In Choosing the Jesus Way Angela Tarango provides a close study of the evolution of Assemblies of God missionary outreach to American Indians. She discusses the early AG missionary work as a participation in widespread white people's efforts to Americanize the Indians. And she traces the changes in missionary attitudes and the development of American Indian leaders, which led to the denomination's adoption of the “indigenous principle.” She argues that this indigenous principle allows pentecostal theology to be fully translated from one culture to another, and its adoption required the AG leadership to let go of their desire to control the pentecostal message and trust the emerging American Indian leaders to translate it into their own languages.

Tarango focuses her study through the lens of two particularly important people in the larger story, Alta Washburn, a white evangelist and founder of the American Indian College in Arizona, and Charlie Lee, a Navajo evangelist/pastor who founded the first indigenous AG church. Both did their work in the 1930s. Through these two biographies in particular, Tarango gives an account of institutional change and power shifts in the Assemblies of God denomination as the indigenous principle became accepted, and as the American Indian College became fully supported as an expression of this acceptance, it finally resulted in the election of John Maracle (Mohawk) to the AG Executive Presbytery in 2007. The indigenous principle, Tarango argues, is a theology expressed as practice. In order to understand how it developed she investigates religious practice as a site of agency. She discusses such practices as worship, dress, educational practices, ways of conducting meetings for both worship and business, and translation from one language to another, as sites where the tensions between Assemblies of God assumptions and ideals and the experience and practice of American Indian pentecostals are evident. In following the changes in these practices, she discerns changes in theology, but also in institutional organization and the distribution of power. Tarango comes to the study partly as an insider, having been raised in a family where many were pentecostal, but also as a scholar with outsider's eyes. Her research included study in archives as well as oral history interviews and visits to relevant places.

Choosing the Jesus Way contributes to a growing number of studies on various aspects of American Indian engagement with Christianity. Tarango does not simplify the historian's task in navigating the diversity of American Indian communities and the diversity within them. She also does not simplify Christianity, but acknowledges its own diverse communities and the diversity within each one, particularly the diversity among and within pentecostal denominations. Her focus on particular people like Alta Washburn and Charlie Lee allows her to show us this diversity in an organic way through the network of relationships that was represented by each of these people as they worked within the Assemblies of God, the American Indian tribal structures, and the larger American society.

This book will be useful to a wide range of audiences. Students of pentecostalism will find it helpful in understanding the way in which the indigenous principle is not a concept imposed from the outside but instead grows deeply from the roots of the modern pentecostal movement. Students of American Indian religions will find it useful in providing insight into the persistence of American Indian interest in Christianity, and the way people such as Navajo Charlie Lee and Mohawk John Maracle shaped the larger denominational structures. Students of American religious history will be reminded, as Tarango says, that “Native peoples deserve to be fully included in the history of American religion, because their stories and histories are indicative of greater trends in the history of American religion” (176). Tarango's book challenges simplified assumptions about American Indians and about pentecostalism. She provides intriguing answers to the question of why people convert to Christianity, and in this case to pentecostal Christianity. She shows that once converted, American Indians are no more likely than other adherents to passively practice their religion, but that they continually adapt it and reshape their beliefs and practices as their lives and communities develop.