Sarah Thistlethwaite

Life

Her full name was Sarah Eleanor Thistlethwaite. According to cemetery records, she was born on November 29, 1877, in Medina, New York. She came from a Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) background and is said to have been a devout Quaker.

She is reported to have married Charles Parham on December 31, 1896, although some cemetery records give the year of the marriage as 1895, so the sources differ. After her marriage she was known as Sarah Parham.

Her husband died in 1929. Sarah continued to live in Baxter Springs, Kansas, until her death on December 28, 1937, at the age of 60. A local newspaper reported at the time that more than 1,300 people attended her funeral. Her son, Wilfred Charles Parham (1904–1948), also served as a minister.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Partner in itinerant evangelism: Beginning shortly after their marriage, she and her husband traveled to various cities in Kansas, holding revival meetings. During this period Charles Parham placed increasing emphasis on divine healing (the teaching that illness is healed through faith) in addition to the holiness message.
• Family involvement: Sarah's older sister, Lilian Thistlethwaite, also took part in Parham's ministry. Meetings held near Topeka, Kansas, around 1900–1901 were covered in the newspapers, and one article printed a transcription of Lilian's speaking in tongues.
• Leadership of the movement: After her husband's death, she led the Apostolic Faith movement he had founded. She edited its periodical, The Apostolic Faith, and is also recorded as having headed Bethel Bible School.
• Compilation of the biography: In 1930 she compiled and published The Life of Charles F. Parham, Founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement. The book includes Parham's sermon "The Latter Rain" and the testimony of Lilian Thistlethwaite, among other materials, and it is therefore frequently cited as a primary source in the study of the early Pentecostal movement.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is no confirmed record of Sarah Thistlethwaite having engaged in any activity directly connected with Korea. Her husband, Charles Parham, however, is regarded, together with William J. Seymour, as a central figure in the formation and spread of American Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism places great importance on speaking in tongues as the evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit, and Pentecostal denominations in Korea such as the Korea Assemblies of God belong to this tradition. For this reason, the biography Sarah compiled serves as a reference work for examining the roots of the history of the Pentecostal movement in Korea.

Assessment

She is regarded as a woman leader of the early Pentecostal movement who shared in her husband's ministry from its beginning and who carried on the movement and its periodical after his death.

Some have noted that the biography she compiled, having been written by a family member, reflects a perspective sympathetic to her husband. The biography also preserves traces of the early movement's understanding of tongues as actual foreign languages to be used in proclaiming the gospel to various peoples. For this reason, scholars also use the book as a point of comparison with later understandings of speaking in tongues.