Azusa Street, 1906¶

In April 1906 a one-eyed black preacher from Louisiana began holding meetings in a ramshackle former church at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles. The building had been a warehouse and, before that, an African Methodist Episcopal church; it had a dirt floor and no pretensions. Visitors knelt in the sawdust and prayed for hours.

Within three years the meetings were reported in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, and missionaries had carried the practice of tongues and healing to Europe, Asia and Africa. Within a century the movement was the largest family in global Christianity. Whatever one makes of the theology, that is the historical fact this page has to explain.

The claim¶

Azusa Street is the point at which the scattered restorationist streams became a global movement, and the movement's own account of itself runs through that room. Pentecostals do not claim that nothing happened between the apostles and 1906. They claim that what had been reported in fragments — Irving's prophets, the faith-cure homes, the Holiness camp meetings — came together in a mission where black and white, poor and less poor, prayed together and spoke in tongues. The claim is historical before it is theological, and it can be examined.

Seymour, Parham, and the road to Los Angeles¶

William J. Seymour was born in 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana, the son of former slaves. He was a Holiness preacher, self-educated, and in 1905 he went to Houston to hear Charles Parham, a Kansas evangelist who taught that speaking in tongues was the "initial evidence" of the baptism in the Spirit. At Parham's Bible school in Topeka a student, Agnes Ozman, had reportedly spoken in tongues on New Year's Day 1901.

Seymour studied with Parham in Houston — by the account of those present, sitting in the corridor outside the classroom because of the colour bar — and in February 1906 accepted an invitation to pastor a Holiness congregation in Los Angeles. He preached the new doctrine, was locked out of the church for it, and began praying with a small group in a house on Bonnie Brae Street. In April, tongues broke out there, and the group moved to Azusa Street.

312 Azusa Street¶

The mission, called the Apostolic Faith, was not a church in any conventional sense. It had no membership roll and took no offerings; Seymour said the mission would not solicit money. Services ran daily, often until late at night. The seating was mixed, the leadership was mixed, and the worship was loud enough that neighbours complained.

What drew people was the claim that God was pouring out his Spirit "on all flesh" (Acts 2:17). Seymour taught that the colour line had no place in the church, and the mission practised what he taught: black, white, Mexican and Asian worshippers knelt together at the altar, and the mission's paper claimed that the colour line had been washed away in the blood of Christ. For a few years, in a city with restrictive racial customs, that was itself a scandal and a sign.

The paper and the press¶

Two kinds of document survive, and they are not of equal value.

The Apostolic Faith was the mission's own newspaper, published from September 1906 and reportedly circulated in tens of thousands of copies. It is the primary source for what the mission said about itself — healings, utterances, conversions — written by participants with an interest in the outcome. It is evidence of what they claimed, not proof that the claims were true.

The Los Angeles press is the other kind. On 18 April 1906 the Los Angeles Times ran a report headed "Weird Babel of Tongues", describing a "new sect of fanatics" and a meeting the reporter could make no sense of. The mockery is obvious, and the article is still useful: it confirms the crowds, the racial mixing and the phenomena at a date when the mission had barely begun. A hostile witness who gets the details right is worth more than a friendly one who gets them wrong. Frank Bartleman, an eyewitness published in 1925, supplies the inside story — including the shame he felt at his own racial prejudices.

The missionaries¶

The movement spread because people went. T. B. Barratt, a Norwegian Methodist pastor, visited in 1906 and carried the teaching to Oslo; Alexander Boddy, an Anglican vicar in Sunderland, visited in 1907 and made his parish a hub for Britain; John G. Lake went to South Africa in 1908. Missionaries sailed for China, India and Japan within a few years, most with no denominational backing and little money.

This is the strongest historical fact about Azusa Street. Doctrines can be argued about, but the diffusion is documented: a movement that began in a rented building had within a decade become an international network with its own press, its own theology of the Spirit, and its own martyrs and scandals.

The honest problems¶

The revival had disorder. The Times report is not entirely wrong: meetings were noisy, emotionally extreme and sometimes chaotic, and Seymour had to impose order more than once. It had theological novelty: the "initial evidence" doctrine — that tongues are the necessary sign of Spirit baptism — was Parham's innovation, and it divided Pentecostals from the start.

It had racial tension, and the tension won. Parham, when he visited, denounced the mixing of races; white leaders increasingly took control of a movement whose founding congregation was black; and the wider Pentecostal denominations that formed after 1914 were largely segregated. Seymour's mission declined, and he died in 1922 with the work in other hands.

It had divisions. The "finished work" controversy after 1910 split the movement over sanctification; the Oneness controversy over the Trinity produced a second family of churches; and the Assemblies of God, formed in 1914, was a consolidation as much as a beginning.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that a global movement of tens of millions traces its practice of tongues and healing to this room; that the spread is documented in its own press and in hostile newspapers; and that the revival was mixed — genuinely interracial for a season, and also disorderly, theologically novel and soon divided.

It does not prove: that the tongues were languages, that the healings were verifiable, or that the doctrine of initial evidence is correct. It proves that the twentieth-century question is not whether the gifts were claimed — they were, publicly, in a city with four newspapers — but what to make of the claim. That question is the Pentecostal century.