The Azusa Street Revival Explained

1. What the Azusa Street Revival Was

The Azusa Street revival was a continuous series of religious meetings held from April 1906 until roughly 1909 in a plain two-storey building at 312 Azusa Street, on the industrial edge of downtown Los Angeles. The congregation called itself the Apostolic Faith Mission, its pastor was William Joseph Seymour, and the practice that drew the crowds was speaking in tongues, understood by those present as the same gift described in Acts 2 and given again in their own time. Services ran three times a day and often much longer, with no fixed order of worship and no announced preacher.

The meetings mattered because of who travelled to them. Holiness preachers, missionaries on furlough, curious pastors and newspaper reporters came to Los Angeles, and a large number of them went home convinced and started doing the same thing where they lived. Within about four years the practice had appeared in Norway, Britain, Sweden, Germany, India, China, Chile, Brazil, Liberia, Angola and South Africa, sometimes through people who had been at the mission and sometimes through printed reports of it.

Historians of Christianity divide over how much of world Pentecostalism can be traced through this one address. Revivals with similar features had already occurred in Wales in 1904 and 1905, and at the Mukti Mission in Maharashtra under Pandita Ramabai in 1905, before anything happened in Los Angeles, and the Korean revival at Pyongyang in 1907 had its own roots. What Azusa Street supplied was a clear doctrine, a visible model of what such a meeting looked like, a free newspaper with a large mailing list, and a stream of departing visitors who acted as carriers.

This page is the history of the event. For what Pentecostal Christians believe today, how the classical denominations are organised, and the Catholic response to Pentecostal doctrine, see our guide to Pentecostal beliefs and denominations, which handles the doctrinal side that this page only touches in passing.

2. Before Azusa: Holiness Camp Meetings and Topeka

Azusa Street grew out of the Holiness movement, an offshoot of American Methodism that had been preaching a second definite work of grace for half a century before 1906. John Wesley had taught that a believer justified by faith could afterwards be sanctified entirely, freed from the inward disposition to sin, and nineteenth-century American revivalists such as Phoebe Palmer pressed that teaching into a distinct experience that could be sought, dated and testified to. By the 1890s Holiness camp meetings drew large summer crowds across the United States, and many who attended had left or been pushed out of the Methodist churches where the doctrine began.

Three convictions were already common in that world before anyone in it spoke in tongues. First, a Christian should expect a definite experience after conversion, felt and datable. Second, God still heals bodies in answer to prayer, a conviction pressed by Holiness healing homes and by A. B. Simpson's Christian and Missionary Alliance. Third, Christ would return before the millennium and the Church should expect a great outpouring of the Spirit shortly beforehand, read from Joel 2:28 and Acts 2:17. Our guide to the Holiness movement and entire sanctification traces that background in full, and our guide to Methodism covers the Wesleyan doctrine it came from.

Topeka, 1 January 1901

The specific doctrine that made Azusa Street possible was formulated in Kansas five years earlier. Charles Fox Parham, a former Methodist minister running a small residential Bible school at Bethel in Topeka, set his students to search the Book of Acts for what evidence accompanied the baptism in the Holy Spirit. On 1 January 1901 a student named Agnes Ozman asked Parham to lay hands on her and afterwards spoke in what those present took to be a language she had never learned. Parham and others in the school followed, and he drew the conclusion that made him distinctive: speaking in tongues is the uniform biblical evidence that a believer has received the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Parham built a further claim on top of that one which the movement later abandoned. He held that the tongues given were real human languages, granted so that missionaries could preach abroad without study, and Pentecostal missionaries who sailed on that assumption discovered within a few years that it did not work. What survived was the narrower doctrine of tongues as initial evidence, which remains the position of the classical Pentecostal denominations.

Houston, 1905

Parham moved his work to Houston and opened a short-term Bible school there in December 1905. The teaching had spread slowly through Kansas, Missouri and Texas without producing anything like a movement, and it was in Houston that it reached the man who would carry it further than Parham ever did.

3. Who William J. Seymour Was

William Joseph Seymour was born on 2 May 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana, to Simon and Phillis Seymour, who had been enslaved before emancipation. He grew up Baptist in the Reconstruction South, moved north as a young man in search of work, and lived in Indianapolis and then Cincinnati, where he took up the Holiness teaching. He was associated for a time with the group known as the Evening Light Saints, the reforming Holiness body now called the Church of God with headquarters at Anderson, Indiana, which held that God was restoring the New Testament church before the end. An attack of smallpox in Cincinnati left him blind in one eye and scarred, and he took the illness as a summons to preach.

Seymour reached Houston in 1905 and was preaching in black Holiness circles there when Parham opened his school. He asked to attend. Texas law and custom did not permit a black student to sit in a class with white students, and the arrangement reached was that Seymour listened from the hallway through the open door. Accounts differ on how much of this was Parham's insistence and how much the ordinary practice of the state, and the fact of the arrangement is not disputed by historians of either sympathy. Seymour accepted the doctrine of tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism while sitting in that hallway, and he had not yet spoken in tongues himself.

The Call to Los Angeles

Neely Terry, a member of a small black Holiness congregation in Los Angeles, was visiting family in Houston and heard Seymour preach. Back in California she recommended him to Julia Hutchins, who led the congregation, and an invitation followed. Seymour arrived in Los Angeles on 22 February 1906, with his fare partly paid by Parham, who expected to keep some authority over whatever came next.

The arrangement lasted about two weeks. Seymour preached from Acts 2:4 that a believer who has not spoken in tongues has not yet received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Hutchins and her elders held the standard Holiness position, that sanctification was the second work and nothing further was required, and they judged the new teaching an error. When Seymour returned to the Santa Fe Avenue building he found a padlock on the door.

4. Bonnie Brae Street, April 1906

Locked out of the church that had called him, Seymour was taken in by Edward S. Lee, one of the congregation, and began holding prayer meetings in private houses. The meetings settled at the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street, a modest frame house in a black neighbourhood west of downtown. A small group met there through March 1906, fasting and praying for the experience Seymour was preaching, without any of them receiving it.

9 April 1906

On 9 April 1906 Seymour prayed over Edward Lee at Lee's home and Lee began to speak in tongues. That evening at the Asberry house the same thing happened to several others, among them Jennie Evans Moore, who moved to the piano and played and sang in what those present described as an unlearned language. Seymour himself did not receive the experience until 12 April, three days after the people he had been teaching.

Word spread through the black Holiness networks of the city and then beyond them. Within days the house could not hold the crowds. People stood in the street, the meetings ran day and night, and at one point the front porch gave way under the weight of those standing on it. The group started looking for a building.

Finding 312 Azusa Street

They rented a disused building at 312 Azusa Street, a short lane in an industrial block near the wholesale district. It had been built in the 1880s as a church for the First African Methodist Episcopal congregation, which had long since moved to a better site, and in the years since it had served as a warehouse, a stable and a tenement. The upper floor was partly burned out. The group cleared the ground floor, laid planks across empty nail kegs for benches, put down sawdust, and used two wooden crates stacked on end as a pulpit. The first meeting was held there on 14 April 1906.

5. Inside 312 Azusa Street

The meetings at the Apostolic Faith Mission had no printed order, no announced preacher and no fixed ending time. Services were scheduled three times a day, at mid-morning, afternoon and evening, and in practice they ran together so that the building was in use for most of the day and much of the night. Anyone present might stand and testify, sing, pray aloud, or come forward for prayer. Seymour spent long stretches of the meetings seated behind the crate pulpit with his head inside an empty shoe box, praying, and rose to speak when he judged it right.

What a visitor would have seen

Eyewitness accounts, hostile and sympathetic alike, describe the same elements. Singing without instruments or hymnbooks, including a spontaneous unaccompanied harmony the participants called singing in the Spirit. Testimonies from anyone who wished to give one. Speaking in tongues, sometimes followed by an interpretation offered by another person present. Prayer for the sick with laying on of hands, and reports of healings. People weeping, shouting, falling to the floor, and lying still for long periods. Long silences. Altar calls at which those seeking conversion, sanctification or Spirit baptism knelt at the plank benches while others prayed over them.

The building itself was small, roughly forty by sixty feet, and the crowds it drew in 1906 and 1907 far exceeded its capacity, so people filled the doorways and the lane outside. The mission kept no membership roll during the revival years and took no offering by collection, relying on a box on the wall, which is one reason firm attendance figures for the period do not exist.

Descriptions in this section follow the published eyewitness accounts of the period, principally Frank Bartleman's How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925) and the mission's own paper The Apostolic Faith (1906 to 1908), together with the contemporary reports in the Los Angeles daily press. No reliable attendance count was kept, and figures circulated for crowd sizes at the mission are estimates made after the fact rather than records.

Who ran it

Seymour was pastor, and government of the mission was shared with a group of elders and workers, several of them women. Jennie Evans Moore, who had been among the first to speak in tongues at Bonnie Brae, became a leading figure and married Seymour on 13 May 1908. Clara Lum, a white woman who had come from the Midwest, served as secretary and edited the mission's newspaper with Seymour. Women prayed over men, preached and led meetings, which was a substantial part of what scandalised visiting critics.

6. The Newspapers, the Earthquake and the Apostolic Faith

The Los Angeles daily press noticed the mission within a few days and treated it as a scandal. On 18 April 1906 the Los Angeles Daily Times ran a report under the headline "Weird Babel of Tongues", describing a "new sect of fanatics" that had broken loose, mocking the sounds made in the meetings and drawing pointed attention to the fact that black and white worshippers were mingling. Hostile coverage continued through the year in the Los Angeles papers and was reprinted elsewhere. It functioned as advertising. People came to see what the newspapers were condemning, and a proportion of them stayed.

The San Francisco earthquake

The same 18 April brought the San Francisco earthquake, which killed thousands of people and destroyed much of the city four hundred miles up the coast. In Los Angeles, where the shock was felt, the disaster arrived among people already primed to read events as signs. Frank Bartleman, a Holiness writer who attended the mission and became its most quoted chronicler, wrote and distributed tracts calling the earthquake a warning from God and urging repentance, and reported handing out tens of thousands of them across the city. Attendance at the mission rose sharply in the weeks that followed.

Reading a specific disaster as a divine message about a particular sin goes beyond what Scripture allows. Christ addressed exactly this reasoning when he was told about the eighteen killed by the falling tower of Siloam and answered that they were no more guilty than anyone else in Jerusalem, adding that all his hearers should repent (Luke 13:4-5). The call to repentance is right. The attribution of a specific catastrophe to a specific cause is not available to us.

The Apostolic Faith newspaper

The single most effective instrument of the revival was a free newspaper. The Apostolic Faith first appeared in September 1906, edited by Seymour with Clara Lum, and carried testimonies, doctrinal instruction, letters from missionaries and reports of what was happening at the mission and in the places where visitors had taken it. It was sent without charge to anyone who asked, funded by donations, and it reached readers across the United States and abroad who had no possibility of travelling to Los Angeles. Its own pages reported a mailing list that had grown into the tens of thousands by 1907 and 1908.

Circulation figures for The Apostolic Faith come from the paper's own statements in its issues of 1907 and 1908. No independent audit of the mailing list exists, so the numbers should be read as the mission's own claim rather than as verified circulation.

7. What Was Actually Taught There

The doctrine preached at Azusa Street was Wesleyan Holiness teaching with one addition. Seymour taught a three-stage sequence: justification by faith in Christ, entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace, and baptism in the Holy Spirit as a third experience, evidenced by speaking in tongues and given for power in witness. Alongside these he taught divine healing as part of the atonement and the premillennial return of Christ. The mission's paper printed the sequence repeatedly and plainly.

The unity Seymour preached

Seymour's own emphasis shifted over the years of the mission, and it is the most interesting thing about him theologically. He came to argue in The Apostolic Faith and in his later writings that love is the true evidence of the Spirit's presence, and that tongues without love proves nothing, quoting 1 Corinthians 13 against people who claimed the gift and despised their neighbours. He wrote that a mission where the races could not sit together had not received what it claimed to have. The shift put him at odds with much of the movement he had started, and it reads today as the sounder instinct.

8. Who Came, and Where They Carried It

The mission's reach came from its visitors. Preachers arrived at Azusa Street from across the United States, stayed days or weeks, sought the experience at the plank altar, and went home to preach it. Several of them were already leading Holiness denominations, so a single conversion could carry an entire body into the new teaching within a year.

The Americans who mattered most

Charles Harrison Mason, a black Holiness preacher from Mississippi and Tennessee, came in March 1907, received the experience, and reorganised the Church of God in Christ around Pentecostal doctrine. It grew into one of the largest Pentecostal bodies in the United States, and for years it was one of the few that would ordain black ministers, so a number of white preachers held credentials from it.

Gaston B. Cashwell of North Carolina travelled to Los Angeles in late 1906 and returned to hold meetings at Dunn, North Carolina, from which Pentecostal teaching entered the Southern Holiness bodies. The Church of God with headquarters at Cleveland, Tennessee, the Pentecostal Holiness Church and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church all took it up in the following two years.

William H. Durham, pastor of a mission in Chicago, received the experience at Azusa Street early in 1907 and made Chicago the northern distribution point for the teaching. His later doctrinal quarrel with Seymour is covered in section 10.

The international carriers

Thomas Ball Barratt, a British-born Methodist minister working in Norway, was in New York raising funds in 1906, learned of the revival through correspondence and the mission's paper, received the experience there, and took Pentecostal teaching to Kristiania, now Oslo, at the end of the year. From Norway it passed to Sweden, Denmark, Germany and England, where Alexander Boddy, an Anglican vicar at Sunderland, invited Barratt to preach in 1907 and turned his parish into the centre of British Pentecostalism.

Missionaries left Los Angeles directly for Liberia, Angola, India and China within months of receiving the experience, many of them on Parham's discredited assumption that they would be able to preach in local languages without study. In Chile, Willis Hoover, a Methodist missionary at Valparaiso, led a Pentecostal revival from 1909 that grew into one of the largest Protestant bodies in Latin America, prompted by printed accounts from India and from Los Angeles rather than by a visit. In South Africa, John G. Lake and Thomas Hezmalhalch arrived from the United States in 1908 and founded the work that became the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, from which a large part of African Pentecostalism descends. Our guide to Christianity in Africa follows that story forward.

9. The Colour Line, and What Happened to It

The Azusa Street mission was racially integrated in a city and a decade where almost nothing else was. Its pastor was black, its congregation was black, white, Mexican and immigrant, and people of different races prayed over one another, laid hands on one another and testified in the same room. Women held authority. Frank Bartleman's sentence about the meetings, that the colour line was washed away in the blood, is the most quoted line in the movement's history, and it was written by a white participant about a black pastor's church.

The Los Angeles papers reported the mixing with open disgust, which tells us the integration was real and was noticed. Visiting Holiness leaders who came to inspect the meetings frequently named it among their objections, alongside the noise and the women.

How quickly it was lost

The integration did not survive the movement's institutional phase. When Pentecostal bodies organised themselves after 1910 they organised along the colour line like every other American institution of the period. The Assemblies of God, formed at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914, was effectively a white body from the start, and the Church of God in Christ remained a black one. Separate black and white Pentecostal denominations, conventions and Bible schools ran in parallel for most of the twentieth century.

The white Pentecostal denominations of North America made a formal act of repentance for this in October 1994, at a meeting in Memphis that dissolved the all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America and replaced it with a racially inclusive body, in a session at which a white denominational leader washed the feet of a black bishop. Pentecostal writers call the event the Memphis Miracle. The gap between 1906 and 1994 is the honest measure of what was lost.

10. The Breaks: Parham, Lum and Durham

Three separations damaged the mission, and they came in the same order as the revival's rise, its publicity and its doctrine. Each one is documented well enough that Pentecostal historians write about them openly.

Parham, October 1906

Charles Parham regarded himself as the projector of the whole movement and expected to take charge of the Los Angeles work. Seymour invited him, and he arrived in October 1906. He preached at the mission and denounced what he saw there: the noise, the falling and shaking, which he called spiritual wildfire and attributed in part to demonic influence, and the mixing of black and white worshippers, which offended him directly. The elders of the mission locked him out. Parham held rival meetings elsewhere in the city, drew a fraction of the crowd, and never recovered a leading position in the movement he had helped to start. He continued to attack Azusa Street in print for years.

Parham's reputation fell further in 1907, when he was arrested in San Antonio on a morals charge. The case was dropped and never came to trial, and the accusation itself was enough to end his standing with most Pentecostal leaders. Historians of the movement treat the episode as unproven and as decisive for his career.

The 1907 arrest and its aftermath are documented in the standard scholarly biography of Parham, James R. Goff Jr., Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (University of Arkansas Press, 1988). The charge was never tested in court and no finding of guilt was ever made.

Clara Lum and the mailing list, 1908

The mission's newspaper was its reach, and it lost it. In 1908 Clara Lum, the secretary who edited The Apostolic Faith with Seymour, left Los Angeles for Portland, Oregon, taking the national and international mailing lists with her, and joined Florence Crawford, a former Azusa worker who had established her own Apostolic Faith work there. The paper continued from Portland. Seymour travelled to Portland to ask for the lists back and did not get them. Without the mailing list the Los Angeles mission could no longer speak to the movement it had begun, and its national influence dropped away within two years.

Durham and the finished work, 1911

William Durham returned to Los Angeles in February 1911 preaching a doctrine that split Pentecostalism in two. Against the Wesleyan three-stage scheme he argued the finished work of Calvary: sanctification is accomplished in Christ's death and received at conversion, and it grows through the Christian life rather than arriving as a second crisis. On that account there are two experiences, conversion and Spirit baptism, and not three. He preached it at the Azusa mission while Seymour was away, drew large crowds, and when Seymour returned in May he locked the doors against Durham as Julia Hutchins had once locked them against him.

Durham took his congregation elsewhere in the city and died the following year, in 1912. His doctrine won. The Assemblies of God, founded in 1914, adopted the finished-work position, and the majority of Pentecostals worldwide hold it today, while the Holiness Pentecostal bodies of the American South kept the three-stage scheme. Our guide to the Assemblies of God traces that denominational history, and the further split over the doctrine of God that produced Oneness Pentecostalism after 1913 is covered in our guide to Oneness Pentecostalism and the baptismal formula.

11. Decline, Seymour's Last Years and the Site Today

The revival at Azusa Street faded between 1909 and 1911, and the mission became a small black congregation in a city that had stopped paying attention. The visitors had gone home to build their own works. The newspaper was published from Portland. The doctrinal centre of the movement had shifted to Chicago and then to the new denominations. By the middle of the 1910s the meetings on Azusa Street drew a handful of local families.

Seymour continued as pastor. He issued a doctrinal statement for the mission in 1915 that restricted its leadership to people of colour, a provision his defenders read as a defensive measure taken after white preachers had repeatedly tried to take the work from him, and which he had spent a decade arguing against in principle. He travelled and preached in the eastern states in his later years, largely unrecognised by the movement he had founded. He died of a heart attack on 28 September 1922, aged fifty-two. Jennie Moore Seymour pastored the mission after him until her death in 1936.

The building

The congregation lost the property in the early 1930s and the building was demolished, and the block was subsequently redeveloped. The site lies in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles and is marked with a commemorative monument. The Bonnie Brae Street house where tongues first broke out in April 1906 still stands.

Dates for the loss and demolition of the 312 Azusa Street building differ between accounts, and no single figure is settled in the sources, so this page gives the period rather than a specific year. Details about the current condition of the sites are subject to change and should be checked locally before any visit.

What was left behind

What the mission produced was a movement, and it did not produce an institution to govern it. The bodies that grew from Azusa Street govern themselves independently, split readily, and have no shared authority able to settle a doctrinal dispute. That is the structural difference between what began on Azusa Street and what Catholics understand the Church to be, and it accounts for much of what followed in the century since, including the healing revivals of the 1940s and 1950s and the prosperity gospel that grew in the same soil.

12. How Catholics Can Read Azusa Street

The Catholic Church has issued no judgement on the Azusa Street meetings, and it has said a great deal about the questions they raise. Charisms including tongues, prophecy and healing are genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit, given for the building up of the Church, and they are subject to discernment by those who preside over the Church. The Second Vatican Council said this in Lumen Gentium 12, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church sets it out in paragraphs 799 to 801. That is the frame a Catholic brings to any account of a revival.

What a Catholic can affirm

A great deal, and it should be said before the criticism. People at Azusa Street wanted God with an intensity most parishes rarely see, and they gave hours a day to prayer to get it. They repented of specific sins and made restitution. They prayed for the sick and cared for the poor of a rough district. They crossed a racial line their whole society enforced, and they crossed it at the altar, which is where it counts. They sent people to the ends of the earth at their own expense. Scripture tells us to test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and there is real good here to hold.

What a Catholic questions

The doctrinal claim that made the movement is the claim a Catholic cannot grant: that speaking in tongues is the necessary evidence that a believer has received the Holy Spirit. Paul lists tongues among the gifts distributed as the Spirit chooses and asks directly whether all speak in tongues, a rhetorical question expecting the answer no (1 Corinthians 12:11, 12:30). He ranks tongues below prophecy for the assembly precisely because it does not build others up unless it is interpreted (1 Corinthians 14:5). He requires order: at most two or three, in turn, with an interpreter, and everything done decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14:27-33, 14:40). A doctrine that makes a single gift the test of whether the Spirit has been received divides Christians into two ranks, which is the opposite of what the chapter was written to do.

The Catholic account of receiving the Spirit runs through the sacraments. The Holy Spirit is given in baptism and the gift is completed and sealed in confirmation, which the Catechism describes as an increase and deepening of baptismal grace rooting the believer more deeply in divine sonship (CCC 1302 to 1303). A Catholic may afterwards experience a striking renewal of fervour, and many have, and that experience is not a further sacrament and not the moment the Spirit arrives. Our guides to the Holy Spirit and confirmation set out the doctrine in detail.

Two further cautions belong here. Reading a particular disaster as God's comment on a particular sin, as the 1906 earthquake tracts did, goes past what any of us can know. And a movement with no settled authority to judge a claim of prophecy or healing will accumulate false claims, which is a structural problem rather than a matter of anyone's sincerity, and the century since has borne that out repeatedly.

What Rome has actually done since

Catholic engagement with the movement descended from Azusa Street has been substantial and largely warm. Catholics began praying for and receiving charismatic experience in 1967, after a retreat weekend involving faculty and students of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal grew from there with the encouragement of successive popes, always inside the sacramental and hierarchical life of the Church. Paul VI addressed the renewal in Rome in 1975 and welcomed it while insisting on its integration with the Church's discipline. CHARIS, the single international service body for the renewal, began work at Pentecost 2019 with the approval of Pope Francis.

Formal dialogue between the Catholic Church and Pentecostal churches began in 1972 and has continued in five-year rounds, producing joint reports on Spirit baptism, faith and experience, evangelisation and proselytism, and the Church as communion. In July 2014 Pope Francis visited a Pentecostal congregation at Caserta in Italy and asked forgiveness of Pentecostals for Catholics who had persecuted and denounced them under the Fascist government. That is the temper in which this history should be handled. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism explains the principles behind it, and our guide to the charismatic movement covers what descended from Azusa Street into the mainline churches.

Related Topics