American Revivals Part 3: The Azusa Street Revival

It is clear to me that the Christian Church in America needs a revival. To help understand what such a revival might consist of, I have attempted to present a brief history of past revivals.  I examined Revivals in America between 1740 and 1885, and the Role of Dwight Moody. This post looks at how the revival movement evolved during the twentieth century.

Revival in the twentieth century has two main threads: 1) the Pentecostal and late charismatic revivals and 2) the evolution of camp meetings into large urban crusades associated with first Billy Sunday and then with Billy Graham. This post will focus on the Pentecostal movement. The next one will examine the crusade movement. I gleaned much of the information for this post from two sources: the Apostolic Archives International website and the Christian Assemblies International website.

Pentecostal Revivalism.  Two biblical passages undergird the Pentecostal Movement:

 And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions.     Joel 2:28

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. ² Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. ³ They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.                  Acts 2:1-3

Pentecostalism differs from other Christian movements because of its emphasis on “speaking in tongues (glossolalia).”  The biblical basis for this practice is primarily found in the two passages above, but also in Mark 16:17 (Jesus’ Apostles), Acts 10:46 (the household of Cornelius), Acts 19:6 (in Ephesus), and in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (chapters 12-14). From what we can tell, glossolalia was no longer practiced in the church by the third century. For the next 15 centuries, it reappeared in the practices of certain Christian offshoots such as the Moravians (15^th century), the Camisards (17^th century), the Quakers (also 17^th century; the Quakers may have gotten their name because of their ecstatic worship), and the Mormons (19^th century).  I hope to discuss speaking in tongues in more detail in another post.

As described in the Apostolic Archives International, The Pentecostal revival first appeared in Wales in 1904, during which approximately 100,000 people in Wales joined the movement. “Internationally, evangelical Christians took this event to be a sign that a fulfillment of the prophecy in the Bible’s book of Joel, chapter 2:23–29 was about to take place…During this time, other small-scale revivals were taking place in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas. By 1905, reports of speaking in tongues, supernatural healings, and significant lifestyle changes accompanied these revivals. As news spread, evangelicals across the United States began to pray for similar revivals in their own congregations.

The Azuza Street Revival. According to Christian Assemblies International, “What happened at Azusa Street has fascinated church historians for decades and has yet to be fully understood and explained. For over three years, the Azusa Street “Apostolic Faith Mission” conducted three services a day, seven days a week, where thousands of seekers received the Holy Spirit.”  Mimicking some earlier revivals, people began assembling and praying and they received some kind of visitation from the Holy Spirit.

To Pentecostals, “receiving the Holy Spirit” means manifesting the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are enumerated in 1^st Corinthians 12:7-11: ⁷ The Holy Spirit is given to each of us in a special way. That is for the good of all. ⁸ To some people the Spirit gives a message of wisdom. To others the same Spirit gives a message of knowledge. ⁹ To others the same Spirit gives faith. To others that one Spirit gives gifts of healing. ¹⁰ To others he gives the power to do miracles. To others he gives the ability to prophesy. To others he gives the ability to tell the spirits apart. To others he gives the ability to speak in different kinds of languages they had not known before. And to still others he gives the ability to explain what was said in those languages. ¹¹ All the gifts are produced by one and the same Spirit. He gives gifts to each person, just as he decides.

In 1905, William J. Seymour, the one-eyed 34 year-old son of former slaves, was a student of well-known Pentecostal preacher Charles Parham and an interim pastor for a small holiness church in Houston, Texas. Seymour preached the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues, although he had not experienced this personally. In February 1906 Seymour received and accepted an invitation to preach at a church in Los Angeles.

He arrived there on February 22, 1906, and within two days was preaching at a church at the corner of Ninth Street and Santa Fe Avenue. During his first sermon, he preached that speaking in tongues was the first biblical evidence of the inevitable baptism in the Holy Spirit. On the following Sunday, March 4, he returned to the church and found that the church had been padlocked the door. Elders of the church rejected Seymour’s teaching, primarily because he had not yet experienced the blessing about which he was preaching.  Condemnation of his message also came from the Holiness Church Association of Southern California with which the church had affiliation. However, not all members of the church rejected Seymour’s preaching. He was invited to stay in the home of congregation member Edward S. Lee, and he began to hold Bible studies and prayer meetings there.

Seymour and his small group of new followers soon relocated to the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street. White families from local holiness churches began to attend as well. The group would get together regularly and pray to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. On April 9, 1906, after five weeks of Seymour’s preaching and prayer, and three days into an intended 10-day fast, Edward S. Lee spoke in tongues for the first time. At the next meeting, Seymour shared Lee’s testimony and preached a sermon on Acts 2:4 and soon six others began to speak in tongues as well, including Jennie Moore, who would later become Seymour’s wife. A few days later, on April 12, Seymour spoke in tongues for the first time after praying all night long.

The house became too small, so they moved to an abandoned church on Azusa Street. By mid-May 1906, anywhere from 300 to 1,500 people would attempt to fit into the building. People from a diversity of backgrounds came together to worship: men, women, children, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, illiterate, and educated. People of all ages flocked to Los Angeles with both skepticism and a desire to participate. The intermingling of races and the group’s encouragement of women in leadership was remarkable, as 1906 was the height of the “Jim Crow” era of racial segregation, and fourteen years prior to women receiving suffrage in the United States.

Word of the revival was spread abroad through ‘The Apostolic Faith’, a paper that Seymour sent free of charge to some 50,000 subscribers. From Azusa Street the revival spread throughout the United States. Holiness leaders from the Church of God in Christ (Memphis, Tennessee), the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the Pentecostal Holiness Church (Georgia and the Carolinas), were present at Azusa and carried its message back to their churches.”

Some first-hand accounts of the revival show that people filter their experiences through their own biases:

An observer at one of the services wrote these words:

“No instruments of music are used. None are needed. No choir- the angels have been heard by some in the spirit. No collections are taken. No bills have been posted to advertise the meetings. No church organization is back of it. All who are in touch with God realize as soon as they enter the meetings that the Holy Ghost is the leader.”

The Los Angeles Times was not so kind in its description:

“Meetings are held in a tumble-down shack on Azusa Street, and the devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement in their peculiar zeal. Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers, who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication. They claim to have the “gift of tongues” and be able to understand the babel.”

Charles Parham, Seymour’s mentor, was also sharp in his criticism:

“Men and women, white and blacks, knelt together or fell across one another; a white woman, perhaps of wealth and culture, could be seen thrown back in the arms of a big ‘buck nigger,’ and held tightly thus as she shivered and shook in freak imitation of Pentecost. Horrible, awful shame!”

The first edition of the Apostolic Faith publication claimed a common reaction to the revival from visitors:

“Proud, well-dressed preachers came to ‘investigate’. Soon their high looks were replaced with wonder, then conviction comes, and very often you will find them in a short time wallowing on the dirty floor, asking God to forgive them and make them as little children.”

The Great Oak which emerged from the Azusa Street Revival.

Two great branches of Christianity emerged from this revival: Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement. Pentecostals are direct descendants from Azusa Street; their distinctive theological tenet is that there is a second work of grace for all believers following their baptism and this is the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit,” which is evidenced by speaking in tongues. While early Pentecostals were often marginalized within the larger Christian community, Pentecostal beliefs began penetrating the mainline Protestant denominations from 1960 onward and the Catholic Church from 1967. This adoption of Pentecostal beliefs by those in the historic churches became known as the charismatic movement. Charismatics are defined as Christians who share with Pentecostals an emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit but who remain a part of a mainline church. Also, charismatics are more likely than Pentecostals to believe that glossolalia is not a necessary evidence of Spirit baptism.

According to data presented by the Pew Forum in 2011, 584 million people called themselves either Pentecostal or Charismatic Christians. This number was 26% of all Christians worldwide and 8.5% of the global population. “The Pew Forum’s analysis estimates that about eight-in-ten of the world’s Pentecostals reside either in sub-Saharan Africa (44%) or in the Americas (37%). According to this analysis, 15% of the total population in sub-Saharan Africa is Pentecostal, as is 11% of the population in the Americas.  Almost half (49%) of all charismatic Christians in the world live in the Americas, a region in which 16% of the population is charismatic. Nearly 30% of charismatics live in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Ecumenical movements, led by Pope Francis, are seeking to build bridges between Pentecostals and the segments of main-line churches which identify themselves as Charismatics. The enormous growth of Pentecostal and charismatic churches, particularly in the global South can, with a great deal of justification, be attributed to the faith of one man (William Seymour), who believed before he saw.  Or, as written in the Gospel of John, “Then Jesus told him, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” (John 20:29)