The Origins of the Renewal, Part 2: The Pentecostal Heresy #3

Chapter Two

Charles Parham

If there is any figure who can be called the Father of Pentecostalism, well, it would be Satan, but in the human form, it would be Charles Parham. As was discussed in the last chapter, Parham was not only linked with Dowie and Sandford in a peripheral sense, but they directly influenced him to the point that he modelled his own ministry endeavour after theirs.

Charles Parham (1873-1929) was a supply pastor in the Methodist Church as a young man but left the denomination in 1895. He did so after hearing of Dowie’s movement and came to disagree with the Methodist hierarchy, arguing that pastors and ministers should preach and minister under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost.¹ 

In 1898, Parham visited Dowie’s cult so that he could learn his methods. After that he went to Topeka, Kansas to create his own faith-healing home called Bethel.² Two years later, in 1900, Frank Sandford’s cult made national headlines after it was claimed that someone in his commune was miraculously raised from the dead. Hearing this, Parham took a leave from his fledgling bible school in Topeka and went to Sandford’s Shiloh cult in Maine. He spent six weeks with Sandford and studied his methods; he even taught Sandford’s students while he stayed at Shiloh. In addition, he participated in one of Sandford’s “revivals” in another town as a spiritual leader.³

Parham brought dozens of his own students to Sandford’s cult, and one of them, a woman named Lizzie Bell, was rendered insane after a botched “faith healing.”⁴ After his sojourn with Sandford, Parham returned to Topeka with renewed inspiration to up the ante in his own community. He modelled his community after both Zion City and Shiloh and swiftly announced his own “prophecy” that the end of the world was nigh. According to Parham, the world would end before 1925, therefore those who desired to be saved needed to prepare for the end and be saved.⁵ 

By September of 1900, Parham’s bible school/cult was thriving, with hundreds of people living in an old mansion he leased. He displayed a zeal similar to Sandford and ordered regimented prayer sessions, including residents taking shifts to ensure that prayer took place twenty-four hours daily. In Topeka, Parham’s followers became known as “Parhamites,” but his national influence would reach epic proportions on January 1, 1901.

The Topeka Outpouring 

Leading up to New Year’s Day, 1901, Parham instructed his students to consider the Acts of the Apostles in great detail to discern God’s will for his ministry. His students were convinced that if they truly had the Holy Ghost, they would manifest the same gifts as the Apostles and first disciples, which included things like speaking in foreign languages (tongues), miraculous healings, and prophecies. So, at New Year’s, Parham’s community prayed for a revival of the Holy Ghost and to receive the charismatic gifts.  

On January 1, a woman named Agnes Ozman began to speak Chinese — or so they thought. For Parham and his followers, this was evidence of the “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” which would become a central theme of Pentecostalism and then Charismatic Catholicism.⁶

It was a miracle! An American woman with supposedly no knowledge of the Chinese language had broken out into a foreign tongue miraculously, just like the Apostles. Those present attested that Ozman could not only speak Chinese, but could also write in Chinese, and she apparently couldn’t even speak English for three whole days, communicating and writing only in Chinese. Word spread throughout the United States through the newspapers.⁷ Ozman convinced everyone that she had never before spoken Chinese, therefore it must have been a true miracle.

Now, there are a couple of things worth considering before we continue. First, it is interesting to note that the first Pentecostals believed that the gift of tongues would come as real languages and not mindless babbling. Second, their impression of the gift of tongues was that it not only helped a person speak a new language but essentially stopped them from speaking their native tongue. Third, by their prayers, they believed you could, in essence, ask God for the gifts, and He would give them to you if you prayed hard enough. Lastly, a new “gift” had emerged which was apparently some sort of Holy Spirit writing, which is nowhere mentioned in Scripture, but it is a trait that manifests in those dedicated to the dark arts of the Occult and other forms of Satanic spiritualism.⁸

We will discuss the gift of tongues at length in a subsequent chapter, but this theology of how charismatic graces operate is not orthodox. The first notion that the gift of tongues would be the ability to speak a foreign language is perfectly in line with Catholic thinking, but the notions that you would cease to speak your own language and that you can receive the gifts by asking the way they did, is without merit when considering the wisdom of the Church on the matter.

At any rate, for Parham’s followers, this was evidence that the Holy Ghost favoured his cult, and therefore it had God’s favour. 

However, there is a major problem with the story.

It seems that Ozman was not telling the truth about her ability to speak Chinese out of the blue. You see, Ozman had trained for foreign missions before attending Parham’s school. A newspaper article from 1894 stated: “Miss Agnes N. Ozman returned this afternoon from St. Paul, Minn, where she has been attending for two years the Bible Mission school, preparing herself for foreign missionary work.”⁹ A year later, in the same paper, it was written that she had “completed her studies… [and] passed a satisfactory examination and been admitted as a member of the foreign missionary class that is assigned to the China missionary field.”¹⁰

Now, if one were to be trained to do missionary work in a foreign country for a number of years, what do you suppose they would be taught? Of course, they would be instructed in the language of the foreign land — this is obvious. Ozman may not have been a master of Chinese, but that she passed the examinations necessary to teach and preach in China is clear evidence that she at least had a basic understanding of the language. She certainly knew enough Chinese to confuse a bunch of unwitting Americans in Kansas at the turn of the last century. Remember, this was long before foreign films with dubbing and subtitles flooded the international market, and it is likely that no one in her vicinity had ever heard anyone speak Chinese. 

On January 6, 1901, Ozman’s supposed Chinese handwriting was published in the Topeka Daily Capital. If you assess the photographs of her writings, it does not take an expert to understand that she was not writing in Chinese, and in fact, her etchings look more like something a toddler or preschooler would do with a pencil if he was pretending to write in Eastern characters. The Topeka paper even had a Chinese man look at the writings, and as you can imagine, what Ozman had written was not Chinese, or any language at all.¹¹

Nonetheless, Parham and his followers continued with the lie that they had received the gift of tongues and were now the progenitors of what would become an international scam. It should also be noted that Ozman herself may have been a victim of the insane pressure put on the students under the influence of Parham, who modelled his cult after the tyrannical communities of Dowie and Sandford. In a Christian publication in 1906, her classmates admitted that Ozman suffered from some sort of nervous disorder or mental illness; they said: “She was of a nervous nature, and we believe that she was entirely deceived, as she practically admitted to us some months after she had broken with the Parham people.”¹²

It is worth noting that Ozman listed disciples of Frank Sandford as some of her “more esteemed spiritual teachers.”¹³ Ozman may have been influenced by the Devil or may have been a mentally ill victim of a pressurized scam from a tyrannical false prophet, but she certainly was not given a miraculous gift from God — that poor woman.

One of Parham’s students knew that what had happened during the supposed “speaking in tongues” fiasco was a fraud. He told the Topeka State Journal: “They began to claim the gift of tongues and the gift of discernment, and each talked a different kind of gibberish, claiming to be inspired by God, and that they talked one of the foreign languages. I was not under the influence, and could see that the students of the school had been led to this extreme through their fanaticism… I told them that they were under the influence of the evil one… They all laughed at me.”¹⁴