Charles Parham grew up in Kansas amid serious childhood illnesses. Years later, as an adult, a healing he attributed to prayer, his own and that of his young son, led him to abandon conventional medicine and devote himself to preaching divine healing. He was a Methodist lay preacher, but broke with the denomination in 1895, seeking a faith of more direct inspiration.
In Topeka, Kansas, he opened the Bethel Healing Home, a faith healing house, and in October 1900 founded Bethel Bible College, where he taught dozens of students from the Bible and the doctrines of the holiness movement.
In January 1901, he directed his students to search the Scriptures for concrete evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Student Agnes Ozman was the first to speak in tongues after prayer, and Parham concluded that glossolalia was the biblical evidence he had been seeking.
Between 1903 and 1904, his healing meetings in Galena, Kansas, drew crowds, with newspapers of the time reporting about a thousand healings and eight hundred conversions, cementing his regional leadership. In December 1905, he opened a Bible school in Houston, Texas, where William Seymour, future leader of the Azusa Street revival, was forced to follow the classes from the hallway because of the racial segregation of the era.
When he visited Azusa Street in October 1906, Parham publicly denounced the interracial, emotional services led by Seymour, and was told by the revival’s own leaders that he was no longer welcome there, breaking with the movement his own doctrine had helped birth. In 1907, he was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, on a morals charge; the prosecutor dropped the case, but his reputation never recovered among much of the emerging Pentecostal movement.
In the years that followed, Parham maintained segregationist views and even preached to the Ku Klux Klan, a grave stain on a life that, despite this, left as an unintended legacy one of the largest Christian movements of the twentieth century.
