George Jeffreys: Elim Foursquare Gospel Church

George Jeffreys was a Pentecostal minister and founder of the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance. Jeffreys was a Welsh Congregational Church minister who converted to Christianity in the Welsh Revival of 1904. When the Welsh Revival ended and Pentecostalism began to spread into Wales, George and his brother Stephen were converted to the Pentecostal faith. The timing of his conversion coincided with the First World War; Jeffreys was ordained as a minister in 1913 and therefore exempt from military conscription when war broke out in 1914.

In 1915, Jeffreys was invited to hold meetings at the Temperance Hall in Monaghan, Ireland. The meetings turned into a revival, and eventually into a "full gospel" movement that emphasized healing and glossolalia. By 1916 the first Elim Church opened its doors in Belfast. From there, the movement spread quickly into other parts of the world, attracting thousands of converts. It began as Elim Evangelistic Band and was later officially named the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance. By 1929, Jeffreys held revivals as large as 150,000 people boasting of over 3,000 converts. The revivals were often advertised as having free admission, but an offering was collected, and converts gave hundreds of dollars each (in today's money).

In his faith healing revivals, Jeffreys used a strategy similar to that of John Alexander Dowie, one later adopted by William Branham in the Latter Rain revivals. "healings" were "of the gradual type." When asked if healings would last, Jeffreys responded that the healings would only last as long as the people concerned "walked in the light of God's word." This "light of God's Word," according to Jeffreys, was the "Four Square Gospel" — not to be confused with Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Gospel sect. When McPherson staged her kidnapping, however, Jeffreys sent a cable to assist in the plot. According to Jeffreys, McPherson had drowned. McPherson later emerged after having spent a vacation on what appears to have been a romantic tryst with her lover.

Like many other leaders of the Pentecostal Movement, Jeffreys was a strong supporter of the pseudo-archaeological doctrine of British Israelism. This is the notion that Europeans were biologically descended from the ancient Israelites of the Old Testament. British Israelism eventually birthed the Christian Identity doctrine that was used by many terrorist groups.

In the early 1930s, Jeffreys began holding open discussions with ministers, attempting to recruit them into the British Israelism philosophy. He was not successful in convincing them, however, and a majority of them rejected it. During a ministerial conference in 1934, Jeffreys appointed John Leech to debate in favor of British Israelism. This resulted in disaster when Leech backed out of the debate.
The disaster was made worse when Jeffreys began making unwise financial decisions. Shortly after the debate, Jeffreys took his campaign team on a five-week vacation to the Holy Land, starting with an excursion to the pyramids and making his way north. Upon reaching Jerusalem, Jeffreys claimed to have seen a vision of British soldiers defending Jerusalem immediately prior to the Battle of Armageddon and went on a revival tour raising money to pay off debt. As part of this strategy, Jeffreys proposed dividing the Elim churches into two sections: the most prosperous in a "Jubliee Concentration" and the less prosperous in a "Forward Movement". Leaders in the Elim churches saw this as a threat, however, and assumed that Jeffreys was attempting to transition Elim churches into a denomination that adopted British Israel teaching. This eventually led Jeffreys into parting ways with the denomination that he created. In 1939, Jeffreys resigned.

George Jeffreys
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/george_jeffreys