Christian History Magazine Collection

The story behind the Azusa Street revival, the most phenomenal event of twentieth-century Christianity.

by Ted Olsen from Christian History magazine no. 58

In the early morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco residents were rudely awakened by the deadliest earthquake in North American history. A devastating fire, fed by ruptured gas lines, finished off what the earthquake, later estimated as 8.3 on the Richter scale, failed to destroy in its first deadly seconds. Some 700 people lay dead among the decimated 514 city blocks.

Angry men and women blamed God and the unstable earth sitting atop the unpredictable San Andreas Fault. A gospel tract, rushed to the printer and widely circulated in the area, called the tragedy a judgment and a warning from the God some were cursing.

That same morning, 400 miles south, the world took notice of another movement—one with aftershocks still spreading today. In a skeptical front-page story titled “Weird Babel of Tongues,” a Los Angeles Times reporter attempted to describe what would soon be known as the Azusa Street Revival.

“Breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand,” the story began, “the newest religious sect has started in Los Angeles.”

Skinny and Sickly Fanatic

The “newest religious sect” had, in fact, been around for a few years. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Midwestern Methodists and other Christians associated with the Holiness movement had become obsessed with divine healing and the possibility of speaking in tongues—doctrines and practices that dispensationalists argued had ended with the apostolic age. One of these Holiness Christians was an 18-year-old Kansas collegian named Charles Fox Parham.

Like other Methodists, Parham believed that sanctification was a second work of grace, separate from salvation. But he also adopted the more radical Holiness belief in a third experience—the “baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire.” As early as 1891, Midwesterners heard young Parham claim that glossolalia—speaking in unknown or foreign tongues—should accompany this baptism in the Holy Spirit.

A handful of his listeners accepted him as a latter-day Elijah, ushering in Christ’s return. Some wrote him off as another self-appointed prophet, while others branded the skinny and often sickly Parham as a fanatic.

To perpetuate his views, Parham opened a Bible school in 1900. It was housed in a three-story, turreted Topeka mansion dubbed “Stone’s Folly” because it had bankrupted its builder. (Local residents had thought the building was haunted.) In developing his “Apostolic Faith” theology, Parham promoted a revolutionary but short-lived theory—which even Christian and Missionary Alliance leader A. B. Simpson would toy with. Simply put, Parham believed God would supernaturally give known, earthly languages to baptized believers so they could quickly evangelize the world. This end-time revival, accompanied by believers speaking in known languages they had never learned (xenolalia), would bring to an end the church age and bring back a triumphant Christ.

Even Parham’s missionaries—and those later sent out from Azusa Street—found difficulties when it came to putting this belief into practice. For example, A. G. Garr, the first white man to speak in tongues at Azusa, went to India expecting the Spirit to enable him to speak Hindi. When this did not happen, Garr and his wife went to Hong Kong and studied Chinese. Though Parham never gave up his belief that he and his followers had spoken in earthly foreign languages, his followers discovered that if foreigners understood them, it was an exception rather than the rule.

Yet Charles Fox Parham based his life on the exceptions rather than the rules. The status quo, he believed, was rarely in touch with the Spirit. He left the Methodist church, calling it predictable and staid. He searched for the missing element he believed would lead Christians back to the true, nondenominational New Testament church. He decided the missing element was speaking in tongues.

At his Bible school, Parham assigned his students to search the Bible for demonstrable evidence that a believer had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. Their conclusion matched Parham’s: the Holy Spirit is manifested through tongues.

Speaking in tongues was not a new occurrence, but popped up occasionally in both Christian and heretical groups throughout history. In 1896, W. F. Bryant and his followers had spoken in tongues (this group became the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) ). But Charles Parham was the first to consider it the initial evidence of “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.”

Convinced of their findings, Parham and his students conducted a Watch Night service on New Year’s Eve to ring in 1901. One of the students, a 30-year-old evangelist named Agnes Ozman, asked (in Parham’s words) “that hands be laid on her to receive the Holy Spirit as she hoped to go to foreign fields.” As he prayed for her, “a glory fell upon her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face,” and she is reported to have spoken in Chinese. Though many people believed Ozman’s experience proved Parham’s teachings, it is unclear if she actually spoke in Chinese or simply a “heavenly language.” In any event, within the next few days, about half of the school’s 34 members, including Parham, spoke in tongues.

Finding the Texas Protégé

Meanwhile, the press was giving Parham’s Apostolic Faith band and its critics front-page coverage. The publicity gained the “Parhamites” more notoriety than fame. Parham closed the school to spread the news of revival with his more devoted students (several students dubious of the recent events had left the school). Their message was met with less than overwhelming success. Though crowds did not show up to see the tongues-speech, reporters did.

Following several scathing articles and the death of one of Parham’s sons, the pioneer struggled. He continued to preach here and there, witnessing healings and glossolalia but without great success. Not until a Galena, Kansas, revival in late 1903 did Parham begin to see the results for which he had prayed. Newspapers as far away as Cincinnati gave these meetings favorable publicity as Parham gained several thousand converts.

Crowds in Galena and other Midwestern towns soon learned that Parham was not your usual Sunday morning preacher. Often dressed in Palestinian costume, he warned his listeners that “God will hold them responsible if they do not join in this great crusade with our captain, Jesus, against sin and Satan.” He viewed himself as the “projector” of the Apostolic Faith (also called Pentecostal or Latter Rain) movement, though he opposed officially organizing the group.

While Parham preached throughout the Midwest, Texas, the East Coast, and into Canada, claiming a following of 13,000 to 25,000, an even larger Pentecostal movement was happening in Wales, at New Quay on Cardigan Bay. American Holiness publisher S. B. Shaw stirred worldwide interest in that awakening with his 1905 book The Great Revival in Wales. For many believers, the Welsh Revival became a rallying cry for God to do it again. And it prompted many of them to conduct prayer meetings that went on for years.

From Kansas in 1905, Parham took a band of his protégés into Texas. There he preached, distributed his The Apostolic Faith newspaper, won converts, and set up a non-credit Bible school. One of the students attracted to the school was a former waiter and southern Holiness preacher, William J. Seymour. In the Jim Crow South, Seymour, a black, could take part in the Bible studies only by sitting in the hallway outside Parham’s classroom.

After only a few weeks of listening to Parham, Seymour received an invitation to pastor a small Los Angeles church of Baptists expelled from their congregation for espousing Holiness doctrines. Seymour carried more than his luggage to California. He boarded the steam train in the Houston depot with enthusiasm and Parham’s finely tuned statement of faith.