David du Plessis

David Johannes du Plessis was born on February 7, 1905, near Cape Town in South Africa. He grew up at a time when Pentecostal Christianity was still a young movement and its ministers were often regarded with suspicion by older denominations. The religious world in which he would eventually travel was divided by different understandings of the Holy Spirit, of church authority, and of how Christians should relate to one another. Du Plessis spent the first part of his life inside one of those divisions. He later became known as “Mr. Pentecost” because he carried Pentecostal teaching into conversations with people who had once been taught to distrust it.

His family was closely connected with Pentecostal mission work. Accounts of his upbringing record that his parents entered the movement in the years after John G. Lake and other preachers had taken Pentecostal teaching into South Africa. The family also spent time in Basutoland, now Lesotho, in connection with missionary work. Du Plessis described his own conversion as a boy and remembered receiving what Pentecostals called baptism in the Holy Spirit while still young. These experiences shaped his convictions about prayer, worship, and spiritual gifts. But the exact details of his youthful religious experiences come largely through later testimony; the history of his public service is better documented.

He married Anna Cornelia Jacobs in 1927, and family responsibilities accompanied the work that followed. In 1928 he was ordained in the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa. He began to assume organisational duties within that denomination and eventually served as its general secretary. Different reference works give somewhat different starting years for that office, so it is safer to say that he held it during the 1930s and 1940s than to build a story upon one disputed appointment date. The work required correspondence, leadership, and negotiations within a church that was growing but still lacked the public standing of long-established Christian bodies.

The South African setting also carried divisions that extended far beyond theology. White rule and racial separation shaped public life, and the Christian churches were not free of those influences. Du Plessis came from a Pentecostal community in which worship among Black and white Christians had a complicated history, marked by both cooperation and segregation. His later international reputation should not erase that setting. He learned to speak about the unity of believers while coming from a society that often denied such unity in ordinary life. That tension belongs in any honest account of the world in which his ministry developed.

He later told a story about an encounter with the English evangelist Smith Wigglesworth in 1936. According to du Plessis, Wigglesworth spoke over him about a day when the Holy Spirit would work among Christians in the historic denominations and when du Plessis would have a part in that work. This is a remembered religious testimony, not an independently recorded prophecy. It is important because du Plessis used it to explain how he understood the direction his ministry eventually took. At the time he was not yet known for entering the offices of church councils or speaking at seminaries whose leaders differed from his own tradition.

After the Second World War, Pentecostal churches sought greater contact with one another across national borders. Du Plessis helped organise the first Pentecostal World Conference in 1947 and later served as an organising secretary for the international fellowship. His responsibilities took him beyond South Africa. He and his family moved to the United States in the late 1940s. He taught for a period at Lee College, worked in Pentecostal and evangelical settings, and became connected with the Assemblies of God. These years gave him a wider view of the movement and brought him into contact with people who did not share every one of his beliefs.

One meeting proved especially consequential. In 1951 he visited the offices of the World Council of Churches in New York. The welcome he received challenged his earlier assumptions about Christians outside Pentecostalism. A friendship with John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary helped open further doors, and in 1952 du Plessis spoke at a meeting of the International Missionary Council in Germany. Invitations followed from seminaries and ecumenical gatherings. He was asked to explain Pentecostal beliefs rather than simply defend them against attack. The change did not require him to abandon what he believed about the Holy Spirit, but it did ask him to meet other Christians as people rather than as opponents.

Du Plessis later admitted that in earlier years he would have approached some of those leaders with anger and suspicion. He described being surprised by the openness and spiritual hunger he encountered. A published account of a 1960 meeting with Methodist leaders shows how he spoke about the need for renewed spiritual life while listening to their concerns. He believed that the gifts of the Holy Spirit did not belong only to churches bearing the Pentecostal name. For him, renewal could come to people who remained Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Catholic. That position encouraged people across church boundaries, but it unsettled some members of his own denomination.

The disagreement became costly in 1962 when the Assemblies of God asked him to surrender his ministerial credentials. Its leaders were concerned about the impression that he represented the denomination in his work with the World Council of Churches and related bodies. Du Plessis complied, but did not abandon the conversations. He continued to meet Christian leaders and to speak about the Holy Spirit. Eighteen years later, in 1980, the Assemblies of God restored his credentials. The episode reveals both the reach of his work and the limits of agreement among Pentecostals about ecumenical relationships. He had not persuaded everyone, and he had to live with that disagreement.

He attended major gatherings of the World Council of Churches and was invited to the third session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964. He later helped develop formal conversations between Roman Catholics and Pentecostals, serving as a co-chair in the international dialogue from 1972 to 1982. The meetings did not erase real differences of doctrine, worship, or church government. Their value lay partly in allowing participants to describe what they actually believed and to hear what others meant by their words. Du Plessis became a prominent representative of a movement that many older church leaders had previously treated as marginal.

His books made that work available to readers who never met him. In The Spirit Bade Me Go he recounted the personal change that accompanied his travels among other churches. A Man Called Mr. Pentecost, written with Bob Slosser, gave a fuller account of his ministry, while later writings continued his concern for spiritual renewal. Autobiography is valuable evidence of how a person understood his life, though it is not independent confirmation of every recalled exchange. His writing is best read alongside organisational records, correspondence, and the testimony of those with whom he worked.

David du Plessis died in Pasadena, California, on February 2, 1987, shortly before his eighty-second birthday. His wife Anna survived him, as did several of their children. The obituaries remembered the Pentecostal preacher who had been willing to enter rooms where he was not expected, and whose presence helped change how churches spoke to one another. His legacy is more complicated than a simple story of everyone finally agreeing. The divisions did not disappear. But he helped create a space in which Christians separated by theology and history could speak with candour and respect, while he continued to bear witness to the work of the Spirit as he understood it.