Speaking in Tongues at Azusa Street Revival

Azusa Street Revival

The Azusa Street Revival from 1906 to 1909 has been credited with spawning the worldwide movement of Pentecostalism (Pope-Levison, 2007). It began with Pentecostal preacher William Seymour, a son of freed slaves, who was discovered preaching in Houston, Texas, by a Californian woman visiting his holiness church. He was invited to preach at her church in California and duly accepted. However, because he had not received the Holy Spirit personally, people at the church in California barred the doors against him. Others in the holiness community felt his message and preaching were good and they took him in. He preached to a small group of followers at Bonnie Brae Street in 1906. The group prayed for the Holy Spirit to come to them and it was there that follower Edward S. Lee began to speak in tongues. Jennie Moore (later Seymour’s wife) and Seymour himself soon began speaking in tongues thereafter as well. The news spread like wildfire among the diverse community of blacks, Latinos and whites. The entire city seemed transfixed by what was happening at Bonnie Brae Street. The crowds were so big that no one could even get to the house itself. So the group migrated to the abandoned property at 312 Azusa Street in the industrial sector of downtown L.A. The building was 2400 square feet, and it would serve as the launch pad for Pentecostalism and as the start of the three cycles of three-year revivals (Synan, 2001).

The barn-like building at Azusa Street had once been used for church services but it had since become a storehouse, lumberyard and served other purposes. The congregants had some work to do to fix the building up and restore it for working conditions so that the group could meet inside. The first floor of the building had 8 foot ceilings, so there was not even room for a platform. Makeshift benches were set up on the floor and it was a very meager type of church—but these people were not interested in stained-glass windows or in fine linens. They were interested in receiving the Holy Spirit. And the preaching of Seymour and the zeal of the holiness group was more than enough to make up for the apparent deprivations.

Seymour and a white woman named Clara Lum began producing a newspaper called Apostolic Faith. This allowed them to spread the word about what was happening at Azusa Street. Thousands of ministers received the newsletter free of charge: “5,000 copies of the first edition (September 1906) were printed, and by 1907 the press run reached 40,000” (Pope-Levison, 2007). However, Seymour and Lum soon fell out over different perspectives on evidential teaching as well as race relations and by 1912 Seymour fell out of favor in the movement altogether (Pope-Levison, 2007). The movement kept going all the same without him.

What was most remarkable about the Revival was the fact that it was so diverse: men, women, young, old, white, black, Native American, immigrants, rich and poor, all came together at Azusa Street, sometimes packing the old building with as many as 1500 people (Apostolic Archives International, 2020). At its height, services went all day and all night. There was a fervor for the Holy Spirit; excitement was kept at a fever pitch because it was believed that miracles were happening and that people were speaking in tongues. There were skeptics, of course. Many came because they had heard the stories and they wanted to see for themselves what all the sensation was about. Reporters from the Los Angeles Times described the Revival as consisting of fanatical rites involving a nerve-wracking method of prayer, inevitably resulting in the rousing gift of tongues that the congregants insisted was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

All the same, in spite of skepticism from the papers, many within the Protestant community were attracted, including Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians and of course those within the Holiness Movement. There was no collection, no music, just preaching and praying, and that impressed a great many preachers who came wearing fine clothes and holding high expectations of what a religious service should be like. At Azusa Street they were bedazzled by what was like an underground religious rite with low ceilings, people packed shoulder to shoulder, and full of energy. In 1906, it seemed the Pentecost had come to a great many followers of the Revival, as Seymour wrote in the first edition of Apostolic Faith.

However, by 1913, after Seymour’s falling out with other Pentecostal preachers, the Revival had sputtered to a stop. Seymour remained there with his wife and a smaller congregation of mainly African Americans. Seymour made small trips to help establish other Pentecostal churches, but for the most part, he and his wife remained in L.A. Seymour died of a heart attack in 1922 and his wife carried on with leading church services at Azusa Street until 1931 when the building was abandoned (Newmann & Tinney, 1978).

As it turned out, the Revival did not depend upon Seymour. The many thousands who visited the Revival in its first few years went back home or went abroad to spread Pentecostalism themselves. Reverend Spooner was one of these men: he visited the Azusa Street Revival in 1909 and then took what he saw and learned there all the way to Africa where he became a missionary in Botswana. Reverend Garr went to India from Azusa Street and then later to China, spreading Pentecostalism everywhere they landed and were welcomed. Dozens and dozens of missionaries went out from Azusa Street in its first year alone that soon Pentecostalism and the practice of speaking in tongues had grown in popularity in England, Germany, Hong Kong, Egypt, Syria and many other nations.

The Pentecostal Movement began at Azusa Street, but it was not really a unified or consistent movement. Seymour himself was at odds with many other prominent preachers and their teachings did not always align. Some held strict views about certain matters and others did not. In the southern states of the US, Pentecostalism was well-received by the African-American community there, and many Wesleyan-holiness congregations also embraced Pentecostalism. The Church of God and the Church of God in Christ became two big spin-offs in and of themselves. Indeed, the Church of God in Christ is now the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US with nearly 9 million members and it is also an international Christian organization (headquarters in Memphis, TN) serving people all over the world. It has a structure that rivals the Catholic Church in terms of hierarchy and governance, and it counts as its founders not Seymour but rather two other preachers who began speaking in tongues in 1906: Charles Harrison Mason and Charles Price Jones. They would end up splitting and dividing into the two Church of God organizations. Of course, had it not been for the Azusa Street Revival, it is very likely that neither one would have existed (Newmann & Tinney, 1978; Synan, 2001).

The fervor and energy that the Azusa Street Revival inspired was unique, but it was also organic within the American religious landscape, where individualism, spontaneity, and religious innovation were part and parcel of the American spirit. The Protestant movement had unleashed a tidal wave of do-it-yourself religionists, all with their own ideas and creative solutions to various issues within the religious context. American life was also structured in such a way that these movements could proliferate quite freely without any influence or intervention from the state. The separation of church and state had made it so that movements like Pentecostalism could catch fire. However, what made the Azusa Street Revival so popular in its beginnings was its utter uniqueness and the frenzy with which so many preachers and congregants took to it and took it spread in their own homes and nations. The act of speaking in tongues was seen as the ultimate expression of religious faith, and it was seen as the Holy Spirit coming down to people with faith.