The Azusa Street Mission and Revival

by Cecil M. Robeck Jr.

Suddenly, Cashwell began to “speak in tongues and praise God.” Having received his baptism in the Spirit, Cashwell returned to Dunn, North Carolina. On December 31, 1906, he gave his testimony in the local holiness church, encouraging the group to join him in receiving their “Pentecost.” Many did.

Invitations were quickly sent to a host of holiness preachers in the region, inviting them to a series of meetings that Cashwell would preach in Dunn. Cashwell rented a large tobacco

warehouse, and scores of...

came. The meetings ran for at least three weeks, and by the time they were over, many pastors of the Free Will Baptist Church and most of the leaders of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church and some from the Holiness Church ...

Word had also reached the African American leaders Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, co-founders of the Church of God in Christ. In February 1907 Pastor Mason, accompanied by J. A. Jeter and J. D. Young, traveled from Memphis to Los Angeles to see for themselves what the Azusa Street revival had to offer. Their stay lasted six weeks, and before it was over Mason and J. A. Jeter had spoken in tongues.

Glenn Cook left Los Angeles on December 4, 1906, bound for Lam-ont, Oklahoma. He held a series of cottage prayer meetings there, where he brought a number of people into a dynamic encounter with the Holy Spirit. He then turned northward to Chicago. After spending two days in the Windy City he continued on to Indianapolis, Indiana, arriving January 18.

Ivey Campbell was a member of the Holiness Church of Los Angeles when she first visited the Azusa Street Mission. She was baptized in the Spirit early in the summer of 1906, and in November she returned to Ohio to share her testimony with friends and family. She had been instrumental in helping to establish the Broadway Mission in East Liverpool, Ohio, before

she moved to Los Angeles, and she wanted to testify to those she had left behind.

We rejoice to hear that Pentecost has fallen in Calcutta, India, over ten thousand miles away on the other side of the world. Praise God. We have letters from China, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, England, Ireland, Australia, and other countries from hungry souls that want their Pentecost. Some of these letters are in foreign languages. Missionaries write that they are hungry for this outpouring of the Spirit which they believe to be the real Pentecost. The world seems ripe for the Pentecost in all lands and God is sending it. Amen. THE APOSTOLIC FAITH

IF PASTOR William J. Seymour and the people of the Azusa Street Mission wanted to spread the message

of salvation, holiness, and spiritual empowerment across North America, they wanted even more t...

They believed that God was restoring something to the church that had been missing for centuries. They read ominous significance in the fact that this was occurring at the beginning of the last century of the second Christian millennium. This seemed to signal the imminent ...

Initially Pastor Seymour had agreed with Parham’s position that tongues were actual human languages, given for missionary use. But by mid-1907 he seemed to distance himself from Parham on the issue. Seymour hesitated because, while many believed they could identify the new languages

they were speaking, Parham’s theory regarding God-given foreign languages had not yet been proven. The tongues spoken at the Azusa Street Mission might be genuine foreign languages. God was certainly able to give such a gift. But then again, they might be something else. Only testing on the missionary field would finally answer the question to Seymour’s satisfaction. In the end, the bestowal of tongues on the people of the Apostolic Faith might best be explained in another way.

In spite of Seymour’s personal concerns, the faithful at Azusa Street continued to speak in tongues in anticipation that much of this new spe...

Thus many people sought to identify the tongue in ...

At the Azusa Street Mission, exactly the opposite was true. This is why I have chosen to highlight the Azusa Street Mission as the birthplace of global Pentecostalism. Essentially, when someone spoke in a tongue, the mission followed a simple four-step program. First, they attempted to identify the language. Second, if they felt they had identified it, they sought to establish whether the speaker believed he or she had a received a missionary “call.” Third, if the tongues-speaker claimed to have such a call, the mission staff tried to discern whether the call was genuine and whether the person was ready and willing to go.

Finally, if the person testified to a readiness to go, and the mission discerned

the necessary gifts and call, then they gave the candidate the money to reach the foreign field, and he or she left town within days, if not hours. Alfred G. and Lillian Garr pr...

The Pentecostal historian Vinson Synan has wittily described this sort of missionary program pioneered at the Azusa Street Mission as the program of the “one way ticket.” The mission faithful believed that the Lord

would return before their missionaries needed to come back home. If it should become necessary for them to return, however, the mission was equally convinced that their missionaries’ ticket home would be covered by relying upon God in faith to meet the need. The faith of the mission was simple and it seemed to have no boundaries.

Parham accused Seymour of sending evangelists and missionaries around the world that were ill prepared and ill equipped to carry out such a ministry. And Seymour was indeed doing just that.

Many of the missionaries that went out from the Azusa Street Mission had never had any missionary training or even any theological training.

They did not know the languages or the customs of the countries to which they believed themselves called. These simple believers took the Bible and their experience at fac...

Such a missionary program obviously led to certain problems that subsequent missionary theologies, programs, and strategies have tried to address. To the Azusa Street faithful who were ready to take on the missionary challenge, ...

firmly believed that God would provide for their needs if they were faithful to Jesus’ comman...

They blessed the missionaries by issuing credentials, and they provided them with enough money to get them where they believed God had called them.

The number of missionaries who underwent this process and were sent out from Los Angeles during the

first three years of the mission’s existence is simply staggering.

A large number of those sent out by the Azusa Street Mission were short-term missionaries, intent on communicating the full gospel through their newly given tongue. Most of these

folks lasted on the foreign field between six months and a year, especially when their initial expectations were disappointed.

THOSE who went abroad as Apostolic Faith missionaries were probably all well-intentioned. Given their general lack of training and their overall lack of experience, however, we should not be surprised to find a number of concerns raised and a number of criticisms lodged against them. These concerns and criticisms reveal

some of the challenges that these

new missionaries faced— challenges they might have overcome had they received certain theological, cultural, and linguistic training before the...

Criticism began to emerge first among Protestant missionaries serving in India and China. While some were open to hear the case for speaking in tongues, others clearly thought such claims ...

The burgeoning Apostolic Faith missionary movement clearly needed to take responsibility for addressing concerns regarding missionary service.

Lake warned that American workers must respect local culture, and too many already on the mission field did not understand that fact.

Given even this brief introduction to Azusa Street’s missionaries, we find a number of reasons why their story is so difficult to tell. First, literally scores of people rose to the missionary challenge. Second, most of these missionaries did not stay put once they arrived in their field of choice. They moved about, often spending a week here or a month there, attempting to minister as they went. Third, like the balls on a billiard table, they had received their initial impetus at the Azusa Street Mission when they were baptized in the Spirit, but once they began to move about they passed their energy on to others who also moved about. Finally, their claims and their methods changed over time.

Rachel Sizelove, one of the organizers of the 1907 camp meeting, was there that morning. She would later complain, How well I remember the first time the flesh began to get in the way of the Holy Ghost, and how the burden came upon the saints that morning when Brother Seymore [sic] stood before the audience and spoke of raising money to buy the Azusa Street Mission. The Holy Ghost was grieved. You could feel it all over the audience, when they began to ask for money, and the Holy Ghost power began to leave, and instead of the Holy Ghost heavenly choir, they brought in a piano.

this shift in established ways disturbed Sizelove.

She blamed the problem on the flesh; he blamed it on the devil.

Brower’s complaint that the mission had incorporated was shared by others. It smacked of organization. And some of the Azusa Street faithful, such as Frank Bartleman, wanted nothing to do with formal organization.

The mission had been incorporated nearly a year earlier, on March 9, 1907, and an announcement had appeared in The Apostolic Faith that same month.

Faith.”

new leaders were emerging. New leadership roles were opening up at other missions. And those who had been called and equipped to make such contributions should not be criticized for looking for opportunities to engage in ministry.

While attendance at the Azusa Street Mission remained healthy throughout most of 1908, by the beginning of 1909 it had entered a steady decline.

Sunday, October 10, Caswell attended the Azusa Street Mission once again. He didn’t stay long. He just noted, “Only a few old-timers and not much stirring.” He made no further entries on the mission for another year, but the verdict was the same. From his perspective, the revival had effectively ended.

Invariably, he had something to say there, either by way of testimony or of sermon. And inevitably Bartle-man complained about what he termed “a spirit of dictatorship” in the mission leadership. Services were “programmed” “from start to finish,” he growled. There was no longer any room for the Holy Spirit to break in.

In the middle of 1930, a man named Ruthford D. Griffith, aged 78, began to attend the mission with his wife. He claimed that he had been a missionary in Africa, and that he had pastored several African American congregations. Before long, he offered his services to Jennie Seymour. In exchange for some preaching, she provided the couple with temporary housing adjacent to her apartment upstairs in the mission. Before long, Griffith had decided that he could replace her as the pastor. He began by recruiting people who would vote for him. He argued that the mission was in violation of its Doctrines and Discipline, since this document stated that the congregation’s leader should be a man. Once he had these two things lined up, he moved on to intimidate not only Jennie Seymour, but also her faithful following, including the elected board of trustees. He forced

the smaller Seymour party to worship upstairs, while he took the main sanctuary as his own. He announced that he was the new bishop of the mission and proceeded to take control. In January 1931, the situation exploded into an argument that reduced both parties to throwing hymnals at one another. Police were called; the mission was padlocked. While Jennie Seymour sought justice, Ruthford Griffith sought control. The disagreement finally ended up in various courts, with Griffith suing the mission and the mission suing Griffith. The matter remained in the courts for another year and a half. While a lower court found in favor of Griffith, a higher court ultimately reversed the ruling, and in June 1932 it found in favor of Mrs. Seymour. By then the building had been demolished, and the group moved back to the Asberry home on North Bonnie Brae Street, where the revival and the mission had been born 26 years