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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Revival Streams
William J. Seymour
1870–1922AmericanPentecostal
The son of freed slaves who had to take his Bible lessons from the hallway, and whose Los Angeles mission became the seedbed of world Pentecostalism.
Summary
- Lived 1870–1922, American.
- Stood in The Revival Streams (1900–1950).
- Hangs on The Revivalists.
- Tradition: Pentecostal.
The life
William Joseph Seymour was born in Louisiana to parents who had been slaves, lost the sight of one eye to smallpox, and learned Pentecostal doctrine in Houston in 1905 sitting outside the classroom door, because segregation law would not let him sit inside it. Invited to preach in Los Angeles in 1906, he was locked out of the church that had invited him after his first sermon on Acts 2:4. He kept preaching in a house on Bonnie Brae Street until the porch gave way under the crowd, then moved into a run-down building at 312 Azusa Street.
What happened there ran for three years, three services a day, with Black and white and Mexican and Chinese worshipers kneeling at the same altar in a city where that was not done. Visitors carried it home to forty-some nations within two years. Seymour spent his last years pastoring the same mission, mostly forgotten, and died of a heart attack in 1922.
What was happening while he lived11 moments · 1900–1950
- Feb 1904A girl stands up in New Quay, WalesAt a young people's meeting on the Welsh coast, Florrie Evans stood and said simply that she loved the Lord Jesus with all her heart. The room broke, and the meetings that followed spread up the coast months before Evan Roberts began.
- Nov 1904 – 1905The Welsh valleys burnThe Western Mail sent reporters to follow the meetings nightly, and the story went round the world by cable. About a hundred thousand converts within the year is the figure the press and the churches gave at the time, widely repeated since, but never audited.
- 1905The social effects the newspapers recordedPapers reported taverns closing for want of custom, old debts repaid, and magistrates handed white gloves for court sessions with no cases to try. The best-loved story, that the pit ponies balked because the miners had stopped swearing at them, is the era's own testimony and hard to document.
- Jun 1905Mukti Mission, India, revival among the rescuedAt Pandita Ramabai's mission at Kedgaon, where hundreds of famine widows and orphan girls were being sheltered and taught, prayer meetings turned into weeping, confession, and reported tongues. Ramabai had asked her girls to pray for revival after reading the reports from Wales.
- Apr 1906312 Azusa StreetThey moved into an abandoned livery stable with sawdust on the floor and planks laid across nail kegs for pews. Meetings ran nearly around the clock for three years, with no set order, no name on the door, and no one taking up an offering by force.
- Sep 1906The Apostolic Faith goes out freeThe mission began printing its own paper and mailing it to anyone who asked, at no charge. It claimed a subscription list in the tens of thousands and reported healings, tongues, and conversions in nearly every issue, the mission's own testimony about itself, and read best that way.
- Jan 1907Pyongyang, the Korean PentecostAt New Year Bible study meetings in Korea, missionary confession of coldness opened a flood of public confession among the Korean believers: theft, hatred, adultery named out loud. Restitution followed, and the daybreak prayer meeting born there still marks Korean churches worldwide.
- 1906–1909Workers scatter from AzusaPeople came, received, and went home, to more than twenty-five nations within about two years, by the mission's own count. Parham himself came in late 1906, denounced what he saw, and was turned away; the mission's leadership and its mailing list fractured soon after.
- Apr 1914The streams organize: Assemblies of GodMinisters met at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to form a fellowship for order, missions, and credentials. The new bodies mostly formed along the color line that Azusa had crossed, and the American Pentecostal movement stayed largely segregated for eighty years.
- 1915–1920Rees Howells in southern AfricaA Welsh miner converted in America and shaped by the 1904 revival went out to the Rusitu valley as a missionary. He prayed for the same thing he had seen at home, and by his and his colleagues' accounts revival came to the mission stations and spread through the district.
- 1924The Bible College of Wales opens at SwanseaHowells bought an estate he could not afford and opened a college where students were taught to pray as work. Its ledger of answered prayer, kept in his own hand, is the reason his biography exists.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search William J. Seymour at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Learned Pentecost from a hallway because the law would not seat him in the room, then led a revival where the color line came down.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.
Standing beside himThe Revival Streams · 17 on this stretch of wall
A plumber who could barely read, whose wife taught him the Bible and whose prayers for the sick filled halls across the world.
Died at forty-three in an Egyptian army camp; his wife's shorthand of his talks became the daily book millions still read.
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Prayed for years that God would bend Wales, saw a revival credited at the time with about a hundred thousand converts (a contemporary estimate, not an audit), then vanished into hidden prayer for the rest of his life.
Burned a Bible at fourteen, saw Christ three days later, and walked the Himalayas in a saffron robe until the mountains kept him.
Widowed on the mission field at twenty, she came home and built a temple, a radio station, and a soup line that fed Los Angeles through the Depression.
Asked why revival tarries and would not let a single preacher near him answer the question easily.