Choosing the Jesus Way

American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle

Angela Tarango

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469612935
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Choosing the Jesus Way uncovers the history and religious experiences of the first American Indian converts to Pentecostalism. Focusing on the Assemblies of God denomination, the story begins in 1918, when white missionaries fanned out from the South and Midwest to convert Native Americans in the West and other parts of the country. Drawing on new approaches to the global history of Pentecostalism, Angela Tarango shows how converted indigenous leaders eventually transformed a standard Pentecostal theology of missions in ways that reflected their own religious struggles and advanced their sovereignty within the denomination. Key to the story is the Pentecostal "indigenous principle, " which encourages missionaries to train local leadership in hopes of creating an indigenous church rooted in the culture of the missionized. In Tarango's analysis, the indigenous principle itself was appropriated by the first generation of Native American Pentecostals, who transformed it to critique aspects of the missionary project and to argue for greater religious autonomy. More broadly, Tarango scrutinizes simplistic views of religious imperialism and demonstrates how religious forms and practices are often mutually influenced in the American experience.

Chapter 1
The Indigenous Principle

Pentecostal Missionary Theology and the Birth of the Assemblies of God’s Home Missions to American Indians

“I am still on the Lord’s side. I am located here at La Moine, [sic] Cal. I moved here to get right among the Indians. With the Lord’s help I have reached quite a few and have given out the Word of life to them. . . . There are some God has touched and I pray that they will receive the promise of the Father. I request your earnest prayer for us and the dear Indian people.”¹ Brother Thompson’s report of his missionary work to American Indians was the first of its kind in the pages of the Christian Evangel, the forerunner of the Pentecostal Evangel (PE). The simple language and misspelling of the place name (it is Lamoine, not La Moine) highlights his social location as a rather ordinary American—one who had chosen to be one of the first-known white Pentecostal missionaries to Native peoples in the United States.

This is the story of ordinary believers, both white and red, men and women, and how they harnessed the power of the Holy Spirit to transform everyday lives, institutions, and theology. This is a story not only of paternalism and ethnocentrism, cultural misunderstanding and racism, but also of innovation and leadership, pragmatism and inspiration. Chiefly, however, this is the story of belief, of the transformative fire of Pentecost, of the toil of being a disciple, and of holding a religious movement to its deepest principles. This is the story of American Indian Pentecostals and their white supporters, and how a small minority group challenged a religious movement.

This book focuses on the AG’s home missions program to American Indians, how American Indian converts rose to leadership positions, and how those leaders took the theology of the indigenous principle and shaped it into a religious practice—it is what undergirded their rallying cry for Indian leadership, autonomy, and spiritual authority. This work focuses on the voices of the American Indians who were shaped by, and who shaped, the Assemblies of God; however, we must also consider the structure and history of the denomination before the issues of racial, cultural, and religious identity can be explored.

In order to provide a working overview of AG history and the theology that led to the evangelization of American Indians, I divide this first chapter into three sections. First, the chapter considers the birth of the Assemblies of God and the establishment and organization of its Foreign and Home Missions Departments. The chapter continues with an examination of the early theology behind the indigenous principle—the Pauline ideal that churches should be rooted in the culture of the missionized. The indigenous principle is the key to understanding this work. It represents the theology that Indian Pentecostal leaders utilized to argue for their greater involvement in the AG, and it is a theology that they lived, embodied, and practiced in their struggle for religious autonomy. The chapter closes by tracing the beginnings of home missions to American Indians in the years from 1918 to 1950, before large numbers of white evangelists arrived on the reservations.

Historians have written much on global Pentecostalism and its emphasis on world missions but little on the American home missions experience. Few historians seem aware that the AG features a long history of missions to American Indians. To be sure, at the turn of the twentieth century, American Indians were no strangers to Christian missionaries. By the time Pentecostalism appeared on the reservations, American Indians had experienced several centuries of interaction with Christian missionaries. Those missionaries, especially Protestant ones, had been deeply influential in the shaping of federal Indian policy, including shaping the policies surrounding the creation of reservations and the allotment of those reservations in the late nineteenth century. Missionaries supported the building of boarding schools, both federal and religious, to Christianize Native children and encouraged adult Indians to give up their “heathen ways” so that they could become like white Americans.² By the early twentieth century, American Indians were wary of Christian missionaries and often resisted them in the hope of preserving their cultures. In this climate, Pentecostal missionaries arrived on the reservations.³

The three sections of this chapter explore the beginnings of the AG’s main difficulty during the early decades of the twentieth century: the juxtaposition of Pentecostal ideals about indigenization with the need for denominational organization. These ideals resulted in a strong American Indian leadership in the AG during the middle to late decades of the twentieth century, but the realities of denominational organization and personnel—both presumptively paternalistic toward Indians—resulted in white control, a problem that ran counter to indigenizing church ideals from the 1950s to the 1980s. The essential problem that the AG faced in its missions to American Indians emerges: could the AG stay true to its roots and belief in the power of the Holy Spirit and allow the Gospel to empower all peoples, regardless of race or nationality? Could it allow indigenous people real, tangible autonomy and power? Accomplishing this goal would have required a truly radical departure from the history of Christian missions to American Indians. The result is a complicated history of a denomination steeped in religious idealism, but also shaped by its own time and place. Thus, the indigenous principle did not trump the deeply rooted ethnocentrism and paternalism within the AG, but it gave Native Pentecostals a tool with which to hold the denomination accountable. White AG missionaries thought their work of spreading the Gospel lay at the heart of their identities as Pentecostals, but it was their American Indian converts who helped save the soul of the denomination by demanding that it live up to its foundational and most cherished beliefs.

The Beginnings of the Assemblies of God

In 1906, during the great Pentecostal revival at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, California, scores of believers received the gift of tongues. They thought that they were actually speaking the language of a foreign land and therefore could evangelize foreign peoples. Caught up in the fervor of the moment, many early Pentecostal believers traveled overseas and tried to use their newfound gift for spreading the gospel. The Apostolic Faith, the periodical that documented the great revival, reported this phenomenon. “A band of three missionaries, Bro. Andrew Johnson and Sisters Louise Condit and Lucy M. Leatherman, who have been baptized with the Holy Ghost and received the gift of languages, have left for Jerusalem. . . . Bro. Johnson has received seven different languages, one of which is Arabic. Sister Leatherman speaks the Turkish language.”⁴ These three missionaries constituted only a few of the many believers who thought that God had sent the gift of tongues for the purpose of world evangelization. Eventually, however, believers understood the gift of tongues to be something other than the gift of an actual language. Yet early Pentecostal believers remained undeterred. In their eyes, even if God had not given them the ability to speak foreign languages, God or the Holy Spirit had still given them a new and exciting faith to proclaim, and they fanned out across the United States and the globe to spread the word of revival and Pentecost.

As a denomination, the Assemblies of God came into being partly if not largely because of the Pentecostal missionary impulse.⁵ The early years following Azusa Street were chaotic and decentralized, with believers moving from revival to revival, congregation to congregation. Missionaries with neither formal ties to a congregation nor financial support launched themselves on faith missions.⁶ Yet early Pentecostalism lacked organization. The gifts and authority of the Holy Spirit meant that most of its early leaders were men and women called to the faith rather than those who had formal training to be leaders. The resulting lack of organization presented numerous problems for early Pentecostals.

In 1913, the mostly white and loosely organized Pentecostal leadership in the Midwest sent out a letter to other pioneers in the movement and advertised in Pentecostal periodicals that it wanted to organize a general council of all Pentecostals.⁷ These leaders drew mainly from four Pentecostal groups: Charles Parham’s following in Texas and Arkansas, the Zion City group founded by John Alexander Dowie, William H. Durham and William H. Piper’s missions from Chicago, and Pentecostal believers who had left A. B. Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance.⁸ These groups differed in theology from the Holiness groups that had initially popularized early Pentecostalism. Instead of coming from a Methodist, Wesleyan background, the groups that initially made up the AG came mainly from Baptist, Presbyterian, and non-Wesleyan Reformed traditions influenced by the Keswick teachings.⁹ These groups did not agree with the Holiness idea that sanctification was a “perfecting work of grace.” Instead, “they wanted to return to a position more characteristic of the Reformed tradition in which sanctification was understood as a process that commences at conversion, but was never ‘perfected’ in this life.”¹⁰ They also held to a second distinct experience in the order of salvation that they called baptism of the Holy Spirit, always evidenced by speaking in tongues as the Spirit gave utterance. These differences also meant that the AG drew from the white Midwest and South rather than African American Pentecostals who were steeped in the Holiness tradition.

Pentecostal leaders flocked to Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the early spring of 1914 to take part in the council.¹¹ Before this call for a council, some semblance of organization existed in midwestern, white, Higher-Life Pentecostalism, mainly through the publication of periodicals, the camp meeting circuit, and other conventions. The lack of a formal organization, however, meant that Pentecostals had no appointed leadership to speak for them.¹² This council allowed the movement to standardize its beliefs and goals so that Pentecostals could be more effective at spreading the gospel. The council began with four days of meetings that focused on awakening the Holy Spirit. On Monday, 6 April, the council organized itself for formal meetings and set forth its explicit purposes, later published in the Pentecostal periodical Word and Witness.¹³ These were to clarify doctrine and reduce theological differences in the Pentecostal ranks; to emphasize missions, both home and foreign; to find ways of funding the missionary project in the most efficient manner possible; to charter churches under one name and one leadership; and to develop a Bible school network.¹⁴ These motivations led to the founding of the Assemblies of God.

With such purposes firmly in mind, Pentecostal leaders elected E. N. Bell as the chair of the new council and J. R. Flower as the secretary.¹⁵ After some deliberation, the council extended voting rights only to male members of the leadership, and a preamble and resolution of constitution emerged. This document declared the council’s purpose: “Neither to legislate laws of government, nor usurp authority over said Assemblies of God, nor deprive them of their Scriptural and local rights and privileges, but to recognize Scriptural methods and order for worship, unity, fellowship, work and business doctrines and conduct, and approve of all Scriptural truth and conduct.”¹⁶ The statement evidenced the Pentecostal tendency to minimize a formal denominational leadership. The designation “Assemblies of God” originally referred to the variety of Pentecostal churches that came together...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Choosing the Jesus Way
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Indigenous Principle
• Chapter 2 The Indigenous Principle on the Ground
• Chapter 3 The Lived Indigenous Principle
• Chapter 4 Institutionalizing the Indigenous Principle
• Chapter 5 The Fight for National Power and the Indigenous Principle
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index