The Theological Roots of Wellspring Church
Latter Rain Ancestry, Jesus-Name Theology, and the Making of Wellspring’s Doctrine of the Kingdom
Is Wellspring Really the “Last Remaining Latter Rain Church”?
Wellspring Church has long taken considerable pride in its Latter Rain heritage. Norman H. James repeatedly presented the church as the last remaining Latter Rain church to his knowledge, and that claim continues to be repeated by Wellspring’s present leadership.
The claim is not without historical basis. Norman James became associated with Bethesda Missionary Temple in Detroit, one of the most important American centers of the Latter Rain revival that began in western Canada in 1948. Myrtle D. Beall had embraced the revival after encountering it in Canada, and Bethesda became deeply identified with its restorationist theology.
The Latter Rain movement emphasized themes such as prophecy, the laying on of hands, spiritual gifts, restored apostolic and prophetic ministries, divine church order, and the belief that God was restoring dimensions of New Testament Christianity that had been lost or neglected. These themes clearly influenced Norman James. He later taught that God was restoring truth and authority to the church and eventually claimed an apostolic mantle for himself.
In that sense, Wellspring possesses a genuine Latter Rain ancestry.
But ancestry is not the same thing as doctrinal continuity.
By the time Norman James became associated with Bethesda in the mid-1960s, the intense revival phase that began in 1948 had largely passed. The original movement had dispersed into a broad and decentralized network of independent churches, ministries, and continuing restorationist influences. Norman therefore encountered a Bethesda tradition that had developed out of the Latter Rain movement, rather than the original revival itself.
Latter Rain Was Not a Jesus-Name Pentecostal Movement
Bethesda Missionary Temple was only one influential center within the much larger movement. Latter Rain crossed existing Pentecostal denominational boundaries and included ministers and churches that continued to baptize converts using the Trinitarian language of Matthew 28:19 - “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Jesus-Name baptism was not a defining requirement of the movement, nor was Oneness Pentecostal theology.
The distinction was recognized even by contemporary Oneness Pentecostals.
Oneness theologian and historian David K. Bernard records that the United Pentecostal Church International responded to the Latter Rain movement at its 1950 General Conference by condemning, among other things, “the compromising of the truths of Oneness and water baptism in the name of Jesus Christ,” acceptance of receiving the Holy Spirit without speaking in tongues, and an expansive understanding of the true church that crossed established doctrinal boundaries (A History of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, pp. 272–273).
This criticism is historically significant. Oneness Pentecostals themselves regarded the Latter Rain movement as compromising doctrines they considered essential - including Oneness theology, exclusive Jesus-Name baptism, and tongues as the necessary evidence of receiving the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Those are precisely the kinds of doctrines that later became central to Wellspring’s definition of being born again and entering the Kingdom. The original Latter Rain movement therefore cannot simply be treated as the source of Wellspring’s later doctrine.
Latter Rain supplied important elements of Wellspring’s restorationist identity and understanding of the church - particularly its emphasis on restored ministry, apostolic authority, divine order, and recovered truth.
But Wellspring’s distinctive teachings concerning Jesus-Name baptism, water baptism as essential to being born again, circumcision of the heart through baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit as part of entry into the Kingdom developed along a different theological trajectory.
Those teachings become much more visible in the later writings of Patricia Beall Gruits and James Lee Beall and closely parallel doctrines found within Jesus-Name and Oneness Pentecostal traditions.
Wellspring therefore appears better understood as a later descendant of the Bethesda-Latter Rain tradition that incorporated additional theological developments, rather than as an unchanged preservation of the original Latter Rain movement.
“Last Remaining” in what sense?
The claim that Wellspring is among the “last remaining” Latter Rain churches raises an important historical question: remaining in what sense?
The original Latter Rain movement was decentralized and did not possess a single, fixed doctrinal system. Bethesda Missionary Temple was an important Latter Rain center, but its later theology also incorporated teachings concerning the divine name, Jesus-Name baptism, water baptism and the new birth, circumcision of the heart, and receiving the Holy Spirit that were not defining requirements of the broader movement.
What Wellspring appears to have preserved most directly, therefore, is not a uniform body of “Latter Rain doctrine,” but the later theological tradition that developed within Bethesda Missionary Temple.
Norman James then inherited that Bethesda framework and added further distinctives of his own, including Wellspring’s prescribed baptismal wording concerning baptism “in Jesus’ name for the circumcision of heart and remission of sin.”
Wellspring can reasonably claim Latter Rain ancestry. But its actual doctrinal system is better understood as Bethesda-derived theology further formalized and modified by Norman James, rather than as the unique preservation of a specific original Latter Rain system.
The Jesus-Name Pentecostal Tradition Outside Classical Oneness
Pentecostal history did not divide neatly between conventional Trinitarians who baptized using Matthew 28:19 and Oneness Pentecostals who baptized in Jesus’ name.
A less familiar theological stream developed in which some Pentecostal ministers continued to affirm the Trinity - or described God in terms of “triunity” - while embracing important elements of Jesus-Name theology.
One important early example was W. H. Offiler, founder of Bethel Temple in Seattle. In 1915, Offiler was baptized in Jesus’ name by Glenn Cook, one of the principal early advocates of the emerging Jesus-Name movement.
Offiler did not subsequently embrace classical Oneness theology, but instead developed a modified Trinitarian or “triunity” theology that retained Jesus-Name baptism and a strong theology of the divine name. He distinguished Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and explicitly presented himself as defending a triune understanding of God. (God, and His Name, pp. 6–8).
Yet Offiler simultaneously developed a theology of the divine name. He argued that Matthew 28:19 and the baptismal accounts in Acts were reconciled because the singular name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was: “the LORD-JESUS-CHRIST.”
Offiler called this the “Triune Name of the Triune God” and maintained that baptism in the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled rather than contradicted Matthew 28:19 (God, and His Name, pp. 47–49).
He went further, arguing that Christian baptism was not complete without the divine name and devoted an entire subsequent chapter to rebaptism (God, and His Name, pp. 50–52).
Yet Offiler also provides an important historical distinction. He explicitly stated that neither water baptism nor Baptism in the Holy Spirit was necessary to be born again. He regarded both as experiences subsequent to it (God, and His Name, p. 49).
Offiler therefore did not teach the later Bethesda or Wellspring doctrine of Christian initiation.
His importance is different. By 1932, he demonstrates the existence of a Pentecostal theological position that combined:
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explicit affirmation of a triune God,
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the singular divine-name argument,
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identification of that name as “Lord Jesus Christ,”
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Jesus-Name baptism,
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and even a theology of rebaptism,
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without accepting classical Oneness theology.
Offiler therefore demonstrates that the divine-name theology later found at Bethesda already had precedents within Pentecostalism. But he does not explain Bethesda’s later doctrine of Christian initiation. For that development, the evidence must be followed into Bethesda itself.
The Changing Theology Within Bethesda
Myrtle Beall: An Earlier, Broader Position
Myrtle D. Beall provides an important early benchmark within Bethesda itself.
In her 1951 book The Plumb Line, Beall explicitly rejected identification with “Oneness” or “Jesus Only” theology. In the material presently available, she also accepted both the Matthew 28:19 baptismal wording and the New Testament references to baptism in Jesus’ name.
She wrote: “Water baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost according to the command of Jesus in Matt. 28:19, or as Peter baptized in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:38) and in the name of the Lord Jesus (Acts 8:16) is scriptural in each case and is the answer of a good conscience toward God (I Peter 3:21).”
This surviving 1951 material therefore provides an important benchmark: Bethesda’s founder accepted Jesus-Name baptism, but she did not yet present it as the exclusive baptismal practice later found at Wellspring.
Patricia Beall Gruits: Divine Identity and Christian Initiation
Myrtle Beall’s daughter Patricia Beall Gruits became Bethesda’s Minister of Education in 1952. In 1955 she began teaching a youth catechism class, and the material developed for those classes eventually became Understanding God, first published in 1962.
Although Gruits continued to employ Trinitarian terminology, her explanations were different when compared with historic Trinitarian theology. Historic Trinitarian theology understands the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not as three identities or forms of one divine person, but as three eternally distinct divine Persons who share the one divine being.
She described Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three divine and distinct “identities” (Understanding God, p. 25). She then illustrated those identities by saying that one human person can simultaneously be a father, son, and husband while remaining only one person (Understanding God, p. 26). She also described the invisible God as revealing Himself in various “forms” (Understanding God, pp. 26–27).
In her baptismal teaching, Gruits identified the singular “name” of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as “The Lord Jesus Christ” (Understanding God, pp. 364–365).
More importantly, these ideas were joined to a developed theology of Christian initiation. Gruits taught that water baptism produces a distinct spiritual change, associated water baptism with the circumcision of the heart, and treated that circumcision as essential to being born again (Understanding God, pp. 182–185, 358–360). She presented Acts 2:38 as the normal relationship between repentance, water baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit, while recognizing Cornelius as a case in which God sovereignly reversed the normal order.
By 1962, Bethesda’s teaching had therefore moved substantially beyond Myrtle Beall’s broader 1951 baptismal position. These teachings significantly anticipate doctrines later central to Norman James and Wellspring Church.
James Lee Beall: The System Becomes Explicit
Myrtle Beall’s son James Lee Beall developed the same themes even more explicitly.
His 1976 catechetical work Laying the Foundation contains four consecutive lessons particularly relevant to this history:
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“New Covenant Initiation,” pp. 175–186
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“Putting on Christ,” pp. 187–198
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“Circumcision of the Heart,” pp. 199–210
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“A Washing of Regeneration?,” pp. 211–226
Beall begins his discussion of New Covenant initiation with an unambiguous proposition: “Water baptism is essential to the new birth.” He directly connects John 3:3–5 with water baptism and entrance into the Kingdom of God and describes baptism as required of those entering the Kingdom.
Beall then describes what he calls the package of “Christian initiation”: repentance, faith, water baptism, Baptism in the Holy Spirit. He immediately quotes Acts 2:38 and describes Cornelius as an instance in which the normal order of initiation was “reversed,” explaining that Cornelius’s initiation still had to be completed through water baptism.
This is remarkably close structurally to the framework later found at Wellspring, although it is not identical to Norman James’s eventual three-step definition of becoming born again.
Beall also taught that circumcision of the heart occurs at a definite moment. After describing it as a supernatural work performed by Christ through the Holy Spirit, he wrote: “It is the moment of our water baptism.” He subsequently describes the baptized person as entering “an entirely new spiritual dimension” and becoming a “new creature” (Laying the Foundation, pp. 199–210).
In the following lesson, Beall explicitly states that "regeneration and the new birth are the same thing" and lists water baptism and the Holy Spirit among the agents involved in that work (Laying the Foundation, pp. 211–226).
His theology of the divine name is equally significant.
In “Putting on Christ,” Beall asks whether the name used in baptism matters. He answers that the name expressing the completeness of the Godhead is “the Lord Jesus Christ.” He then interprets the singular “name” in Matthew 28:19 accordingly.
Beall writes: “‘The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit’ is a term expressing the important truth of the tri-unity of God, but it is not His personal name. These are but titles. We discover God’s personality in the face of Jesus Christ.” (Laying the Foundation, pp. 187–198).
This is not merely a preference for one baptismal wording over another. It represents a particular theology of the divine name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit express “tri-unity,” but are titles rather than God's personal name; the personal baptismal name is found in Jesus Christ. James Beall nevertheless continued to identify as Trinitarian.
By the time James Beall published these teachings in the 1970s, most of the theological architecture later associated with Wellspring’s doctrine of initiation was already present within Bethesda, even though Norman James would subsequently narrow, formalize, and enforce it in distinctive ways.
How Did This Theology Enter Bethesda?
The similarities between Offiler’s 1932 theology and later Bethesda teaching are striking. Decades before Gruits or James Beall wrote their books, Offiler was already teaching a triune God while identifying “Lord Jesus Christ” as the singular name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and insisting upon baptism in that name.
The similarity does not establish that Gruits or Beall directly borrowed from Offiler. At present, no documentary chain connecting Offiler personally or literarily to Bethesda has been established. His importance is that his writings demonstrate that this distinctive combination of Trinitarian profession, Jesus-Name baptism, and singular-name theology was already circulating within Pentecostalism decades before the Bealls wrote.
Moreover, Offiler differed sharply from later Bethesda teaching regarding being born again. He explicitly placed both water baptism and Spirit baptism after being born again, whereas James Beall later called water baptism “essential to the new birth.”
This suggests development rather than simple copying.
Pentecostalism during these decades was highly fluid. Theology circulated not only through published books but through camp meetings, traveling ministries, Bible schools, church periodicals, revival meetings, sermon tapes, missionary relationships, and extensive personal networks. The specific ministers, publications, conferences, or personal relationships through which these ideas entered Bethesda therefore remain an open historical question.
These ideas did not originate with Norman James. By the 1960s and 1970s, significant elements of the theology later central to Wellspring were already present within Bethesda's own teaching tradition.
The available evidence therefore points to significant theological changes within Bethesda between Myrtle Beall’s 1951 position and the teaching published by Patricia Gruits in 1962 and James Beall in the 1970s.
What Norman James Inherited
By the time Norman James became associated with Bethesda in the mid-1960s, he did not encounter a single theological system handed down unchanged from the 1948 Latter Rain revival. He entered a Bethesda tradition in which several theological currents had already overlapped.
From the Latter Rain restorationist tradition came a vision of the church involving restored spiritual ministries, apostolic authority, divine order, and the recovery of truths believed to have been lost or neglected by historic Christianity.
Alongside it, within Bethesda’s developing Jesus-name theology came a cluster of separate earlier teachings:
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the singular divine name,
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water baptism and being born again,
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circumcision of the heart through baptism,
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entrance into the Kingdom,
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and receiving the Holy Spirit as part of Christian initiation.
This distinction helps explain an apparent contradiction within Wellspring’s theological identity.
Norman James inherited a Latter Rain restorationist framework within a Bethesda environment that had also absorbed or developed theological ideas with substantial Jesus-Name and Oneness doctrines. Wellspring ultimately combined these elements into a system that was neither simply original Latter Rain nor simply classical Oneness Pentecostalism.
What Norman James Added, Formalized, and Required
Norman James did not merely repeat Bethesda teaching unchanged.
He formalized the inherited initiation framework into Wellspring's distinctive definition of becoming born again and entering the Kingdom of God.
Wellspring came to teach that a person must ultimately experience:
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repentance,
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water baptism in Jesus’ name with Norman James’s prescribed baptismal formula: “in Jesus name for the circumcision of heart and remission of sin,”
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receiving the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.
The continuity with later Bethesda theology is substantial. Patricia Gruits and James Beall had already connected water baptism, being born again, circumcision of the heart, Jesus-Name baptism, and Spirit reception.
Norman's distinctiveness appears increasingly to lie not in inventing the underlying theological components but in combining, formalizing, prescribing, and enforcing them.
He also distinguished being “saved” from being fully “born again,” and made completion of the prescribed initiation necessary for entrance into the Kingdom. Within Wellspring, baptism performed by other Christian churches was not ordinarily sufficient; converts were expected to receive Wellspring's prescribed baptism before being recognized as being born again and becoming members of the assembly.
This transformed theological interpretation into a boundary of religious identity.
From Separate Teachings to a Unified System
The central historical difficulty with a simple progressive-restoration narrative is that the components of Wellspring’s later theology did not first appear as parts of a single system. They emerged in different Pentecostal contexts, were held in different combinations by different teachers, and were sometimes explicitly separated from one another. Only later were these elements brought together within Bethesda and then combined by Norman James with his own distinctive formulations and requirements into Wellspring’s doctrine of the Kingdom.
Wellspring may interpret that eventual convergence as divine restoration. Historically, however, the evidence demonstrates synthesis and systematization more directly than it demonstrates the recovery of a previously unified body of apostolic doctrine.
If Wellspring’s completed system is truly a restoration, the relevant question is not whether its individual components can be traced through twentieth-century Pentecostal history, but whether those components can be shown to have existed together as a coherent system in the teaching of the New Testament apostles.
Why Wellspring Could Reject the Oneness Label
This history may also explain why Wellspring leaders could sincerely reject comparisons with Oneness Pentecostalism even while teaching doctrines with substantial Oneness parallels.
These teachings did not necessarily reach Wellspring labeled “Oneness.” They came through Bethesda teachers who themselves continued to identify as Trinitarian.
James Beall affirmed the “tri-unity of God” while simultaneously saying that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were “but titles” and that the baptismal name expressing the Godhead was the Lord Jesus Christ.
Patricia Gruits used the terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit while describing them as divine “identities,” comparing them to the relational roles of one human person, and identifying “The Lord Jesus Christ” as their singular name.
Consequently, theological identity within this tradition could readily be understood through self-identification and lineage: We believe in the Trinity; this is what Bethesda taught; therefore this cannot be Oneness.
Historical comparison produces a different question: What does the theology actually teach, regardless of the label attached to it?
That question reveals substantial continuity with theological arguments historically associated with Jesus-Name and Oneness Pentecostalism.
When the Theological System Became a Boundary
This is where Wellspring's history becomes more than an obscure dispute within Pentecostal theology.
A doctrine can exist within a fluid religious movement without becoming a comprehensive mechanism of social control. The same doctrine functions differently when it becomes an exclusive test of spiritual legitimacy administered by a tightly controlled community.
At Wellspring, Norman James's doctrine of the Kingdom eventually determined much more than a person's opinion about baptism.
It determined whether a believer had been properly born again.
It determined whether a baptism performed elsewhere would be recognized.
It determined whether a person's reception of the Holy Spirit was considered complete.
It separated Christians believed to possess restored Kingdom truth from Christians who did not.
And within an authority structure that increasingly identified Norman James with restored apostolic leadership, doctrinal disagreement could become something more serious than disagreement with one pastor's interpretation of Scripture. Restored doctrine and restored authority reinforced one another.
That combination contributed to the development of an increasingly closed and theologically cultic environment - not because every Latter Rain or Jesus-Name believer inevitably reaches that outcome, but because of the particular way these doctrines were integrated with authority, exclusivity, belonging, and discipline at Wellspring.
Why This History Matters - A Summary
For members who have spent their entire lives at Wellspring Church, much of the history preceding Norman James is now difficult to recover.
Bethesda Missionary Temple, Myrtle Beall, Patricia Gruits, James Beall, the Latter Rain revival, and the earlier Jesus-Name debates belong to a religious world that most current members never personally experienced.
Without that history, Wellspring's own account of itself can become the principal frame through which its theology is understood: restored truths were recovered, Norman James faithfully preserved them, and a remnant of Kingdom people continues to hold what the wider church has lost.
Historical reconstruction makes it possible to test that claim.
Wellspring has a genuine Latter Rain ancestry, particularly in its understanding of restored ministry, apostolic authority, divine order, and the restoration of the church. But many of the doctrines that most clearly distinguish Wellspring from other Christian churches were not defining requirements of the Latter Rain movement and did not originate together as a single theological system.
The historical record instead reveals several Pentecostal currents intersecting within Bethesda and eventually being combined, formalized, and required at Wellspring. Some elements predated Latter Rain; Myrtle Beall held positions broader than those later required at Wellspring; Patricia Gruits and James Beall articulated increasingly integrated teachings concerning baptism, the divine name, the new birth, and the Holy Spirit; and Norman James ultimately combined these elements with his own distinctive formulations and requirements.
Historical context does not by itself determine whether any particular doctrine is true. But it does allow claims about a church's theological inheritance to be tested against the chronology of the teachings themselves - when they appeared, where they appeared, how they changed, and how they were eventually combined.
At Wellspring, that history has consequences beyond theological classification. The resulting system became a standard for determining who had been properly born again, whose baptism was recognized, who had received the Holy Spirit, who could belong to the assembly, and how Christians outside the system were understood.
Understanding where that system came from matters because it shaped the spiritual identities, relationships, choices, and lives of generations of people.
Notes
1. W. H. Offiler, God, and His Name: A Message for Today (Seattle: Bethel Temple, 1932), 6–8, 47–52. The available 1932 text explicitly affirms a triune God while identifying “Lord-Jesus-Christ” as the “Triune Name of the Triune God.” Importantly, Offiler states on p. 49 that water and Spirit baptism follow rather than constitute the new birth.
2. Patricia Beall Gruits, Understanding God: A Catechism of Christian Doctrine (Detroit: Evangel Press, 1962), 25–27, 182–185, 193–195, 354–365. The first edition appeared in 1962; Gruits had begun developing the material for Bethesda youth catechesis in 1955.
3. James Lee Beall and Marjorie Barber, Laying the Foundation (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1976), 175–226. Bibliographic records identify the original edition as 389 pages and published by Logos International.
4. James Lee Beall, Rise to Newness of Life: A Look at Water Baptism (Detroit: Evangel Press, 1974). The volume is 149 pages. A later Oneness source specifically identifies pp. 60–61 as containing Beall's interpretation of the baptismal name; that citation should be verified against the primary copy before final publication.
5. David K. Bernard, A History of Christian Doctrine, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, A.D. 1900–2000 (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1999), 249–273, especially 272–273. Bernard reproduces the UPCI's 1950 objections to Latter Rain teachings, including compromise regarding Oneness and Jesus-Name baptism.
Bibliography
Beall, James Lee. Rise to Newness of Life: A Look at Water Baptism. Detroit: Evangel Press, 1974.
Beall, James Lee, and Marjorie Barber. Laying the Foundation. Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1976.
Beall, Myrtle D. The Plumb Line. Detroit: Latter Rain Evangel, 1951. [Publication details and quoted passages to be verified against the primary copy.]
Bernard, David K. A History of Christian Doctrine. Vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, A.D. 1900–2000. Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1999.
Gruits, Patricia Beall. Understanding God: A Catechism of Christian Doctrine. Detroit: Evangel Press, 1962.
Offiler, W. H. God, and His Name: A Message for Today. Seattle: Bethel Temple, 1932.
Riss, Richard M. The Latter Rain: The Latter Rain Movement of 1948 and the Mid-Twentieth Century Evangelical Awakening. Mississauga, ON: Honeycomb Visual Productions, 1987.