Alfred Garr, a pioneer missionary of the Azusa Street Revival in the early 1900s explains why his conferred supernatural gift of the Bengali language did not work upon arrival.
Surely, such a condition would threaten one’s theological opinions but not Mr. Garr’s. He believed that the gift had switched to another language while in voyage and Bengali never reappeared. He then side-stepped the issue and focused on other miraculous demonstrations.
This case is one of the earliest documented examples of the tongues crisis facing Azusa missionaries. Many traveled the world thinking they were endowed with a certain foreign language and upon arrival, did not. The resolution of this theological crisis became a foremost problem to solve.
The Pentecostal movement had a number of choices to address the issue, admit they were wrong, redefine, or ignore. Garr chose the third option, ignoring the theological crisis by giving a weak apologetic.
V. P. Simmons on the Church History of Tongues
The early Pentecostal writer V. P. Simmons on the Church history of tongues–an important and early contribution to the Pentecostal doctrine of tongues. V. P. Simmons is an unknown name in the annals of Pentecostal history and even more so in the general historical records. However, the impact of his historical thesis which connects the …