A History of Christian Doctrine #3 - Online Christian Library

The Pentecostal Movement
January 1, 1901, Agnes Ozman (1870-1937), a “city missionary”
in Topeka and a student at the Bible school, asked
Parham to lay hands on her that she might receive the Holy
Spirit. When he did, she began to speak in tongues. On
January 3, Parham, his wife, and twelve ministerial students
also received the Holy Spirit with the sign of tongues.
The new Pentecostals concluded that the experience
they had received was something more than what the
Holiness movement had taught. Parham thought of it as a
third crisis experience, as expressed in the common testimony
of early Pentecostals: “Thank God, I am saved,
sanctified, and filled with the Holy Ghost.” He believed it
was an endowment of power for service, and at first he
thought that speaking in tongues would assist in foreign
missions efforts.
Parham called his new group the Apostolic Faith movement,
and he published a periodical called The Apostolic
Faith. The group conducted meetings in Kansas and
Missouri but did not grow rapidly at first. A significant
breakthrough came in the fall of 1903 in Galena, Kansas.
A woman from the town was almost completely blind from
an eye disease. After she was instantly healed in one of
Parham’s services in Eldorado Springs, Missouri, she
invited him to conduct meetings in Galena. There, more
than eight hundred people were baptized in water, many
hundreds received the Holy Ghost, and at least one thousand
people testified that they were healed.
A convert in this revival was Howard Goss (1883-
1964), who would become one of the founders of the
Assemblies of God and later the first general superintendent
of the United Pentecostal Church. He was an
“infidel” (atheist) when he visited Parham’s meeting. He
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