The Revival Streams

The paper that carried the Azusa Street revival around the world was given away. The Apostolic Faith was printed in Los Angeles from September 1906, mailed free to anyone who asked, and reached tens of thousands of subscribers with no price on it anywhere.

The twentieth century opened with the church in the West feeling thin. Attendance was steady, machinery was everywhere, and preachers in both Britain and America were writing openly that something living had gone out of the meetings. In small groups on several continents, people began asking God for exactly one thing: do it again.

It came first, and hardest, in Wales. In the autumn of 1904 a twenty-six-year-old collier named Evan Roberts came home to Loughor after months of praying that had cost him his sleep. He asked if he could speak to the young people after the service; seventeen stayed. He gave them four things, confess every known sin, put away anything doubtful, obey the Spirit promptly, confess Christ publicly, and the meetings that followed ran for two years.

There was almost no preaching. The meetings ran on singing, testimony, and open prayer, often past midnight, and Roberts refused to control them because he believed the Spirit was leading. There was no advertising and no organization. The Western Mail sent reporters anyway, and the story went out by cable to the whole English-speaking world.

The effects were public enough that the newspapers counted them. About a hundred thousand converts inside a year is the figure the press and the churches gave at the time, repeated ever since, but taken from counts, not from an audit. Papers reported taverns closing, old debts repaid, and magistrates handed white gloves for court sessions with nothing to try. The most-loved story, that the pit ponies balked underground because the miners had stopped cursing at them, belongs to the era's own testimony; it is told everywhere and documented nowhere.

What Wales did next mattered more than what Wales did. The reports crossed the ocean in newspapers and letters, and people in Los Angeles read them and started praying for the same thing. A separate stream had already opened in Topeka, Kansas, where on New Year's Day 1901 a student in Charles Parham's Bible school spoke in a language she did not know, as the participants themselves told it afterward. One of Parham's later students in Texas was William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, blind in one eye, who had to sit in the hallway to hear the lectures because the classroom was segregated.

Seymour came to Los Angeles in 1906 to preach and was locked out of the church that had invited him. He kept praying in a house on Bonnie Brae Street until, on April 9, the outpouring came and the front porch collapsed under the crowd. They moved into an abandoned livery stable at 312 Azusa Street, sawdust floor, planks across nail kegs for pews, and the meetings ran nearly around the clock for three years. The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter and ran it under the headline "Weird Babel of Tongues."

The thing eyewitnesses kept returning to was not the tongues. It was who was in the room. Black, white, Mexican, Chinese, rich and poor worshiped together in 1906 Los Angeles, led by a black man, in a decade when that simply did not happen. Frank Bartleman wrote that the color line was washed away in the blood. Honesty requires the rest of it: within a few years the new Pentecostal bodies organized themselves along that same color line and stayed there for most of a century. The miracle was real and the church did not keep it.

The participants understood the tongues plainly: Acts 2 was not a closed chapter. They believed God still fills, still speaks, still heals, and that what fell on the hundred and twenty was promised to the church and not withdrawn from it. This house believes that too. What the Spirit did in a stable in Los Angeles was not a new religion; it was the church remembering the equipment it had been given.

It was never only America. In June 1905, at Pandita Ramabai's Mukti Mission in India, revival came among hundreds of famine widows and orphan girls Ramabai had rescued and taught, after she read the Welsh reports and asked her girls to pray. In January 1907 the New Year Bible meetings in Pyongyang, Korea, turned into public confession so heavy that the missionaries present admitted they were frightened, and stolen money went back to its owners. The daybreak prayer meeting born there still marks Korean churches across the world.

The cost was real too. Evan Roberts collapsed under the strain and spent most of the rest of his life out of public ministry. Azusa fractured over leadership and a stolen mailing list. Sadhu Sundar Singh, who had walked the Himalayas preaching Christ for twenty years, set out for Tibet in April 1929 and was never seen again. Revivals do not run on strong men; they run on God, and He tends to leave the strong men visibly weak so no one mistakes the source.

Under all of it ran a quieter work. Rees Howells, a Welsh miner converted in America and marked by 1904, gave himself to intercession, praying through, at cost, until he had assurance, and writing down what he had prayed. He served years in southern Africa, then in 1924 bought an estate he could not pay for and opened the Bible College of Wales at Swansea. Through Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, he and his students prayed by name and kept the record. The whole era rests on one conviction, and it is the plainest thing in it: God still acts, and the door He opens is prayer.