How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles: The Story Behind the Azusa Street Revival

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Introduction

The Azusa Street Revival

and Its Early Impact

Cecil M. Robeck Jr.

The revival that took place at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, California at the beginning of the twentieth century is without parallel in the story of the Pentecostal Movement. It began in 1906, shortly after an African American pastor, William J. Seymour, arrived in Los Angeles where he had been invited to become the pastor of a small Holiness congregation. He had traveled from Houston, Texas, arriving in Los Angeles on February 22. While in Houston, Pastor Seymour had been a student at Charles Parham’s Apostolic Faith Bible School for about six weeks.

Shortly after Seymour began his ministry with that little storefront congregation, part of the Holiness Church of Southern California and Arizona, he preached a sermon that was based upon the experience of those who waited in Jerusalem as Jesus had commanded them, and were subsequently baptized in the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4, 8 and 2:4). He explained to his flock that this was the pattern of empowerment intended for the whole church, and as such, his congregation could ask and expect to be baptized in the Holy Spirit in the very same way and with the very same evidence, the Bible evidence, that is, the ability to speak in other tongues. Some members of the congregation were open to his message, but others were not. A meeting with denominational leaders was called to evaluate his theology, and by the following week, Pastor Seymour found himself without a job.

Fortunately, one of the African American couples, Edward and Mattie Lee, who were part of this congregation, invited Pastor Seymour to stay with them while he sought the mind of the Lord on what to do next. During the evenings they shared together, Brother Seymour led them in prayer and Bible study. He continued to share with them his conviction that if they sought the Lord, He would baptize them in the Holy Spirit just as He had done for those who waited for the Promise of the Father in Jerusalem. As their relationship developed, the Lees invited other friends to join them in hearing William Seymour. This was where Frank Bartleman, the primary chronicler of the Azusa Street Revival, first met Pastor Seymour. At the same time, Pastor Seymour sent for a couple of friends from Houston to join him. One of them was another African American, Mrs. Lucy Farrow, who had been baptized in the Holy Spirit under the ministry of Charles Parham. She would become a great helper to Seymour in the days that followed. As the meeting outgrew the Lee home, it moved to the home of another African American couple, Richard and Ruth Asberry, at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street.

On April 9, 1906, Edward Lee came home from his janitorial job, complaining that he didn’t feel well. He asked Seymour to pray for him so that they could attend the prayer meeting at the Asberry home. Pastor Seymour laid hands on Edward Lee and prayed for his healing, and then Lucy Farrow joined him and prayed that Lee would be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Suddenly, Lee fell to the floor and began to speak in other tongues. Excited by this spiritual breakthrough, this small group hurried the two blocks to the Asberry home, where they shared what had just happened. Before the night had ended, several from the group had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoken in tongues, including Jennie Evans Moore, who would two years later become Mrs. Seymour.

News of this initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Los Angeles quickly spread among the various Holiness churches in the area, including the Holiness Church of Southern California and Arizona, the Free Methodist Church, the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, two very lively Holiness congregations, one known as the Burning Bush, and other as the Pillar of Fire, and an independent holiness congregation of Swedish immigrants. The group managed to continue its nightly meetings at the Asberry home for the remainder of the week, but by April 15, Easter Sunday, they had relocated to the former Stephens African Methodist Episcopal Church building at 312 Azusa Street in the heart of Los Angeles. That congregation had built a new and larger sanctuary about six blocks away, renamed their church First African Methodist Episcopal Church, and then leased their previous building to Seymour’s group.

The building was in very bad shape. After the congregation had vacated the building, an arsonist had set it ablaze. The congregation that owned the facility had tried to remodel the second floor, where the original sanctuary had been, into several small apartments for possible rental. The ground floor, which was completely unfinished and had a dirt floor where horses had been kept, along with a few building supplies, would become the new sanctuary. Seymour and his little congregation quickly went to work cleaning up the place. They scattered sawdust on the floor, took down cobwebs, whitewashed the unfinished walls, placed boards on nail kegs that they found there and supplemented them with a few mismatched chairs to provide more seating, arranged the seats more or less in a circle, placed a makeshift pulpit in the middle, and by Easter Sunday, April 15, they had held their first meeting. It would soon be known the world over as the Azusa Street Mission.

Two days after Easter, April 17, a reporter showed up from the Los Angeles Daily Times, one of at least eight regular newspapers that then served the roughly 238,000 people of the city. The following day, April 18, the city of Los Angeles woke to an introduction to the Mission through an article in the Times titled, Weird Babble of Tongues. The subtitles left little to the imagination! New Sect of Fanatics Is Breaking Loose. Wild Scene Last Night on Azusa Street. Gurgle of Wordless Talk by a Sister. It was a rude introduction to this newest congregation to which the city would now play host, but these headlines came on the same day as the great San Francisco earthquake. Suddenly, Los Angeles was wide awake! Many local residents and many church members throughout Los Angeles wondered aloud what was happening. Many local pastors addressed the meaning of the earthquake the following Sunday. Some chose to explain it by appealing solely to science. Others saw in this enormous event a much more apocalyptic meaning. They saw the hand of God at work, calling for repentance. Frank Bartleman was convinced that there was a direct connection between the earthquake in San Francisco and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Los Angeles. He quickly scribbled a tract titled simply Earthquake! that called people to repentance, and in the succeeding three weeks, 125,000 copies of this tract had been distributed throughout California, from San Diego to San Francisco.

The growth of the Azusa Street Mission became nothing less than spectacular. The Mission had only begun its services around April 15, yet by the end of that 1906 summer, it could safely be said that on any given Sunday, the Mission was hosting as many as 1,500 people! Local newspapers carried stories of events there weekly—some of them almost daily. The revival that was taking place on Azusa Street became the talk of the town. Parishioners in other churches asked, and in some cases confronted, their pastors about its message and its meaning, wondering if they should be seeking God in this same way. The pastors, some of whom had formed the newly organized Los Angeles Church Federation, met to discuss how best to respond to this energetic revival. Some of these pastors thought it was nothing more than an outbreak of bedlam or fanaticism. One pastor described it as a disgusting amalgamation of African voodoo superstition and Caucasian insanity and predicted that it would quickly disappear. Obviously, it did not.

The result of the meeting convened by this Federation of pastors was met head-on by Pastor Joseph Smale, former pastor of First Baptist Church, and subsequently the pastor of First New Testament Church. While he was serving as the pastor of First Baptist Church, he suffered from exhaustion and his congregation gave him a short sabbatical. He chose to spend it in Wales, where, in 1904 and 1905, the great Welsh Revival had been underway. While Smale was in Wales, he spent time with Evan Roberts, the acknowledged leader of the Welsh Revival, and was strengthened in body, mind, and spirit. Upon his return to Los Angeles, Pastor Smale hoped to bring the revival to his Baptist flock. For a number of weeks he preached on their need for revival, holding nightly meetings that involved extended periods of prayer. Not everyone was happy with this turn of events, and eventually, the board of elders from First Baptist Church asked Smale to leave. Only when a large number of members from First Baptist Church came to his home and begged him to start another church where he could continue leading them into revival, did Smale decide to establish the First New Testament Church. That congregation had begun to meet in 1905.

As one who had a good reputation in the Los Angeles area among other pastors, Joseph Smale was in a unique position to speak to what was now happening at Azusa Street. When the pastors of the Los Angeles Church Federation decided to meet, Pastor Smale wrote an open letter to the Federation that was published in the Los Angeles Express. He argued for openness and receptivity toward the work of the Holy Spirit, an end to any spirit of competition between them, and a spirit of graciousness in their treatment of Seymour and his congregation at the Azusa Street Mission. Indeed, he pleaded with Federation pastors for greater toleration of this new congregation while pointing out the spiritual needs of all the churches in Los Angeles. The result was that many of the Federation pastors were convinced that if they wanted to prevail, they would do what the Azusa Street Mission was doing. They began holding street meetings and weekly evangelistic services. They called upon their people to adopt a more disciplined prayer life. They established a variety of Prayer Bands. And they offered additional midweek prayer services. They decided to cooperate with one another in canvasing the entire city, in order to introduce the many newcomers to the churches of the city that were available to them. And they worked together toward a citywide evangelistic service.

Clearly, the Azusa Street Mission, under the leadership of William J. Seymour and the unsolicited graciousness of Joseph Smale, was seeing results that mattered. As the Azusa Street Mission began to grow, it attracted people from all walks of life—the rich and the poor, professional people and blue collar workers, women and men, the highly educated alongside those with little to no formal education, former slaves and those who were born free, immigrants, migrants, and refugees from dozens of countries, and people representing a wide range of races and ethnicities. In fact, Frank Bartleman would later observe that at the Azusa Street Mission, the ‘color line’ was washed away in the blood. While some would argue that this was not really the case, it can be easily demonstrated that one of the facts about the Mission that troubled many people in Los Angeles, was the freedom with which people of different races and ethnicities worshipped in close proximity to one another, engaged with one another on a personal level, rejoiced and cried with one another, laid hands on one another, and hugged and kissed one another in ways that defied conventional cultural norms. And in every instance, when new congregations were birthed by those who went out from the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles and across North America, the same model of church life followed. Those missions clearly demonstrated the apostle Paul’s claim that in Christ Jesus, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for they were all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

The many secular newspapers in Los Angeles and around the country carried hundreds of articles criticizing and ridiculing what was happening at the Azusa Street Mission. Their colorful accounts in the day of yellow journalism brought many visitors and many more questions about what was actually happening. As a result, Pastor Seymour and the Azusa Street Mission became the publishers, and Miss Clara Lum became the editor, of a periodic newspaper. They called it The Apostolic Faith [Los Angeles, CA] with the subtitle, Earnestly contend for the faith once delivered unto the saints, from Jude 3. It began publication of its first twelve issues in September 1906 and it would run through at least May 1908, though there is evidence that it ran a bit longer. The paper was printed only after it was determined that there were sufficient funds in hand to cover the cost of printing and mailing. It carried news of what was happening at the Mission, along with sermon excerpts and short articles by Pastor Seymour. It became a standard historical resource by publishing news of the revival’s expansion as people left Los Angeles to carry the message of Pentecost across the nation and around the world. It provided space for people at the Mission, as well as those who wrote from afar to share their testimonies of God’s saving, sanctifying, healing, and evangelistic power that they were experiencing. It also provided space to inform readers how they could connect with others in their area. During its life, The Apostolic Faith [Los Angeles, CA] was distributed freely to whoever wished to have it, and for whom the Mission had an address. As subscriptions grew, as many as fifty thousand copies went out, giving the Azusa Street Mission a voice, especially throughout much of the Western world.

Thus the revival quickly attracted people in and from other churches, especially those congregations that were identified with the Wesleyan Holiness Movement. The message that Pastor Seymour had brought to Los Angeles was a message that for the most part was familiar to Holiness churches. He worked with his staff and they quickly adopted a statement that embodied Holiness teaching, but added something as well, what they called the work of the Holy Spirit upon the sanctified life. The congregation’s official statement, signed and distributed by Pastor William J. Seymour, stated in part that the Azusa Street Mission preached nothing more than the Apostolic Faith itself. It could be summarized in three simple steps:

First Work—Justification is that act of God’s free grace by which we receive remission of sins. Acts 10:42–43; Romans 3:25.

Second Work—Sanctification is the second work of grace and the last work of grace. Sanctification is that act of God’s free grace by which He makes us holy. John 17: 15, 17. Sanctify them through Thy truth. Thy word is truth. 1 Thess. 4:3. 1 Thess. 3:23; Heb. 2:11; 12:14; 13:12.

The Baptism of the Holy Ghost is a gift of power upon the sanctified life; so when we get it we have the same evidence as the Disciples received on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:3,4), in speaking in new tongues. See also Acts 10:45–46; Acts 19:6; 1 Cor. 14:21. For I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe though it be told you. Hab. 1:5.

Holiness churches accepted the first two works as stated, but most of them rejected the statement on Baptism of the Holy Ghost that has long played such a foundational role for Pentecostals since that time.

There were a number of exceptions in the Los Angeles area. The pastor of the Los Angeles Holiness Church, William Pendleton, and over 80 percent of his congregation received this baptism of the Holy Spirit at Azusa Street, and then joined Frank Bartleman in founding a congregation known as the 8th and Maple church. Bartleman competed with the Pillar of Fire congregation to rent that space, and must have chuckled when he reported that, the ‘Pillar of Fire’ had gone up in smoke, unable to raise the necessary rent. Indeed, many members from the Pillar of Fire switched allegiance when they were baptized in the Spirit. The Metropolitan Holiness Church, otherwise known as the Burning Bush, essentially shut its doors when the pastor, A. G. Garr, his wife, Lillian, and much of their congregation joined forces with the Azusa Street Mission. The Garrs became the Mission’s first foreign missionaries, when in early July 1906 they were commissioned to go to India. A minister from the Free Methodist church was baptized in the Spirit and quickly joined with Pastor Seymour in offering regular morning Bible studies. The Holiness congregation of Swedish immigrants, with Arthur Osterberg as their pastor, threw its hat into the Pentecostal ring when Osterberg, the board, and the congregation as a whole, were baptized in the Holy Spirit. Osterberg would later become the district superintendent of the Southern California District Council of the Assemblies of God. The Peniel Mission, in the heart of the city, founded to provide young women with ministry experience, lost several of its key workers to the emerging Pentecostal or Apostolic Faith Movement, including George B. Studd, the editor of that mission’s paper, the Peniel Herald. Dr. Finis Yoakum and his Pisgah Home Movement quickly joined hands with Azusa Street and other Pentecostal works such as the 8th and Maple congregation. And the Church of the Nazarene lost most of its members from their Elysian Park congregation, as well as Pastor Franklin E. Hill and many of his parishioners at the Second Church of the Nazarene congregation, when they were baptized in the Holy Spirit.

Within eight months of its first service, the Azusa Street Mission had been joined by Elmer K. Fisher, who led a congregation that resulted from a split in Joseph Smale’s First New Testament Church. It took the name, Upper Room Mission. Thomas G. Atteberry began holding Pentecostal meetings at the People’s Church, while the Holiness Church in Sawtelle, west of downtown Los Angeles, would form yet another Pentecostal congregation, this one led by young women from First New Testament Church and the Azusa Street Mission. Finally, Charles F. Parham began to hold meetings in Los Angeles in November 1906. His was the only work that intentionally attempted to counter or compete with the work of the Azusa Street Mission. He did so, arguing that Seymour’s work was a complete distortion of anything he had tried to teach Seymour when Seymour was one of his students.

From 1900 to 1907, Parham had been the most recognizable Pentecostal in the United States. He had been reared in the Methodist Church, and for a period of time, he served as a Methodist pastor. During those years, however, he came to embrace a series of beliefs that led him to form what he called the Apostolic Faith Movement. He believed in and established several short-term Bible schools in Topeka, Kansas; Houston, Texas; and Baxter Springs, Kansas. There he taught students about the need for evangelism; he emphasized living lives of holiness, prayer for the healing of the sick, and from late 1900s, baptism in the Holy Spirit with the Bible evidence of speaking in tongues. These tongues, he claimed, were not foreign languages that people had learned, but rather foreign languages that were spontaneous gifts or charisms of the Holy Spirit that they had not learned, but that they could now use to evangelize the nations.

While Parham taught these things, which became hallmarks of early Pentecostal theology, he also accepted some teachings that have never been accepted in Christian or Pentecostal orthodoxy. Through the influence of his wife’s family, he embraced a theory of British Israelitism, the idea that when the tribes of Israel returned to Palestine from Babylon, some tribes remained in Babylon and were ultimately lost to history. They became the British people. Even before 1900, he joined the Zionist Movement of Jews that was advocating a return to Israel as their God-given homeland. Pressure for such a Zionist land for Jews alone contributed to the current troubles between Israel and the Palestinians today. He argued also that only those who had been baptized in the Holy Spirit would ultimately be raptured when Christ returns, and in some measure, he seems to have argued that those with an African heritage would not be part of that rapture. Furthermore, he maintained that the wicked would ultimately be annihilated, thereby denying the existence of hell.

William J. Seymour had enrolled in Charles Parham’s Houston Bible school in January 1906. Texas was a racially segregated state at that time, unwilling to allow African Americans and Caucasians to be educated in the same schools or classrooms. Parham decided to follow the letter of the law, but not its spirit, when he allowed Seymour to have access to his lectures. He moved Seymour’s seat outside the classroom by an open door, so that Seymour could hear. There it was that William Seymour learned of the baptism in the Spirit and he began a quest of several months to receive it. He did not give up tarrying for it, even though he had not yet received it when he arrived in Los Angeles. He finally received the baptism in the Holy Spirit after a number of those that he was teaching and with whom he was praying received it before him. When he finally received the Baptism and spoke in other tongues, he led his Azusa Street congregation with wisdom, even though his services could be labeled as somewhat experimental.

What I mean by calling them experimental is that apart from Charles Parham and his small Apostolic Faith Movement in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, there were few who had any real idea about how a Pentecostal service was to be conducted or what Pentecostals believed. William Seymour clearly accepted parts of Parham’s teachings, but he rejected other parts, for instance, his British Israelite teaching and his theory regarding the ultimate annihilation of the wicked. But instead of relying on someone else’s theological system, Seymour decided that