The Pentecostal movement that produced the Assemblies of God began without any single denomination behind it. Following the Azusa Street Revival that broke out in Los Angeles in 1906, independent Pentecostal congregations, missionaries and traveling evangelists multiplied across the United States with almost no shared organization at all, each answering to its own local leadership and holding property, when it held any, in the name of whichever individual happened to be in charge.
That independence carried real costs. Missionaries overseas struggled to raise support without a recognized sending body behind them; congregations had no orderly way to credential ministers or discipline the unqualified; and no Pentecostal Bible school existed to train the movement's next generation of leaders. In April 1914, roughly three hundred ministers and lay leaders, among them Eudorus N. Bell and Howard A. Goss, answered a published call to gather at Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a General Council meant to address exactly these problems, not to found a rigid new denomination but to bring enough shared order to sustain missions, education and ministerial standards.
The result, the General Council of the Assemblies of God, deliberately avoided a detailed doctrinal statement at first, wary of the very creedalism many attendees had left other denominations to escape. That reluctance did not last. Doctrinal controversy within the young fellowship forced the issue within two years, and the 1916 General Council adopted the Statement of Fundamental Truths the movement still uses to define itself today.