The Street Mission That Read Itself Into This Chapter

For most of Christian history this chapter was read as a unique, unrepeatable founding event, the moment the church itself began. In April 1906 a small congregation meeting on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, led by the African American preacher William Seymour, read it differently, as a pattern meant to recur, and one that had just recurred among them. Cecil Robeck's history of the mission describes services that ran for years, day and night, built around the claim that speaking in tongues was the outward sign of the same baptism in the Holy Spirit this chapter describes happening to the apostles.

The revival's own theology drew on the distinction already present in the passage's own account, between tongues the crowd understands as their own languages and the less structured phenomenon later addressed in Paul's letters to Corinth; Azusa Street participants and the Pentecostal movement that grew from the mission generally read the two together as one gift under different circumstances, against readings that keep them apart. Within a few years missionaries trained at Azusa Street had carried the practice worldwide, and global Pentecostalism, one of the fastest growing branches of Christianity in the twentieth century, traces its own founding narrative to a congregation that took this chapter as an instruction to expect a repeat performance rather than as history closed.