How the Holy Spirt Marked a Movement

Assemblies Government 101

While the AG’s current racial makeup defies its relatively recent history, there’s also a paradox in how the denomination is structured. It’s what observers see as an odd mix of congregational governance, where each congregation owns its own property as in Baptist denominations, and a form of presbyterian polity. Local church leaders do not report to headquarters. However, the credentials of ministers are held by the district councils and the General Council. Ministers are accountable in areas of doctrine, morality and ethics.

This means churches are independent but clergy answer to district-level officials who are elected. National leaders are also elected, while the entire denomination is governed by General Presbyters who meet annually in Springfield (the Executive Presbytery meets five times a year) and by a General Council that meets every other year.

Like most denominations the leadership is predominantly male. Yet paradoxically, women have been credentialed since the beginning. My own mother-in-law, Rose Ferrell, who passed away in 2011 at age 96, was an ordained AG minster who pioneered churches throughout the South and overseas with her husband. The AG initially ordained women as missionaries and evangelists, but not as elders. This changed in 1935.

The AG has a long history of female evangelists, and today there are nearly 600 women senior pastors. Of the six members of the Executive Management Team, two are women who serve as vice presidents. Beth Grant serves as the lone female on the Executive Presbytery, representing ordained female ministers and having served in that position since 2009. And Carol Taylor was president of Vanguard University before going to Springfield to serve as president of the new consolidated Evangel University—a first in the school’s 92-year history.

These days the average AG churchgoer might not know the difference between the Springfield where the AG headquarters is and the dozens of other Springfields that dot the American landscape. But be assured, AG pastors know. They use “Springfield” to refer to headquarters the way journalists use “Washington” to refer to the federal government. Insiders jokingly refer to Springfield as “Mecca” or the “Holy City.”

AG pastors are first certified, licensed, then ordained. Though churches don’t have to tithe to the denomination as the Church of God (Cleveland) requires, pastors are required to send in a portion of their tithe to the district and can be disciplined if they don’t. (The percentage of the minister’s tithe depends on the district.) The only real control the denomination has over its clergy, however, is to “pull the papers” (withdraw their ordination, effectively kicking them out of the AG) if they stray doctrinally or have a moral or ethical failure.

In the early days AG leaders did not seem as open as today. Consider how David du Plessis was treated in the early 1960s. Originally from South Africa, he took the message of the baptism in the Holy Spirit to so many mainline churches he became known as “Mr. Pentecost.” For reasons that may be never fully known, his credentials in the Assemblies were withdrawn because, as he told me years later when I wrote about him in Charisma, he was hobnobbing with liberals in the National Council of Churches. AG leaders later apologized to him, and in 1980 he was reinstated as an AG minister.

Another example is Loren Cunningham, who founded Youth With A Mission while in the denomination. He had a vision to take young people overseas on trips to give them a heart for missions. The story goes that an AG leader said he would approve this as long as Cunningham limited it to about 10 per year. Today YWAM has more than 16,000 full-time “missionaries” around the world—almost four times as many as the Assemblies itself. Of course, one AG official told me that it was a “missiological difference” that led to the parting of the ways. While YWAM may have more people on the field, the Assemblies has worked to establish the indigenous church, resulting in more than 360,000 local AG churches around the world.

“We invested heavily in raising up pastors and leaders in their own nations, founding hundreds upon hundreds of short-term and long-term Bible colleges that have now equipped tens of thousands of national workers and pastors,” Wood says. “And the AG learned from YWAM and has deployed thousands of young people over the years in short-term missions assignments.”

The narrow-mindedness that prompted duPlessis and Cunningham to leave also led to a well-known quip by the late C.M. Ward, who at the time was the voice of the denomination’s weekly radio broadcast, Revivaltime, making his name a household word in Assemblies circles. Ward was an iconoclast of sorts and seemed to enjoy tweaking the leaders in Springfield, despite the fact the leadership gave him the microphone for 25 years. After he said that the Assemblies leadership “must be on the pill” because they hadn’t “given birth to a new idea in years,” denominational leaders called him in to explain. At first he denied saying it. But when a tape was played of him saying it in Canada, he responded: “Well, you never know what you will say under the anointing.”

One Springfield insider who knows the personalities involved told me that some of the leaders Ward criticized may not have been perfect, but “if Springfield had been on the pill then, we wouldn’t be seeing the explosive growth we are having today. Obviously, some foundations were being laid in those years.”

In the past leadership also frowned upon AG pastors preaching in non-Assemblies churches. Yet, true to the ongoing paradox of its makeup, the denomination has always been open to other groups and, unlike the United Pentecostal Church, has never said it is the “only church.” In fact, the AG was one of the founders of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1943 and for decades has been the NAE’s largest member and financial contributor.

Today things have changed so much that AG pastors frequently headline cross-denominational conferences while other leaders enjoy freedoms unheard of in previous generations. For example, Matthew Barnett, who founded the Dream Center in Los Angeles with his father, beloved AG megachurch pastor Tommy Barnett, now pastors Angelus Temple, the famous Foursquare church founded by Aimee Semple McPherson. Matthew Barnett surrendered his AG credentials but still leads the Dream Center, which remains AG. And in recent years, some exceptions have been made for pastors holding joint credentials with other denominations.