Rev. Garfield T. Haywood

Bishop Haywood received the baptism of Holy Ghost February, 1908. The makeshift church was a converted tin shop and was led by Elder Henry Prentice, who had received the baptism of the Holy Ghost at Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles. Here, G.T. Haywood and his wife, Ida, were gloriously filled with the Spirit and began their spiritual training.

In February 1909, only a year after their conversion, the pair began meetings in an empty storeroom at 12th and Lafayette Streets in downtown Indianapolis. A few months later, services were moved to a tent at West 13th and the Canal.

Consistently bad weather made the location less than optimal, and a small frame building at 12th and Missouri Streets was secured. Elder Haywood felt led to hold a convention for area Pentecostals, but there was certainly not enough room in their present building. The Peniel Mission at 11th and Senate was rented for the occasion. Many were filled with the Holy Ghost in these meetings, and the church continued to rent the space, which was finally purchased by the growing congregation in 1919. In the early days of Pentecostalism, churches were not generally named. Pentecostals were determined not to lapse into the formalism of the denominations from which they had emerged, and churches were customarily known only by their location. This was the case with 11th and Senate.

In early spring 1916, Brother Glenn Cook, an elder from the Azusa Street Mission who had accepted baptism in the Name of Jesus arrived in Indiana, and was received by Bishop Haywood and his congregation at 11th and Senate.

March 6, 1916, Bishop Haywood and 465 members of his church were baptized in Jesus’ Name in Eagle Creek, marking the first apostolic baptisms east of the Mississippi River. J. Roswell Flower, the General Secretary of the Assemblies of God and a prolific opponent of the Oneness movement, sent a telegram to Bishop Haywood warning him of Brother Cook’s ''error.'' The message arrived too late, and Bishop Haywood, fully convinced of the veracity of Cook’s message, became one of the most avid and effective proponents and propagators of Oneness theology.

In 1910, Bishop Haywood’s church began publishing ''The Voice in the Wilderness''. After 1916, this became one of the most influential Oneness circulars, and was the official organ of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW), which followed Bishop Haywood into the Oneness movement. The PAW was formed in 1906, and he became the first presiding bishop of the organization, when it converted to the episcopal polity in 1925. He served in that capacity until his untimely death in 1931.

In 1924, construction was completed on Christ Temple, the final edifice undertaken by Bishop Haywood. This church, located on Fall Creek Boulevard, still stands.

After his death in 1931, he was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, and in 1980, the city of Indianapolis renamed the segment of Fall Creek Drive where Christ Temple is located Bishop Garfield T. Haywood Memorial Way.