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The Azusa Street Revival Centennial

The Lasting Impact of the Azusa Street Revival

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Azusa Street Revival: Bringing in the Kingdom

By Paul Strand
Washington Sr. Correspondent

CBN.com – LOS ANGELES, California - For three years, the Azusa Street Revival lit a Holy Ghost fire in a humble Los Angeles mission building, then it spread all over the city, and soon, across the world.

Why did people so want this Baptism in the Holy Spirit?

Eddie Hyatt, the author of 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity, said, "Acts 1:8, 'You shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses.’"

Hyatt was commissioned to write a few of the key books celebrating the Azusa centennial.

"(The) primary purpose of the Baptism is to empower us to be witnesses for Jesus Christ," Hyatt explained.

He says it is that power -- the miracles, healings, signs, and wonders -- that so often make God so real to those who witness it. And that Pentecost power flowed from Azusa into wave after wave of revival in the decades after.

One of the most famous involved the first Pentecostal superstar was Aimee Semple McPherson. In the 1920s, she became the first woman to preach on radio, and in Hollywood she led three services a day seven days a week at the world's first mega-church.

But still, in those days, most Pentecostals were looked down upon and marginalized, according to Vinson Synan, editor of The Century of the Holy Spirit.

"Much prejudice, a lot of criticism,” Synan said. “They were called ‘holy rollers.’"

But Synan said that did not stop what the Spirit was doing. After World War II came the Healing Revival, which Pentecostals like Oral Roberts took right into the homes of Americans, via the new medium of television.

Never before had so many been able to view this type of ministry first-hand.

"Oral Roberts went on TV and the American public saw this in their living rooms. And I think that planted the seed for the charismatic movement," Synan said.

That is when the Holy Spirit in the 1960s jumped from the Pentecostal churches into the major denominations of Christianity.

Before that, Synan said, "Pentecostals -- if they were in a mainline church like Baptist or Methodist and they spoke in tongues -- they were given the ‘left foot of fellowship,’ usually."

But in April 1960, an Episcopalian priest who headed up one Van Nuys, California church dared go public about being Pentecostal.

Dennis Bennett was so thrilled with his baptism in the Holy Ghost, that he felt he had to share it with his congregation. But when he did, they became so wild and angry, they set off a near-riot.
His assistant priest threw off his robes and said, 'I can no longer work with this man.'

A parishioner got up on a chair and yelled out 'We are Episcopalians, not a bunch of wild-eyed hillbillies.'

Bennett was forced out of his church. But the righteous cause of this well-educated Englishman was covered by Time and Newsweek, where he appeared "very suave, sophisticated...the very opposite of all the stereotypes," Synan said.

Synan said the Holy Spirit used Bennett to break down the walls, and soon hundreds of thousands of Protestants in every mainline denomination were speaking in tongues and flowing in the gifts of the Spirit.

Then it happened to the Catholics.

A group of Roman Catholics from Pittsburgh's Duquesne University gathered at a retreat center in February 1967 to investigate if the Baptism of the Holy Spirit was for them. They were getting ready for a birthday party downstairs when suddenly upstairs the Holy Spirit began to touch student after student.

As they entered the upstairs chapel one by one, the Catholic students found themselves prostrate on the floor under the power of God, and many began to speak in tongues.

This movement spread rapidly, until soon there were more than 100 million Catholic charismatics.

Next to embrace this experience were the hippies -- those Flower-Power kids burned out on sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll were discovering the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost at welcoming churches – such as Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in southern California.

The conservative Smith had to overcome his own revulsion to reach out to these young longhairs.

Smith said, "My first impression was 'Dirty hippies -- why don't you get a bath and get a job?'’“ But he soon came to love these Jesus People, as they were dubbed.

He said that God radically changed their lives and they, in turn, radically changed the way the church worships, bringing in modern music and lively exuberant praise.

Smith also found these young people filled with extraordinary faith that the Spirit of God could meet all their needs.

Once Smith was given five fish and since he didn't need them, he took them to one of the Jesus People's communal houses, where they had just been praying for fish!

Smith recalled, "The girls who were fixing dinner said, 'I'll bet you brought fish, and I'll bet there are five because we're fixing dinner tonight, and we needed five fish for the meal.' And I said, 'You've got it!'"

The charismatic renewal rolled on into the 1990s, sparking major revivals in Brownsville, Florida and Toronto, Canada that spread like wildfire worldwide.

That is because -- as John and Carol Arnott of Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship explain -- Christians who came from all over the world got infected with the power that God's Spirit was unleashing in Brownsville and Toronto.

Carol said, "Everybody that was there seemed to...well, they were contagious after that. When they prayed for people, the Holy Spirit came on them."

Revivals like Toronto's are thriving all over the world today, and John Arnott thinks that is because charismatics keep doing what God wants done.

"The very thing that Jesus did,” John said, “we are to be doing -- bringing the kingdom, with signs and wonders...a demonstration of the Spirit."

But some segments of Christianity doubt that these signs and wonders, these gifts of the Spirit, are a legitimate blessing from God.

Florida-based radio preacher Hank Lindstrom believes that the gifts of the Spirit disappeared -- they were no longer needed -- when the last apostle wrote the last book of the Bible.

“In I Corinthians 13:8-10: when the Word of God would be complete, then there were several gifts listed that would cease, and tongues was one of those that would stop." Lindstrom said.

Historian Eddie Hyatt says that this “cessation theory,” as it is called, is flawed because its belief that the gifts disappeared with the apostles is not true.

Hyatt said, "I wrote a book called 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity, where I documented the gifts of the Holy Spirit all throughout church history. And the famous church fathers recognized by both Catholics and Protestants in the early centuries -- Irenaeus, Tertullian, Augustine -- up into the 5th century. They all talk about speaking in tongues, miracles, healings, even the raising of the dead."

Synan says Scriptures about tongues must be parsed most carefully. "The Bible does say 'whether there be tongues, they shall cease,' and people grabbed onto that one verse, but it also said knowledge would cease," he explained.

Still, Lindstrom argues that Jesus warned that Satan in the last days would use false gifts and miracles.

Lindstrom said, "And He said there would arise false Christs and false prophets and they would show great signs and wonders insomuch if it were possible they would deceive the very elect."

As for tongues, Lindstrom declares it is made up, or of the devil. "Today, I believe it's a gibberish," he said.

But does Satan lead people to praise the Lord?

Harold Bredesen, one of the most influential mainline ministers who became a charismatic, remembers walking in a forest singing in tongues just after his Baptism in the Spirit. He ran into a Polish man who said Bredesen was praising God in Polish, going from one Slavic dialect to another.

Eddie Hyatt has a Pentecostal friend who ministers in an isolated region of northern India. "On numerous occasions he has heard illiterate Indians praise God fluently in English when they are baptized in the Holy Spirit," he said

One thing is for sure: signs and wonders have been a powerful pull to hundreds of millions of people who have given their hearts to Jesus in this Pentecostal century.

Indeed, within these 100 years, there has been more evangelism with more spectacular results than at any other time in history.

Dr. Philip Jenkins wrote The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. He points out that although many say Islam is the world's fastest growing religion, it is actually Christianity -- especially among Pentecostals -- who only numbered a few thousand in 1906.

"Today, you're dealing with several hundred million people, and the best projections are by 2040s or 2050s, you could be dealing with a billion Pentecostals worldwide,” Jenkins said. “By that stage there will be more Pentecostals than Hindus. There are already more Pentecostals than Buddhists."

Even in China, where a violently atheist government ruled for decades, there are some hundred-million Christians -- many of them charismatics. It is a twelfth of the population now, but experts predict the percentage will soar to 25 or 30 percent in the next two or three decades.

At the start of the 1900s, only 10 million Africans were Christians, a tenth of the population. Today, it is 360 million, just a little less than half of all Africa.

There, in crusades led by the likes of Reinhard Bonnke, millions are saved and thousands are healed in some of the world's largest mass meetings.

Synan says that Pentecostalism has become the “religion of choice” now in the third world, and he thinks the numbers are growing so large in Africa and Latin America that "there are whole nations that in the 21st century will have a majority population of Pentecostals."

Synan expects the numbers to keep soaring throughout the new century. "Sometime in the 21st century,” he said, “Pentecostals and charismatics will be half of all the Christians in the world…It's incredible, the vast scale of this Pentecostal revival and charismatic movement that is moving all over the Earth."

And it all started at that old beat-up building called the Azusa Street Mission.

Azusa Street really is nothing but a short, one-block alley now. There is nothing left of it but a couple of plaques to testify about the revival fires that burst out here in 1906.

But the wonders, the miracles that happened in the Mission are the heritage of every Pentecostal and charismatic — all 600 million of them -- who enjoy the blessings of the Holy Spirit today.

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