Origin from 1947
In May 1947, Swiss pastor Leonard Steiner organized the first Pentecostal World Conference in Zurich, Switzerland, together with David J. du Plessis, J. Roswell Flower and Donald Gee, bringing Pentecostal leaders together from around the world for the first time since the movement's early twentieth century revivals. Roughly three thousand people attended the gathering, meeting in a country that had escaped the devastation of the Second World War to seek fellowship and coordination across the many national and denominational Pentecostal bodies that had multiplied largely in isolation from one another. The conference established a pattern of gathering every three years in a different city, and in 1961 the celebrative gathering was formally named the Pentecostal World Conference, with the standing body behind it known today as the Pentecostal World Fellowship.
Facts
Dates
StatusEstablished marks this first 1947 gathering of Pentecostal leaders at Zurich, the origin of the ongoing Pentecostal World Conference, not the movement's earlier Azusa Street origins in 1906 or its later twenty first century conferences already recorded here. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Switzerland directly: "World Conference in Zurich, Switzerland, together with David J."
Occurred In
Spread Event Of
Adds a specific, dated institutional milestone between the General Council's 1916 split over the Trinity and Pentecostalism's growth into a global movement by 2006 already recorded here: the movement's own 1947 gathering of leaders at Zurich, the first Pentecostal World Conference, which began the pattern of triennial global meetings still continuing today.
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