Lancaster became president of the nation's earliest attempt to organise Pentecostalism into a denomination, the Apostolic Faith Mission of Australasia.
[3] Speaking in tongues was also unknown in Australian churches until Lancaster heard of the phenomena being practised in both England and in the Azusa Street revival that began in a storefront meeting in the US in 1906.
[2] Accounts of her healing and spirit baptism were published in Good News magazine and were part of her testimony often repeated in her preaching and teaching.
In 1908 Lancaster bought a shop-front at 104 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne, a former temperance hall, and began to gather a congregation.
The emotional flavour of her Good News Hall provoked opposition from other church leaders and even the public, who sometimes greeted her street preachers with rotten fruit.
[2] The orthodoxy of her holiness preaching was part of her attraction to crowds of Christians seeking a deeper life-changing experience in an age of revivalism.
She read widely and demonstrated her grasp of current affairs by applying political and economic problems to the much anticipated Parousia or Second Coming of Jesus.
However, in her over-simplistic interpretations of Christology and Trinitarian theology, she began to teach that Jesus as the son of God was not equal to the Father and Holy Spirit.
South African evangelist Frederick Bernadas Van Eyk offered to collaborate with Lancaster and the Good News Hall from the time he arrived in Australia in 1926.
Van Eyk proposed that Lancaster align all of her work with his South African organisation the Apostolic Faith Mission.
The Good News became the official publication for the AFM in Australia, a move that was made easy by the serendipitous inclusion of the words apostolic mission on the trust deeds for the church hall.
[8] An organisation known as the Pentecostal Churches of Australia was established about this time by a remnant of followers of the eccentric American evangelist John Alexander Dowie (25 May 1847 – 9 March 1907).
Although Van Eyk initially travelled with his family, when his wife and four children returned to South Africa he formed what he claimed was a platonic friendship with a pastor's daughter.
Her unorthodox teachings, including purported annihilationism, were raised in discussions among a group of churches that collaborated to launch what became the Assemblies of God in Australia.