"I Sought a Full Surrender"

Agnes Ozman and the Best of the Pentecostal Tradition

Agnes Ozman, “the first one to speak in tongues,” wrote this testimony almost exactly a decade after her January 1901 “watch-night” experience at Charles Fox Parham’s Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. Her reflections no doubt mirror some of the tradition’s quirks, lacks, and failures. But they also reveal something of its deepest, truest graces.

She begins…