William Seymour and the color line broken
Black and white worshipping together in 1906
William Seymour leads the Azusa Street revival from a wooden crate behind which he prays with his head bowed, often not speaking at all.
He is twenty-five years old. He has been educated by sitting outside a classroom door. He leads a revival that will produce the fastest-growing Christian movement of the twentieth century from a converted livery stable in a poor neighborhood, and his primary leadership style appears to be prayer.
The theological claim of Pentecostalism — that the gifts of the Spirit described in Acts 2 are available to all believers in all ages, not only to the apostolic generation — is explosive in 1906. Most of the Protestant world believes these gifts ceased with the apostles. Seymour believes they are being poured out in Los Angeles.
The evidence that convinces observers is not primarily doctrinal. It is the quality of what they see: people of different races, different classes, different educational backgrounds, all receiving the same experience, all being changed by it, all being pressed into a community that their world insists cannot exist.
Seymour later says that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is meaningless unless it produces love — specifically, the love that crosses the lines the world maintains.
The Azusa Street revival produces the largest and fastest-growing family of churches in the history of Christianity. It also fails his test repeatedly — the segregation that Seymour's revival briefly dissolved reasserts itself within years.
The vision was real. The church is still catching up to it.
“The baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire means to be flooded with the love of God and power for service.”
— William J. Seymour, The Apostolic Faith newsletter, 1906 AD
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Seymour said the baptism of the Spirit is meaningless unless it produces love — love that crosses the lines the world maintains.
The revival he led briefly demonstrated this. The church that followed failed to sustain it. The vision is still outrunning the institution, a century later.
This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for honesty — the recognition that genuine spiritual experience does not automatically dismantle the social structures we inhabit, and that the work of living the vision is always ongoing.
The Spirit falls on all flesh. The structures push back. The question for every generation is whether the experience is deep enough and the love wide enough to resist the pushing back.
What lines does the Spirit keep asking your community to cross? And what is stopping the crossing?