The World Pentecostal Assemblies of God Fellowship Forms in Indianapolis

On 15 August 1989, at the Decade of Harvest Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, delegates founded the World Pentecostal Assemblies of God Fellowship, forty two years after the first Pentecostal World Conference convened at Zurich in 1947, already recorded here, and five years before the Memphis Miracle founded the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America in 1994, also recorded here. J. Philip Hogan, the Assemblies of God USA's longtime missions leader, had convened a provisional committee the year before in Springfield, Missouri, drawing regional representatives from Asia, Eurasia, Latin America, Africa and North America, among them Paul Yonggi Cho of Seoul's Yoido Full Gospel Church and the Eurasia representative Peter Kuzmic; at Indianapolis that committee's proposal was put to a vote, delegates approved it unanimously, and the provisional committee itself was recognized as the new Fellowship's first executive committee, with G. Raymond Carlson, the Assemblies of God USA's general superintendent, delivering the keynote address. The World Religions and Spirituality Project's scholarly profile of the Assemblies of God records the result as an international coordination structure uniting autonomous national Assemblies of God churches on equal standing, renamed the World Assemblies of God Fellowship in 1993. The Fellowship's own history page names the USA Assemblies of God's provision of office space and staff support as its first practical form. Unlike the 1947 Zurich gathering, open to Pentecostal bodies of every kind, the 1989 Fellowship coordinated specifically the national churches descended from the 1914 Hot Springs Assemblies of God, already recorded here, and by the early twenty first century had grown to more than one hundred fifty member fellowships across every inhabited continent.