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mission in 1908, came to India with his wife and two daughters in October 1913. 85
Although he came as an independent missionary, later in 1919, Cook joined the
AoG, USA. However, after ten years he left the AoG and worked independently
until he joined the Church of God (CoG, Tennessee, Cleveland, USA) in 1936. A
number of other foreign missionaries with the Pentecostal message came to
India, 86 particularly the south, and many other existing missionaries were
converted to Pentecostalism. According to the NIDPCM, around a thousand
people from various parts of the country were reported to have spoken in tongues,
including sixty missionaries. 87
However, it is wrong to argue that Pentecostalism in India was begun and spread
by western missionaries. One of the major reasons for this notion is probably the
inaccurate reports by the early Pentecostal missionaries in India. Both McGee 88
and Anderson 89 refer to some of these reports. For example, as McGee observes,
Garr announced that ‘Captain Angel Smith was the first to receive the baptism in
the Holy Spirit in India.’ Nevertheless, they were aware of the revival,
accompanied by tongues speaking that had already begun among the native
Christians before their arrival. Max Wood Moorhead, a Presbyterian missionary
who was converted to Pentecostalism through the ministry of the Garrs in
Calcutta, credited the Calcutta revival with the first outpouring of the Spirit of
85 Cook, Half a Century, 21.
86 For more details concerning the foreign missionaries who came with the Pentecostal message to
India, see Anderson, Spreading Fires, 75-108; Mathew, Kerala Penthecosthu, 32-35.
87 McGee and Burgess, ‘India,’ 118-126.
88 Gary B. McGee, ‘The Calcutta Revival of 1907 and the Reformulation of Charles Parham’s
Bible Evidence Doctrine,’ AJPS 6, no.1 (2003): 134-136.
89 Anderson, Spreading Fires, 82-83, 89.
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