Oneness Pentecostalism

History

Causes

Oneness Pentecostalism began as a quarrel about a baptismal formula and became a quarrel about God. Its date is usually set at 1913, the year the idea was first preached publicly, though it took three more years to become a separate movement. The map uses 1913 for that reason: the later dates (the first rebaptisms in 1914, the split in 1916) are consequences of what was said that spring.

The setting was the young Finished Work wing of the movement that came out of the Azusa Street Revival. In April 1913 Pentecostals gathered at Arroyo Seco, near Los Angeles, for the Apostolic Faith World-Wide Camp Meeting, an event planned with the healing evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter in the hope that God would do a “new thing” and unite the scattered movement (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary). At a baptismal service the Canadian minister R. E. McAlister preached that baptism “in the name of Jesus” was to be preferred to the threefold formula of Matthew 28:19, pointing to Peter’s words at Pentecost as the apostolic model (Acts 2:38). A young minister, John Schaepe, spent the night in prayer and announced the next morning that he had received a revelation on the point.

The man who turned the remark into a theology was Frank Ewart, an Australian-born former Baptist pastor who heard McAlister at Arroyo Seco and worked the idea out with him and with the evangelist Glenn Cook (Frank Ewart, secondary). On 15 April 1914 Ewart and Cook rebaptized each other “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” in a tank in Ewart’s tent, the act usually taken as the movement’s start as a distinct body. Ewart’s paper Meat in Due Season carried the “New Issue” across the country. Its logic ran in one direction: if baptism must be in Jesus’ name because that is the one name of God, then Father, Son and Spirit are titles of one person, not three persons.

The message spread fast inside the new Assemblies of God, formed in 1914. Cook carried it to the Midwest, and in Indianapolis Garfield Thomas Haywood, the African-American pastor of Christ Temple, a congregation of several hundred Black and white members, was rebaptized around 1915 after reading Ewart’s paper (Garfield Thomas Haywood, secondary). Even E. N. Bell, the Assemblies’ chairman, was rebaptized in Jesus’ name in 1915, though he stayed Trinitarian.

The 1916 split

The Assemblies first appealed for tolerance. At its fourth General Council in October 1916, the Trinitarian leadership, fearing the new teaching would take over the young fellowship, adopted a Statement of Fundamental Truths (1916) that affirmed the Trinity. The Assemblies of God still publishes the statement on its website (blocked to plain requests, so not linked here). A large minority of its ministers then left; Wikipedia’s summary puts it at a third (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary). From then on the Oneness churches stood apart both from Trinitarian Pentecostals and from the wider church.

Organizations

The departing ministers met at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to form the General Assembly of the Apostolic Churches, which merged in late 1917 into the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, which Haywood led as presiding bishop from 1925 until his death in 1931 (Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, secondary). The early PAW was racially mixed, with a white chairman, Haywood as its first secretary, and Black and white ministers. It did not hold. In 1924 white Southern ministers, objecting among other things to travel to Northern meetings and to credentials signed by Haywood, withdrew and formed new bodies. In 1945 two mainly white groups, the Pentecostal Church, Incorporated, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ, merged as the United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI), with Howard Goss as its first general superintendent. The PAW is still headquartered in Indianapolis (PAW).

Influence and spread

The UPCI became the largest and most visible Oneness denomination. Wikipedia, citing the UPCI’s own figures, gives its constituency as over 6.1 million in 2025, and estimates the whole Oneness movement at about 30 million people, of whom roughly 40 percent are Black, 30 percent Asian, 20 percent Hispanic and under a tenth white (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary; these are estimates, not a census). There are large Oneness communities in Latin America and Asia. China’s True Jesus Church, an indigenous Chinese church, is also Oneness, and the Philippines alone has well over a hundred Oneness organizations.

Key ideas and contributors

The oneness of God. The UPCI’s statement of belief reads: “There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation. Jesus Christ is God manifested in flesh. He is both God and man” (UPCI, Our Beliefs). The proof texts it lists are Deuteronomy 6:4, Ephesians 4:4–6, Colossians 2:9 (“in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”) and 1 Timothy 3:16. The Son, in this teaching, is God’s self-revelation in the human Jesus; he did not exist as a distinct person before the incarnation, except as God’s Word or plan. The movement’s standard systematic statement is David K. Bernard’s The Oneness of God (Word Aflame Press; Archive.org, 1986 printing), written by the man who later became the UPCI’s general superintendent. Bernard grants that Oneness theology resembles ancient modalism but argues it is a biblical form of it, distinct from the views the early church condemned.

Baptism in Jesus’ name. Oneness churches baptize by immersion with a formula naming Jesus, following Acts, where converts are baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ” or “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 2:38; Acts 8:16, 10:48, 19:5). They read Matthew 28:19 the same way: Jesus commands baptism into “the name” (singular) of Father, Son and Spirit, and the apostles in Acts show what that one name is. The study note on Matthew covers the verse’s place in this argument.

The Acts 2:38 plan of salvation. Peter’s answer at Pentecost (“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ… and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”) became the movement’s pattern of conversion, outlined early by Haywood, the Canadian Franklin Small and the Persian evangelist Andrew Urshan. The UPCI calls it obeying the gospel: “repentance (death to sin), water baptism in the name of Jesus Christ (burial), and the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the initial sign of speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives the utterance (resurrection)” (UPCI, Our Beliefs). Many Oneness churches treat all three as the new birth, so that someone baptized with the Trinitarian formula, or who has not spoken in tongues, has not yet been fully born again.

Tongues and the gifts. With other classical Pentecostals, Oneness churches hold that tongues are the initial sign of Spirit baptism and that the gifts, healing included, continue today (Continuationism). What sets them apart is that they fold Spirit baptism into salvation itself, where most Trinitarian Pentecostals treat it as a later empowering experience for people already saved.

Holiness standards. The UPCI tells its members to “live a holy life inwardly and outwardly.” In practice many Oneness churches keep visible standards: women not cutting their hair or wearing trousers, makeup or jewellery, men keeping short hair, and in some churches avoiding television and films (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary). Oneness teachers present these as the fruit of salvation, not a way of earning it.

Key controversies

Modalism. The main charge against the movement is that it revives the third-century heresy usually called modalism or Sabellianism: one God taking on three roles in turn, with no real distinction of persons. The early Trinitarian case against that view is Tertullian’s Against Praxeas, which accuses Praxeas of having “put to flight the Paraclete” and “crucified the Father” (New Advent). Trinitarians argue that the Gospels show the Father, Son and Spirit acting together and speaking to one another, as at Jesus’ baptism and in his prayers, which only makes sense if they are distinct persons, and that this was settled in the debates over God and Trinity from the Council of Nicaea on. Oneness writers answer that the Son’s prayers are the human Jesus speaking to God, and that “person” is a philosophical word the Bible does not use. Bernard’s reply to the charge, as noted above, is to accept that the view is modalist while denying that it teaches what Sabellius did.

Book-length Trinitarian critiques include Gregory Boyd’s Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (1992), James R. White’s The Forgotten Trinity (1998, Archive.org), a popular defence of the Trinity, and Michael R. Burgos’s Against Oneness Pentecostalism (3rd ed., 2020). Thomas A. Fudge’s Christianity Without the Cross: A History of Salvation in Oneness Pentecostalism (2003) examines the movement’s teaching on salvation.

The baptismal formula. The second dispute is the one in Matthew. Trinitarians point to the Didache, a church manual usually dated to the late first or early second century, which tells churches to “baptize into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living water” (Didache 7). If that formula was in use so early, they argue, it cannot be a later corruption of an original Jesus’-name practice, and “in the name of Jesus” in Acts describes whose baptism it was, not the words spoken. Oneness scholars such as David Norris reply that there is “a strong scholarly consensus that the earliest Christian baptism was practiced in Jesus’ name,” and that the threefold formula came in with the later development of the doctrine of the Trinity (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary).

Who is saved. Where Oneness churches teach that Jesus’-name baptism and tongues are part of the new birth, the logic leaves Christians baptized with the Trinitarian formula short of full salvation, and Trinitarians in turn regard Oneness teaching on God as outside orthodoxy. After 1916 most Oneness believers were isolated from other Pentecostals and from the wider church (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary). Critics also call the holiness standards legalistic, a charge the churches reject.

T. D. Jakes and the Elephant Room. The question reached a wide evangelical audience in January 2012. T. D. Jakes, pastor of The Potter’s House in Dallas, had been converted and ordained in Oneness churches, and critics had long called him a modalist. At the second “Elephant Room” roundtable, hosted by James MacDonald and Mark Driscoll on 25 January 2012, Driscoll pressed him on the Godhead (Christian Post, 26 January 2012). Jakes said he had once held the Oneness view but had come to find some of it “very dogmatic, very narrow,” and he agreed with Driscoll’s wording “one God, three persons.” He added that he was “not crazy about the word ‘persons’” and that his statement differed from Driscoll’s mainly in using “manifest” instead, “which you describe as modalist and I describe as Pauline.” Supporters took this as an affirmation of the Trinity; critics noted that he did not affirm that the three persons are eternal, which Oneness theology denies (T. D. Jakes, secondary). The invitation also strained relations among the hosts’ allies: the Christian Post linked it to MacDonald’s resignation from The Gospel Coalition.

What remains unresolved

Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostals share nearly everything else: the experience of the Spirit, tongues, healing, the expectation of Christ’s return. They divide over whether God is one person or three, and over whether the words said at baptism decide whether it counts. Neither side has moved on the first question in a century. The second depends on how much weight the Didache and the later church can carry against the narrative of Acts, which is exactly the point Oneness readers deny.