Description
This book presents the definitive interpretation of Pentecostalism’s history in New Zealand from its origin to the present.
This book presents the definitive interpretation of Pentecostalism’s history in New Zealand from its origin to the present.
Dr. D. William Faupel –
This volume presents the definitive interpretation of Pentecostalism’s history in New Zealand from its origin to the present. Unlike Australia, China, Korea, India, and Japan where the Pentecostal Movement was flourishing by 1909, the movement did not become visible in New Zealand until the English Pentecostal Evangelist, Smith Wigglesworth, held a series of crusades throughout the country in 1922. Knowles’ extensive research, however, demonstrates that a Pentecostal presence did exist by 1903. In that year, John A.D. Adams, a disciple of John Alexander Dowie, founded the Roslyn City Road Mission in Dunedin. This group advocated “perfect liberty for the exercise of spiritual gifts,” including glossolalia. Adams visited the Azusa Street Mission in 1907 and later became an Elder in the Pentecostal Church of New Zealand after its formation in 1923 in the wake of Wigglesworth’s crusades. This monograph is the culmination of years of research and reflection as Knowles grounds the movement’s roots in the nineteenth-century soil of New Zealand’s culture and particularly in the heritage of revivalism and healing in that country. He then describes the movement’s development as he analyzes its salient features decade by decade.