by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Sequestered in an area of the unincorporated Avocado Heights community next to the City of Industry and a couple miles from the Homestead is LABI College, formally the Latin American Bible Institute, an Assemblies of God Pentecostal institution formed in 1926 in San Diego. Fifteen years later, the school moved to Los Angeles and, in fall 1948, it relocated to its current site and its mission is to train, through bilingual and bicultural studies, students for further education, leadership in churches or the ministry.
A key founder of the college was Alice E. Luce and she is a main figure associated with the highlighted object from the Museum’s collection for this post in the “Take It On Faith” series dealing with pre-1930 greater Los Angeles religious and spiritual history. This is a flyer for The Annual Missionary Convention of Bethel Temple, an Assemblies of God church in Los Angeles, held from 21 January to 1 February 1925.
The document highlighted Luce as an author of Pentecostal concepts from the Old Testament of the Bible, as well as evangelist John Saunders McConnell, touted as “one of the most aggressive and successful Pentecostal evangelists of the day. Other “well-known leading workers” and missionaries providing “inspiring missionary addresses . . . from various mission fields” were also promoted, as were three daily serves with those at night to be “distinctly evangelistic” with McConnell preaching.
The final day of the convention, a Sunday, was readied to be the “Great Day of the Feast,” with a “missionary sermon” offered by the Temple’s Pastor J. Narver Gortner and Luce and a “Mrs. Turnbull” to speak in the afternoon and McConnell to do so in the evening service. Those receiving the flyer were exhorted to “plan to come and bring your friends” to the church, situated at 324-326 Buena Vista Street, now North Broadway, just north and across Temple Street from the County Courthouse, as well as to “pray each day for this Convention.”
The gathering was nearly two decades after a signal event in the rapid rise of Pentecostalism, this being the “Azusa Street Revival” of 1906 in Los Angeles. The Rev. William J. Seymour, an African-American minister recently arrived from Texas began holding revival meetings at houses, including one on Bonnie Brae Street, just west of downtown, before moving to 312 Azusa Street in what is now Little Tokyo but what was then the center of Black Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times of 18 April 1906 dismissively covered one of the meetings there, beginning with this description:
Breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand, the newest religious sect has started in Los Angeles. Meetings are held in a tumble-down shack . . . and the devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal.
Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and the night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshipers . . .
An old colored exhorter, blind in one eye, is the major-domo of the company. With his stony optic fixed on some luckless unbeliever, the old man yells his defiance and challenges an answer . . .
One of the wildest meetings was held last night . . . the old exhorter urged the “sisters” to let the “tongues come forth” and the women gave themselves over to a riot of religious fervor . . .
Among the “believers” is a man who claims to be a Jewish rabbi . . . Gold [his surname] claims to have been miraculously healed and is a convert of the new sect.
Another speaker had a vision . . . [and] prophesied awful destruction to this city unless its citizens are brought to a belief in the tenets of the new faith.
While Seymour gained a large following in short order, a schism developed with his mentor, a white pastor who was shocked at the ethnic mixing, and there was a gradual diminution of his flock, though Seymour remained the minister until his death in 1922 and his work was followed his wife for nearly another decade.
Despite the Times patent disregard for the so-called “holy rollers,” there were social, economic and political conditions, beyond the religious, that led to the intense expansion of Pentecostalism during the early 20th century, given the incredible changes in American life. As just some examples, the exponential growth of industrialization, transformations in labor and work, the heightened pace of life, and, for religious people, a manifest concern that the secular was trumping the spiritual were among the factors that could largely account for what might be considered a new “awakening,” not that unlike those that burst forth earlier in America’s history.
One of the Pentecostal organizations that formed within a decade of the Azusa Street Revival was the Assemblies of God, formed in Hot Springs, Arkansas with roughly 300 persons gathered to start the development of what, a century later, included nearly 13,000 churches and well north than 3.1 million congregants in the United States, while it was stated that were not too far south of 3,000 missionaries and others with the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, which claims 67 million members.
J. Narver Gortner (1874-1961) was originally a Methodist minister who made a mark in rural Nebraska, northwest of Omaha during the later years of the 19th century. In fall 1910, due to the illness of his wife who needed a better climate, he became pastor of a church in the border town of Calexico and was later in Arroyo Grande in San Luis Obispo County. Though he was imbued with Pentecostalism after attending a 1914 tent meeting, he remained a Methodist minister in central California through the end of the Teens. Following his conversion, he ministered in Cleveland during the early 1920s before coming back to California and taking the reins at Bethel Temple, formerly on Temple Street as Bethel Mission.
In early December 1916, the renamed Temple welcomed members to the new building on Buena Vista with the structure made of pressed brick and designed in the Romanesque style—both reflecting modern building in the City of Angels. The auditorium had a capacity for 500 worshippers, while it was noted that
special arrangements have been made for different class rooms so that during the week special services and classes may be held for the different nationalities, including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Jewish.
The pastor then was George N. Eldridge, assisted by Harold K. Needham, but it was noted that “among the out-of-town speakers” was Gortner, then living at [Rancho] Cucamonga. Special attention was given, as per usual, to prayer for the sick and troubled and Sunday afternoons were to include meetings for the “young women’s missionary band.”
Nearly a decade later, the convention was held at the Temple, of which Gortner had assumed the pastorate very recently after the 1924 retirement of Eldridge, who died six years later. The “Mrs. Turnbull” mention in the flyer was Eldridge’s daughter, Josephine who, with her husband, Louis, was a missionary in India and both were pastors at Bethel Temple.
As to Gortner, his stay at the church was brief as, by 1927, he was in Oakland, where he remained for a decade and then ran the Glad Tidings Bible Institute (which later merged with LABI) in San Francisco for much of the Forties. He was a prolific writer and an important church leader and theologian, credited with being a key figure in the Assemblies of God. His son, Vernon, followed in the ministry, but was not apparently officially within the church when his son, Marjoe, proved to be a child prodigy preacher, attaining significant attention at age 4.
Marjoe Gortner, however, who later said he earned some $3 million for his parents, none of which he saw (this sounds a lot like what happened to child star actor Jackie Coogan in the 1920s), later turned against his Pentecostal past and was the subject of a 1972 documentary, simply called Marjoe, about that aspect of his youthful life. He went on to be an actor in film and television and lives today in New Mexico.
John Saunders McConnell (1892-1966) was born in Seattle and his father Theodore was a teacher and minister, though his marriage to Isabel (Belle) Saunders ended when John was a boy. His mother married a farmer in Santa Cruz County near the Bay Area of California and, after the second husband died, John and Belle ended up in Spokane in eastern Washington, where he worked in business.
In 1912, McConnell married Hattie McLaughlin and he embarked on his Pentecostal ministry not long afterward, including a stint in a hamlet in southern Iowa. When he registered for the draft during World War I, seeking a religious exemption from military service, he, his wife, and two small children were in a little town in northeastern Oregon. Enumerated two years later in the census, he was a minister in Seattle.
In 1925, when he was a major presence at the convention, McConnell resided in Covina, though, as was typical for those in his profession, he moved frequently, with short stays in San Diego, Glendale and South Pasadena before settling in for a long period in Oakland. After retirement, he moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills and resided there for nearly twenty years, most of them in retirement. Notably, his namesake son, who also sought to avoid conscription, this during World War II, became one of the persons credited with the establishment of Earth Day, though there is some difference of opinion about whether he was the sole figure behind that environmental movement.
Lastly, there is Alice E. Luce (1873-1955). She was born in Cheltenham, England, near Gloucester, where her father, the Rev. John James Luce was a Church of England vicar at St. Nicholas. She was educated at a women’s college in her hometown and then ventured to India, a colony of Great Britain, and spent fifteen years there from 1895-1910 as a missionary for the Anglican Church. During the latter part of her time there, however, she became an adherent of Pentecostalism and illness then led her to return home to England.
In 1913, Luce traveled to Canada, specifically to Scarborough, adjacent to Toronto, and, while visiting, gave her occupation as a missionary. She then came to Los Angeles and spent three years in the Angel City and in Long Beach. She’d wanted to minister to Mexicans, but the political and military conditions there led her to go to Texas, where she was ordained in the Assemblies of God, and then she spent time in México—one source states she did so for seven years, but this might have included her time in Los Angeles and Texas working with Latinos. Luce spent some time in England in their early 1920s before again returning to Los Angeles.
During her early years in the Angel City, she became associated with Dr. Florence Murcutt (1865-1935), a native of Melbourne, Australia. Murcutt came to the United States as the 19th century drew to a close and became a national speaker for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a key player in the movement to bring the prohibition of alcohol manufacturing, distribution and sale in the country. Her first stint in Los Angeles was during the first half of 1902 and she returned eight years later, after some time in Vancouver, British Columbia. In fall 1916, while at Asbury Park, New Jersey, press accounts referred to her a “a converted Jewess.”
The two women lived together for most of fifteen years, until Murcutt’s death in 1935 when she was hit by a car while walking near their Inglewood home. They opened the East Side Pentecostal Mission in the Belmont Heights area of Long Beach in 1920, with Murcutt referring to herself as a “medical missionary” during this period. A few years later, the couple became affiliated with the Lighthouse Church in Manhattan Beach, where they resided for much of the Roaring Twenties. At the end of that decade, the two applied and were approved for American citizenship.
Luce and Murcutt also traveled for their missionary work, as well as for visits to the respective home countries of England and Australia, with the first in the early Twenties and the second about a decade later. During Gortner’s decade-long tenure in Oakland, Luce ventured north several times to speak at his church and she occasionally went on tour, including trips to Toronto in 1930 and 1932, as well as Atlanta and Mexico during that era.
In 1940, she was still living in Inglewood with no listed occupation, but that would soon change when she got involved again with the Latin American Bible Institute, first in Los Angeles and then in what was then known as Puente. When the next federal census was taken, she resided in one of the Victorian-era houses that are now part of a showcase of these dwellings on Carroll Avenue in Angelino Heights near downtown Los Angeles. Shortly before her death, she was president of the school, as well as involved with the Women’s Missionary Council of the Full Gospel assembly within the Assemblies of God.
Luce was not only a well-known speaker within the church, but wrote extensively and became known for her views on eschatology, dealing with what happens to humans after death, including the condition of the soul, the judgment before God and the end of time, including three books by the church’s Gospel Publishing House. Like Gortner, she is accorded a high status in the Assemblies of God, with another source acknowledging her role in missiology, the study of the purposes and methods of missionary work.
This flyer is an interesting artifact relating to the rising Pentecostal movement in Los Angeles during the 1920s and the early 19th century, a period generally of remarkable religious and spiritual dimensions locally and beyond.