Charles Fox Parham

Charles Fox Parham

Charles Fox Parham (born June 4, 1873 in Muscatine , Iowa , † January 29, 1929 in Baxter Springs , Kansas ) was an American preacher and co-founder of the Pentecostal movement .

Life

Charles Fox Parham was born in Iowa and raised in Kansas , teaching a Sunday school and later becoming a lay preacher in a Methodist Episcopal Church . In 1894 he gave up his job as a pastor to work as an independent preacher and evangelist . In 1896 Parham married Sarah Thistlethwaite, who came from a Quaker family. A year later their first son was born. Together with his wife, Parham opened a mental institution in Topeka , Kansas, in 1898 , which was named Bethel . However, Parham lost control of the home and traveled around, eventually re-establishing a facility called Bethel in 1900 . Students could live here to learn of Parham's evangelistic skills.

Before setting off on a trip to the end-time preacher Frank Sandford's The Kingdom religious community in Durham, Maine in the summer of 1900 , he asked his students to find passages from the Bible dealing with baptism in the Holy Spirit . The students worked out that speaking in tongues was a sign of baptism. Tradition has it that Parham and his students prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit on the evening of December 31, 1900 , until Agnes Oznam received the experience and began to speak in tongues in the early hours of January 1, 1901. The connection between baptism in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues has since been regarded as a distinguishing feature for Christians with Pentecostal influences. Because of his origins in the sanctification movement , Parham explained the baptism in the Holy Spirit as the third act of grace in the life of a believer who had previously been sanctified . Parham represented his doctrine, which he himself called Apostolic Faith , in circles of the sanctification movement in Kansas and the neighboring states. Eventually he started a Bible school in Houston . From 1905, the African-American preacher of the sanctification movement, William J. Seymour , attended classes, although he was not allowed to enter the school because of racial segregation in Texas and had to watch the class from the window.

Parham helped Seymour move to Los Angeles in 1906 , where Seymour was to begin a position as pastor of a small church. In Los Angeles, however, Seymour soon presided over what became known nationally and internationally as the Azusa Street Revival . Parham and Seymour parted ways because of differing views on church practice and allegations of sexual impropriety against Parham. Alienated from the mainstream of Pentecostalism , Parham retired to Baxter Springs, where he taught in a small Bible school and preached in the surrounding churches. Some of these churches eventually formed an association known as the Apostolic Faith .

Works

• A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, 1902)
• The Everlasting Gospel (Baxter Springs, KS: Apostolic Faith Bible College, 1911)

literature

Walter J. Hollenweger, Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity: Origin, Situation, Ecumenical Opportunities , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Walter J. Hollenweger, Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity: Origin, Situation, Ecumenical Opportunities , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997, p. 33
2. ↑ Sources often also indicate the spelling Thistlewaite .
3. ↑ Roy Weremchuk, THUS Saith the Lord? , Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag, Baden-Baden 2019, p. 522 f.
4. ^ J. Gordon Melton: Parham, Charles Fox . In: Encyclopedia of World Religions . Encyclopedia of Protestantism, No. 6 . Facts of File, New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-8160-5456-5 , pp. 417 (English).