G. B. Cashwell (1862—1916)

Country of Origin

  • United States

Countries/Regions of Ministry

  • United States

Traditions

  • Pentecostal

Ministries

  • Evangelist
  • Revivalist

Gaston Barnabas Cashwell was an eastern North Carolina revivalist who received the Pentecostal experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues at the Azusa Street revival in November 1906. He is best known for the Pentecostal revival that spread across the southern United States upon his return to Dunn, North Carolina.

Cashwell was born on April 28, 1862, in Halls Township, Sampson County, North Carolina. His religious upbringing upbringing took place in local Baptist and Methodist churches in rural eastern North Carolina. He worked in the tobacco industry, traveling to Georgia in the 1890s. He then experienced a holiness encounter where he noted, “All the mule and goat are taken out of me.”

In the early 1900s, many in holiness churches were spiritually hungry for more of God’s presence. By 1903, Cashwell was a member of a small holiness movement started by A. B. Crumpler, “The Holiness Church,” which was organized in 1898 in Goldsboro, N.C. In 1906, Cashwell read about the Azusa revival in magazines like J.M. Pike’s Way of Faith. In mid-November 1906, Cashwell rode a train to Los Angeles, California and attended the Azusa meeting for nearly two weeks. He wrote that, for five days, he struggled to submit to going forward “in earnest for my Pentecost.” For many years it was thought that his primary resistance was because William Seymour was black. This view has been challenged for several reasons including the record of his speaking in black churches across North Carolina and that he never identified what constituted his struggle. Regardless of what his initial reservations were, he humbly submitted to the Holy Spirit and received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and spoke in other tongues.

Cashwell returned home in early December 1906 and prepared a December 31 service to be held in a tobacco warehouse in Dunn, NC. That night, the Pentecostal baptism fell upon the group who gathered. Services continued for nearly three weeks as word spread, and Cashwell began traveling across the Southern states for the next four years.

During that time, Cashwell began a magazine entitled Bridegroom’s Messenger. He led other Holiness leaders into the Pentecostal experience including N. J. Holmes, G. F. Taylor, A. J. Tomlinson, T. J. McIntosh, M. M. Pinson, and H. G. Rodgers.

The legacy of Cashwell’s Pentecostal ministry includes his preaching of Seymour’s theology of Pentecost as a separate experience from holiness. For Wesleyan Holiness movements that became Pentecostal, Cashwell helped solidify the current theology of: justification by faith, sanctification as a second definite work of grace, the baptism of the Holy Spirit with initial evidence of speaking in tongues, divine healing in the atonement, and Jesus’ Second Coming.

Additionally, multiple denominations or movements were directly influenced through people who received the baptism under Cashwell’s ministry. These include the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church, Church of God (Cleveland, TN), and later, the Assemblies of God in the American South (through Pinson and Rodger).

By 2011, Cashwell’s ministry slowed, perhaps due to his declining health. The last years of his life were spent in Dunn, North Carolina. He died on March 4, 1916 and is buried there in Greenwood Cemetery.

Doug Beacham
International Pentecostal Holiness Church

 

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