The Origins of the Pentecostal Movement
The place of William Seymour as an important religious leader now seems to be assured. As early as 1972 Sidney Ahlstrom, the noted church historian from Yale University, said that Seymour was “the most influential black leader in American religious history.” Seymour, along with Charles Parham, could well be called the “co-founders” of world pentecostalism.
American Pentecostal Pioneers
The first wave of “Azusa pilgrims” journeyed throughout the United States spreading the Pentecostal fire, primarily in holiness churches, missions, and camp meetings. For some time, it was thought that it was necessary to journey to California to receive the “blessing.” Soon, however, people received the tongues experience wherever they lived.
American pentecostal pioneers who received tongues at Azusa Street went back to their homes to spread the movement among their own people, at times against great opposition. One of the first was Gaston Barnabas Cashwell of North Carolina, who spoke in tongues in 1906. His six-month preaching tour of the South in 1907 resulted in major inroads among Southern holiness folk. Under his ministry, Cashwell saw several holiness denominations swept into the new movement, including the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, and the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church.
Testifying in a Chicago church in 1941.
Also in 1906, Charles Harrison Mason journeyed to Azusa Street and returned to Memphis, Tennessee to spread the pentecostal fire in the Church of God in Christ. Mason and the church he founded were made up of African Americans only one generation removed from slavery. (The parents of both Seymour and Mason had been born as southern slaves). Although tongues caused a split in the church in 1907, the Church of God in Christ experienced such explosive growth that by 1993, it was by far the largest Pentecostal denomination in North America claiming some 5,500,000 members in 15,300 local churches. Another Azusa Pilgrim was William H. Durham of Chicago. After receiving his tongues experience at Azusa Street in 1907 he returned to Chicago where he led thousands of mid-western Americans and Canadians into the pentecostal movement. His “finished work” theology of gradual progressive sanctification, which he announced in 1910, led to the formation of the Assemblies of God in 1914. Since many white pastors had formerly been part of Mason’s church, the beginnings of the Assemblies of God was also partially a racial separation. In time the Assemblies of God church was destined to become the largest Pentecostal denominational church in the world, claiming by 1993 over 2,000,000 members in the U.S. and some 25,000,000 adherents in 150 nations of the world.
Missionaries of the One-Way Ticket
In addition to the ministers who received their pentecostal experience at Azusa Street, there were thousands of others who were indirectly influenced by the revival in Los Angeles. Among these was Thomas Ball Barratt of Norway, a Methodist pastor later to be known as the pentecostal apostle to northern and western Europe. Receiving a glossolalic baptism in the Spirit in New York City in 1906, he returned to Oslo where he conducted the first pentecostal services in Europe in December of 1906. From Norway, Barratt traveled to Sweden, England, France, and Germany where he sparked other national Pentecostal movements. Under Barratt such leaders as Lewi Pethrus in Sweden, Jonathan Paul in Germany and Alexander Boddy in England were brought into the movement.
Category: Church History, Fall 2000
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