The Assemblies of God Joins the National Association of Evangelicals

Twenty seven years after the General Council split Pentecostalism over the Trinity in 1916, already recorded here, and four years before the first Pentecostal World Conference convened in Zurich in 1947, also recorded here, American Pentecostalism's largest denomination joined the broader evangelical movement it had long been kept apart from. Representatives of the Assemblies of God attended the exploratory meeting that formed the National Association of Evangelicals for United Action at St Louis in April 1942, and the Assemblies of God's own 1943 General Council voted to affiliate; the association held its constitutional convention in Chicago in May 1943, with more than a thousand delegates from nearly fifty denominations. Before this, most American fundamentalists had kept Pentecostalism at arm's length as a heretical enthusiasm; the National Association of Evangelicals became the first major national body to unite mainstream evangelicals and Pentecostals, and by 1958 five Pentecostal denominations counted for nearly two thirds of its membership. The Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, the Assemblies of God's own archive, records the 1943 affiliation. Edith Blumhofer's academic history of the Assemblies of God traces the vote as a deliberate step in the denomination's own movement from a separatist sect toward the American evangelical mainstream.