The Third Awakening: Azusa Street

The Story Everyone Loves

Ask many churchgoers today where the power of the Spirit came back to the church, and the answer will be Azusa Street. A small, run-down building in Los Angeles is remembered as the place heaven opened in 1906, and hundreds of millions of people around the world trace their churches back to it. Its heirs speak of it the way older Christians speak of the Great Awakenings — and they are the loudest voices today promising that the next awakening is just around the corner.

The pattern from the first two parts of this series holds here too. People had a powerful experience, someone built a doctrine on top of it, and those who received it began dividing almost at once — faster, in fact, than either earlier awakening managed.

Consider this a short tour, not the whole map. The churches born from Azusa Street have kept dividing for more than a century, and tracing them all is a study each reader will have to carry on personally.

Topeka, 1901: The Doctrine Comes First

The story starts five years earlier at a small Bible school in Topeka, Kansas, run by a preacher named Charles Parham. On the first day of 1901 one of his students spoke in tongues, and Parham drew a sweeping conclusion from it: speaking in tongues was the proof that a person had received the Spirit. Without it, a believer was still missing something.

That one idea changed how ordinary believers saw themselves. A man who had walked faithfully with Yahuah for years could now be told he lacked the Spirit because he had never spoken in tongues. Believers were sorted into two classes — those who had the experience and those who did not — before a single new church was ever founded. The division was built into the doctrine from the first day.

Parham also taught that these tongues were real foreign languages, so missionaries could go overseas and preach without study. Some went to India and China expecting exactly that, and found they could not speak a word of the local language. Rather than drop the teaching, the movement changed it: the tongues became heavenly languages that no one could check. When a claim fails the test and is then moved out of reach of testing, it is fair to ask where the claim came from in the first place.

Azusa Street, 1906

One of Parham’s students was William Seymour, a Black preacher who, under the segregation of the day, was reportedly made to listen from the hallway. In 1906 Seymour carried the teaching to Los Angeles. He was turned out of the church that had invited him, began meeting in a home, and when tongues broke out there, the crowds soon outgrew it. They moved into an old church building on Azusa Street that had been used as a stable.

For a while it looked like something new: Black and white, rich and poor, crowded into the same room, with meetings running day and night. The city newspaper’s first report called it a “Weird Babel of Tongues.” The word Babel was meant as mockery, but it turned out to be a fair prediction of what came next.

Even the movement’s name says something. It named itself after the Greek label for Shavuot rather than after Shavuot itself, claiming to restore what the apostles experienced while keeping none of the feasts the apostles kept.

The Measure Scripture Sets

Scripture gives a plain picture of what tongues were and what they were for. At Shavuot in Acts 2, the tongues were real languages that visitors from many nations understood: “every man heard them speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6). The point was that men could hear the message — the very opposite of confusion.

Paul asked the Corinthians, “do all speak with tongues?” (1 Corinthians 12:30), and the expected answer is no. That one question undoes the teaching that every Spirit-filled believer must speak in tongues. Paul went further, quoting Isaiah 28:11, and said tongues are a sign “not to them that believe, but to them that believe not” (1 Corinthians 14:21-22). They were never a badge for believers to measure one another by. And he set limits — two or three at most, one at a time, with someone to interpret — because Yahuah “is not the author of confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:27, 33). Azusa ran on the opposite rule, and so did nearly everything built on it.

The Founder Disowns the Revival

Within six months, the man whose doctrine started it all turned against it. Parham visited Azusa in the fall of 1906, called much of what he saw fleshly and fanatical — with open contempt for Black and white worshiping together — and opened a rival mission in the same city. Two years later, two of Seymour’s own workers moved to Oregon and took the mission newspaper’s mailing list with them, and with it the movement’s line to thousands of followers.

Consider what that meant for the people in the pews. Within two years of the “outpouring,” a believer in the movement already had to choose: Parham or Seymour, Los Angeles or Portland. The teacher, the student, and the student’s helpers had each gone their own way.

Finished Work, Unfinished Unity

In 1910 another quarrel broke out, this time over how a believer is made holy — whether in a second, separate experience after conversion, or as part of the work begun at the start. A Chicago preacher pressed the new view at Azusa itself, and Seymour locked him out of the building. Churches lined up on one side or the other, and that line still divides the movement’s denominations today. The question was a real one, but the answer came by choosing sides, not by opening the Scriptures together.

The Trinity Written In, the Questioners Written Out

The biggest split came over the Name. At a large camp meeting near Los Angeles in 1913, a preacher pointed out that the apostles always immersed in the name of Yahushua (Acts 2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5), never in the three-title formula used in the churches. It was a fair observation straight from the text, and many ministers were re-immersed.

The newly formed Assemblies of God answered in 1916 — not with a Bible study, but with a creed. It wrote the Trinity into its statement of beliefs, and roughly a quarter of its ministers left or were pushed out. A century earlier, the first American seminary had been founded to defend the Trinity. Now a brand-new denomination did the same thing: when the Scriptures raised a question, the answer was a written creed, and the people asking the question were shown the door.

Sadly, those who left overcorrected. They formed the Oneness movement, which teaches that the Father, Son, and Spirit are all one person — that Yahushua is the Father. Scripture keeps the two distinct. Yahushua named the Father as a second witness beside Himself (John 8:17-18) and called Him “the only true God” who sent Him (John 17:3). One side wrote the Trinity into law; the other folded the Son into the Father. Neither went back to the text, and believers caught between them were handed two wrong answers to choose from.

One Movement, Two Colors

Azusa was famous for Black and white worshiping side by side. Within a decade that was over. The movement sorted itself into a large Black church and a largely white one, each with its own leaders, its own conferences, and its own buildings. Seymour’s mission faded to a small congregation by the time he died in 1922, and the building where it all began was torn down in 1931. The place remembered as the birthplace of a worldwide movement could not keep its own doors open.

The Awakening That Keeps Coming Back

The same story has repeated ever since. In 1960 tongues spread into the older churches — Episcopal, Lutheran, Catholic — and congregations split over whether to welcome it. More waves followed in the 1980s and after, each announced as the long-awaited awakening, each leaving behind new networks, new ministries, and more divided churches.

Jeremiah described the prophets of his day as men who “healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Paul foresaw people who would “heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears” (2 Timothy 4:3). An awakening that leaves the Law asleep and the body in pieces is that kind of healing — loud, emotional, and slight.

What None of the Three Woke Up To

Across Northampton, Cane Ridge, and Azusa Street, the deepest errors of the church slept straight through. Not one of the three called the people back to the Name of Yahuah. Not one restored Pesach, Shavuot, Yom Teruah, or Sukkot. Not one questioned the Roman calendar or the Roman creeds. The Trinity was given a seminary in the second awakening and a creed in the third. The Law was treated in all three as the thing the new convert had been freed from. Yahuah asked His people to seek “the old paths” (Jeremiah 6:16). Three awakenings delivered new ones.

Meanwhile, the Remnant

While Azusa’s heirs filled stadiums, the few seeking the old paths were scattered further than ever. In the 1930s a handful of believers began calling others back to the Name and the feasts, but their assemblies stayed small and kept splintering. Many who keep the commandments today know the feeling well: show me someone who believes as I believe. Such people are out there, but so scattered that one rarely meets another.

Yahuah promised He would not leave it so: “I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out… and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered” (Ezekiel 34:11-12). Yahushua spoke of “other sheep” to be brought, so “there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (John 10:16). And He asked the question that fits this whole history: “when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). The Greek reads ten pistin — the belief, a particular belief, not a crowd’s enthusiasm.

The gathering Scripture promises is not another awakening. It is a call out of the confusion: “Come out of her, my people” (Revelation 18:4) — and those who answer are known not by their numbers but by this: “here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Yahushua” (Revelation 14:12).