Restorationism in the Holiness Movement in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

In her 1917 sermon Lost and Restored, Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson claimed that God had given her a vision showing the fall of the Christian Church from its original purity and the gradual restoration of that original purity in successive stages. Using the prophetic images of agricultural blight and recovery in Joel chapter two, she detailed the fall of the church after the apostolic age to its complete corruption in the Middle Ages. Then, beginning with the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, she described the church's gradual restoration to purity and power with the influence of the Reformers, continuing through Wesley and the holiness movement, and culminating with the Pentecostal movement of her own lifetime.