Pentecostalism Started in a Former Livery Stable in Los Angeles in 1906

William J. Seymour was a 34-year-old African American Holiness preacher when he arrived in Los Angeles in February 1906 to take a small pastorate. The son of formerly enslaved parents in Louisiana, he had lost the use of one eye to smallpox and had spent the previous year studying under Charles Parham at a Bible school in Houston, where he was made to sit in the hallway because of segregation rules. The doctrine he had absorbed from Parham's sermons was that the speaking-in-tongues (glossolalia) described in the Acts of the Apostles was the missing evidence of true baptism in the Spirit and ought to recur in the church.

The Los Angeles pastorate fell apart inside a week when Seymour preached on tongues; the congregation locked him out. He moved his prayer meetings to a private home on Bonnie Brae Street. On April 9, 1906, a man named Edward S. Lee began speaking in tongues at the home prayer service. Six others followed in days. The crowd outgrew the house. Seymour and his backers rented a deteriorating two-story former African Methodist Episcopal building at 312 Azusa Street that had been functioning since as a livery stable. Rent was $8 a month. Plank benches, an eight-foot ceiling, sawdust floors. The revival ran daily, three services a day, for the next three years.

The most surprising thing about Azusa, in 1906 Los Angeles, was who was in the room. Seymour led integrated services — Black, white, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, immigrant, illiterate, university-trained, all worshipping together — fourteen years before American women got the vote and at the height of Jim Crow. Visitors carried the practice home. By 1907, the Apostolic Faith newsletter was printing 40,000 copies and missionaries had reached fifty countries. Modern Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, mostly traceable to Azusa Street, now numbers around 500 million believers.