Willis Collins Hoover (1858—1936)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- Chile, Peru, United States
Traditions
- Pentecostal
- Methodist
Ministries
- church planter
- revivalist
Willis Collins Hoover was born on 20 July 1858 in Freeport, Illinois to David Hoover and Rebecca Kurt, and died on 26 May 1936 in Valparaiso, Chile. He was a Methodist missionary who, together with his wife, Mary Louise Hilton, traveled with their Methodist Episcopal Mission to Chile in 1889. The couple were recruited by William Taylor, a noted pioneer missiologist in Africa, India, and Chile, and promoter of the renewed Second Blessing holiness revivalism arising again in Europe and the US at the end of the nineteenth century.
Hoover is recognised both within and beyond Chile as the main pastoral figure who led the 1909 Pentecostal revival for 27 years, from 1909 to 1936 (although some would argue that the holiness revivals they experienced in 1902 were the beginnings of the extraordinary visitations). Their movements as a missionary couple, and later, a family of four children, after losing their first child at birth in Chile in 1892, gave them an interaction between the two American cultures of revivalism that were gathering momentum in Chicago, Azusa, and Chile. Mary Louise was always by Willis’s side until she was forced to return to Chicago in 1919 on account of ill health and remained there until her death from cancer in 1921. Hoover returned to Chile on 14 October of the same year, after a further marriage proposal was turned down.
Under his ministry, the Chilean Pentecostal revival that began has been situated historically at the beginning of what has been called "the century of the Holy Spirit" by Vinson Synan and Pentecostal historians. The concept of revival came into ordinary parlance towards the end of the nineteenth century when it began to signify a renewal of the state of the church through God’s sovereign intervention. Several key revivals had been manifesting around the globe at this time: the Welsh, 1904–5; the Korean 1903–7; and the Indian 1905–9. However, controversy exists as to whether these would classify fully as ‘Pentecostal’ revivals. Despite sporadic Pentecostal manifestations, their characteristics conformed more to Wesleyan sanctification with an emphasis on a Second Blessing (an experience of sanctification, sometimes entire sanctifying grace, that was sought as a further step in the Christian walk). Some had begun applying the term ‘Baptism of the Spirit’ that John Fletcher, (sometimes even John Wesley), used to denote the experience. However, mixed with this yearning for Christian perfection, there is evidence that Pentecostal phenomena, as part of a growing search for Baptism of the Spirit, were known as far back as the ministry of Edward Irving (1792–1834). Early Montanism that emerged in the latter half of the second century is known, of course, for such manifestations, that have also appeared at other sporadic moments in church history.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American society experienced several ‘Awakenings’ during the years 1727, 1792, 1830, 1857, and 1882. These culminated in a period of Radical Holiness Methodist revivals within a Wesleyan concept towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although the origin of Pentecostalism is often associated with the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, California, in 1906, under William Seymour, Agnes Osman could be said to have initiated the movement when she spoke in tongues on New Year’s Eve at the Parham Bible Institute.
Around that time, there emerged an identifiable Pentecostal Triangle of three concurrent revival movements from Mukti, North India (1905); Azusa, California U.S.A. (1906); and Valparaiso, Chile (1909). These Pentecostal movements were characterised by the ‘Baptism of the Spirit’, which they understood to be the empowering experience in the Book of Acts. They understood this experience to include tongues, prophecies, miracles, healing, and other supernatural manifestations. Although they quickly influenced other world centres for revival, such as Thomas Barratt’s Norwegian church in Christiana (later named Oslo), these three points of the Pentecostal Triangle were mainly indigenous, sparked by their own seeking after the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Shut away between the Andes and the Pacific, Chile’s relative geographic isolation makes it a ‘Pentecostal Galapagos’ for study. Hoover became convinced that Baptism of the Holy Spirit, as experienced in the Acts of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost, resulted in a renewed knowledge and relationship with the person of the Holy Spirit that would bring the church to the place that the Acts of the Apostles had always testified as normative. Hoover believed that this was the prime cause of the 1909 Pentecostal revival he oversaw and administered in Chile from 1909 to the year of his death in 1936. It was the gem that, when it fell, made the waters ripple.
William Taylor’s principles of ‘self‐supporting’ and ‘self‐propagating’ churches were similarly aided by geographic isolation and, therefore, also from mission agency policy. Interestingly, the same principles were being developed in the China Inland Mission under Hudson Taylor and later Dixon Edward Hoste, and would prepare the Chinese church for the entire exodus of missionary personnel by 1950 under communist rule. They even preceded the well‐known Missionary Methods by Roland Allen. The lesser‐known Chilean Pentecostal revival began to receive world attention on account of its numerical growth during the three decades after its inception (see below) and its unusual success in mission to indigenous people. It was among the first churches from the majority world to flourish in the twentieth century without assistance from Western agencies.
That something remarkable occurred in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Valparaiso in 1909 with lasting missional effects in Chile over the following 30 years, is now no longer questioned. It was the first autonomous Pentecostal movement in Latin America, and became impossible to ignore simply because the revival grew in such numbers and social influence. Pentecostalism has been studied as the fastest growing church movement in Latin America over the last 50 years of the twentieth century. It is estimated that by 2025, it will have swelled to 680 million. In 2012, 17% of Chileans had come to call themselves Protestants/Evangélicos according to the 2012 National Census.
Willis Collins Hoover graduated as a doctor in 1884, as well as in some architectural studies. Later, he felt the call to be a missionary. He said that in his breast, he felt a burden that he could not ignore. It was like a voice that repeated day after day, ‘South America, South America, South America’. He applied and was accepted as a missionary of his church. He immediately began his studies in an induction school of preparation for mission, the Chicago Christian Training School for City Home and Foreign Missions (CCTSCHFM). There is no mention of Willis’ theological studies, apart from the assumption that he trained in the same Bible college (CCTSCHFM) as his future wife, Mary Louise Hilton where they met and married in 1887. She was born in Ontario, Canada in 1864, but was brought up in Chicago where she and her family attended the Oak Park Methodist Episcopal Church. They left for Chile in 1889 and always worked closely together. Mary Louise may have been a more able theologian than Willis, as is discernible in her letters and interviews printed in Pentecostal periodicals such as The Latter Rain Evangel and Confidence, but her faithful support of her husband in times of stormy conflict as the new movement emerged in 1909 and 1910 was clearly her strongest contribution.
The Hoovers had been seeking revival for some time after the Wesleyan manner of the ‘Radical Holiness Movement’, the grouping that sought a further experience of the Holy Spirit in ‘perfecting holiness’. Always a devout man, sensitive to the Spirit, Hoover had been stirred by reports from David Livingstone to offer himself as a missionary to Africa. When the mission board replied with an offer of an assignment to Chile instead, Hoover accepted it as God’s will. Although it meant leaving his practice as a homeopathic physician in the Chicago area, it was in that city which they would later visit on furloughs, that they became further influenced by the ‘new’ Pentecostal movement and Pentecostal mission to which the local Stone Church would make a radical commitment in 1906, and to the 1914 Second Assemblies of God Conference held there, which Mary Anne attended.
While many sociological and political aspects of the Chilean revival have been studied (classically ‘Haven of the Masses’ by Lalive D’Epaingy) Hoover himself would have attributed the ensuing revival to the seeking and reception of the Baptism of the Spirit.
For Further Reading
- Alfred Cooper, A Gem in the Water (Oxford, UK: Regnum, 2024).
- Lalive D’Epaingy, Haven of the Masses.