  • 1906–1909 — Azusa Street

    In a former livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a revival led by William J. Seymour — a Black holiness preacher, the son of formerly enslaved parents — ran for three years and launched global Pentecostalism, now counted in the hundreds of millions. Black, white, Latino and Asian worshipers prayed together under a Black pastor in Jim Crow America; the participant Frank Bartleman wrote that at Azusa "the color line was washed away in the blood."

    Modern Christianity's fastest-growing stream began as an interracial prayer meeting led by the son of enslaved people. Its later divisions were a departure from its birth, not an expression of it.

  • 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.

  • 1916–1970 — The Great Migration replants the Black church

    Six million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern and western cities, and the Black church moved with them — historic congregations swelled, storefront churches by the thousands opened, COGIC became a national church, and in Chicago Thomas A. Dorsey fused blues and sacred song into gospel music, which reshaped the worship of the whole American church.

    Gospel music — born in the migrating Black church — may be the most widely shared gift any American tradition has given the others.

  • 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.

  • 1923 — Aimee Semple McPherson and the Foursquare Church

    Aimee Semple McPherson opened the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles in 1923 and founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel — one of the first American denominations founded by a woman, with a commissary that fed an estimated 1.5 million people through the Depression regardless of creed.

  • 1942 — Wycliffe Bible Translators

    William Cameron Townsend, a onetime Bible salesman in Guatemala, founded Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1942 on a simple conviction: everyone deserves Scripture in the language of their heart. Workers came from nearly every Protestant stream, and the movement has touched over a thousand languages.

    Bible translation became the missionary work no single tradition could claim — or accomplish — alone.

  • 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.

  • 1950–1952 — The child-sponsorship missions

    Baptist evangelist Bob Pierce founded World Vision in 1950 for children orphaned by the Korean War, and Everett Swanson founded Compassion International in 1952 from the same battlefields. Child sponsorship — one family, one child, across an ocean — became the door through which millions of American Christians of every tradition entered world missions.

  • 1960–1977 — The charismatic renewal crosses every border

    When Episcopal rector Dennis Bennett told his Van Nuys congregation in 1960 that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal experience jumped the denominational fence — into Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and, from the 1967 Duquesne weekend, Catholic life. The 1977 Kansas City conference drew some fifty thousand charismatics, roughly half of them Catholic, worshiping in one stadium.

    A renewal that began at a segregated-out revival in 1906 ended up praying in every tradition's sanctuary — the most border-crossing spiritual movement in American history.

  • 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.

  • 1967–1990 — Michigan becomes a centre of Catholic charismatic life

    The Catholic charismatic renewal began at a student retreat outside Pittsburgh in February 1967, and it reached Michigan almost at once: Ralph Martin and Steve Clark, then working out of the Cursillo office in Lansing, carried it to Ann Arbor and gathered the prayer meeting that became the Word of God community that same year. Its magazine, New Covenant, claimed 12,000 subscribers in 87 countries by 1972, and for two decades Ann Arbor was one of the places the worldwide renewal was organised from. The community itself divided in the early 1990s as its founders parted ways.

    A renewal that began in a Los Angeles livery stable in 1906, and that most Catholics of 1950 would have called someone else's religion entirely, was being taught to the world from a college town in Michigan within sixty years.

  • 1971 — The common songbook

    From Maranatha! Music in the Jesus Movement, through the hymns of Keith and Kristyn Getty, to the catalogs of Hillsong, Bethel and Elevation: American congregations of nearly every tradition now draw Sunday music from one shared, living repertoire. A Baptist church, a Catholic youth group, a Pentecostal storefront and a Methodist chapel can all sing the same three songs in the same week without anyone planning it.

    The traditions never merged their pulpits — but they have very nearly merged their singing, and singing is how most people carry their faith through the week.

  • 1974 — Lausanne: American missions joins a world table

    Billy Graham and John Stott convened 2,700 evangelical leaders from 150 nations at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974. American denominations and agencies — long the senders — sat as partners with the global church, and the Lausanne Covenant became the shared missions charter across denominational lines, holding evangelism and social concern together.

    The missionary movement America helped send out came back as a worldwide family — and the American church discovered it was one member among many.

  • 1976 — Prison Fellowship

    Charles Colson, converted before serving prison time for Watergate, founded Prison Fellowship in 1976; its in-prison ministry and Angel Tree Christmas program run on volunteers from Catholic parishes, Baptist churches, Pentecostal storefronts and Presbyterian sessions alike.

  • 1990–1997 — Promise Keepers fills the stadiums

    Football coach Bill McCartney's men's movement filled stadiums through the 1990s — over a million men at "Stand in the Gap" on the National Mall in 1997 — drawing Baptists, Pentecostals, Catholics and mainliners to the same field, with racial reconciliation preached as a core promise rather than a side theme.

    For one decade, the most visible gatherings of American Christian men were deliberately cross-denominational and deliberately cross-racial.

  • 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.

  • 1996 — Alpha crosses the Atlantic

    The Alpha course — a dinner-table introduction to Christianity from Holy Trinity Brompton, an Anglican parish in London — spread through the US from the mid-1990s into tens of thousands of congregations: Catholic parishes run it, as do Baptist, Pentecostal, Lutheran and non-denominational churches, largely unaltered.

    A single Anglican parish's supper course became common property of nearly every tradition in this taxonomy — proof that the traditions will gladly borrow from each other when the gift is good.

  • 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.

  • 2016 — Encounter Ministries and the renewal's next generation

    Fr. Mathias Thelen — ordained for the Diocese of Lansing in 2010, pastor of St. Patrick parish in Brighton, Michigan, and holder of a licence in sacred theology from the Angelicum in Rome — founded Encounter Ministries in 2016 with Patrick Reis, to teach ordinary Catholics to pray for healing and to expect the Holy Spirit to act. Its Encounter School of Ministry runs a two-year curriculum reviewed by standing boards of bishops and theologians, and Thelen's Biblical Foundations for the Role of Healing in Evangelization (2018) sets out the theology behind it. It is a ministry inside the Catholic Church, not a body beside it, and it stands forty minutes down the road from where the American renewal was organised in the 1970s.

    What Azusa Street handed to Catholics through a student retreat in 1967 is now taught in Catholic parishes by Catholic priests with their bishops' approval — the same fire, received into a very different house, and at home there.

  • 2023 — The Asbury outpouring

    A routine chapel service at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky on February 8, 2023 simply did not end: students kept praying and singing for sixteen days, tens of thousands drove in from every state and stream — Baptist deacons, Catholic students, Pentecostal grandmothers in the same pews — and the university kept the platform deliberately low: no celebrity preachers, no branding, phones discouraged.

    The most-watched American revival in a generation belonged to no denomination, promoted no one, and was handed off — on purpose — before anyone could own it.

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