The most prominent leader of Azusa St. was Wm. Seymour, born 1870 in La. As son of slaves. Moved to Houston in 1903and said of himself, “Such a hunger to have more of God was in my heart that I prayed for 5 hrs., a day for 2.5 yrs”
There was a man named Charles Parham who had a Bible College in Topeka Kansas. He and the students in his Bible College had experience an outpouring of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues at the closing days of 1900.
In 1905 Charles Parham came to Houston to conduct a city-wide crusade and to start a Bible school there. Seymour wanted to join the school in Houston, but because of segregation at the time he was unable to sit in the classroom. Parham skirted the issue by allowing him to sit in an adjacent room and listen to the teachings through an open door. (P.25 CFNI)
Seymour was invited to come pastor a storefront church in LA. After prayer he felt led to go there and left Houston in Feb. 1906. Even though Seymour himself did not have the Bapt. at that time, he preached it without wavering. In his first services as pastor, he preached about the Bapt. of HS W evidence of tongues. The church rejected this and when he returned to preach the evening service, the door was padlocked, and he was without a church. Some local people had compassion on him and allowed him to stay in their home where they opened their home to evening prayer meetings at 214 Bonnie Brae St.
His hunger for more of God was overpowering. He asked the Lord what he should do further, and the Lord told him to pray more. He was already praying 5 hrs a day so he increased it to
7 hrs. a day. He prayed for God to give him what Parham preached… the real Holy Ghost with fire and tongues, and the power of God like the apostles had. (p.28 CFNI)
One night at the Asberry’s home where they were having prayer meeting a move of the Spirit broke out. People were getting healed and falling out under the power of God as they walked into the door or the house. There was shouting and praising God for three days and nights.
The crowds grew until they could no longer continue to meet in Asberry’s home, so they started looking for another place to meet. They found an older bldg. at 312 Azusa Street measuring 40 ft. by 60 ft. It was a two-story structure that had most recently been used as a warehouse and a stable. The only problem was no $ to rent it.
Seymour prayed for direction & God instructed him to get on a trolley car one night and go to Pasadena. When God told him to get off, he did. The Spirit led him to a certain apartment. Unknown to Seymour there was a group of women inside that were hungry for the Bapt. in HG. They had been praying together for months. That night they had been praying for hours specifically for revival in the LA area. One of the ladies was a teenager named Sis. Carney who had just arrived to Pasadena that afternoon. It was @10:30 at night when Seymour, a Afr. Am. Man W one blind eye knocked on the door. All the ladies came to the door together. Though startled, one of them said,” Can I help you?” Seymour replied, “You are praying for revival, right?” They said yes & he replied, “I am the man God has sent to preach that revival.” They invited him in and after preaching to them he took up an offering which was enough to rent the bldg.
They cleaned out the debris. Sis. Carney laughingly said she was glad she had been assigned to clean out the droppings from small goats instead of the mounds of animal waste from the cattle and horses. Meetings began there on Ap. 14, 1906 & continued for 3.5 years.
The meetings were spontaneous with no prearranged order, no special singing, no well-known evangelists, no collections, no advertisements, no church organization backing them. The Holy Ghost was in control. Seymour was the leader. He spent most of his time behind the pulpit with his head in a box praying and waiting on the Lord. God began to manifest His power, and the meeting would continue all day and into the night. When well-dressed preachers came in to “Investigate”, conviction would soon fall on them and they would be wallowing on the floor asking God to forgive them. In a typical service someone would be talking and suddenly the Spirit would fall on the congregation, “God Himself would give the altar call. Men would fall over the house like the slain in battle, or rush to the altar to seek God.”
The bldg. was always full of people praying. Services usually began mid-morning and continued until 3-4 a.m. Though there were many supernatural manifestations, the most prominent feature or the revival was God’s love. Frank Bartleman, a journalist and participant in the revival describes it like this…
” The Baptism as we received it in the beginning did not allow us to THINK, SPEAK, or HEAR evil of any man. We knew the moment we had grieved the Spirit by an unkind thought or word. We seemed to live in a sea of pure divine love.” (p.33 CFNI)
The revival began with about 150 people, but by fall news had spread and people were coming from all over North America and the nations of the world. Concerning the racial issue Bartleman wrote, “the color line has been washed away by the Blood.” (p.xviii-Bart)
Miracles:
p.41 One day a woman came in holding a bloody cloth over one ear. She was in agony. Sis Carney asked what had happened. The wife came home and found another woman in bed with her husband. The 2 women got into a fight and the second woman bit off the ear of the wife, who then came to Azusa St. Sis. Carney put her hand over the bloody area where the ear used to be & began to pray. The pain left immediately. When she removed her hand, much to her amazement, a new ear was growing out right in front of her eyes.
P.43-44 When Seymour would come down from his upstairs apt. he would put a box over his head and wait on the Lord to tell him what to do. Great miracles would happen when he took the box of and did what God told him to do. At times he would point to a section that had all cot or wheelchairs that had been brought from the hosp. and say,” Everyone on cots or wheelchairs, you are healed in the Name of Jesus.” They would all get up at once, walk around, and be completely healed.
p.42-43 Many people came in wheelchairs. It became the Carney rule to fold up the footrests on the chair before praying, knowing that God would heal them. One such man was the pastor of a big church in LA named Aubrey. He had heavy braces on his legs and hadn’t walked in years. Sis. Carney prayed and then lifted his feet and put them on the ground. She told him to get up and walk. He said he couldn’t because of the braces, so she told them to remove the braces. He immediately got up and walked.
p.140 While at Azusa St., Bill Brown loved ministering to those that were blind. While there he participated in the healing of over 50 blind people, and they all saw instantaneously. One healing was a woman who was born blind. Her eyes were totally black. The whites of the eyes never developed. After he prayed, she let out a bloodcurdling scream which scared him. That is why he remembered her so well. She could see for the first time in her life. When Bill Brown was an older man in a retirement home, one day God told him to go pray for an old lady that had been blind since her mid-thirties. He went over to her, removed her thick black glasses, broke her cane in two, put his hands over her eyes and prayed. When he took his hands away, she could see perfectly. The gift of healing eyes still remained.
P.48The fire department responded to calls of the bldg. on fire. Came running inside-no sign of flames or smoke, but outside you could see flames coming down from heaven and meeting flames shooting up from the bldg. When this happened, there was an extraordinary anointing for miracles.
P.55 On one occasion when the flames of God were shooting, there was a man who had smoked a cigar all his life. Where he kept the cigar hanging from one corner of his mouth, he had developed cancer which had already eaten away much of his cheek. What was left of that cheek was black and rotting. You could see into his mouth where even gums and teeth had been destroyed by cancer and were missing. Seymour asked him how long the Dr. said he could live. He replied, 1yr. or less. Seymour said, “God can change that.” Seymour laid hands on him and prayed. When he removed his hand, the black was gone and they watched in astonishment as missing teeth, gums, and flesh filled in where there had been none before.
P. On another occasion when fire was shooting there was a man who had lost his arm in an accident on the job. The arm had been pulled out of the socket and was lost. He was told to remove the prosthetic arm which was useless to him. Seymour asked him if he was able to make a living with just one arm. He said, “ barely”. Seymour prayed and they all stood stunned as they watched the bone start growing with flesh growing behind it. They even watched as fingers and fingernails grew out. No one in the world could deny that these miracles were done by the hand of God.
P. 58Bro. Christopher was a young man about 18years old who played his violin at Azusa St. One night the parents of a teenage boy carried their son up to Christopher, saying that he had had a brain hemorrhage 4-5 years before and had been this way since then. They asked if God would heal him, and Christopher said yes. He began talking to the boy even though the parents said the boy could understand nothing. He told the boy he was going to take authority over this, and he would be delivered. He put his hands on the boy and rebuked the damage the devil had done. He commanded all blood clots & everything to clear up. “I want it done now, not tomorrow, in Jesus’ Name” The boy fell down jerking and kicking, but within 10 min. he was running, jumping and praising God.
P.64 A young woman about 20 years old came in holding a tumor in her hands that was hanging off her face. It was half the size of a basketball. The doctors said it was too large for them to remove surgically. She knew she would die with it, so she decided to come to Azusa St. She had heard of the miracles happening there and had seen the fire going up and coming down. She thought what do I have to lose? A young man named Anderson told her that God would work a miracle for her. As people laid hands on her, the tumor began to shrink. She was speechless until she finally yelled, “I am healed.” That miracle propelled her into a ministry to help thousands of people. With only 25 cents to her name, she started a soup kitchen when she was in her 20s and was still doing it when she was in her 60s.
P.87Brother Fox came to Azusa when 18 years old to be trained for the mission field in India. He would whisper in the ear of a deaf person, “You deaf spirit, you come out in the name of Jesus. “He would hear a pop or whishing sound as the ear was healed and he would go to the next person. Once a sign language teacher brought his whole class of 35 students to Azusa. Fox asked him why he brought them there, because he would soon be out of a job. The teacher laughed at him and said, “You are talking like they will all be healed.” Fox replied, “They will be.” Fox had them form a circle and hold hands. He then whispered in the ear of the first person commanding the deaf spirit to come out. Immediately the deaf man could hear and got excited. When the other deaf people saw his excitement, they too got excited and one by one God went around the circle healing every one of them without Fox doing anything. The teacher stopped laughing. He was out of a job. Through this Fox learned that you didn’t have to pray for people one at a time.
He was involved in other miracles also. He learned that the thicker the Shekinah Glory cloud of God was, the greater the miracles. By the time he was 20yo he took the healing power of God to India as a missionary. The Shekinah Glory did not go with him to India. He felt it was unique to the Azusa revival.
P.14,29 In 1910 Seymour stood up on the stage, took the box off of his head, and began to prophesy that in about 100yrs there would be another great revival like Azusa. However, this one would not be in just one place, it would be all over the world, and everyone in the body of Christ would participate, not just preachers. Shekinah Glory and miracles would accompany it. This revival would be greater than the day of Pentecost and greater than Azusa and would last until Jesus comes. He prophesied this on more than one occasion. Within a couple of days of this prophecy, Charles Parham on the opposite coast in NY City, having no knowledge of what Seymour had said, prophesied almost identical words. The mighty healing revivalist, Maria Woodworth –Etter, prophesied the same thing also. To make sure we heard His voice, and we knew that it was from Him, God spoke the prophesy through three different giants of God in three different places in close succession. We hear you God.
We now live in that approximate 100-year time frame that God spoke about and I for one am watching with expectancy to see it come at any time. I am ready to catch the wave of the tsunami of the Holy Ghost when it arrives. How about you?