The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Revival Streams
Charles Fox Parham
1873–1929 · American
The Kansas teacher whose students went looking in Acts for the evidence of Spirit baptism - and whose later years disgraced what he began.
The life
Charles Fox Parham was a young holiness preacher running a Bible school in a rented mansion in Topeka, Kansas, when he set his students a question: what does the book of Acts give as the evidence that a believer has been baptized in the Holy Spirit? They came back with one answer - speaking in tongues. On January 1, 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman asked for prayer and began to speak in a language she did not know, and Parham built a movement on it.
His Houston school four years later is where William Seymour heard the teaching he would carry to Azusa Street. Then Parham's own story darkened: he denounced the Azusa meetings in openly racist terms, was arrested in San Antonio in 1907 on a morals charge that was dropped but never lived down, and spoke approvingly of the Ku Klux Klan in his last decade. The doctrine outlived the man who framed it, and the movement he started largely left him behind.