Assemblies of God Holds World Congress

INDIANAPOLIS — About 50,000 members of the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal church, gathered for their first world congress held in the United States--celebrating the denomination’s growth around the globe and noting that missionaries are no longer exclusively white men from the West.

“It’s a demonstration that missions no longer is a domain of the Northern Hemisphere,” said Don Corbin, the U.S. church’s African regional director.

Independent churches banded together in 1914 in Hot Springs, Ark., adopting the name Assemblies of God. Since then, aggressive missionary work has carried the church’s message far. Today only 2.5 million of the church’s 32 million adherents are Americans.