Event · 1906

Azusa Street Revival

A revival held at a mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles from 1906, led by William J. Seymour, an African American Holiness preacher, whose meetings featured speaking in tongues and drew people of many races and nations.

History

Roots

Azusa Street grew out of the Holiness movement, the nineteenth-century heir of John Wesley’s teaching on entire sanctification. Holiness preachers spoke of a “second blessing” after conversion that cleansed the heart, and many also talked of a “baptism of the Holy Ghost” that gave power for service. By 1900 the Methodist and Holiness world was full of people praying for a fresh Pentecost before Christ’s return.

Charles Fox Parham, a Holiness evangelist in Kansas, gave that hope a test. At his Bethel Bible School in Topeka, on 1 January 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues, and Parham began teaching that tongues are the biblical evidence of Spirit baptism (Parham, secondary; Ozman, secondary). He read Acts 2:4 as the pattern for every believer. He also expected the tongues to be real foreign languages, given so that missionaries could preach abroad without study.

Causes

William J. Seymour, born in Louisiana in 1870 to formerly enslaved parents, heard Parham in Houston in 1905. Under Jim Crow rules he was not allowed to sit in the classroom with the white students; with Parham’s permission he sat just outside the classroom door (Seymour, secondary). He took Parham’s teaching that Spirit baptism is a third work of grace after conversion and sanctification, marked by tongues (Seymour, secondary).

In early 1906 Julia Hutchins invited Seymour to preach at her small Holiness church in Los Angeles. When he preached that tongues are the evidence of the Spirit, she locked him out. He moved the meetings to the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry at 216 North Bonnie Brae Street (Azusa Street Revival, secondary). On 9 April 1906, after weeks of prayer and fasting, Edward Lee and then several others spoke in tongues. Seymour himself did so days later. Crowds gathered on the street, and by one account the porch collapsed.

Los Angeles was ready for the news. Frank Bartleman, a Holiness journalist, had been praying and writing for revival since reports came of the 1904–1905 Welsh revival. The city was also full of recent migrants, Black, white, Latino and immigrant, many of them poor and outside established churches.

Proceedings

The group rented a former African Methodist Episcopal building at 312 Azusa Street, lately used as a warehouse and stable, and held its first service there on 14 April 1906. It became the Apostolic Faith Mission. Meetings ran nearly around the clock for about three years. There was no choir or set order: people sang, prayed, testified, fell to the floor, and spoke in tongues, and Seymour often sat behind a pulpit built of shoe boxes, praying.

The Los Angeles Daily Times ran a front-page story on 18 April, “Weird Babel of Tongues,” mocking the “colored people and a sprinkling of whites” who made up the congregation (summary, secondary). The publicity only drew more visitors. In September 1906 the mission began its own paper, The Apostolic Faith, edited by Seymour and Clara Lum and sent free to thousands of readers worldwide; the first issue’s headline was “Pentecost Has Come” (Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, with digitized issues). Bartleman’s eyewitness memoir, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), was later reprinted as Azusa Street (Archive.org). It gave the revival its best-known line: “the color line was washed away in the blood” (Christian History Institute, secondary).

Visitors came from across North America and from Europe and Asia, and many left as missionaries. A. G. Garr and his wife went to India and then Hong Kong. Within two years Pentecostal missions had appeared in dozens of countries. By about 1909 the crowds had thinned, and by 1913 the mission was a small Black congregation. Seymour pastored it until his death in 1922, and his wife Jennie Evans Seymour led it until the building was lost in 1931.

Influence

Azusa Street became the main hub through which the Pentecostal message reached the world. Charles Harrison Mason, a leader of the Church of God in Christ, received Spirit baptism there in 1907 and took his largely Black denomination into the movement (Mason, secondary). G. B. Cashwell carried the message to Holiness churches in the American South, and Florence Crawford founded the Apostolic Faith Mission in Portland. The Assemblies of God (1914), the Oneness churches, and much of Latin American and African Pentecostalism trace lines back to the mission.

The later Charismatic renewal in mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches from the 1960s, and figures such as Kenneth Hagin and John Wimber, belong to the same family tree. Pentecostals and charismatics together were estimated at well over 500 million people by the 2000s (Pew, Spirit and Power, 2006), which makes Azusa Street one of the most consequential events in modern Christianity.

Key ideas and contributors

Spirit baptism as a distinct experience. Seymour taught three experiences: conversion, entire sanctification, and baptism in the Holy Spirit, which gave power for witness. The first issue of The Apostolic Faith described the mission’s testimony in those terms. Later Pentecostals dropped the middle step, but the idea of a Spirit baptism after conversion survived as the core of the movement’s teaching on gifts.

Tongues as the evidence. Following Parham, the mission held that speaking in tongues is the sign that a person has received the Spirit, as at Pentecost (Acts 2:4, Acts 10:44–46, Acts 19:6). This “initial evidence” doctrine became the defining belief of classical Pentecostalism.

The gifts restored for the last days. The revival read itself through Joel 2:28–29 as quoted in Acts 2: the “latter rain” poured out before Christ’s return. Healing, prophecy and tongues were not relics of the apostolic age but signs of the end. This is the root of the modern continuationist position, joined to a strong premillennial expectation.

One body across the color line. Seymour treated the mixing of races as evidence of the Spirit’s work. A 1907 issue of the paper said the Lord “is melting all races and nations together” (quoted, secondary). Women preached, testified and served as missionaries and editors, which fed later debates over Women in Ministry.

Other contributors: Parham, whose Topeka school supplied the doctrine; Bartleman, whose memoir shaped how the revival was remembered; Lum and Crawford, who ran the paper; and Cecil M. Robeck Jr., whose The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (2006, Archive.org) is the standard modern history.

Key controversies

Parham’s rejection. Seymour invited Parham to Los Angeles in October 1906, but Parham was appalled by the shouting, the falling, and above all the racial mixing. He denounced the meetings as fanaticism and set up a rival campaign nearby, and for the rest of his life he called Azusa Street a counterfeit (Parham, secondary). His racial views and his 1907 arrest in Texas (the charge was dropped) damaged his standing in the movement he had helped start.

The race question. The interracial worship did not last. By 1908 Crawford and Lum had moved to Portland, taking the paper’s national mailing list with them, which cut Seymour off from his readers (IFPHC; Crawford, secondary). White leaders left to form their own bodies, and in 1914 the mostly white Assemblies of God organized apart from Mason’s Church of God in Christ. Seymour’s 1915 Doctrines and Discipline for the mission required that the bishop, vice bishop and trustees “must be people of color” (constitution text), a sign of how bitter the experience had been. Historians still argue whether the color line was “washed away” or only briefly crossed; Marne Campbell’s study of race and class in early Los Angeles Pentecostalism is one example (Journal of African American History, 2010, secondary).

Missionary tongues. Early missionaries expected to preach in foreign languages they had never learned. Garr found in Calcutta that his tongues were not Bengali, and others came home disappointed. Pentecostals reinterpreted tongues as prayer and praise in the Spirit rather than a tool for preaching, a quiet but large doctrinal change.

Is tongues the evidence? Critics noted that Paul asks “Do all speak with tongues?” expecting the answer no (1 Corinthians 12:30). Seymour himself came to doubt that tongues alone proved Spirit baptism, after seeing people speak in tongues who showed no love; he pointed to love and holiness as the surer marks. Many charismatics today treat tongues as one gift among others, while classical Pentecostal bodies keep the initial-evidence doctrine.

Splits within the movement. In 1910 William Durham of Chicago preached the “Finished Work” view, that sanctification is accomplished at conversion and not as a second crisis. When he brought it to Azusa Street in 1911, Seymour locked him out (Durham, secondary). The Finished Work view won much of the movement and shaped the Assemblies of God (Finished Work Pentecostalism, secondary). A 1913 camp meeting in Los Angeles then launched the Oneness movement, which baptized in Jesus’ name only and rejected the Trinity (Oneness Pentecostalism, secondary), a dispute that bears on God and Trinity.

Outside critics. Holiness leaders who rejected tongues were among the fiercest opponents. Alma White of the Pillar of Fire called the movement demonic in Demons and Tongues (1910; 1949 edition on Archive.org). Among Reformed theologians, B. B. Warfield’s Counterfeit Miracles (1918, Archive.org) argued that miraculous gifts ended with the apostles, setting out the cessationist case Pentecostals have answered ever since (1 Corinthians 13:8–10 is the central disputed text).

Who founded Pentecostalism? Older white Pentecostal histories put Parham and Topeka at the center and treated Azusa Street as one revival among several. Since the 1970s, historians such as Robert Mapes Anderson (Vision of the Disinherited, 1979, Archive.org) and Robeck have stressed Seymour, the Black roots of Pentecostal worship, and the mission as the global hub. The question is partly about evidence and partly about whose story the movement tells.

What remains unresolved

The revival’s two claims to fame pull against each other. It is remembered for tongues, which became the badge of a movement now spread across the global South, and for the crossing of the color line, which the movement it launched mostly failed to keep. Pentecostals still debate whether tongues is the evidence of the Spirit or one gift among many, and whether Seymour’s late emphasis on love as the true sign was a correction or a retreat.