United Pentecostal Church International

In September 1945, delegates of two separate Oneness Pentecostal bodies, the Pentecostal Church, Incorporated and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ, met in St. Louis, Missouri, and voted to merge into a single organization, first named the United Pentecostal Church. The union brought together two groups that had each carried the same distinctive teaching since the "Jesus' Name" controversies that split early twentieth century Pentecostalism: that baptism should be administered in the name of Jesus Christ alone, following the pattern of Acts 2:38, rather than in the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that God is a single, undivided person rather than three coequal persons.

At the time of the merger the new church counted 521 congregations. Its own account of its history reports that growth since has been sustained and substantial: the UPCI today lists more than 45,000 churches and preaching points, some 45,000 credentialed ministers, and close to 6.2 million constituents, with an organized presence in 203 nations and territories. That places it among the largest Pentecostal denominations of any kind and the largest body within the Oneness, or Apostolic, wing of the Pentecostal movement specifically, a wing that remains institutionally and doctrinally distinct from Trinitarian Pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God, with which it shares a Pentecostal emphasis on the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues but not the doctrine of the Trinity itself.

The UPCI does not govern by a single fixed creed alone; its positions on contested social and moral questions are set by written resolutions of two bodies, its General Conference and its General Board, published afterward as standing position papers that name their own adoption date on the title page. "The Biblical Ideal of Marriage and Family," first adopted by the General Conference in 1990 and readopted in 2012, defines the family as founded on "one man and one woman, married by law in accordance with all biblical injunctions," and commits the church to opposing any broadening of that legal definition, though it stops short of stating a rule for divorce or remarriage among members.

"The Biblical View of Human Sexuality," adopted by the smaller General Board rather than the full Conference in September 2015, addresses a wider list of subjects than the 1990s paper had: fornication, adultery, polygamy, homosexuality, bestiality, incest and transgenderism are each treated in turn as improper expressions of human sexuality, each with its own scriptural citations. Both papers close on the same note, that the church's aim toward those who fall short of its teaching is reconciliation rather than condemnation, a pairing of firm doctrinal statement with an explicitly stated pastoral posture that runs through both documents.