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by Jim Holman.
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They Breathed Strange Utterances

Pentecost on Azusa Street

BY CHARLES A. COULOMBE

Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles' Little Tokyo is not much to look at today -- it's really just an alley leading to the rear of the Japanese Cultural Center. But a century ago it was witness to practically the first chapter in a story that has gone round the world and affected the whole of Christianity -- both inside and outside of the Catholic Church. Whether one looks at the Assemblies of God (which brought us such notables as Jimmie Swaggart and James Bakker), the Church of the Four Square Gospel of Aimee Semple McPherson, or our own Catholic Charismatic Movement, they all owe their origins to this little back alley.

It was a very different place in 1906. In April of that year, at a run-down former stable that had seen use as a Black Methodist Church, Azusa Street witnessed some rather strange goings-on. According to a sizzling exposé in the Los Angeles Times of the time, the shabby structure was host to people "breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand." Were that not sufficient to put the town's vigilant citizens on guard, "devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories, and work themselves into a state of mad excitement." Breaking the race barrier, "Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication." The worshippers maintained that they had the "gift of tongues," and could "comprehend the babel."

These nocturnal hootenannies owed their origin to a black preacher, William Seymour. Born May 2, 1870, in Centerville, Louisiana, to former slaves Simon and Phillis Seymour, he was baptized a Catholic on September 4 of that year at the Church of the Assumption in nearby Franklin. Founded in 1858, it is today one of the most magnificent churches in the state -- not only was it filled with beautiful statuary, marble altars, and stained glass in the fist half of the century, but the immediate post-Vatican II damage was repaired in 1995, and the tabernacle and Blessed Sacrament have been replaced on the high altar.

This lay in the future at the time of Seymour's birth. What was in the present at that time, however, was the Freedmen's Bureau, an office erected by the Federal government, ostensibly to guide the newly liberated slaves onto the path of freedom. In Louisiana, at any rate, that mandate was interpreted by the local bureau leadership as entailing getting as many of their charges to abandon Catholicism as possible. (To be fair, during the same period the Bureau of Indian Affairs replaced Catholic with Protestant missionaries on many Indian reservations.) The Freedmen's Bureau was successful with Seymour's parents, who apostatized and raised their son Baptist.

Unhappy with the Jim Crow laws that succeeded Reconstruction, William moved up north to Cincinnati, Ohio. There he encountered the "Holiness Movement." This spin-off from Methodism took John Wesley's notion of Christian perfection (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement) further and taught that "that the 'carnal nature' of man can be cleansed through faith and by the power of the Holy Spirit if one has had his sins forgiven through faith in Jesus. The benefits professed include 'spiritual power' and an ability to maintain purity of heart (that is, thoughts and motives that are uncorrupted by sin). The doctrine is typically referred to in Holiness churches as 'entire sanctification,' though it is more widely known as 'Christian perfection.'"The local adherents of these notions Seymour met with were Martin Wells Knapp's God's Revivalist movement and Daniel Warner's Church of God Reformation movement. To the usual Holiness beliefs, they added an apocalyptic element: They believed that "they were living in the twilight of human history," and "that the Spirit's outpouring would precede the rapture of the Church."

Imbued with these ideas, Seymour moved on to Houston, where he encountered a Black Holiness group whose pastoress, Lucy Farrow, had been governess to the children of Charles Parham, a figure instrumental in what would be a major split in Holiness circles. As head of the Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, Parham came to believe and teach that baptism in the Holy Spirit would manifest itself in speaking in tongues in order to equip believers for missionary evangelism. (This was not the ability to speak in one's own language and have listeners who did not know it understand, or to speak languages one did not already know, as in the New Testament and the lives of such saints as Francis Xavier, but rather to speak incomprehensibly and have others able to interpret one's words). This radical teaching roused opposition among the "right wing" of the Holiness Movement, who have been referred to as "Perfectionists" ever since -- the Church of the Nazarene was one such grouping. Farham's followers came to be called "Pentecostals."

In 1905, Parham himself moved on to Houston, where he employed Miss Farrow, and, at her urging, began teaching Seymour. At these classes, the young man from Louisiana became convinced and converted. Seymour began preaching himself and impressed a visiting black Angeleno, Neeley Terry. She asked the leader of her home congregation, Julia Hutchinson, to invite Seymour out west; being in search of a pastor, Hutchinson agreed. Seymour arrived in Los Angeles in February 1906.

Once ensconced in L.A., Seymour began preaching to his new flock that speaking in tongues was the biblical evidence of having received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. For a number of reasons (not least because Seymour himself had not received the baptism he preached on, using only English to do so), Miss Hutchinson and the other congregants locked their new pastor out. The congregation's parent, the Holiness Church Association of Southern California, echoed the condemnation. Even so, member Edward Lee invited Seymour to hold Bible studies and prayer meetings at Lee's home. The young minister went on to do the same at the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry at 214 N. Bonnie Brae Street. Despite the change in venue, five weeks later, Lee became the first to speak in tongues, right there at the Asberrys' house. Finally, on April 12, after all his preaching about it, Seymour himself began speaking in tongues. Crowds of people began to join in the nightly rituals, until so many attended that the front porch collapsed under their weight.

To prevent further damage to the house, Seymour and his friends rented a former stable (that had also done duty as Stevens African Methodist Episcopal Church) at 312 Azusa Street. Although Seymour grandly named it the Apostolic Faith Mission, the Los Angeles Times article quoted earlier called it a "tumble down shack." But despite the lumber and plaster littering the ground floor, between 300 and 350 people began attending. Word spread amongst both blacks and poor whites. Thus began the famous "Azusa Street Revival." By Autumn, visitors from all over the world descended on the mission either to scoff or accept. Enough of the latter came that the small mission was able to support a magazine that spread Seymour's message overseas. Speaking in tongues made its way across the globe to small churches and congregations of a great many different denominations. Pentecostalism was born. Of course, its interests were not confined to speaking in tongues. Healings, exorcisms -- even, in a few remote areas, the taking up of poisonous serpents (hence snake-handlers) -- were practiced as signs of impending glory.

The mix of races that had characterized Azusa Street's beginning eventually gave way to most whites joining other groups; Seymour's congregation became primarily black. But he soldiered on until his death in 1922, after which his widow acted as pastoress until her own demise nine years later. Although the Azusa Street mission is long gone, the Asberry house at 214 Bonnie Brae, where Seymour first started his ministry, survived the ruin of its porch and has become a museum of Pentecostal heritage.

But Seymour's heritage is far broader than that. Pentecostalism spread throughout the religious world of poor whites and poorer blacks, creating the Assemblies of God and Aimee Semple McPherson. Ridiculed as "Holy Rollers," the religion was considered to be a faith for the poverty-struck -- good enough for the great unwashed, perhaps, but with nothing to offer mainstream Protestants, and certainly not Catholics. They had their own denominations, after all.

This changed after World War II, when, in 1952, a young Methodist Minister in Chapel Hill, North Carolina believed that he had received baptism of the Holy Ghost and began speaking in tongues and the rest of it. Of course, in a sense, given its historical roots, Pentecostalism was only coming home in its entrance into Methodism. By 1968, Oral Roberts, an extremely well-known Pentecostal minister, felt comfortable becoming Methodist.

But the phenomenon would expand further. On April 3, 1960, the Rev. Dennis Bennett, rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, announced that he had received the "Baptism of the Spirit" and was now able to speak in tongues, heal, and so on. From about this time, "charismatic" -- referring to a member of a mainstream church who believed that he was exercising the gifts of the Holy Ghost -- was differentiated from "Pentecostal," which continued to mean an adherent of one of the many mushrooming denominations of the poor.

Nor was Catholicism to be immune. The period after the Second Vatican Council, when so many traditions were abandoned seemingly overnight and thousands of the faithful found themselves extremely confused, to say the least, many were looking for something, anything to hold on to.

In this context, an odd development occurred in 1967: the "Duquesne Week-end." "On February, 1967, about a year after four Duquesne University professors in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania started praying together to stir up fervor within their Catholic faith, a small group of individuals met with these faculty members for a weekend. One engaged couple had heard of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and they desired it; so they asked the professors to pray with them so that the Spirit would more fully enter their lives. The party quietly went to an upstairs bedroom where they prayed. Soon all felt the Spirit of Christ as the Spirit was manifested in the gift of tongues in which the young man and woman praised God."

From there it spread like wildfire amongst Catholics, due in no small part to the intervention of Kevin Ranaghan. A religion scholar at Notre Dame, he received the "Baptism of the Spirit" on March 5, 1967, after hearing about the event from a friend at Duquesne. After introducing the baptism of the Spirit to his university, he went on to be ordained a deacon and to co-found the ecumenical "People of Praise" community in 1971. Adherents of the phenomena began calling it the "Charismatic Renewal."

Considered revolutionary at the time, the Charismatics engendered a great deal of opposition among more conservative Catholics. Among the criticisms were that Charismatics tended to place more stock in their subjective experiences and feeling than in the Church's teachings and sacraments; they seemed closer to and more comfortable with non-Catholic Charismatics and Pentecostals than with their co-religionists; and their "happy-clappy" style of worship lowered the tone of the Mass in general.

Regardless of the truth of these accusations, there were other elements at work among some of the Charismatics. When the phenomenon spread to Latin American and European Catholics, some of its more bizarre symptoms quieted somewhat. Speaking in tongues was not that widely practiced among these folk, and some began to rediscover traditional doctrines and prayers. Moreover, in common with North American Pentecostals, if not always with North American Catholic Charismatics, these folk had a lively belief in the devil and a strong notion that deviation from traditional morality gave him strength over the individual.

Although the excitement of the 1960s and '70s has passed away as its great names have died or become debilitated, the questions Charismatic and Pentecostal activities raise remain. Are the manifestations of God, or the devil, or human foibles? Rome has not ruled definitively, and so neither can the individual. In some ways, however, the Pentecostals, at least, remain controversial.

This being the centennial of the Azusa Street Revival, many Pentecostal groups, in the midst of planning the celebrations centering around both the Bonnie Brae House and the little alley Azusa Street has become, have hoped to put up some memorial actually on the spot -- specifically, a mural on the wall of the community center (there are flimsy city signs commemorating the mission at the foot of the street). So far, the community center has had no interest in accommodating them. But the reason behind this lack of interest may lie with local religious groups. According to an article in the February 17, 2006 Pacific Citizen by executive Carolyn Aoyagi, "more recently some concerns have been raised by the Nikkei Interfaith Council, a group of various Christian and Buddhist churches in the Little Tokyo area. They believe the values and beliefs of the Pentecostal Church are in direct opposition to their beliefs, especially on ethnicity, diversity of culture, and gender orientation issues. 'The Nikkei Interfaith Council has values we believe are at odds with the values associated with this church,' said Pastor Mark Nakagawa of the Centenary United Methodist Church, who noted that although Little Tokyo may be the home of the Pentecostal Church Movement, Japanese churches and temples have been here even longer."

But if Pentecostal morality displeases some clerics, other have an alternative view. According to Walter Cardinal Kasper, newly appointed by Benedict XVI as president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, "we have begun a fairly substantial dialogue with the Pentecostals, who with more than 500 million adherents are now the second-largest Christian confession after the Catholic Church, and are especially present in the southern hemisphere, in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. They are showing enormous growth, and some are even speaking of the Christianity of the future."

In regard to this Pentecostal "tidal wave," Kasper, according to a June 6 Chiesa.com story, remarked that "it seems to me that self-critical inquiry is more important than the traditional ecumenical questions. Why are these communities so attractive? What are we missing? How can we improve our pastoral practice? How can we make our parish liturgy more lively? How can we begin substantial and essential catechesis? How can we accomplish healthy renewal and spiritual reinvigoration?" This is a pressing issue in such places as Guatemala, where Pentecostals and other Protestants have risen in three decades from one percent of the population to a third. Of course, one frequently cited reason among Guatemalan apostates is that Catholic priests tend to speak more about social issues than of Jesus or morality.

A lot to think about, as one walks through the dingy little alley where it all began.

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