Azusa Street Missionaries Found The Apostolic Faith Mission In South Africa

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

John G. Lake and Thomas Hezmalhalch, both baptised in the Holy Spirit at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, arrived in South Africa from Indianapolis in May 1908 together with three companions, carrying the revival's practice to a country neither man had worked in before and to a continent the movement had not yet reached at all. They began ministry in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, on 25 May of that year, barely two years after Seymour's meetings had first opened in Los Angeles.

What they started did not become a formal body immediately. An organising committee first met in September 1908, but four more years passed before the Apostolic Faith Mission was registered as a legal entity in 1913, a gap between the movement's first meetings and its settled institutional form that stretched across half a decade of ministry conducted without a fixed legal footing.

What this founding changed for Pentecostalism's spread was reach far beyond the revival's North American origin: the Apostolic Faith Mission became one of Pentecostalism's first footholds outside North America, carried there in under two years by missionaries who had themselves been present at the Los Angeles meetings the tradition traces its beginning to, planting the movement on a second continent within a decade of Azusa Street itself and giving it an institutional presence in South Africa that would long outlast its founders.