A Falling Down Building on Azusa Street

Start with the hallway, because everything else reads differently once you know about it.

In 1905, in Houston, Texas, a man named William J. Seymour wanted to attend a short Bible school led by Charles Parham. Seymour was Black. He was the son of parents who had been enslaved. He had lost the sight in one eye, most accounts say to smallpox.

Texas law and Texas custom did not permit him to sit in the classroom with the white students.

So he sat in the hallway, outside the door, and listened through the doorway.

That is the documented arrangement, and it is where the man who would be at the center of the events on Azusa Street learned what he learned.

In February 1906 he traveled to Los Angeles, having been invited to preach at a small mission. Within a short time the invitation was withdrawn and the door of that mission was locked against him. He ended up staying with a family and holding meetings in a house on North Bonnie Brae Street.

Something began there in April 1906. Within days the crowds were too large for the porch, and they moved to a building at 312 Azusa Street: a former African Methodist Episcopal church that had since been used as a livery stable and a warehouse.

Frank Bartleman, who was there, published an account of it afterward, and it is one of the main written sources we have.

Look at the building and look at the room

The building was not a church any more. It had sawdust on the floor and planks laid across nail kegs for seats. Bartleman's written account describes the plainness of it, and the fact that there was no platform and no fixed order.

And the room was mixed.

That is the fact that made it notorious at the time, in Los Angeles, in 1906. Black and white worshippers, and Mexican, and Chinese, and immigrants of a dozen kinds, in one room, in a city and a country that did not do that. Newspapers wrote about it with open contempt, and some of the reporting from the period is unpleasant to read.

Bartleman wrote a sentence about it that has been quoted ever since: the color line was washed away in the blood.

You are not the wrong sort. Acts 10:34 says God is no respecter of persons, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that off the page and puts it over a person who has been told, in words or otherwise, that they are the wrong kind.

Here is the verse.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of personsActs 10:34, King James Version

Notice the word perceive. Peter is reporting a realization. He did not always know this. He had to be shown it, in a vision, on a roof, and then argue about it with his own colleagues afterward.

You have a sentence that the first generation had to be argued into, and it is written down as a discovery. Acts 10:34 records Peter perceiving rather than reciting, and the same Spirit who kept it in that form is the reason a person who has been excluded is not being handed a platitude.

Now the honest part, and this category requires it.

The integration at Azusa Street did not last. Within a few years the movement that came out of it had divided along the same lines as the country around it, and by 1914 there were separate white and Black bodies. Historians differ about the causes, about how integrated the meetings actually remained after the first year, and about how much responsibility lies where. That argument is live in the scholarship and I am not going to settle it.

What is not in dispute is that for a period, in a warehouse with sawdust on the floor, it was otherwise. And that the man at the center of it had learned in a hallway.

You are looking at a room that did not stay that way and was still real while it lasted. The written accounts from 1906 describe it plainly and the later divisions are documented too, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps both facts standing without either one canceling the other.

You have been shown that a room can be otherwise, even if it did not stay that way. Acts 10:34 states it as a fact about God rather than an achievement of any church, and it is His Spirit who keeps that from depending on how well anybody kept it up.

There is one more detail from Bartleman's account that I keep coming back to.

He wrote that there was no fixed order in those meetings, and that nobody was announced, and that Seymour would often sit behind the crates with his head inside them, praying, while things went on.

The man who is remembered as the leader of it spent a lot of the time with his head in a box.