Within a decade of its beginning, Pentecostalism divided over the doctrine of God, and the division has never closed.
From 1913 a substantial current concluded that baptism should be performed in the name of Jesus alone, following the formula used in Acts, rather than in the threefold name, and from there moved to a Oneness theology: that Father, Son and Spirit are not three persons but three modes or offices of one God, who is Jesus. Trinitarian Pentecostals regard this as a revival of the ancient modalist heresy. The Assemblies of God, formed in 1914, adopted a trinitarian statement in 1916 and lost roughly a quarter of its ministers over it. Oneness bodies, the United Pentecostal Church International and the largely Black Pentecostal Assemblies of the World among them, remain a substantial minority of the movement worldwide.
A second division concerns the number of works of grace. The earliest Pentecostal bodies, coming out of Holiness teaching, held three, conversion, sanctification, Spirit baptism. From 1910 William Durham's finished work teaching reduced these to two, and most of the movement followed.
Racially, the movement began integrated and did not stay that way. The Assemblies of God formed as a white body; the Church of God in Christ, under Charles Harrison Mason, became the largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the United States and remains among the largest Pentecostal bodies anywhere. American Pentecostal leaders formally repented of the separation in 1994, in what is usually called the Memphis Miracle.
Governance across the movement runs from the episcopal to the wholly independent, with no shared structure of any kind. What the movement has instead of polity is a network of personalities, conferences and media, and that is a genuine difference in kind from the older traditions.