Search

Ellen Wharton was born on January 15, 1865, in Gayton, Northamptonshire, England. She underwent an emotive conversion and sanctification experience at the age of fifteen, which contributed to her decision to move to London, England, to work under the tutelage of the renowned faith healer, Elizabeth Baxter, as well as her desire to establish a healing mission of her own.After apprenticing with Baxter, Ellen met James Hebden—four years her senior, and, like Ellen, an aspiring missionary—who was raising his two children alone after the death of his first wife. E…

The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC) was established on May 17, 1919. What would eventually become the country’s largest Pentecostal denomination, however, initially represented fewer than thirty congregations in eastern Canada. Also in 1919, Pentecostals in western Canada joined the American Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, as the Western Canada District Council of the Assemblies of God. The existence of two separate Canadian Pentecostal organizations was a result of the …

Robert Edward McAlister was born into a large Presbyterian farming family in Renfrew County, Ontario, in 1880. The family moved to Cobden, Ontario, in 1891, where McAlister had an important conversion experience in the holiness congregation led by Ralph Cecil Horner—an important Canadian radical holiness evangelist and founder of the Holiness Movement Church and the Standard Church of America. McAlister studied at God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio, during 1900–1902, before returning home du…

Approximately 478,705 Canadians (about 1.5 percent of all Canadians) self-identify as Pentecostals. The majority of these individuals likely attend congregations affiliated with one of about a dozen explicitly Pentecostal denominations, the two largest being the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (established in 1919) and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland and Labrador (established in 1925). The remainder attend other non-Pentecostal congregations or no congregations at all, but find meaning in self-identifying as Pentecostal becaus…

Until recently, it was almost mandatory for authors writing a book about Pentecostalism to begin by emphasizing its significant growth—especially in Africa and Latin America—since the time of its origination in the first decade of the twentieth century (Stewart 2012). This authorial ritual was motivated by an either real or perceived need for scholars interested in the study of Pentecostalism to legitimate their work among their disciplinary peers who largely understood Pentecostalism as either …