WILLIAM SEYMOUR

WILLIAM J. SEYMOUR

The Founder of Modern Pentecostalism

Today, the spiritual heirs of the Azusa Street Revival number over half a billion, making Pentecostals and Charismatics the second largest and the fastest-growing family of Christians in the world. Whether black or white, Hispanic or Asian, almost all churches in this movement can trace their roots directly or indirectly to the humble mission at 312 Azusa Street and its pastor, William J. Seymour.

Seymour was born on May 2, 1870, in Centerville, Louisiana, to Simon and Phyllis Seymour, former slaves, who raised him as a Baptist. In his youth, William often had visions of God and studied the Scriptures diligently. At the age of twenty-five, he moved to Indianapolis, where he worked as a railroad porter and a waiter in a fashionable restaurant. His church while in Indianapolis was a black Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1900 he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and enrolled in a Holiness Bible School that emphasized sanctification (being made holy), divine healing, and the expectation that there would be a worldwide Holy Spirit revival before the Lord’s soon return. Seymour heard God call him to become a preacher, but he resisted until he caught smallpox, a disease that often killed its victims, and left poor William blind in his left eye. After he recovered, he felt his illness had been a punishment for not obeying God’s call. So he immediately accepted ordination as a preacher.

He then moved to Houston, Texas, to find and then live with some relatives lost during slavery. From 1903 to 1905 he accepted several short-term preaching assignments. He also met a black woman, Mrs. Lucy Farrow, who claimed to have spoken in unknown tongues while accompanying evangelist Charles F. Parham and his family to Kansas as their governess. Earlier in Topeka, a woman named Agness Ozman had spoken in unknown tongues, and Parham considered this the first evidence of a Pentecost-like renewal. He had not yet experienced it himself, but he preached that it was coming. Now that the Parhams and Mrs. Farrow had returned to Houston, Seymour wanted to learn more. Parham, however, was a determined segregationist, and he would not allow Seymour to sit in his classroom with white students. So Seymour arranged to sit in the hallway outside the open door and listen to Parham’s lectures. Theologically they made sense to Seymour, though he could not abide Parham’s racism.

One day William Seymour received a letter from a small church in Los Angeles. One of its members had heard Seymour preach when she had visited relatives in Houston. The church invited him to be their pastor, and they had included a train ticket in the letter.

Seymour arrived and preached his Pentecostal message in the small house church until after a month of intense prayer and fasting, the Holy Spirit fell in power on the small group and several spoke in tongues in April 1906. The experience was like fire, in that word spread so quickly that the crowds who came broke the porch on the little house, and the group had to look for another building. They found and rented a former church—then used as a warehouse—at 312 Azusa Street. Meetings were held daily and late into each night for the next three years, often six hundred people at a time crowded into the little church with five or six hundred more outside listening through the windows.

Initially the secular press and the religious leaders who opposed this movement pointed to the more dramatic spiritual gifts—the healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues—as characteristics either to mock or question. But those were not the qualities that William Seymour believed were the most important demonstrations of the Holy Spirit’s baptism and not the ones he emphasized in his teaching. “Tongues are one of the signs that go with every baptized person, but it is not the real evidence of the baptism in the everyday life,” he wrote.

Seymour believed that the real miracle on the Day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2 was the Holy Spirit’s outpouring of so much godly love that three thousand people from “every nation under heaven” accepted the Gospel in one day. The unity Jesus prayed for in John 17 was dramatically realized between former enemies and strangers. The gift of tongues was merely a means of communicating that love. And so for Seymour, love that could unite blacks and whites, people from India and China and South America was what mattered. He said that if people weren’t expressing this First-Corinthians-thirteen kind of love, then “I care not how many tongues you may have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.” As far as Seymour was concerned, the blood of Jesus washed away the color line in Christ’s church.

Black people—many only a generation removed from slavery and terrified by the thousands of lynchings still occurring to their race—embraced white brothers and sisters in the Lord at Azusa. Sophisticated white people humbled themselves and asked black people to “actually” lay hands on them and pray for them. This mixing among the races mesmerized and alarmed the world. But the new “Pentecostals,” as they were by then called, rose up from their knees praising God, healed of their fear and hatred, and volunteered to go to other cities or foreign countries as missionaries. Many were confident that the tongues the Holy Spirit enabled them to speak equipped them to communicate with non-English-speaking people. Indeed, while these Pentecostals most often spoke in a heavenly prayer and praise language, dozens of reports confirmed that sometimes messages in recognized foreign languages came from people who previously knew only English.

Within two years, the movement took root in over fifty nations around the world. Seymour’s newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, reached a circulation of fifty thousand. Unquestionably, something real was happening.

But jealousy and strife also took root.

Not all white people liked the idea of a humble black man with such a significant ministry. In late October 1906, evangelist Charles F. Parham, the Texan who had allowed Seymour to sit outside of his classroom of white students, came to Los Angeles. Seymour received him respectfully, but it was soon apparent that Parham intended to take over the Azusa Street Mission. In his first message, he declared, “God is sick to his stomach” at the racial mixing that was going on at Azusa. Later his wife explained, “In Texas, you know, the colored people are not allowed to mix with the white people.” Parham was a full-fledged racist and an open supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. In time, he succeeded in drawing away almost three hundred whites from Azusa to start a rival group, but his ministry ended in disgrace because of his arrest in connection with a sex scandal.

William H. Durham, an influential Holiness leader from Chicago, moved to Los Angeles and at first seemed to join Seymour, but before long he publicly challenged some of Seymour’s doctrinal beliefs and ultimately split off about six hundred of Seymour’s followers—mostly white.

By the end of 1906 there were nine Pentecostal assemblies in Los Angeles. This would have been great, but some were not on good terms with each other, and in the end Seymour’s dedication to racial unity suffered as the groups, both there and elsewhere, became increasingly segregated and placed more and more emphasis on speaking in tongues and other “signs” rather than unity as proof of the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

On May 13, 1908, Seymour married Jennie Evans Moore, a dedicated member of his church. Clara Lum, mission secretary for the Azusa Street Mission, left Los Angeles and moved to Portland, Oregon—possibly out of jealousy, since she opposed the marriage—where she joined with minister Florence Crawford. However, without permission she took with her the national and foreign mailing lists for Seymour’s newspaper. She then commenced publishing the paper from Portland as though it were still Seymour doing the writing and editing. Only later did she admit in print that she had taken over as editor. The Seymours went to Portland and tried, without success, to get Clara Lum to return the mailing lists. With only the Los Angeles area addresses, the influence of Seymour’s paper quickly declined.

Nevertheless, the Pentecostal movement continued to expand until by 1914 it was represented in every American city of three thousand or more people and in every area of the world from Iceland to Tasmania, publishing literature in thirty languages.

Several major denominations grew out of the Azusa Street Revival. One example involves Bishop Charles H. Mason who attended in 1907. He experienced the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and returned to his home in Jackson, Mississippi, to reorganize the Church of God in Christ. His ministry included a concern for all people, black and white. However, in 1914, because of heightened racial tension, a white segment split away from the main body and formed the Assemblies of God denomination. As years passed and the various Pentecostal denominations grew, William Seymour and his commitment to unity among Christians of every race was largely overlooked. The work at 312 Azusa Street continued in relative obscurity until William Seymour died of heart failure September 22, 1922. His wife carried on the declining ministry, but after her death in 1936, even the building was lost in 1938 because of unpaid taxes.

However, in 1994 and again in 1997 leaders of the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God of Prophecy, and various independent Pentecostal and Charismatic groups met to pursue reconciliation and eliminate racism in their congregations. These efforts have involved formal expressions of repentance and apologies from white leaders and a celebration in which whites and blacks washed one another’s feet.

Christian scholars and church historians are finally starting to realize the importance of Bishop William J. Seymour and his vision for Christian unity. As early as 1972, Sidney Ahlstrom, the noted church historian from Yale University, said, “Seymour exerted greater influence upon American Christianity than any other black leader.”