Pentecostalism, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Church of God
Why the Church of God Decided to Take the Leap
Even though representatives of the Church of God (CG) attended the organizational meeting in St. Louis (1942) and the constitutional convention in Chicago (1943), it was not until the 1944 meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) that the denomination affiliated. Minutes from the April 14th NAE Board of Administration meeting show that the formal application from the CG was accepted at that time. In one of his final acts as general overseer, J. Herbert Walker reported the results to the council of bishops at the August general assembly in Columbus, Ohio. The lengthy time frame was not only due to the timing of the fall general assemblies in relation to the spring NAE meetings, but the fact that many in the CG were wary of associating with a group that had been so hostile to Pentecostals.
In the 1930s fundamentalism entered fully into its militant separatism phase. This separatism was not only from the modernists in the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), it was also from the Pentecostals. Most in the CG were not aware of the larger debates between fundamentalists and Pentecostals in the 1920s because so much time had been spent trying to grow the denomination after the formal split in 1923. By the mid-1930s, however, there was a different mood. With the election of J. Herbert Walker as general overseer in 1935, a young group of ministers in their 30s and 40s suddenly filled the leadership of the denomination.
Walker was 35 yrs old when he assumed the position in a swirl of controversy that almost split the denomination a second time. The debate on the floor at the thirty-fifth assembly was intense. The council of bishops had voted for Samuel Latimer with a 2/3rds majority but a small group of influential men persuaded Latimer to give way to new leadership. When the recommendation of Walker for general overseer came to the general assembly, young evangelists stood up and accused older ministers of playing politics in trying to oust the 63-yrs-old Latimer who had served since F. J. Lee passed away in 1928.
Amidst the uproar, R. P. Johnson shouted out for order but the young evangelists were determined to see Latimer re-elected. E. L. Simmons finally admitted that Latimer had the votes “but a lot of good men felt the need for a change.” Almost half-heartedly, Latimer announced it was for the best even if “I don’t say it’s the will of God for this change to be made.” In tears and sobs, Walker responded that he would do his best to serve. Suddenly, a message in tongues rang out from U. D. Tidwell. J. P. Hughes, Overseer of Georgia, stood up and gave the interpretation: “I will walk with thee and hold thy hand.” The people wept as Walker became the youngest man ever to be general overseer.
Walker’s tenure as general overseer (1935-1944) proved to be a critical period. While the denomination grew from almost 50,000 to 85,000 members during his tenure, the road to the NAE was rocky at best. In contrast, Pentecostal Holiness Church was less than half at 16,000 members in 1936 while the Assemblies of God (AG) was more than triple the size at 166,000 in 1935. He needed the help of other leaders in their late 30s and 40s like E. C. Clark, Zeno Tharp, Earl Paulk, Sr., John C. Jernigan, and M.P. Cross. What started with Walker lasted at least through the tenure of Tharp as general overseer (1952-1956) when Charles W. Conn first published Like A Mighty Army. It was nothing short of a revolution.
In light of the militant fundamentalists, many in the CG thought it unwise to join the fledgling NAE. There were also questions about what membership required and whether the benefits outweighed the costs. All of this occurred during a decade in which these young leaders debated fundamentalists, the nature of sanctification, and tried to forge a new Declaration of Faith. They also revised the formal teaching that the CG is “against members going to war in combatant service” in light of young CG men going into the military during World War II. In the end, they pushed the denomination toward the NAE.
In this article, I explore the road to the NAE. While the reasons why the CG joined are complicated, they revolve around several variables that coalesced, including the need for help to navigate the new political climate of the U.S. and the NAE leadership of J. Elwin Wright and Harold Ockenga. It was the fact that Wright had a history within the broader Pentecostal-Charismatic movement and that Ockenga still held to a basic Wesleyanism that helped Pentecostals feel more comfortable with the association.
To set the stage, I first need to unpack the debates that CG ministers had with fundamentalists before 1942. I will then detail the history of Wright and Ockenga leading up to the NAE and how that history informed their intentions to create a broader coalition of Protestants. Finally, I’ll examine the concerns at the 1943 general assembly and how those concerns were addressed.
CG Debates With Fundamentalists
The fundamentalists emerged from the 1930s defeated but more determined than ever to forge a separate existence. Many of those who remained in the Northern Baptist Convention and Presbyterian Church U.S.A. had been sidelined. By the time J. Gresham Machen led the revolt to form Westminster Seminary in 1929, the dye had been cast. The 1930s witnessed several splits and fractures as new denominations were formed and many congregations went independent or joined new associations. Separatist fundamentalists saw themselves occupying the radical middle between a liberal modernism and a cultic Pentecostalism.
One important fundamentalist leader was the hard-charging Texan, J. Frank Morris. As a graduate of Baylor and then Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Morris pushed Texas Baptists toward the fundamentals from his perch at First Baptist Church in Fort Worth. He had been the editor of The Baptist Standard and by 1935 was pastoring in Forth Worth and Temple Baptist Church in Detroit. Through his preaching, radio addresses, and writing, Norris commanded a large army of followers in the tens of thousands.
In 1936, Norris launched a series of broadsides in radio and print at Pentecostals calling them a “cult” and more dangerous than “rationalistic modernism.” By this point, he had fully embraced the cessationism advanced by Lewis Sperry Chafer and Charles Scofield with its center at Dallas Theological Seminary. Any association with “the Snake-Poison-Oily Crowd” was anathema. Those epithets referred to the practices of anointing with oil, accusations of drinking poison, and the handling of snakes in worship.
Norris’ colleague, Louis Entzminger, who led the Sunday School at Norris’ church and later founded the Fundamental Baptist College in 1939 (now Norris Bible Baptist Seminary), went further. In 1938 he published a pamphlet called “The Modern ‘Divine Healing’ Racket” followed by a second pamphlet on the baptism of the Holy Spirit and tongues. In the latter pamphlet, he caricatured Pentecostals as placing “no emphasis on the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord. They use the name ‘Jesus’ almost exclusively, and this is a characteristic of all cults and isms.” He argued that there were no “tarrying meetings” in the Bible and that miracles from the early church are no longer available. The church has the complete revelation of the Bible and no other revelation is needed either in prophecy, tongues, or the gift of tongues. Like Norris, Entzminger combined biblical literalism with cessationism to rule out almost all Pentecostal distinctives.
Roy E. Blackwood was a CG pastor in Fort Worth in 1936. After joining the CG in 1919, he rose through the ranks to become overseer of North Carolina before moving into music ministry. Even though he formed the Blackwood Brothers Quartet in 1934 with his younger brothers James and Doyle, he felt called back into ministry. As a result, he pastored for 18 months in Fort Worth. While in Fort Worth, Blackwood heard on the radio “some of the bitterest attacks against Pentecostal beliefs, or Holy Ghost baptism, I have ever heard or read.”
The attackers were J. Frank Norris and Louis Entzminger. In response, Blackwood wrote five articles over the course of 1936. Drawing on his basic knowledge of Greek words and Methodist commentators like Adam Clark, Blackwood responded to the arguments for cessationism and against the Pentecostal view of baptism in the Spirit. He concluded by stating that “Dr. Norris can refer to the Holy-Ghost-baptized people as ‘glass-eyed fanatics’ if he wants to, but he, nor anyone else, can down the experience of the baptism of the Holy Ghost from a Bible standpoint.”
After he graduated from Bible Training School (BTS), D. C. Barnes returned to Florida where he pastored a local Church of God. While at BTS Barnes had served as a co-editor of The Lighted Pathway writing on a number of topics including Mormonism. Barnes was an emerging voice who would return to BTS as a faculty member in the 1940s. Between 1936 and 1937, he responded to articles on “holy rollers,” an epithet that had been given to a number of groups including the CG. One article entitled, “Nuts for Holy Rollers & Others,” had been written by H. Boyce Taylor, Sr. in a periodical published by the West Kentucky Bible School in Murray, Kentucky. Taylor chastised Pentecostals on their views about sanctification, tongues, and allowing women to preach and teach in churches. In response, Barnes defended each practice concluding the article with the admonition, “Women, if God calls you to preach, obey your calling.”
In South Carolina, Earl Paulk challenged the popular fundamentalist Baptist evangelist W. Norman Greenway to a public debate in May 1937 over tongues and baptism in the Spirit. Greenway had been holding evangelistic services between Anderson and Greenville, South Carolina for several years. As part of his services, he had been targeting Pentecostals on the issues of sanctification and baptism in the Spirit. Greenway interpreted the tongues in Acts 2 as known languages. He saw Pentecostals as misguided and fanatical. At one point Greenway challenged any “unknown tongues group” member to be bitten by a snake on the platform as long as he provided the snake to ensure that its poison sacs had not been drained. Paulk could not let such charges stand in the town where he pastored over 600.
After debating Greenway, Paulk preached at the 1937 general assembly in Chattanooga. Before a crowd of around 7,000, he reminded CG members “the world hates us because it also hated him. . .What do we care what the world thinks? We are in fellowship with God–in fellowship with the Divine Holy Ghost.” As the quartet began to sing, people jumped, shouted, and danced with some falling out in the floor. The Chattanooga Daily Times reported on the service with the headlines, “Crowd Stirs to New Fervor as Paulk Defends Custom of Ecstatic Religion.” Paulk no doubt had in mind fundamentalists like Greenway who had ridiculed Pentecostal worship.
When CG writers entered into debate with fundamentalists, all of the familiar themes remained. Fundamentalists attacked Pentecostals for their espousal of divine healing, spiritual gifts, tongues in relation to the baptism in the Spirit, women in ministry, and ecstatic worship. Given that snake handling had been present in the CG through the 1930s, these attacks included ridicule of the practice. CG writers did not defend snake handling but they defended their use of Mark 16 as part of Pentecostal theology. They also continued to distinguish the Pauline gift of tongues from the Lukan ecstatic utterance that had become standard in Pentecostal discourse. Through it all, the caricatures and epithets used by fundamentalists left a sour taste in the mouths of many in the CG. They grew weary of being called fanatics, holy rollers, and cultic, among other things. They saw themselves as Protestants contending for the full gospel and they needed someone who understood them on their terms. This is exactly who they found when J. Elwin Wright invited CG offices to attend a national conference for united evangelical action in 1942.
J. Elwin Wright, Harold Ockenga, and Evangelical Action
Most scholars who have written on the formation of the NAE point toward the crucial role that J. Elwin Wright and Harold Ockenga played. While there were other men who contributed to the new association, none were as important, especially for Pentecostals. Ockenga had grown up in the Methodist Episcopal Church and was a graduate of Taylor University before going to Princeton Seminary. Even though Ockenga was deeply influenced by J. Gresham Machen and eventually became Presbyterian and then the Congregationalist pastor of the famous Park Street Church in Boston, he retained basic Wesleyan emphases that had guided his early years.
In his biography of Ockenga, Harold Lindsell states that “from his studies at Princeton and Westminster, Harold Ockenga became a Calvinist.” Garth Rosell is more circumspect in his analysis of Ockenga’s life. Rosell pointed out that Ockenga was ordained a Methodist deacon after graduating from Westminster under Machen and could fully embrace Methodist theology. Even after becoming the pastor of Park Street Church, Ockenga preached a sermon on sanctification as a second crisis. The difference is that Ockenga learned how to translate Wesley’s ideas on entire sanctification into a Reformed idiom by talking about the need for a deeper consecration, yieldedness, and surrender that led to the Spirit-filled life after the assurance of regeneration. He retained this perspective, writing in 1958, “There are two stages in the Christian life: the lower stage under the power of the flesh and the higher stage of spiritual life under the power of the Spirit.” Such language was exactly how others operating in a Reformed environment talked about Wesleyan sanctification.
Whereas some in the Reformed tradition like Charles Finney had imported Wesleyan ideas into a more Reformed framework, Harold Ockenga imported Reformed ideas into a Wesleyan framework. He retained the idea that salvation is a way involving stages, that Pentecost must be personally appropriated as part of a deeper spiritual life, that holiness of heart and life was key to any successful Christianity, and that spiritual renewal through revival was a crucial way Christianity advanced. Ockenga’s view that the church was “an organism formed of spiritually quickened individuals united to Jesus Christ” would have resonated deeply with AG Pentecostals who had used that language in their doctrinal commitments.
Ockenga’s views on sanctification as a deeper renewal of holiness had already been embraced by some in the CG, such as Earl Paulk, Sr. Paulk held to higher life positions. The use of Charles Finney’s works as textbooks went back to the beginning of BTS in the CG. The only required doctrinal commitment was “sanctification subsequent to justification.” Every CG minister believed God demanded holiness and that sanctification involved a consecration of the entire self giving rise to a moment of crisis that was cleansing and purifying. Within this common commitment, however, many nuances remained. Ockenga’s basic Wesleyanism would have found a receptive home among CG leaders.
If Ockenga’s Wesleyan emphases appealed to Pentecostals, J. Elwin Wright’s history in and commitment to the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement went even further. Wright had been raised in an independent network called First Fruit Harvesters. After a stint with Free Will Baptists and Free Methodists, Elwin’s father Joel A. Wright wrote that he felt a call to leave denominations. Between 1896 and 1897, Joel Wright joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) and founded First Fruit Harvesters as a new “undenominational” ministry. The year that the Azusa Street revival broke out, Wright dedicated a new campground and church at Rumney, New Hampshire. Joel A. Wright’s vision to unite Christians into a single movement was itself an adaptation of A. B. Simpson’s strategy for a fellowship of congregations engaged in mission under the Alliance banner.
When Pentecostalism spread through the ranks of the CMA, it impacted Joel and his son Elwin. They ended up embracing the basic position Simpson had outlined in response. Elwin graduated by the CMA’s New York Missionary Training College in 1921. Writing in his father’s ministry journal, The Sheaf of the First Fruits and in pamphlets, Elwin outlined the position of the ministry. He defended healing in the atonement against fundamentalists, argued that the latter rain outpouring had occurred and Pentecostals were part of it, and said that one must be baptized in the Spirit and walk in holiness and charismatic gifting.
He also supported women in mission and facilitated their ordination at all levels in First Fruit Harvesters. One such woman was the future founder of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland and Labrador, Alice Belle Garrigus who had served as a minister at least since 1909. In a pamphlet on the baptism in the Spirit he published in 1922, however, Elwin outlined his position that tongues was one possible sign among many. In doing so, he had embraced the position that led F. F. Bosworth out of the AG and into the CMA. Overall, Elwin and his father were Charismatics just like those who remained CMA. They agreed with many Pentecostal distinctives but could not quite embrace the initial evidence doctrine.
After graduating from Nyack, Elwin moved to Orlando, Florida where First Fruit Harvesters were trying to establish a ministry. While in Orlando, he attended a CMA church and became a prominent real estate agent. By the fall of 1925, Wright was boasting in the local paper of having done 1 million dollars in real estate transactions. He was buying and developing large tracks of land as part of the early growth of the city. As a prominent businessman who was deeply concerned about evangelism and missions, he helped sponsor R. A. Torrey’s last evangelistic meeting in Orlando. He was so successful in networking and promoting various Christian events that the Gideons made him chaplain for the entire state of Florida.
In the fall of 1929, Elwin began to leverage his experiences in Florida to expand his father’s organization. By this point, he had taken control of First Fruit Harvesters and renamed it the New England Fellowship (NEF). At the second annual conference in Rumney, New Hampshire, The Boston Globe reported that twenty-two denominations were represented with speakers like J. Oliver Buswell of Wheaton College. The NEF was billing itself as “an interdenominational organization which embraces all leaders of all the evangelical groups in New England.” In an interview in 1933, Elwin indicated that the purpose of the fellowship was to promote evangelistic campaigns, teach through Bible conferences, cultivate strategic centers of Christianity, and engage in mission. He was setting up an organization that paralleled the CMA’s success under A. B. Simpson and Paul Radar.
By the time Harold Ockenga assumed the pulpit of Park Street Church in 1936, Elwin had established the NEF as the most prominent fellowship in the area. Elwin had been partnering with Park Street Church since 1930 and engaged in Boston activities through an office at the church. Although Elwin saw NEF as defending the fundamentals of the faith, he consistently employed the term evangelical rather than fundamentalist. His desire was to pull from all denominations regardless of whether they were “modernist” or “fundamentalist.” To do so, he strategically utilized the older language of evangelical to unite pastors, independent networks and ministries, and colleges under a single banner.
The idea of using the older term evangelical to unite rather than the newer term fundamentalist resonated with Ockenga. Wright and Ockenga wanted to build a broader coalition. They also were both deeply influenced by older nineteenth-century models of holiness evangelicalism. Throughout the 1930s, Wright consistently employed evangelical to describe the NEF to the local papers. When Merrill Tenney of Gordon College spoke at the annual Bible conference as acting dean of Wright’s “institute,” the morning classes were held under the “Evangelical Teacher Training Association” (ETTA), which came out of Moody Bible Institute in 1929. Wright also developed a radio ensemble to promote radio ministry and wrote a popular work on the radio ministry of Charles E. Fuller.
The use of evangelical served Wright and Ockenga well. They both knew that Harry Emerson Fosdick continued to use the description because, despite his shifts on doctrinal matters, Fosdick still believed in the need for conversion to the gospel. The contested nature of evangelical revolved around who could claim the late nineteenth-century holiness revivalism with its emphasis on conversion and consecration. Fundamentalists who advanced forms of separation preferred terms that clearly demarcated them from other forms of Protestantism. This is not what Ockenga and Wright desired. They wanted to replace the FCC with a new, broader and larger coalition that drew upon the best of the nineteenth-century evangelical enterprise. This was the driving force behind forging the NAE.
The CG, the NAE, and Unity of Action
From 1939 to 1941, the NEF had passed a number of resolutions on the need to establish a “national association based on the principles of the Fellowship.” The interest peaked in 1941 causing Wright to reach out to Will Houghton, the president of Moody Bible Institute to call for a meeting in October to discuss the possibilities. One of the participants was Carl McIntire. McIntire had graduated from Westminster with Ockenga and had gone on to establish the Bible Presbyterian Church as a new fundamentalist denomination.
In September 1941, McIntire founded the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) as a counter to the Federal Council. At the meeting in Chicago, McIntire invited Wright, Ockenga, and others to join his group but they declined. McIntire set up the ACCC for denominations to unite around a narrow set of doctrines that would exclude many holiness and Pentecostal groups. The fact that only denominations could join automatically excluded individuals and organizations that remained connected to bodies such as the Northern Baptist Convention. These were unacceptable conditions to Wright and Ockenga.
Wright and Ockenga wanted an association that united individuals, ministries, educational institutes, and denominations under common action and representation. The common action would revolve around the nineteenth-century example of cooperation in evangelism, discipleship, and revivalism. The common representation would be for matters such as chaplaincy in the military, radio air time, and other public and political mechanisms to advance the gospel. At the time the FCC exercised some control over the appointment of military chaplains and radio air time.
After rejecting McIntire’s proposal, those present at the October 1941 meeting decided to send out a letter to numerous groups for a meeting in St. Louis in April 1942. When CG leaders received the letter, they were cautiously optimistic about the potential. As editor of the CGE, E. L. Simmons printed the relevant portions of the letter in the March 21 edition after invoking “the spirit of awakening” in revivals by men such as Finney, Whitfield, Wesley, Beecher, and Moody. It was clear that Simmons’ saw the NAE as an opportunity to return to the holiness revivalism of the past. Three men went to support General Overseer Walker: E. C. Clark, M. P. Cross, and E. L. Simmons. Clark was the oldest at 53. They were also joined by the Missouri State Overseer Houston R. Morehead.
There were several points in the letter that resonated with CG leadership. First, alongside fundamentalists like Lewis Sperry Chafer, they recognized J. Roswell Flower, general secretary of the AG. At the 1937 General Assembly, AG General Superintendent Ernest S. Williams preached on “Christian Love and Christian Unity” from Psalm 133 with great effect. Walker had invited Williams to come and address the general assembly to reinforce his desire to reach out to other Pentecostals as part of a new future. The CGE announced that Williams’ message was “assuredly. . .from the throne” and expressed hope for more peaceful relations between the CG and AG. When CG leaders saw Flowers’ name, they knew that Williams had approved the measure.
Second, the CG had been slowly moving into more radio broadcasts over the 1930s. Most of these broadcasts were sponsored at the state and local church level although the increased prominence of CG gospel quartets such as the Otis McCoy’s quartet, the LeFevre’s, and the Blackwood Brothers showed how important radio could be. During Walker’s tenure, the CGE started listing radio broadcasts in 1938 by CG ministers for its readers, even given the fact that, at the 1936 general assembly, several sermons decried the “sins of radio.” At the beginning of 1942, the CG published a new version of the songbook, Rays of Hope specially designed for the radio “being accepted and approved by over eight hundred radio stations.” The opportunity to expand the radio ministry of the CG at the local, regional, and denominational levels proved to be a strong attraction to the NAE.
Third, as early as 1940, the council of twelve expressed concern over how to handle the possibility that America would enter World War II. They were faced with the fact that CG members were already considering enlisting and the potential problem of being viewed as unpatriotic. They decided not to publicize the official teaching of the CG, which was against going to war. When the United States entered the war, CG leaders met with a representative from the “Office of Civilian Defense” to determine a course of action. They ensured the representative that the denomination would cooperate at the local level and that officials would not stop members from enlisting if they decided to do so. The challenges of handling the CG’s position against war during World War II were difficult. The NAE, it was thought, could help with those challenges. By 1945, the CG had changed its stance to allow freedom of conscience to determine whether to participate in war or not.
When the five CG representatives arrived at the Coronado Hotel in St. Louis, what they heard was encouraging. Elwin Wright recounted the history leading up the meeting, including the desire of McIntire and the ACCC to get them to join. Wright noted that they could not accept the proposal. He made good on that promise when McIntire attempted to get the Pentecostals and holiness churches kicked out in 1943. J. Roswell Flower communicated his appreciation for Ockenga doing “a new thing on the earth” by recognizing Pentecostals and other groups, which had never happened among fundamentalists.
In his keynote address, Ockenga indicated that the goal was unity, purity, and power. He yearned for “consecrated love. . .an element which is almost unknown in evangelical circles today. . . . If we have the baptism of the Holy Ghost we will have a baptism of love, and if love is absent the Holy Spirit is absent from our midst.” Ockenga knew that this language would be instantly recognizable by holiness and Pentecostal groups even if they disagreed on tongues in relation to baptism in the Spirit. It was Wesleyan language, and it excited the CG representatives. E. L. Simmons recounted in a CGE article that the “convention was nothing short of extremely pleasant.” He also noted how many AG officials were present as well as the holiness denominations.
At the 1942 general assembly in Birmingham, Alabama, it fell to E. C. Clark to present the report to the council of bishops. Clark made sure to note that joining did not impact CG teachings even though it required holding to the basis of the gospel like the virgin birth, deity of Christ, atoning blood of Christ, new birth, and resurrection. He also pointed out that the NAE representatives were respectful to Pentecostals. The benefits were help with copyrights in music and support with handling any difficulties of the members.
At the 1942 general assembly, the CG decided to send a second group to the constitutional convention in Chicago the following year. They did so on the strength of E. C. Clark’s presentation and the fact that Elwin Wright showed up to deal with questions and concerns. CG officials were told to listen closely at the next NAE meeting and gather additional information to report back to the council of bishops at the general assembly in 1943.
Even though the report to be given at the 1943 general assembly was positive, it did not convince everyone. At the council of twelve meeting before the 1943 assembly, a debate broke out over whether to join the NAE or not. Some members remained skeptical over the attitude toward Pentecostals. They decided to move forward because of the potential benefits to establishing a radio ministry and missions but recommended a committee study the NAE constitution at the Chicago meeting. The 1943 general assembly closed with another group appointed to attend the 1944 meeting but they were given the power to affiliate if they thought it acceptable. The enlarged delegation was still led by Walker. They chose to move forward with the NAE for the sake of “unity of action” despite the misgivings.
Conclusion
What led the CG to affiliate with the NAE was a combination of internal and external dynamics. Under Walker’s leadership, the CG had entered a growth phase. They wanted to move forward into radio and open up new avenues for mission. The NAE offered to help them with these endeavors. The CG also faced pressures during World War II. One of the concerns was how the official CG position against war would be received. Joining the NAE would help the CG navigate the ongoing challenges of being a pacifist denomination until they could change their official teaching in 1945.
The internal dynamics stemmed from the debates between CG writers and fundamentalists. By 1940, many in the CG were convinced that fundamentalists hated Pentecostals and were determined to see them as nothing more than a cult of fanatics. What enabled the CG to overcome the majority of these concerns was the common ground they had with Wright and Ockenga. The Wesleyan holiness theology that Ockenga communicated in his speeches was matched by Wright’s CMA sympathy for Pentecostalism. As a charismatic of his day, Wright held to many of the distinctives that defined Pentecostalism. Yet, there remained a contingent of CG ministers who were unsure of the alliance. They did not want the CG to water down its distinctives.
The concern over the fundamentalization of the CG remains even today. At the 2022 general assembly, several speeches were given on the floor that explicitly referenced Baptists and Liberty University. One church official privately wondered whether the CG was more Baptist than Pentecostal. One of the drivers behind the Declaration of Faith was the preservation of CG identity. It was to return the CG to the “full gospel” in the face of threats. In the final installment, I will deal with some of those issues.