PENTECOSTALISM

In a time when society valued binary segregation and utterly rejected mixed races, Seymour’s egalitarian revival stood as a monument to racial confluence, racial convergence, and racial integration. Robeck agrees:

“The Azusa Street Mission...was nonetheless quite different from nearly all other existing African American congregations in the city, its differences lay in the fact that it attracted participation from more Caucasians than did any other African American congregation in the city. And its worship style was not consistent with that shared by the upwardly mobile majority of African Americans. In fact, it represented more the style of slave churches in the African American past, the style of frontier rather than urban worship, a style from which much of Los Angeles’ African-American population had attempted to distance itself” (Robeck 35).

Gaston Espinosa beautifully connects the historical significance of Seymour's interracial congregation choosing the site at 312 Azusa Street, a former AME church. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the oldest black denominations in the United States. The denomination started in 1814 after Absalom Jones was asked to pray in the segregated seating in the rear of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia (Espinosa 58). Jones refused and left to co-found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Almost a century later, the Methodist Episcopal church, like most churches across America, were still segregated by race. “However, at Azusa...blacks and whites transgressed this social prohibition and prayed together at the front altar” (Espinosa 58).

Pentecostalism’s immense global impact and Azusa Street’s multinational appeal is undeniable. Most scholars point to the fact that at its pinnacle, over twenty nationalities worshiped in one accord at Azusa street (Espinosa 56). While dozens of nationalities participated in Azusa, the vast majority of its pioneers and attendees came from either a European or African heritage. What began as an all-black prayer meeting between Seymour and a handful of African American friends on Bonnie Brae Street transformed into a racially diverse movement with “far more white people than colored” attending (Bartleman 61). During the peak of the Azusa Street Revival, whites and blacks gathered together three times a day, seven days a week. History shows that over a three-year period the Azusa Street Revival reversed the social norm of segregation not once, but three-thousand two-hundred and eighty-five times.

(Dennis B Lacy, Segregation and Spirituality: Rediscovering American Pentecostalism’s Biracial Roots within Binary Traditions)