A Sermon at a Camp Meeting Divides Pentecostalism

In 1913, at a large interdenominational camp meeting near Los Angeles, a Pentecostal minister named R. E. McAlister preached a sermon arguing that the early church had baptized converts in the name of Jesus alone rather than using the fuller Trinitarian formula, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that had become the standard practice among Christian churches. The sermon, and the intense response it provoked among some who heard it, helped launch what became known as the Jesus Only or Oneness movement, and within a few years ministers including Frank Ewart were actively teaching and rebaptizing converts using the single-name formula and developing a fuller theological rationale for it. By 1916 the teaching had gained enough traction within the young Assemblies of God denomination that its governing council felt compelled to respond directly, formally adopting a strong statement affirming the traditional Trinity and effectively forcing Oneness-believing ministers out of the denomination. Those ministers went on to organize their own separate Oneness Pentecostal bodies, so that a single disputed point of baptismal formula and doctrine, debated across only a few years in the 1910s, produced a lasting split that still divides Pentecostalism into Trinitarian and Oneness branches today.