Faith Works 6-4-06
Jeff Gill

An End, And a Beginning

Pentecost is a Christian feast of the church calendar, marking fifty days (pente-, pentagon, got it?) after the events of Easter, paralleling a similar observance in Judaism following Passover.
The original Pentecost is described in the New Testament book of Acts, with the second chapter, where a sermon by Peter follows a gathering of the early church where the presence of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the trinitarian Godhead, was shown by a gift for languages and tongues of fire.
Leap forward to 1906, a century ago last April, where a revival in Los Angeles on Azusa Street was led by an African-American pastor named William Joseph Seymour. He had been to Houston, Texas recently, at a Bible school where Charles Fox Parham was teaching.
Parham had a Bible academy in Topeka, Kansas, where on New Year’s Day 1901 a student named Agnes Oznam "spoke in tongues," or experienced glossolalia, a verbal outpouring of sounds and syllables with no audible meaning.
Three days later, Parham and other students experienced the same phenomenon, and they concluded that speaking in tongues was biblical evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. This decision led to what we now know as Pentecostalism. Seymour’s preaching intersected with the San Francisco Earthquake of that month, drawing ever growing crowds and attention of the media, whose wire services were already looking to the West Coast at the destruction just north and its aftermath.
Nevermind that Parham made Seymour listen behind a door in a room separate from the white pastors in Houston: at Azusa Street, black and white worshiped together. This, as much as glossolalia, caught the public imagination.
Soon the Church of God in Christ sprang into vital, continent-spanning being; just as soon, racial reconciliation met racial divisions, and the Assemblies of God was born. Pentecostals have the mixed heritage of being more racially inclusive in worship and church life than most other denominational groups, but with their own vexed history of dividing and subdividing over racial and ethnic groupings.
A pre-existing "Holiness" movement helped push this new brand of faith and practice into the spotlight, with roots in German Pietism, Reformed revivalism, and Methodist separatism. Oberlin College here in Ohio, with Asa Mahan and Charles Grandison Finney, was one of the centers of Holiness revival, seeking a "higher life" in their traditional faith. With this movement starting in the US and England through the 1830’s, and influenced by later authors like William Boardman and Hannah Whitall Smith, institutions like the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, and William Booth’s Salvation Army were launched. A more personal and immediately transformative view of conversion and faith marked the "Higher Life" or Holiness movements, which gave birth to modern denominations like the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, the Church of the Nazarene, as well as the Salvation Army (a church before it is a social service, as many forget!); the Presbyterian A. B. Simpson led a mission-centered revival that created the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and many groups using the label "Church of God" spring from this period as well. Dwight Moody, the great revivalist of the late 1800’s, gave great force to this movement, laying the foundations for what was to come. (And you’ve likely seen he and his wife: the picture of the elderly, bearded fellow praying over a loaf of bread in the classic print is Moody, and if you have the companion print of an older woman saying grace over a bowl of soup, that’s the Missus.)
But it took the Azusa Street revival to spark the Church of God in Christ (with roots a decade earlier in a Holiness outgrowth), Assemblies of God, International Church of the Four-Square Gospel, and myriad other Pentecostal groups; mainline denominations also saw the rise of "charismatic" fellowships, or groups who worshiped with their wider fellowship but practiced the gift of tongues in private or through smaller gatherings. More recently new groups like Vineyard Fellowships, of which Licking County now has four, are not necessarily Pentecostal in outlook, expecting most members to experience the baptism of the Spirit through speaking in tongues, but charismatic in their inclusiveness of the experience.
This Holiness-Pentecostal movement has been the great gift of distinctively American Christianity to the world, with Pentecostals claiming 500 million adherents worldwide, from a few dozen in Los Angeles just a century ago. With African and Korean charismatics sending missionaries to the US, what will 2106 look like?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him at disciple@voyager.net.