Pentecostalism Arises At The Azusa Street Revival

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

The African American preacher William J. Seymour led a revival that began on 9 April 1906 at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, meetings marked by Spirit baptism, speaking in tongues and other charismatic experience that drew participants across racial lines at a time when American churches were rigidly segregated. The revival continued at that address for roughly a decade, lasting until about 1915, a single sustained gathering rather than a brief flare of enthusiasm that faded within a season.

What began in one Los Angeles building did not stay there. Within two years missionaries carried what Seymour had started to more than fifty nations, spreading the practice and the conviction behind it far faster than the revival's own modest setting would suggest, turning a single congregation's meetings into the seed of a movement that would eventually reach every populated continent.

What Azusa Street changed for Pentecostalism's spread was its origin itself: the revival is commonly regarded as the founding event of the modern Pentecostal movement, the point from which a tradition now counting more than 500 million Pentecostal and charismatic believers worldwide traces its beginning. Few single gatherings anywhere in modern religious history have grown into a following of that scale within little more than a century, from one street address to a movement counted today in the hundreds of millions.