Pentecostalism and the Azusa Street Revival

On New Year's Day 1901 a student at Charles Parham's Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, began to speak in what witnesses took to be an unknown language. Parham taught that speaking in tongues was the sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, as on the day of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. One of his students in Houston was William J. Seymour, a Black preacher and the son of formerly enslaved parents, who because of segregation had to listen to the lessons from a hallway.

In 1906 Seymour went to Los Angeles to preach. Locked out of one church, he began holding meetings in a house on Bonnie Brae Street, and when the crowds broke the front porch he moved into a run-down former church building at 312 Azusa Street, then used as a stable. From April 1906 services ran almost around the clock for three years. Worshipers shouted, wept, fell to the floor, and spoke in tongues, and Black, white, Latino, and Asian believers prayed side by side at a time when that was almost unheard of.

The Los Angeles Times mocked the gathering on April 18, 1906, under the headline Weird Babel of Tongues, on the morning of the San Francisco earthquake, which many believers took as a sign. Visitors carried the revival across the country and abroad within months. The Church of God in Christ, led by Charles Harrison Mason, became the largest Black Pentecostal denomination. The Assemblies of God, formed in 1914, became the largest predominantly white one, and the interracial moment did not last.

Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity grew into a global force, with hundreds of millions of adherents in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the United States it produced Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in the 1920s, the healing evangelists of the 1950s, and much of modern gospel and worship music. Critics have faulted its emotionalism and the prosperity gospel preached by some of its leaders, but its spread from a stable on Azusa Street is among the most remarkable religious stories of the century.