South Africa played a highly significant role in the 20th century Pentecostal outpouring. From its sources at Azusa Street in Los Angeles (1906) and Sunderland (1907), the fire spread rapidly across the globe, and it was as early as 1908 that the southern tip of Africa was first affected through the influence of evangelist John G Lake. Less than three decades later the seeds of the Charismatic Movement were sown in that land through an extraordinary young man called David du Plessis. By Charles Gardner.

It was 1936 and 31-year-old David was general secretary of the Apostolic Faith Mission, a Pentecostal group birthed out of the John G Lake revival in South Africa. He was sitting in his office going through his mail early one morning when, suddenly, the legendary Yorkshire plumber/evangelist Smith Wigglesworth barged in unannounced, pinned him up against the wall and prophesied about extraordinary events to come, and how God would use the young South African to help bring them to pass.

“I was responsible for inviting him to our country,” David later explained to an audience in California. “The council wasn’t sure he could help us as they thought he would be difficult to interpret (into Afrikaans) because if he didn’t know a word, he made one up. But our spirits blended at once and he came and stayed in our home. One morning at 6am Wigglesworth came into the kitchen and asked my wife where I was. She told him I had already gone to the office as it was my practice to work early on administrative matters.

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