Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History

Abstract

As news of the great Welsh Revival of 1904 reached Southern California, Frank Bartleman, an itinerant evangelist and pastor living in Los Angeles, became convinced that God was preparing to revitalize his beloved holiness movement with a powerful, even apocalyptic, spiritual awakening. Certain that events in Wales would be duplicated in California, Bartleman reported in 1905 that “the Spirit is brooding over our land.… Los Angeles, Southern California, and the whole continent shall surely find itself ere long in the throes of a mighty revival.” In 1906 he speculated that theSan Francisco earthquake “was surely the voice of God to the people on the Pacific Coast.” Bartleman indeed witnessed such a revival, for in early April 1906, this “Latter Rain” outpouring had begun to fall on a small gathering of saints led by William J. Seymour, a black holiness preacher. At a vacant AME mission at 312 Azusa Street, countless pentecostals received the baptism of the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in other tongues—a “second Pentecost” replicating the first recorded in Acts 2. Bartleman, who also experienced this, would soon become integral to the revival's growth by reporting the events at Los Angeles within a vast network of holiness and higher life periodicals. As during other religious awakenings, such reports not only generated the perception of widespread divine activity but also provided an interpretive scheme for understanding the meaning of such activity. For Bartleman, Azusa was the starting point of a worldwide awakening that would initiate Christ's return. He reported: “Los Angeles seems to be the place, and this the time, in the mind of God, for the restoration of the church to her former place.”