RELIGION / JOHN DART : Church Plans Racially Mixed Body : Pentecostals: The move would end the black-white division in a group that started in L.A. as an interracial movement in 1906.

One of the last national church associations of overwhelmingly white denominations, the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, plans to disband and form a racially mixed body.

The new umbrella organization for as many as 25 denominations would end a longstanding religious division in a group that began, ironically, as an interracial movement in Los Angeles in 1906. The proposed fellowship would have a constituency exceeding 10 million members, including the largest of them all, the predominantly black Church of God in Christ.

Once on the extreme margins of Christianity because of its humble socioeconomic origins and its exuberant beliefs in healing and supernatural events, Pentecostalism today boasts mega-churches and large television ministries, as well as its share of controversies.

The growth also attracts political attention. It was at a national Church of God in Christ convention in Memphis on Nov. 14 that President Clinton described America’s “great crisis of the spirit” in a widely reported speech.

A task force of 40 white and black church leaders laid plans last month in Memphis for decisions that could be made to reshape the fellowship as early as the next convention in October.

“Things are moving rapidly with nothing negative in the way,” said Bishop B. E. Underwood of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the fellowship chairman who proposed the change.

Most of the fellowship’s 21 current denominations have some black members in their congregations--just as the Church of God in Christ has a small minority of white members. But black denominational leaders were uninterested in joining the fellowship as it is constituted.

The unusual move to disband gained emotional impetus in October at the fellowship’s convention in Atlanta when Pastor Jack Hayford of Van Nuys’ Church on the Way, speaking on behalf of white Pentecostalists to the many black churchmen who were convention guests, apologized for “decades of prejudice and misunderstanding” and embraced the president of a leading black Pentecostal seminary. Hayford also took part in last month’s task force meeting.

“The church historically has reflected or reinforced society’s divisions,” said Hayford, a leader in conservative Christian circles.

“But it’s a happy fact that millions of responsible, repentant, Spirit-filled believers are . . . seeking a full recovery from the crippling impact and spiritual embarrassment of that past divisiveness,” Hayford wrote in a newsletter for his church’s 8,000 members.

The new fellowship, like the one scheduled for dismantling, would be a volunteer association of like-minded believers that has no authority over member denominations.

But the opportunity to “rub shoulders and talk” with culturally conservative white denominations such as the 2.2-million-member Assemblies of God will “automatically make everyone concerned about social issues,” Bishop Gilbert Patterson of Memphis predicted in a telephone interview.

“As we face the 21st Century, I believe the impossible task of bringing blacks and whites together is about to take place,” said Patterson, the Church of God in Christ bishop who will host the October meeting.

Pentecostalism as a full-fledged movement began in Los Angeles, with racially mixed revivals at the Azusa Street Mission between 1906 and 1909 by a black preacher, the Rev. William Seymour.

After a black-white split in 1914, denominations developed along racial lines and mostly in rural and poor urban locales. The Pentecostal Fellowship of North America was formed in 1948, but black churches were not invited to join.

Pentecostalism has been shunned by many conventional churches that contended that speaking in unknown tongues and other claims related to being “filled with the Holy Spirit” created divisions among Christians. The most animated churches were often derisively called “holy rollers.” One group of churches in the fellowship, the Foursquare Gospel churches, have been linked for decades with their flamboyant founder, Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

Whether the congregations were black or white, Pentecostal churches were largely in rural and economically depressed urban locales and their clergy poorly educated. Things began to change in the 1960s when groups of Pentecostal believers surfaced within mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. They and many independent congregations with Pentecostal beliefs described themselves as charismatic, derived from the Greek word for divine gifts.

Today, the theological borders with evangelical churches have frequently become blurred as they found compatibility on opposition to abortion, pornography and gay and lesbian rights.

Their ranks include scandal-stained televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart plus religious television network chiefs Pat Robertson in Virginia Beach, Va., and Paul Crouch in Orange County.

But Pentecostalism also includes such well-regarded clergy as Los Angeles Bishop Charles Blake, who doubles as pastor of the nearly 11,000-member West Angeles Church of God in Christ.

Blake was cautiously optimistic about the pending change in the Pentecostal Fellowship.

“Because black churches are primarily in urban centers and white churches are mostly in the suburbs, it will not be easy for us to have intense collaboration,” Blake said. “But breaking down the walls is altogether necessary and I support any sign of reconciliation.”

Blake praised the work of Hayford in facilitating fellowship locally between black and white pastors of various denominations, primarily through the “Love L.A.” prayer meetings held since 1987 at Hollywood Presbyterian Church and, on major occasions, at the Crenshaw Christian Center in South-Central Los Angeles.

Hayford said that he places a high priority on bringing about a new fellowship.

The pastor wrote a lengthy tribute in a recent Church on the Way bulletin to “beloved” Bishop Benjamin Crouch, the black Church of God in Christ pastor in Pacoima who died in December.

“Nothing I said about him was embellishment,” Hayford said. But he acknowledged in an interview that the reconciliation movement has made him and other white church leaders more sensitive to their black colleagues.

Bishop Patterson of the Church of God in Christ said he keeps on his office wall a copy of a Los Angeles Times article that ran April 18, 1906, headlined “Weird Babel of Tongues, New Set of Fanatics is Breaking Loose.” The article, widely reproduced in Pentecostal circles, described in colorful language the zeal of the racially mixed congregation.

The Church of God in Christ was formed in 1907 after a black minister, the Rev. C. H. Mason, and two brethren visited the modest Azusa Street Mission, which stood on the edge of what is now Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. Returning to Memphis, Mason ordained many white ministers in later years, but a major group of white preachers broke off in 1914 to form the Assemblies of God.

“The racial barriers that were rebuilt within a decade were understandable given the culture then,” Hayford said. “But (the original mission) was nonetheless a vision of what might have been all these years.”