Seeking And Speaking - Agnes Ozman

1870–1937

It’s one of the sad ironies of the modern church. “There is one body and one Spirit,” the apostle Paul wrote (Ephesians 4:4), and yet Christians in the twentieth century regularly fought about the Holy Spirit! The Pentecostal movement dawned in the early years of the century, with its flamboyant gifts of healing and tongues-speaking, and that brought about a backlash of suspicion and criticism from non-Pentecostals.

Agnes Ozman is often considered the first person in this modern Pentecostal movement to speak in tongues. Does that make her a hero or a troublemaker, a saint or a pawn? Who knows? Yet we can’t deny her significance as the firstfruit of a huge religious culture.

Agnes was a seeker. Brought up in a Methodist church in Wisconsin, she yearned for a fuller experience of God, and she traveled across the country following different preachers. At a Bible school run by A. B. Simpson, she became acquainted with Holiness teaching—that sanctification involved a second blessing of the Spirit. Agnes was a woman of faith who prayed for divine healing on a few occasions and received it. She sought to follow God’s leading in her life—and in 1900, he led her to Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas.

Charles Parham was the founder and driving force of that new school. He and his students were exploring what it means to “receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). On New Year’s Eve 1900, the students prayed to receive this gift. The next evening, Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues. A halo seemed to surround her head. Her words sounded like Chinese. “I had the added joy and glory my heart longed for and a depth of the presence of the Lord within that I had never known before,” she wrote later. “It was as if rivers of living waters were proceeding from my innermost being.”

This was just the beginning. The next day, other students spoke in tongues, and there would be other outbreaks over the next few years.

Sort out the theology as you will, but we can learn this from Agnes: be open to God’s leading, wherever that might take you. How can you let the Spirit guide you?

He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. . . . You know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you.

John 14:17