■ 1 ■ The Pentecostal Century: An Overview Vinson Synan ON JANUARY 1, 1901, a young woman named Agnes Ozman was baptized in the Holy Spirit at a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. A student of former Methodist pastor and holiness teacher Charles Fox Parham, Ozman received a startling manifestation of the gift of tongues and became, in effect, the first Pentecostal of the 20th century. “I laid my hands upon her and prayed,” Parham later recalled of the event. “I had scarcely completed three dozen