The Azusa Street Revival

The building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles is a former African Methodist Episcopal church that has been used as a livery stable. It is not impressive. The neighborhood is not impressive. The man who begins preaching there is not, by conventional measures, impressive.

William J. Seymour is the son of formerly enslaved people, a one-eyed Black preacher from Louisiana who has learned about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues from a white Holiness preacher in Houston who made him sit outside the door of the classroom to listen.

He arrives in Los Angeles in 1906 and is locked out of the Holiness mission after his first sermon — his teaching about tongues is too radical. He moves the meetings to a house on Bonnie Brae Street. On April 9, 1906, people begin speaking in tongues.

His leadership style at Azusa Street is unlike anything the revival tradition has produced before or since. He does not preach from the front with commanding authority. He leads from behind a wooden crate, his head bowed, often not speaking at all — simply praying. Eyewitnesses describe services where Seymour prayed in silence for hours while the Spirit moved through the congregation without his direction.

The meetings move to Azusa Street. And then the world comes.

For three years, meetings run almost continuously — morning, afternoon, evening, sometimes through the night. People arrive from across America and from abroad, experience what is happening, and go home carrying it. Within a decade, Pentecostalism has spread to Chile, Brazil, Scandinavia, India, West Africa.

The most striking feature of the Azusa Street revival, noted by observers at the time, is what is not happening: the color line that divides every other social institution in 1906 America is not operating at 312 Azusa Street. Black and white and Latino worshippers are kneeling side by side at the same altar.

The Los Angeles Times mocks it. The mockery does not stop it.

In 1906 America, the color line was one of the most rigid structures in society. At Azusa Street it dissolved.

Not because anyone made a speech about racial equality. Because the Spirit fell on everyone — Black, white, Latino, immigrant, native-born — and the people who were receiving the same gift could not simultaneously maintain the hierarchy that said some of them were worth less than others.

This is what the Spirit does when given room: it dismantles the structures that contradict the kingdom. Not always, not everywhere, not permanently — the color line was reconstructed in Pentecostalism within a decade, and the movement has carried the wounds of that reconstruction ever since.

But for a moment at 312 Azusa Street, the vision of Revelation 7 was visible — every nation, tribe, people, and language — and the people present knew they were seeing something true about what the church is supposed to be.

What would it take for that vision to be visible in your community?