Chinese :

The Birth and Growth of a Uniquely Chinese Version of

J. Gordon Melton Baylor University Email: [email protected]

Abstract The Pentecostal movement, a new Christian movement defined by its triad of belief and practice— as evidence of the of the Holy Spirit, an expectation of the imminent return of Christ, and a heightened missionary zeal—emerged in 1901 in small town America. During its still formative stage, however, became one of the two places where the movement would establish a center for its global dispersion. Movement founder Charles Parham identified the first language spoken in the initial outburst of unknown tongues to be Chinese, a phenomenon repeated in the experience of the movement’s three pioneering missionaries—T. J. McIntosh and Lillian and Alfred Garr. During 1906-07, no less than seven representatives of the still miniscule movement, including four women, arrived in China.

Thus, even as Pentecostalism struggled with its birth pangs in North America, it experienced its birth in China, where in a very different setting it would develop a unique life of its own. In the crucible of a new land, Pentecostalism emerged as a uniquely Chinese movement—quite distinct from both from its Chinese Christian neighbors and the parallel North American Pentecostal Movement.

One the one hand, the Chinese phase of the movement highlights most of the basic issues in Pentecostal history globally—the role assigned women, the work of indigenous assistants, and the struggle with language in spreading the movement beyond the previously existing Christian

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community. Through its first decade, the need to master Chinese, either supernaturally or by self-education, continually appears as a major concern. At the same time, Chinese Pentecostalism interacts with the developing movement in North America, and, for example, reproduces the divisions that were splitting the movement, the division between Holiness and Finished Work theology and subsequently the perspective of Oneness theology.

On the other hand, as the movement quickly adjusted to its Chinese environment, the language issue disappears while the Oneness theology, which would gain only a small minority of adherents within the North American movement, would be accepted as the dominant expression of Chinese Pentecostalism.

This paper traces the initial interest in China by the first exponents of Pentecostalism, the movement’s almost immediate spread to , Shanghai, and Province, its relation with the preexisting Chinese Christian community, its development of local leadership, its division into denominations—denominationalism being the form religion takes in a free religious environment—and the emergence of the unique Chinese form of the movement—the True Church.

By the end of its first decade in China, the True Jesus Church had emerged as a Chinese critic of the whole Christian enterprise, would create a distinct theology, and become the dominant force in the new movement in China. The True Jesus Church would subsequently become one of the largest Chinese Christian movements and in later decades export its distinct Chinese version of Christianity from China to the larger world.

A hundred years after Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, sailed for southern China (1807), the initial representative of a new post-Protestant movement also sailed for China and upon his arrival made his way to Macau, where Morrison had also spent many of his China years. Thomas J. McIntosh, the first Pentecostal missionary in China was quickly joined by the Rev.

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Alfred G. and Lillian Garr and a small cadre of additional workers, all of whom settled in Hong Kong in the fall of 1907. Morrison had largely been denied contact with the Chinese public, and initial access relied on a few Chinese converts. Most notably, Leong Jung Fa (1787-1855), who assisted Morrison in the publication of the Monthly Chinese Magazine, was able to travel through Kwangtang (Guangdong) Province where he preached, distributed literature and recruited a set of Christian evangelists—the earliest phase of the indigenization of what to the Chinese was a very different new religion.

Alfred Garr, who landed in Hong Kong with no preparation for what he would encounter, found his assistance in the persons of Mok Lai Chi and Mr. and Mrs. T. M. Sung. Mok would not only provide a meeting hall for evangelistic activities, but would initiate the first Pentecostal periodical, the bi-lingual, Pentecostal Truths. Sung would emerge as an effective preacher and within a few years take control of the initial Pentecostal mission station. Because of the language situation, the Pentecostal movement would quickly recruit and empower Chinese leadership. A mere decade after its initial emergence, the Pentecostal movement become the birthing place of one of the earliest and most successful of the many Christian churches operating in the country, the completely Chinese movement, the True Jesus Church. The True Jesus Church would subsequently become the instrument of exporting Chinese Christianity to the global community.

Beginnings Chinese Pentecostalism can be traced to August 7, 1907, when the Rev. Thomas James McIntosh arrived in southern China from North Carolina to answer what he felt to be the call of God to the mission field. Accompanied by his wife, he settled in Macau where he found an audience for the new message he bore, a new way of doing Christianity that had originated among a small yet to be organized group of Holiness people. A contingent of some 26 missionaries who were

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vacationing in Macau during what is the hottest part of the year joined with a small group of Chinese Christian believers eager to hear the latest word from across the Pacific.1

Before leaving for China, McIntosh had experienced what was termed the baptism of the Holy Spirit, an experience that included his speaking in a tongue which neither he nor anyone he knew could understand, but which he believed was Chinese. Once he arrived in China, he fully expected to be able to preach in Chinese, even though he had never studied the language. The disappointment when he discovered that the sounds he was uttering were completely unintelligible to the Macau audience, however, dampened his enthusiasm for the new message only momentarily.

Though he had been ordained in a small Holiness denomination, McIntosh came to China as the self-appointed representative of the new Pentecostal movement. Pentecostalism can be dated to an event among an informal group of students in Wichita, , who had been exploring an important question for Holiness , what did the Bible say was the sign that someone had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Their conclusion was that the baptism was always accompanied by speaking in unknown tongues. This phenomenon had appeared at Pentecost, when the church was founded and accompanied the Apostles on their initial ministry in Jerusalem and around the Mediterranean basin. With this knowledge in hand, on New Year’s Eve 1900, the group found their way to the chapel at their small Bible School and early in the morning of January 1, one of their number, Agnes Ozman, became the first person consciously to seek for the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the coincidental experience of speaking in tongues. Soon, others,

1 Material on McIntosh has been compiled by Pentecostal Holiness Church historian Daniel Woods, and ably presented in his paper, “Failure and Success in the Ministry of T. J. McIntosh, the First Pentecostal Missionary to China” (A Paper presented at the International Pentecostal Holiness Church Archives Luncheon, 24th General Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 9, 2001). Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research 12 (January 2003). Posted at http://pctii.org/cyberj/cyberj12/woods.html.

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including the students’ mentor, former Methodist preacher Charles Fox Parham, also personally experienced a similar phenomenon.2

It is the peculiar setting of Ozman’s experience of tongues that initiates the new movement. While Holiness people had through the nineteenth century sought the baptism of the Holy Spirit while others in various revivalistic settings had spoken in tongues, Parham and his students now brought the two together while at the same time identifying tongues with the end-time prophecies of Acts 2. In so doing, Parham transformed tongues from just another revivalistic phenomenon into a central experience of the Christian life. Tongues was no longer just an interesting phenomena to be observed and commented upon in passing, but now became for believers the sign of an important step in their Christian existence, an experience to be earnestly sought and highly valued once received.

The rediscovery of speaking in tongues also comes at what Parham believed to be a crucial moment in human history, the beginning of the End Times—the outpouring of the Spirit had been prophesied in the book of Acts as a sign of Christ’s soon return to bring history to its culmination. Those who experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit were especially privileged, but have also been given a singular responsibility to take advantage of these last days to spread the word globally. They were to reach out to their natural allies within the Christian community, inform them what is happening, and invite their alignment to God’s action even as they preach the gospel to non-believers.

China was important almost from the beginning of the nascent movement. Although Ozman believed that the language she had spoken originally was Bohemian, Parham believed it to be

2 Agnes N. Ozman, What God Hath Wrought: Life and Work of Mrs. Agnes N. O. LaBerge (Chicago: Herald Publishing Co., n.d.). See especially pp. 28-39. Parham’s reaction to Ozman is covered in James R. Goff, Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 1989).

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Chinese, and began to spread that idea. He believed that tongues had been given to his students as a divine present so that the gospel could be spread worldwide in a last effort as the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ approached.3

Over the next few years, Parham led an effort to make this new truth known. Earth had entered its last days, Christ would soon return and the world needed to be evangelized. To assist that process, God was giving his people the gift of tongues, the same gift that the Apostles had experienced that assisted in the quick spread of Christianity in its first generation. As the movement spread through Oklahoma and Texas, Parham relocated to Houston, Texas, where the message reached the African American community. A young preacher William J. Seymour found his way to Parham’s school, and though unable to attend his classes, due to the racial segregation of the era, he absorbed the message. Not daunted by the fact that he had yet to experience the baptism of the Spirit himself, he carried the message and his hope of receiving the Spirit’s empowerment with him when he received the call to pastor a small church in Los Angeles.

The message of Holy Spirit baptism and speaking in tongues split the small African American congregation in Los Angeles, and Seymour and the few who wanted to listen to him had to begin meeting in a private home located on Bonnie Brae Street. Here on April 9, 1906, the Spirit fell, and Edward S. Lee began to speak in tongues. As word spread, an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Church on Azusa Street was rented, and nightly meetings began to be held.

Within a week, on April 18, an earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco, a mere 350 miles north of the small groups of Spirit-filled believers in Los Angeles. Those in attendance were quick to see the connection between the devastation that was occurring just up the coast, the Spirit baptism they were experiencing, and the End Times whose arrival they expected. They

3 Cf. James Goff, Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988):

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quickly printed and widely distributed some 100,000 tracts tying the events together. The tracts initiated the flow of seekers to the tiny mission on Azusa Street.

The Pentecostal movement now experienced a second beginning in Los Angeles, and among those attracted to this new thing was a local Holiness minister Alfred G. Garr. Garr became the first white minister to experience the baptism and speak in tongues at Azusa Street. Shortly thereafter, among the diverse groups attracted to the mission, an Indian national identified the language Garr was speaking as that of his home tongue. Garr immediately felt a calling to do missionary work in India He subsequently convinced his wife to attend, and she soon followed him in speaking in tongues. A fellow attendee identified the sounds she voiced as Chinese. Lillian believed that as a result of her religious experience, she could miraculously speak both Chinese and Tibetan. According to the report from the first issue of the Apostolic Faith, “Brother Garr was able to pray a native of India through in his own language, the Bengali. Sister Garr also spoke Chinese.”4

The Garrs quickly set about putting their affairs in order and left for Asia, They spent some months in India, where they learned that neither of them spoke in any of the several languages spoken by the Indians they met, but in the fall of 1907, they prepared to continue their journey on to China. They landed in Hong Kong on October 9 and soon discovered other Christians in the city. They were invited to preach at the Basel Mission, the center of a German-speaking Swiss missionary effort. Three days after their arrival, the Garrs are joined by May Law and Rosa

4 “Good News from Danville, VA.” The Apostolic Faith 1, 1 (September 1906): 3. Possibly the best source of information on the Garrs and their work in China is the early self-published biography, William A. Ward, The Trailblazer: Dr. A. G. Garr (N.p.: the author, n.d. [1954?]). Garr wrote an account of his emergence as a Pentecostal in “How God Honored the Step of Faith,” Latter Rain Evangel (July 1914). There is also a more recent biography, Steve Thompson with Adam Gordon, 20th Century Apostle: The Life of Alfred Garr (Wilkesboro, NC: MorningStar Publications, 2003).

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Pittman,5 two unmarried women who have experienced the baptism at Azusa and who felt called to China. News of the Garrs’ arrival soon reached McIntosh in Macau, and he headed for Hong Kong to assist them.

The Hong Kong Pioneers The Garrs, Pittman, Law and McIntosh share several commonalities. First, they possessed a similar theological back ground in the Methodist . They taught what would come to be seen as a three-stage approach to the Christian life. Individuals were supposed to respond to the gospel in faith and find their initial relationship with God in Christ (i.e., ), and then seek sanctification or holiness as a second notable work of God in their life. Finally, sanctification prepared them to pray for and receive the empowerment of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by speaking in tongues. This Holiness Pentecostal perspective was what Charles Parham had taught and had passed on to Seymour, who also shared a background in Methodism, and which dominated the Azusa Street Mission. The Holiness Pentecostal theology, later to be institutionalized in the United States by the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Church of God in Christ, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) would dominate the first decade of Pentecostalism in Hong Kong and southern China.

They also, at least initially, shared a belief that the phenomenon of speaking in tongues would be a particular asset and that they would supernaturally be able to speak directly to the Chinese in spite of their having never studied the language.6 Alfred Garr would be the first to question that idea. In the long voyage to India early in the winter of 1906-1907, he began to prepare himself in

5 During her retirement years, Rose Pittman wrote an account of missionary years. See Rose Pittman Downing. “God Works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform,” (Unpublished typescript, n.d.). A copy is located at the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center in Springfield, Missouri. 6 In one of its earliest reports from China noted, “A missionary in China who received the baptism in the Holy Spirit last spring in Canada, was praying with a Chinese teacher for his healing. The Holy Spirit spoke through her in most perfect Chinese: ‘Look to Jesus for your healing.’ She had not learned this language, but the teacher understood her.” Latter Rain Evangel (October 1909): 16.

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case he could not speak Hindi or any other Indian language, and Lillian could not speak Chinese. He reviewed all the relevant scriptures on speaking in tongues in the book of Acts and the letters of Paul and began to place the phenomenon in the larger context of . Once it was confirmed that no Indian could understand either Lillian or himself when they spoke in tongues, he published a booklet, Pentecostal Power, in which he discarded the idea that tongues are primarily another language that is spoken as a tool in evangelistic work. Tongues are primarily for personal use and enlightenment.

Second, no one had sent any of the pioneer Pentecostals to China. They did not have the sponsorship of any foreign-based denomination or missionary agency. They had arrived on their own, each responding to a personally felt call directly from God. Before their rather sudden decision to head for China, they quickly gathered what little financial backing they could from family and friends, and then set out believing that God would supply their needs. They would have to find local support in Hong Kong and slowly build additional support from the United States.

Once in China, they sought support from the Protestant Christian community that had emerged over the previous century. McIntosh preached to missionaries gathered in China, the Garrs found space to meet from the head of the Basel Mission. Both McIntosh and the Garrs expected a positive response to the Pentecostal message from the missionaries. These early Pentecostals had all been Christians and had readily responded to the message once it had been presented to them. Garr had received a relatively positive response from Christians in India, yea had visited the center led by the Indian Pandita Ramabai where a revival was under way, had introduced the peculiarities of the Pentecostal message to her and those under her care, catalyzed the integration of the Indian group into the larger movement, and helped create a branch of the Pentecostal movement that would itself have a global impact. Garr would, unfortunately, not receive the same level of positive response in China from the missionary community.

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Third, once they landed in China, the other pioneer missionaries shared Garr’s experience—the discovery that their speaking in tongues would provide no effective direct assistance in spreading the gospel among the Chinese people. A few never lost hope that it would happen, and received and circulated any reports that one of their colleagues had spoken even a few words of understandable Chinese, but basically, soon after their arrival, each new missionary settled into an understanding in line with Garr’s view that tongues was basically a practice benefitting the individual believer and to be integrated into one’s personal devotional life. Garr wrote to A. A. Boddy in England in 1908 and shared his sad conclusion, “I know of no one having received a language so as to be able to converse intelligently, or to preach in the same with the understanding, in the Pentecostal movement,” and then added in a more positive tone that “. . . [I] feel the power of God in most every instance when I speak at length, and can truly bear witness to the scripture that ‘Speaking in tongues edifies the one speaking’.”7

Garr’s approach would from its beginning come to dominate the Chinese phase of Pentecostalism and distinguish it from the American movement, where speculation on the nature of tongues and discussions of the gift of interpretation of tongues and its role in church life would be regular topics of interest, and where periodicals continued to circulate any reports of people speaking even a few words in a recognizable language when they spoke in tongues. Thus, almost from the beginning, Chinese Pentecostalism took on a slightly different cast as opposed to its North American counterpart, though amid the enthusiasm of the rapidly spreading movement, few would recognize the distinctive path each was pursuing. It would be several generations before Garr’s perspective would become the majority perspective among Pentecostals in the West.

Fourth, the Pentecostals in Hong Kong quickly built a local Chinese following and Western missionaries speedily empowered local leaders. Among the first Chinese to respond to the Garrs’

7 Letter from A. G. Garr to A. A. Boddy, March 15, 1908. Posted at http://the-new-way.org/testimonies/batt_023_a_letter_from_brother_garr.html. Accessed July 31, 2012. This letter was originally published in the periodical Confidence (May 1908).

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message were Mok Lai Chi,8 a school teacher who has been translating for Garr in Hong Kong, and a couple, T. M. Sung and his wife. Sung would soon be ordained and emerge as the pastor of the Hong Kong Pentecostal mission.9 The learned Mok would establish the first Pentecostal periodical in China, Pentecostal Truths, which would appear irregularly over the next six years. In this respect, the Pentecostals in Hong Kong would take the lead in building a constituency and transferring power to the Chinese leadership.

As the movement grew, it would come to rely on preachers raised up within the missions to take the lead in spreading the message from city to city and the countryside beyond. The letters of missionaries written to supporters back in the United States are full of laudatory references to Native workers. For example, in a letter from Shanghai, H. L. Lawler tells of a trip to Sing-Chih, some 25 miles from Nanking, where a Brother and Sister Yang had been praying for two years for a mission to be opened. Lawler opened the mission and left Brother Yang in charge, a seemingly typical practice as the missions spread from the cities.10 Sarah Alice Kugler cites working with a Bible woman, who traveled with her team to assist with the singing, preaching, and for healing.11 The Western Pentecostal missionaries showed little reluctance to empower talented converts who showed shills needed from mission leadership.

Pentecost in North and Central China While the pioneers in Hong Kong were establishing Pentecostalism in southern China, with Canton (now Guangzhou) and SaiNam (now Sanshui) as their early targets for expansion, they represented only a small part of the enthusiasm for China within the emerging movement. Through 1907, word of the continuing Pentecostal revival and the baptism of the Holy Spirit that

8 Mok’s story of the beginning of Pentecostalism in Hong Kong is found in Mok Lai Chi. “Good News from the Land of Sinim.” Latter Rain Evangel (December 1909): 22-23. 9 T. M. Sung, “The Story of My Conversion: History of the Hong Kong Pentecostal Mission.” Latter Rain Evangel (June 1938). 10 H. L. Lawler, “Healed of a Centipede Bite,” The Latter Rain Evangel (September 1913): 10-11. 11 Letter from Sarah Alice Kugler, The Weekly Evangel [St. Louis, MO] 148 (July 15, 1916): 14.

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made it news worthy would circulate through Christian missionary circles across China. In October, Antoinette Mooman, a missionary working at the Door of Hope, a center in Shanghai assisting women formerly trapped in prostitution, returned to the States for a visit and almost immediately headed to Los Angeles for a visit to the Azusa Street mission where she had an intense experience of baptism in the Spirit.12 She returned to China as a Pentecostal, and the Door of Hope would become the first of the several institutions headed by Pentecostal missionaries. She was soon joined by George Hansen, who received the baptism in Chicago accompanied with a calling to China. Shanghai, the real center of Protestant , was destined to become the second center of the emerging Pentecostal movement.

More important for the long-term direction of the movement, Brent Berntsen, a Norwegian American missionary in northern China, encountered a copy of the Azusa Street periodical, Apostolic Faith, which perked his interest to the point that he made a trip to California in September 1907, where he received the baptism. Berntsen was a missionary with the South Chih-li Mission, an independent agency founded in the 1890s by Rev. and Mrs. Horace W. Houlding,13 and which had developed centers throughout Chih-li (now Hebei Province), Brentsen would become instrumental in converting his fellow missionaries, including Houlding, to Pentecostalism even as he established the movement in northern China. He will for the next years operate out of Cheng Ting Fu, a town in Chih-li, south of .14

12 “China Missionary Receives Pentecost,” Apostolic Faith (0ctober-January 1908): 3 13 Houlding is mentioned as early as September 1910 as receiving offerings collected by The Latter Rain Evangel. 14 I am particularly indebted to Melissa Inouye for calling my attention to the unique importance of Brent Berntsen to the development of early Pentecostalism in China and especially his relationship with the founders of the True Jesus Church. Her work on Berntsen is found in Melissa Inouye, Miraculous Mundane: The True Jesus Church and Chinese Christianity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University, Ph.D. dissertation, 2011). Also helpful is Iap Sain-Chin. “Brent Bernstein—A Prominent Oneness Pentecostal Pioneer to North China.” A paper presented at the 41st Annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, 2012. 32 pp.

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Early in 1908, W. W. Simpson, a missionary with the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Minchow, Kansu Province, in north central China, learned of Pentecostalism from reading A. G. Garr’s testimony that had been reprinted in a periodical from India. It spoke to some of his own personal religious yearnings and he began a search for the baptism experience himself. About the same time, two British ministers, Cecil Pohill and A. A. Boddy also began an investigation of the new Pentecostal teachings.

Pohill was one of the original China missionaries sent out by the China Inland Mission (CIM), a group known for both its forsaking life along China’s Pacific Coast and moving into the interior, and its enculturation among the people by training its missionaries to adopt Chinese language, dress, and culture whenever and wherever possible. Returning from a stay in China, he visited Los Angeles in 1908 and was baptized in the Spirit while there. Meanwhile, Boddy, an Anglican priest heavily influenced by the British Keswick (Holiness) movement, traveled to Norway to investigate Pentecostalism and while there received the baptism.

In 19o9, the pair founded the Pentecostal Missionary Union, modeled on the CIM, the first Pentecostal sending agency, and in 1910 sent their first missionaries to China. Headquarters for PMU work would soon be located in Yunnan-fu (aka Kunming), in Yunnan Province. Located close to both the Burmese and Tibetan border, the PMU missionaries went about their work with a high hope of soon penetrating into Tibet, and opened work among Tibetans living in Yunnan.

Isolating Pentecostalism By 1912, the Pentecostal movement was represented in all parts of China. It was growing annually by the addition of new missionary personnel from the United States, Canada and England, and the development of Chinese preachers who were taking the lead as slowly the newcomers were attempting to master the language. But the language was not the only obstacle. The initial welcome extended to the first missionaries in Macau and Hong Kong in 1907, quickly

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dissipated only to be replaced by open hostility from the majority of missionaries from the other non-Pentecostal churches.

Leading the way in the rejection of Pentecostalism was S. C. Todd, a veteran holiness missionary who had made a trip to Japan in 1907, his stay coinciding with the arrival of a boat load of Pentecostal missionaries. He subsequently returned to Macau where he met up with T. J. McIntosh. In 1908 he wrote a widely disseminated article attacking Pentecostalism in general and McIntosh in particular. As part of his wide-ranging critique, he dismissed the idea that the baptism of the Holy Spirit provides the gift of speaking Chinese or any other foreign language.15

As Todd’s writings circulated and as other missionaries encountered the now seemingly ubiquitous Pentecostals, the ecumenical spirit that has permeated the relations between Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Lutherans, CIM, Methodists and Holiness missions was withdrawn from the Pentecostals. Even before Todd’s article appeared, Rev. Hansen, who had originally extended the use of the Basel Mission facilities in Hong Kong to A. G. Garr, had, upon discovering the content of Garr’s message, kicked him out. Garr’s work was rescued by Mok Lai Chi, who provided space to hold meetings at the school where he taught.

Initially, Pentecostals did not see themselves as another new denomination but as a vehicle of conveying the End Time message of Pentecost to all Christians. They hoped and expected that upon hearing the Pentecostal message that Christians would forsake their sectarian differences, accept the baptism in the Spirit and receive the power and motivation it would bring to their missionary endeavor. As various missionaries and even entire missionary stations were lost to the movement, missionaries with the older churches came to see Pentecostals as competitors who were offering not just a variation on , but an unacceptable, disruptive, even heretical

15 S. C. Todd, “An Open Letter,” Macao, China: Bible Missionary Society, n.d. [2008]. Two-page flyer.

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message. And as Pentecostalism spread, resistance from the older missionary establishment grew, as Pentecostal converts W. W. Simpson and Leslie M. Anglin were to learn.

Simpson was a missionary stationed at Taochow near the Tibetan border with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Holiness denomination that had built a strong presence in China.16 After becoming aware of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, he had become friends with Cecil Pohill and the missionaries of the Pentecostal Missionary Union, even attending their annual all-China gatherings. He finally experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of 1912 and eagerly began to share his experience with his fellow CMA missionaries. Among the people affected is the CMA superintendent William Christie. The CMA had previously lost personnel to the emerging Pentecostal movement but had a cautious wait and see attitude. However, in 1914, the Alliance issued a position statement declaring that there was no essential connection between the baptism of the Holy Spirit, to which the Alliance firmly held, and speaking in tongues. The statement would serve as a deciding point for both Simpson, who left the CMA, and Christie, who would revise his own thinking about tongues and not only remain within the CMA but become one of their most heralded missionaries, its apostle to Tibet. Simpson would move to northern China and later emerge as one of the Chinese Pentecostal movement’s most prominent figures.

Leslie M. Anglin began his China career as one of a small team of missionaries in Taian-fu, in Province with the Baptist Gospel Mission, a small independent Baptist sending agency. In 1914, the mission was enlarged by the arrival of the Brinson-Rushins. Jennie Brinson-Rushin had a Holiness background and had experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit before marrying her

16 Simpson left an unpublished autobiographical account of his career in china, W. W. Simpson, “Contending for the Faith. Unpublished and undated mss. Copy at Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center. See also Simpson’s two articles, “What the Baptism in the Holy Spirit Meant upon the Life of a Missionary,” Latter Rain Evangel (November 1915) and “Miracles of Grace on the Tibetan Border. My Heart was Black as Night, but now it is White as Snow!" Latter Rain Evangel (January 1916).

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Baptist missionary minded husband. On their way to China, however, they stopped over in Seattle, where he too received the baptism.17

The couple settled in to their station at Taian-fu just as the issue of Pentecostalism was reaching a peak among the more mainstream Protestant missionaries. In April, after much discussion over several years, the China Council of the China Inland Mission formally issued a statement condemning Pentecostalism. Shortly thereafter, the Presbyterians follow suit. In an even stronger statement, they suggest that Pentecostalism can lead to insanity and even suicide. In spite of these actions, Jennie Brinson-Rushin remained quiet only briefly before she began to share her Pentecostal faith with her new missionary colleagues. Anglin was among those who responded favorably.

The Pentecostal message split the missionary team. While Jennie Brinson-Rushin was writing glowing reports to the Church of God Evangel, the periodical of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), which saw her as their initial China missionary, the more conservative of the Baptists were enraged over the heresy that had broken out in their midst, and the Baptist Gospel Mission ended its support of all those who persisted in their Pentecostal experience. By 1914, all the Pentecostals in China were totally cut off and isolated from the mainstream of Chinese Protestantism.

The situation was critical for Anglin and his wife Ava who had been working in China since 1910. In spite of losing all their support, they decided to stay and attempt to rebuild their support which

17 The account of Anglin and the work at Taian-fu has been put together from Harry James Albus, Twentieth-Century Onesiphorus: the Story of Leslie M. Anglin and the Home of Onesiphorus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1951); Daniel H. Bays, “The First Pentecostal Missions to China, 1906-1916” (A paper presented at the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky, November 10-12, 1988); Correspondence from Jennie Brinson-Rushin from “Taianfu, Shantung, China,” Church of God Evangel (August 26, 1916): 3; and P. R. Rushin, “Interesting Letter From China,” Church of God Evangel (January 13, 1917).

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took some months as they were basically unfamiliar with the still emerging American Pentecostal movement. Anglin also had the idea for taking his missionary activity in a new direction. Pentecostals had rarely attempted to found social service institutions, though they inherited a few whose staff had converted, but in 1916, Anglin opened the Home of Onesiphorus, which supplied a place to live for orphans and elderly Chinese who were abandoned by their families. As the work grew and its mandate expanded, it added a school that soon became its major activity. Though the 1920s and 1930s it would turn out hundreds of trained lay people and Chinese Pentecostal preachers. One of the home’s students, Jing Dianying, would later found one of the two main Chinese-led Pentecostal structures to survive the Chinese Revolution.18

Dividing Pentecostals If the opposition of the Mainline Protestants was not enough, back home the North American Pentecostal movement was fragmenting, and the Chinese missionaries were being asked to choose sides. Trouble began as early as 1910 when former Baptist minister William Durham began to voice his opposition to the Holiness-based theology upon which the Pentecostal movement had been founded. All of the Pentecostal pioneers had built on a Methodist Holiness theological pattern which looked for a progression in the individual’s spiritual life from salvation to sanctification to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, a theology ultimately based in the separation of salvation and sanctification initially articulated by Methodist founder . Durham operated out of a Calvinist Reformation theology that assumed that the believer was both justified and sanctified, in principle, at the time they came into a relationship with Christ and became sanctified, in fact, only after death. Durham suggested that any believer, not just those who had experienced what the Holiness people called sanctification, were candidates for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

18 Jing founded the . Daniel Bays mentions the Jing-Anglin connection citing his own unpublished research.

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Durham’s approach became known as Finished Work theology, a reference to the work of salvation completed by Christ on the Cross. The Holiness Pentecostal leadership in Los Angeles refused to allow Durham to speak at the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street and other centers. Durham, of course, already had a prime secondary Pentecostal center at his large North Avenue Church in Chicago and soon found support across the country from other non-Holiness people who had been attracted to the Pentecostal experience. Through 1911 and 1912 Pentecostal churches and ministers were being asked to choose sides but the only Pentecostal denominations that had as yet organized and whose offices could offer Pentecostal preachers the all-important ministerial credentials they needed, were from the Holiness camp—The Church of God in Christ, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee).

Those who followed the Finished Work approach to Pentecostalism were not completely shut out. The Church of God in Christ was willing to overlook theological differences and offer the credentials to all Pentecostal ministers, but they were an African American organization and given the racial mores of the day, many white Pentecostals chaffed under the African presence throughout the movement. The issue of ministerial credentials became even more acute as World War I approached—many of the Pentecostal ministers were pacifists. They would need a denominational advocate who could secure their status as conscientious objectors to war. The growing pressure would lead directly to the formation of two new Pentecostal congregational associations—the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World and the General Council of the Assemblies of God.

By 1912, the disturbance in the American Pentecostal movement was reverberating through China. Southern China—Hong Kong and the surrounding Guangdong Province seemed solidly in the Holiness camp. During the winter of 1911-12, J. H. King, the future bishop and now the executive in charge of missions for the Pentecostal Holiness Church, spent several months in China where T. J. McIntosh facilitated his visit to evaluate the various missions in the Pearl River

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valley. Once back in the States, King made China one of the main foci of PHC missions and began recruiting additional missionaries for the country.

Further north, the majority of missionaries seem to favor the Assemblies of God. In 1915, when the Assemblies published their first list of ministers and missionaries associated with the new General Council, a group of missionaries in Shanghai were included, and most of these were already familiar to Assemblies members throughout the states as their names had regularly appeared in the pages of the several magazines serving the Finished Work Pentecostals, especially The Latter Rain Evangel, published at the Old Stone Church, one of the early Pentecostal centers in Chicago.

In northern China, both W. W. Simpson and Brent Berntsen had affiliated. In fact, in 1915, in the wake of the formation of the Assemblies of God, Simpson began a lengthy visit in the States where he is one of a minority of Chinese voices who keeps alive the hope of tongues serving as a missionary tool. His initial interest in Pentecostalism originated from an incident in which an uneducated Chinese cook well-known to him spontaneously spoke in tongues—first speaking unintelligible sounds, but then delivering words in a form of classical Chinese readily understood by some Confucian scholars who were present, and finishing in English, a language he had heard but never been taught to speak. Simpson spent a year in the States only ending his tour of Pentecostal churches when at a Convention on Long Island (New York) he heard someone speaking in tongues instructing him in Chinese to return to his missionary station at Taochow.

If the Finished Work controversy was not enough with which to contend, the Chinese missionaries would also have to react to a second movement-splitting controversy begun in 1913. The Oneness or “Jesus Only” controversy began innocently enough. It reflected both the Jesus-centered piety that had grown up among revivalistic groups in the American South (Baptists, Methodists, Cumberland Presbyterians) and the special place given to the book of Acts

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in early Pentecostal circles.19 It took on an added dimension given the new emphasis on the authority of the Bible that had emerged in American Protestantism in reaction to both the increasing authority accorded science in the culture and the 1871 papal declaration of papal infallibility.

In 1913, several Pentecostal ministers challenged the traditional formula for baptism which had been passed down through the various Protestant churches to the Pentecostals. Instead of baptizing in the “name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” a new formula derived from the reported in the book of Acts was suggested— “in the name of Jesus.” Though not particularly a startling suggestion in its original articulation, the possible implication of the change was quickly seized upon and developed into a significantly alternative theology that suggested that Jesus was the name of the One God, who manifested as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The new theology revived an ancient theology, which Patristic scholars called “monarchical modalism,” and which had challenged the foundation of the whole of Western trinitarian theology.20

The Oneness movement (which its critics referred to as the “Jesus Only” movement) found its initial support among those who had already aligned with the Finished Work theology, the Holiness Pentecostal groups showing little attention to it. It would ultimately find its greatest support in the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, whose leading personality, G. T. Haywood, has become well-known outside the United States as he had maintained a significant correspondence with missionaries around the globe. The controversy would peak in 1915-1916 as

19 On the background of the Oneness Movement, see David A. Reed, In Jesus Name: the History and Beliefs of Oneness Pentecostals (Blandford Forum, UK: Deo Publishing, 2007). 20 On the history of the Oneness movements, see Arthur L. Clanton and Charles E. Clanton, United We Stand: A History of Oneness Organizations (Hazelwood, MO: The Pentecostal Publishing House, 1995); Fred J. Foster, Their Story: Twentieth Century Pentecostals (Hazelwood, NJ: World Aflame Press, 1981); and James L. Tyson, The Early Pentecostal Revival: History of the Twentieth-Century Pentecostals and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, 1901-1930 (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1992).

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the Assemblies of God completed its formation and conducted a lengthy discussion of the issue. In a gathering held on October 1-7, 1916, the Assemblies adopted a statement of beliefs that includes a detailed affirmation of the , a position that puts them as odds with those members who held Oneness beliefs, At this point, the remaining Oneness believers in the AofG left. Most found their way to the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.

The Oneness movement emerged at an interesting moment in the developing Chinese Pentecostal situation. It development in North America coincided with the Chinese Pentecostals being rejected and isolated from the older missionary churches. That break had occurred over what seems a less than essential traditional theological issue—speaking in tongues. Chinese Pentecostals would have little else to lose over further examination of the scriptures and a revision of their theological outlook if there was strong biblical justification. It would appear that, for example, W. W. Simpson, who had recently been turned out of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, might be a likely person to adhere to the new theology, and indeed, it seems that soon after coming home on furlough, he flirted with the Oneness perspective, but ultimately maintained an aligned with the Assemblies of God, with whom he would remain affiliated for the rest of his missionary career.

But then there was Brent Berntsen, the pioneer Pentecostal missionary who by 1914 oversaw a network of missionary stations from his base in relatively rural Chih-li (Hebei Province). Berntsen had been an early partisan in the Finished Work controversy, and in 1910 while returning from a trip to Norway together some additional missionaries for his northern China mission, he stopped in Chicago where he garnered the support of the Old Stone Church) in Chicago and he begins to submit reports to the church’s periodical, The Latter Rain Evangel. The Finished Work perspective subsequently permeated Berntsen’s own Popular Gospel Truth, which he launches as a bi-lingual periodical in 1912. Through 1913 and 1914, Berntsen continued to correspond with various American Pentecostal periodicals that were aligned with the Finished Work perspective, and thus it is not surprising to find him among the missionaries initially

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adhering to the Assemblies of God and listed in the early lists of General Council recognized ministers and missionaries.

Berntsen was carried on the Assemblies roles into 1916. But soon a definite change in his thinking began to appear. The May 1916 issue of Popular Gospel Truths included a major article entitled “One Must Be Baptized in the Name of Jesus Christ.”21 Three months later, it was evident that he had accepted Oneness theology in its fullness. The July issue of Popular Gospel Truth features a front page article in which Berntsen advocated the modalism of Oneness theology. He had also picked up a variety of minority (what some would term “sectarian”) notions almost all of which one or more of the various missionary churches had offered to their Chinese converts, such as foot washing, keeping the seventh-day Sabbath, and seeking Jesus’ healing in times of illness. He also announced that as of July 1, his church will meet on Saturday rather than Sunday, a change about which Berntsen had apparently been considering for a number of years. His theological shift alienates him from the Assemblies of God, and therefore he was dropped from their 1916 list of affiliated missionaries. Like most of the other Pentecostal ministers/missionaries who leave the Assemblies of God over the Oneness issue, Berntsen finds the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World as his best option for a wider fellowship (and American support for his ministry) and this when it published its initial list of affiliated ministers/missionaries, it was not surprising to find Berntsen’s name prominently included. Berntsen’s shift in theology seems also to have coincided with a change of residence. After many years in Chih-li, late in 1915 or early in 1916, he relocated to Beijing (Peking),22 and he is still there when he appeared on the Pentecostal Assemblies of the world ministers’ list.23

21 PGT, May 1916, 4. This article is authored by a Ba Ende. Cited in Inouye, op. cit. 22 In February 1915, George Hansen reports that he, his wife, and Sister Ida McGuire are the only Pentecostal missionaries operating in Peking. 23 The 1919 “Minute book and Ministerial Guide of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World” is reprinted in Tyson, op. cit., pp. 293-314.

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Berntsen, though the most prominent, was not the only China missionary to adopt the Oneness theology and realign with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. The Oneness message seems to have found an audience in SaiNam, in southern China, where Pheobe Holmes and Adele Harrison, two of the most well-known of the female missionaries (who actually made up a majority of the Pentecostal’s missionary contingent) also joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. Holmes had been one of the early missionaries in Hong Kong, working with Rosa Pittman, and had been the co-founder with Pittman of the work in SaiNam, up the river from Canton. Harrison helped found and run the orphanage in SaiNam, the sponsorship of which now fell to the PAofW.

Among the western missionaries in China the Oneness position will remain a minority perspective. By 1917 the great majority adhere to either to the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Pentecostal Missionary Union, or the Assemblies of God (which lists some 140 missionary personnel active in China). The PA0fW has only 13. However, the energetic Berntsen in Peking now emerged as possibly the most important Pentecostal missionary in the country as his church in Peking will set the stage for the emergence of the single largest Pentecostal work in China through the twentieth century—The True Jesus Church.

Once relocated to Peking, Berntsen had come into contact and had significant interaction with both Wei Enbo (aka Paul Wei), a Christian layman and prosperous merchant, and Zhang Lingsheng, a former Presbyterian whom Brentsen seems to have ordained at one point. Wei and Zhang organized the independent Universal Correction Church, adopting the Pentecostal Oneness theology and that Brentsen advocated,24 but directing their attention to correcting

24 Berntsen taught a spectrum of ideas, most also held by the majority of Pentecostals, that will become part of the essential focus of the True Jesus Church including the imminent return of Christ, foot-washing, and baptism by immersion.

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the many false doctrines they had come to feel were being taught by the spectrum of Protestant missionaries.25

As Paul Wei experiences a set of personal encounters with Jesus of Nazareth, he and Zhang will assemble a unique set of what they believe are the Christian essentials, ten beliefs that will become the hallmark of their movement, which they will eventually name the True Jesus Church. Their Chinese-led anti-missionary church emerged in 1917 just as Pentecostalism’s first decade in China drew to a close. The True Jesus Church is established in the wake of the Pentecostal movement’s separation from the mainstream of the Protestant missionary movement and the subsequent separation of the Oneness movement from the mainstream of Pentecostalism. The Chinese founders of the True Jesus Church then made the final break from Brent Brentsen’s Beijing congregation and established a textbook example of what would come to be identified in China as a three-self church, a Chinese-led ecclesiastical body that was truly self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating. The True Jesus Church was not only separated from missionary control and influence, it positioned itself as a major critic of the missionary churches. To a great extent, its distinctive placement accounts for its success over the next generation when it jumped out ahead of the spectrum of missionary churches in attracting members to his beliefs and practices.

25 For a more complete treatment of the early years of Wei and Zhang, see Inouye, op. cit.

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