The Revival Streams

In the autumn of 1904 a young coal miner and ministry student named Evan Roberts came home to Loughor in South Wales, burdened after months of praying. He asked to speak to the young people after a service. Seventeen stayed. He put four things to them: confess every known sin, put away anything doubtful, obey the Spirit promptly, and confess Christ publicly.

It spread like fire through the valleys. Meetings ran past midnight with singing, weeping, and spontaneous prayer, and Roberts often barely preached. Estimates of around a hundred thousand converts within a year are widely reported. Pubs emptied, debts were repaid, and the story is told that pit ponies had to be retrained because the miners had stopped swearing at them. Newspapers around the world carried the reports — including in Los Angeles.

The other stream had already begun in Topeka, Kansas, where on January 1, 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues in Charles Parham's Bible school. One of Parham's students was William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, blind in one eye, who had to listen to the lectures from the hallway because of segregation.

Seymour came to Los Angeles in 1906 and was locked out of the church that had invited him. He kept praying in a house on Bonnie Brae Street; on April 9 the outpouring came, and the porch collapsed under the crowd. They moved to an abandoned building at 312 Azusa Street with sawdust on the floor and planks on nail kegs for pews. Meetings ran nearly around the clock for three years.

The journalist Frank Bartleman was there and wrote it down: "The color line was washed away in the blood." Black and white, immigrant and native-born, rich and poor worshiped together in 1906 Los Angeles — which was itself a miracle in that decade. Not everything at Azusa was orderly, and honest participants said so; but people carried what they received home to dozens of nations, and within a generation the Pentecostal movement circled the globe. In the same years God was moving in Pyongyang (1907) and at Pandita Ramabai's Mukti Mission in India.

Alongside the public outpourings ran a hidden work. Rees Howells, a Welsh miner converted in America and shaped by the 1904 revival, gave himself to intercession — praying through, at cost, until he had assurance. At the Bible College of Wales he founded in 1924, he and his students prayed through the crises of the Second World War. Their conviction, and the era's, was simple: God still speaks and still acts, and the door He opens is prayer. The next fifty years would test that in furnaces.