The Consortium of Pentecostal Archives: Where the Movement Keeps Its Own Memory

The Consortium of Pentecostal Archives is the largest freely accessible repository of primary Pentecostal sources in the world. Organized in 2011 as a collaborative effort among archives within the Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, and relaunched with a rebuilt search platform in March 2023, it today offers close to 500,000 digitized pages drawn from more than ninety periodical runs, along with books and pamphlets. Access is free, and no registration is required.

For the Brazilian reader this deserves emphasis, because it is unusual. Serious scholarship in our field is ordinarily locked behind subscriptions that few of us can afford. Here the movement’s own documents (the newspapers, the testimonies, the missionary reports, the doctrinal quarrels as they were fought at the time), are simply open.

What Is the Consortium of Pentecostal Archives?

It is best understood not as a library but as a shared search box. Five denominational archives, each with its own holdings and its own institutional history, agreed to place their digitized materials on a single platform rather than leave them scattered across five separate websites. The purpose was deliberately unglamorous: to remove the friction that keeps researchers from ever reaching the sources.

The result is a full-text searchable database with page previews, comparable in function to a commercial newspaper archive, but devoted entirely to the documentary record of one movement.

The Partner Institutions and What Each Brings

The list of partners is itself an argument about Pentecostal history, and it repays attention:

• Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center — the archive of the Assemblies of God (USA), in Springfield, Missouri, and the largest Pentecostal archive in the world
• Dixon Pentecostal Research Center — the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee: the Wesleyan-holiness wing of the movement
• IPHC Archives and Research Center: International Pentecostal Holiness Church
• Foursquare Church Archives
• Dr. Mattie McGlothen Library & Museum, which joined in March 2023, bringing the archival memory of the Church of God in Christ and of African American Pentecostalism

Consider what that assembly means. In 1910, William H. Durham preached his sermon on the finished work of Calvary, and the movement divided over whether sanctification is a second definite work of grace. The Assemblies of God emerged from one side of that quarrel; the Church of God from the other. More than a century later, both deposit their documents in the same searchable database, and so does the Black Pentecostal tradition, whose sources were for decades the hardest of all to reach. A researcher can now read the controversy from every side without leaving the chair.

The Crown Jewel: The Apostolic Faith, 1906–1908

If you visit the Consortium for one reason only, let it be this one.

The Apostolic Faith was the newspaper published from the Apostolic Faith Mission at 312 Azusa Street, in Los Angeles, under the leadership of William J. Seymour. Thirteen issues appeared between September 1906 and May 1908, mailed without charge to thousands of subscribers across the world. They are, in the most literal sense, the movement speaking for itself before anyone had decided what the movement was.

Reading them is a genuinely disorienting experience, and it ought to be. The testimonies are stranger and less orderly than the tidy narrative most of us inherited. The theology is visibly unsettled: being worked out on the page, week by week. The racial composition of the meetings, Black and white worshipping together in a segregated America, is stated plainly and without the defensiveness of later accounts. Whatever you believed about Azusa Street before, the primary sources will complicate it. That is precisely what primary sources are for.

Representative Holdings: A Snapshot of the Collection

Beyond Azusa, the Consortium holds periodical runs that between them cover the movement from its first decade to the present:

• The Bridegroom’s Messenger (from 1907): founded by the evangelist G. B. Cashwell, the man who carried the Pentecostal message through the American South; it ran until 1996
• The Church of God Evangel (from 1910): begun as The Evening Light and Church of God Evangel and shortened the following year; the principal voice of the Church of God, Cleveland
• The Latter Rain Evangel (Chicago, 1908–1939): published by the Stone Church, at the center of the Midwestern Pentecostal network
• The Whole Truth, the official magazine of the Church of God in Christ, the largest historically African American Pentecostal denomination
• Word and Witness (1912–1915) and The Pentecost (1908–1910), the years in which the Assemblies of God were formed
• The Pentecostal Evangel (from 1913) and Confidence (1908–1926), the British periodical essential for tracing the movement’s international circuits

The Consortium and Brazilian Pentecostal Research

There is a specific reason this archive should matter to us, and it has been almost entirely neglected.

Gunnar Vingren and Daniel Berg did not depart for Belém out of nowhere. They left from the Pentecostal circuit of Chicago and the American Midwest: Vingren had pastored a Baptist congregation in South Bend, Indiana, and the two men met at a Chicago conference in 1909. Reports of their departure, and of the earliest Brazilian work, are far more likely to survive in periodicals such as The Latter Rain Evangel (printed in Chicago while the events were happening), than in denominational histories written decades afterward.

Two practical cautions for anyone who takes up that search. First, the full-text index rests on optical character recognition, and early twentieth-century typography does not always survive the process; foreign names suffer most. If a keyword returns nothing, do not conclude that nothing is there: narrow to a title and a date range and read the issues. Second, remember that spelling was different: American periodicals of 1911 wrote Para and Belem without accents, and Brazil with a z.

Why an Archive Belongs on a Pentecostal Blog

There is a question of intellectual maturity at stake here. A movement that knows itself only through the accounts produced by its own institutions is a movement that cannot examine itself. Archives exist so that the story can be checked against the documents: including, and especially, when the documents prove inconvenient.

We have quoted Azusa Street for a hundred and twenty years. It is time we read it.

A Heartfelt Recommendation: Visit the Consortium of Pentecostal Archives

The full collection is available at pentecostalarchives.org, free of charge and without registration. Browse the complete list of titles, or go directly to The Apostolic Faith and begin with the first issue, September 1906.

Read what they said about themselves, before anyone else said it for them.