The Rise of Pentecostalism, 1901–1910s

A Movement with a Birthday

Most Christian traditions trace their beginnings back across many centuries, their origins lost in the slow growth of the church. Modern Pentecostalism is different. It can be dated, with unusual precision, to the first years of the twentieth century — to a Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, and above all to a humble mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles beginning in 1906. Within a single generation, what started among a handful of praying students had become a worldwide movement. This unit tells that story: the soil it grew in, the people God used, and the teaching that came to mark it.

We tell it as history. Our task here is to describe what happened and what was taught fairly and accurately, giving thanks for the good and being honest about the failures, while reserving the weighing of doctrine for the units that take it up directly. In particular, the question of tongues as the evidence of the Spirit's baptism — the doctrine born in these very years — is examined elsewhere in this course; here we simply record its origin. Throughout, we keep the two questions of this course apart: whether a gift is real is one matter, and whether a particular experience is required of every believer is another.

The Soil It Grew In

Pentecostalism did not appear out of nothing. It grew from soil that had been prepared through the whole of the nineteenth century. The Holiness movement, drawing on John Wesley's teaching, had taught believers to seek a definite second work of grace — an experience of entire sanctification beyond conversion. The Keswick or higher-life movement pressed a similar hunger for a deeper, Spirit-filled Christian life. Movements of divine healing spread the expectation that God still worked wonders among His people, and that His power was not shut up in the past.

"And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy…"Joel 2:28 (NKJV)

Above all, many earnest Christians had come to expect a great outpouring of the Spirit before the return of Christ — a latter rain, they called it, reading the promise of Joel and its fulfillment at Pentecost as a pattern God would renew in the last days. Prayer meetings across America and beyond were pleading for such a visitation. So when it seemed to come, it fell on ground already plowed and watered by decades of longing.

The expectancy only intensified as the new century opened: news of a mighty revival in Wales in 1904 and 1905, under the young preacher Evan Roberts, swept through the churches and convinced many that God was again visiting His people. To hearts already watching for a latter rain, such reports were kindling.

Topeka and the First Outpouring, 1901

Charles Fox Parham was a Holiness preacher and teacher who, at the close of 1900, opened Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas. He set his students a question: what does the Bible give as the evidence that a person has received the baptism in the Holy Spirit? As they searched the book of Acts, they concluded that the sign, again and again, was speaking in tongues.

"And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."Acts 2:4 (NKJV)

On the first day of January 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman asked Parham to lay hands on her that she might receive the Spirit, and she began to speak in what those present took to be a foreign language. In the days that followed, others in the school had the same experience, and Parham himself among them. From this beginning he drew the teaching that would define the movement he was helping to birth.

Parham's Doctrine of "Initial Evidence"

Parham taught that speaking in tongues is the uniform initial evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit — that whenever a believer is so baptized, tongues will follow as the Bible sign. At first he and his followers believed these tongues were real, known foreign languages, given by God to equip missionaries to preach the gospel in lands whose speech they had never learned. This hope of "missionary tongues" faded when those who went abroad found they still had to learn the local languages in the ordinary way; but the core doctrine — tongues as the required evidence of Spirit-baptism — remained, and became the hallmark of early Pentecostalism.

Their reasoning ran from the pattern they saw in the book of Acts. There the Spirit's coming was accompanied by tongues at Pentecost, again at the house of Cornelius, and again at Ephesus; from these accounts they inferred that tongues was the God-appointed sign for every believer who received the baptism. Whether that inference holds — whether a repeated occurrence amounts to a universal rule — is exactly the question the course examines in its units on Acts and on Spirit-baptism, and it need not be settled here.

It is this teaching, more than any other, that has distinguished the movement from the wider church. The present course takes it up directly in the units on tongues in Acts, on the baptism in the Spirit, and in the closing assessment, where it is weighed by Scripture and, as a universal rule for every believer, respectfully declined. Here we neither argue nor settle it; we simply record that at Topeka, in the first days of a new century, the doctrine was born. And we keep the distinction the course has insisted upon throughout: to question whether tongues must accompany every Spirit-baptism is not to deny that the gift of tongues is real.

Houston, and a Student Named Seymour

Parham soon moved his work to Texas, and around 1905 opened a Bible school in Houston. Among those drawn to learn from him was William J. Seymour, a Black Holiness preacher, the son of former slaves, marked by a deep and humble piety. Under the segregation laws of that time and place, Seymour was not allowed to sit in the classroom with the white students; he listened to Parham's lectures from the hallway, through a door left ajar. Whatever indignity this involved, Seymour received the message that a baptism in the Spirit, evidenced by tongues, was offered to the church in his own day — and he would carry it further than his teacher ever did.

Azusa Street, 1906

Invited to preach at a small Holiness congregation in Los Angeles, Seymour proclaimed that the baptism in the Spirit with the sign of tongues was for the present hour. The reception was mixed; he was for a time locked out of the very church that had called him. He began instead to hold meetings in a private home on Bonnie Brae Street, and there, in April of 1906, the outpouring he had preached about came upon the little gathering. Days later, on the eighteenth of April, the great San Francisco earthquake shook California, and to many the timing seemed a sign that God was doing something momentous; the crowds only grew. The house could not hold them — its front porch is said to have collapsed under the press of people — and the work moved to a plain, abandoned building at 312 Azusa Street.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."Galatians 3:28 (NKJV)

There, for about three years, services ran morning, afternoon, and night, drawing the curious and the hungry from across the city and, before long, from around the world. What amazed observers as much as the tongues and the reported healings was something else entirely: Black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, men and women, worshiping and praying side by side as equals — and this in an age of rigid, legally enforced segregation. One who was there wrote that at Azusa the color line was washed away in the blood of Christ. From that mission a little newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, was sent out freely and was soon reaching tens of thousands of readers across the nation and over the seas.

The Message Goes Worldwide

The spread was astonishingly swift. Visitors to Azusa returned home aflame; men and women sailed as missionaries with the message; and within a few short years Pentecostal works had sprung up across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. New fellowships were formed to give the growing movement teaching and order — among them the Church of God in Christ, under C. H. Mason, who visited Azusa in 1907, and, in 1914, the Assemblies of God. What had begun with a handful of students praying in a Kansas schoolhouse had become, within a single generation, one of the great missionary movements in the history of the church — the seed of the hundreds of millions who would name the name of Christ in this tradition a century later.

The reach was truly global. The message crossed to Europe, where a Norwegian pastor, T. B. Barratt, became an early channel to the continent; it took root in Chile and Brazil, in parts of Africa, and in India, where a parallel outpouring had already stirred the Mukti Mission under Pandita Ramabai. Within a decade Pentecostal congregations could be found on every inhabited continent, often among the poor and the overlooked, and often carried by unschooled believers who simply went and told what they had seen.

Reading the History Fairly

An honest account does not tidy away the difficulties, and there were real ones. Charles Parham, the man who first framed the doctrine, saw his own influence wane within a few years amid controversy, and his later life was clouded; it was the humble mission at Azusa Street, under Seymour, that proved to be the movement's more enduring fountainhead. The very interracial worship that so marked Azusa met resistance from some early leaders — Parham among them — who could not accept it.

More sorrowful still, many of the fellowships that formed in the following years divided along the very color line the revival had, for a season, erased, so that a movement born in a remarkable unity too often settled back into the divisions of its age. We record all this not to diminish what God did but to tell the truth: a genuine work of the Spirit still passes through weak, sinful, and shortsighted people. As always in this course, we judge the movement by Scripture and by its faithful, not by its failures or its worst moments — and we give thanks for the grace that worked through such ordinary vessels.

It is worth adding that historians often note how Pentecostal-like outpourings appeared in several places at nearly the same time — Topeka, Wales, the Mukti Mission in India, and then Azusa — which has led many to see the movement less as the invention of a single teacher than as a broad stirring across one era. However one weighs that question, it guards us against pinning either the credit or the blame on one man, and it points us, as Scripture does, to the God who pours out His Spirit where and as He wills.

What the Story Teaches

The birth of Pentecostalism carries lessons for every Christian, whatever he concludes about its distinctive doctrine. It reminds us that God still visits His church, that a longing for His presence and power is not to be despised, and that the gospel of Christ has strength to cross the very lines that most divide people. It reminds us, too, that fervor must be wedded to sound doctrine and humble accountability, lest zeal run ahead of the Word and stumble. The questions first pressed at Topeka and Azusa we weigh carefully elsewhere; here it is enough to give thanks that, as a new century opened, God poured out His Spirit afresh and sent the good news of His Son toward the ends of the earth.

Looking Ahead

In the next unit we follow the story forward to the middle and later twentieth century, when the Pentecostal experience spilled beyond its own new denominations and into the historic churches — the Charismatic Renewal and the movements that came to be called the Third Wave.

Discussion Questions

• Why is it significant that a hunger for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit had been building for decades before 1901?
• What was Parham's doctrine of initial evidence, and why does this course examine it elsewhere rather than settle it here?
• What made the interracial worship at Azusa Street remarkable, and what does the later division teach us about revival passing through sinful people?
• How can we hold together gratitude for a genuine work of God and honesty about the failures of those involved in it?

Ministry Application

Write two or three sentences you might use to teach your congregation the story of Azusa Street in a way that gives thanks for God's work while learning from its human failures.