William J. Seymour

Seymour arrived in Los Angeles early in 1906 to take up an invitation to preach at a small holiness mission. He preached that speaking in tongues accompanies the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the congregation's leadership disagreed, and when he returned for the evening service he found the door padlocked. He continued in a private house on Bonnie Brae Street, and in April, during a prayer meeting there, the outbreak began: tongues, prostration, singing, and crowds large enough that the porch collapsed.

They moved to a disused building at 312 Azusa Street, a former African Methodist Episcopal church that had been serving as a stable and warehouse. Meetings ran there more or less continuously for three years, three times a day, with no advertised order, no printed programme and often no announced preacher, in a bare room with plank benches and shoeboxes for a pulpit.

The Los Angeles press covered it with contempt and fixed on the same detail visitors kept remarking on: the congregation was black and white together, with Mexican and Chinese worshippers among them, in a city where that did not happen. One visiting minister wrote that the colour line had been washed away in the blood. Seymour regarded this as the point rather than a side effect, and taught that a Spirit baptism which left a man's racial contempt intact had not happened.

What carried Azusa Street beyond Los Angeles was a newspaper. The mission printed The Apostolic Faith and mailed it free to anyone who asked, reaching a circulation in the tens of thousands, and the reports in it sent readers to Los Angeles and sent Azusa preachers out. Within two years there were missions traceable to it across North America, in Europe, in India and in west and southern Africa.

The unity did not last. Charles Parham, Seymour's former teacher, came to Los Angeles late in 1906, denounced the meetings as fanaticism, and objected explicitly to the racial mixing; the two never reconciled, and both men have been claimed as the movement's founder ever since. Doctrinal splits followed over sanctification and over the doctrine of the Trinity. The mailing list, which was the mission's reach, was taken by workers who left, and by about 1909 the crowds were gone. Seymour continued to pastor a small congregation at the same address until his death in 1922, and the building was demolished not long after.

The scale of what began there is the reason he is now studied. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity is counted in the hundreds of millions and is the fastest growing part of the religion worldwide. The atlas records Seymour as the central figure of the Azusa Street revival, and records the founding of Pentecostalism itself as contested, because the claims of Topeka in 1901 and Los Angeles in 1906 are both seriously argued and neither man founded a denomination.