The Apostolic Faith Church (AFC), formerly the Apostolic Faith Mission, is a Pentecostal Christian denomination with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, United States. The Apostolic Faith Mission of Portland was founded in 1906 by Florence L. Crawford, who was affiliated at that time with William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival of Los Angeles, California. By 1908, Crawford and Seymour had severed ties, and Crawford founded what would become the Apostolic Faith Church. Since July 2000, the President and Superintendent General of the Apostolic Faith Church has been Darrel D. Lee, who also pastors the headquarters church.
The Apostolic Faith Church has a presence in the United States, Canada, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In 1997, the AFC had 2,013 members in 115 local churches served by 188 clergy in the United States. There are ten churches in Canada, several hundred in Africa (six-hundred in Nigeria alone), twenty throughout the Philippines and Korea, nine in Europe (centrally Romania), and over sixty in West Indies. Church-affiliated groups also regularly assemble in other parts of the world and recently include India. In some locations, member churches carry instead the name Trinity Apostolic Faith Church in order to differentiate themselves from non-affiliated churches in the same area.
Famous quotes containing the words faith and/or church:
“Music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. It is the only assured tone. There are in it such strains as far surpass any man’s faith in the loftiness of his destiny. Things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)