Azusa Street Revival 
An
abandoned Methodist church at 312 Azusa Street in the industrial section of Los
Angeles, became in 1906, the originating center of modern Pentecostalism. William J. Seymour, a mild-mannered
black Holiness preacher, founded the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission on Azusa
Street, where a new emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit rapidly became a
local sensation and eventually a worldwide phenomenon. Before coming to Los
Angeles, Seymour had been influenced by the ministry of Charles Fox Parham, who
had grown up in Methodist and Holiness circles. In his schools in Kansas and
Texas, Parham taught that a baptism of "the Holy Ghost and fire"
should be expected among those who had been converted and who had also gone
forward to the perfect sanctification which John Wesley
and American Holiness bodies had proclaimed.
Parham had also pioneered the teaching that a special sign of the Holy Spirit
baptism would be "speaking with other tongues." With many others in
the Methodist and Holiness traditions at the end of the nineteenth century, he
also placed a stronger emphasis generally on the gifts of the Spirit, including
that of healing.
The revival which began on Azusa Street in
1906, rapidly attracted attention from such secular media as the Los Angeles
Times. More importantly it soon became the center of attraction for thousands
of visitors from around the world, who often went back to their homelands
proclaiming the need for a special post-conversion baptism of the Holy Spirit.
These included Florence Crawford, founder of the Apostolic Faith movement in
the northwestern United States; missionary T. B. Barratt, who is credited with
the establishment of Pentecostalism in Scandinavia and northwestern Europe;
William H. Durham of Chicago, early spokesman for Pentecostalism in the
Midwest; and Eudorus N. Bell of Fort Worth, first chairman of the Assemblies of
God.
Meetings at Azusa Street, which went on daily
for three years, were marked by spontaneous prayer and preaching, a nearly
unprecedented cooperation between blacks and whites. Observers at the time
linked Azusa Street with the great Welsh Revival of 1904 and 1905 and the
"Latter Rain" movement, which had pockets of influence throughout the
United States. Azusa Street remains a potent symbol for the activity of the
Holy Spirit to the now more than 50,000,000 Pentecostals worldwide.
See also
PENTECOSTALISM.