William Seymour

Topic: Theology - Pentecostalism
The question posed by the Anglo-Scots Reformation persists: how does one know one is saved?

Phoebe Palmer looked for answers in John Wesley’s belief that sanctification was a separate step. [1] Since she was raised a Methodist, and baptized as a child, she had not experienced conversion. She hoped this second baptism or second birth would answer her need for certainty.

When even that did not provide assurance, she fell back on Jean Calvin’s covenant theology. [2] She argued, if she did accept Christ, then God could not disown his implicit agreement with humans. [3] To prove her sincerity she devoted her life to doing good deeds in His name. [4]

Camp meetings sponsored by the National Holiness Association disseminated her ideas after the Civil War. From those roots in the Northern Methodist Church, they moved south through African-American churches in the 1870s and 1880s. The set of beliefs expanded in the 1880s as German-American preachers spread the word through Ohio. By 1890, Holiness speakers had come to include elements of premillennialism and faith healing in their sermons.

The question of proof became more urgent after the Panic of 1893 when even God-fearing people lost their jobs or farms. Revivals erupted in Europe and this country. [5] Holiness preachers began emphasizing premillennial connections, and urging people to save themselves by leaving their established churches for new ones that promised ways to survive the coming apocalypse. [6]

Charles Parham was one of many who believed the nature of the proof had been defined by the first chapters of the Book of Acts. After Christ’s death, the apostles had gathered to discuss how to continue His ministry without Judas. They narrowed their choice for a replacement to two men, then cast lots so the Lord could indicate His preference. [7] When they met on the anniversary of Pentecost, they were given a better sign: they heard a wind, then saw tongues of fire come down and touch them. [8]

"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." [9]

Parham gathered a group to study Acts that stumbled on a method for inducing glossolalia. [10] Lucy Farrow, an African-American woman who worked for him in 1905, took his ideas to her church where William Seymour was a member. [11] When the son of slaves went to California, he preached the doctrine of tongues, but members of the congregation were unwilling to accept the possibility their sanctification had been incomplete. Only when Farrow arrived and was able to reproduce Parham’s experiment did they listen. [12]

Their experience of what they called speaking in tongues led to the Azusa Street Revival that lasted in Los Angeles from 1906 to 1915. Religious seekers flocked there. Whites, used to the defined order of worship in Methodist and other churches, were surprised at the seeming randomness of events. Fifty-nine years later, Ernest Williams described his first impression. He arrived when "the altar service was at its height."

"I wish I could describe what I saw. Prayer and worship were everywhere. The altar area was filled with seekers; some were kneeling; others were prone on the floor; some were speaking in tongues. Everyone was doing something; all seemingly lost in God. I simply stood and looked, for I had never seen anything like it." [13]

Arthur Osterberg remembered Seymour was no orator in the tradition of George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards. "He might preach for three-quarters of an hour with no more emotionalism than that there post." [14] Instead of a sermon explicating the word, his services featured prayers for the gift of tongues, testimonies, and the altar calls like the one described by Williams. [15]

Singing was described as "sporadic" and "a capella," although instruments were not proscribed. [16] Seymour’s wife played piano. [17] Stephen Dove found three kinds of music mentioned in revival memoirs: "singing in the Spirit, new compositions written in a conventional style, and traditional hymns." [18]

Years later, a white jazz historian experienced the same disorientation when he entered an African-American church that used "drums, piano, trumpet, saxophone, guitar, and ukulele." Rudi Blesh wrote:

"I recall vividly an evening service in a San Francisco Negro church where the singing began with hand-clapping and the percussive tinkle of tambourines throughout the congregation. The small and nondescript orchestra participated, and soon numbers of the communicants, adults and children, were dancing in the pews and in the aisles. After perhaps ten minutes, the pastor and, one by one, the elders, began to dance on the platform. The last, a white-haired man, reached under his chair, pulled a fiddle from its case, and began to play while swaying, totteringly but rhythmically. For about twenty minutes the music, like a tidal wave, rose in intensity and fervor. As spontaneously as it began, the singing stopped, and, joyous and refreshed, the congregation took up the service again." [19]

The most radical aspect of Azusa Street was the intermingling of men and women, Blacks and whites. This was at the time when Jim Crow practices were spreading beyond the Deep South. Discomforts with racial mixing, blurred social-class boundaries, and unrestrained emotions at Azusa Street led to the formation of dissident sects.

In 1913, the editor of an independent Pentecostal publication, issued a call to all "saints who believe in baptism with the Holy Ghost" to meet in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to create some form of coordinating organization. The all-white Assemblies of God was the result. [20]

Eudorus Bell’s group explicitly endorsed speaking in tongues as the only proof of salvation, but others were not so adamant. Some Pentecostalists accepted being healed by faith, hearing voices, or dancing as equally important signs of divine blessing. Many were persuaded they could receive some benefits of salvation upon committing themselves to Christ. Most demonstrated their status by adopting conservative dress and avoiding a list of tabooed activities.

Not all whites joined the Assemblies of God. Liston Pope visited a white Pentecostal church in Gastonia, North Carolina, [21] that differed little from Azusa Street. The three-hour service began with the usual opening hymns, Bible readings, and a sermon. Then it progressed to testimonies and an altar call with a mourning bench.

Emotions permeated the proceedings. Before the service began, "a band, including three stringed instruments and a saxophone, plays occasional music." [22] Then, rather than a formal call to service

"the actions of the congregation become more intense and concerted in character; there is almost nothing by way of formal announcement. The choir, in coöperation with the pastor, breaks into a rhythmic hymn, and the congregation follows suit. The hymn has an interminable number of stanzas, and a refrain reminiscent of mountain ballads both in music and in narrative form. The hymn looks toward a narrative climax, and the excitement of the congregation increases as the singing proceeds. The stanzas are punctuated with loud shouts of ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ ‘Glory,’ and the rhythmic clapping of hands and tapping of feet. Almost immediately, various members of the congregation begin to ‘get the Holy Ghost’ (as a teen-age boy awesomely remarks)." [23]

The term Pentecostal has developed several meanings since the formation of the Assemblies of God. Outsiders tend to confuse Pentecostals with other forms of conservative or evangelizing Protestantism, and often dismiss them all as Holy Rollers. However, all those groups know the differences between themselves because doctrine is what distinguishes them from one another. [24]

The music, including versions of Kumbaya recorded by Pentecostal artists, tends to follow the patterns described by Blesh and Pope: it serves to initiate contact with the Spirit. The lyrics often emphasize the fact people need Christ’s attention. Some specifically request His healing. The end of the world has faded as a theme in their repertoire.

End Notes
1. John Wesley. "The Scripture Way of Salvation." Sermon 43. Sermons on Several Occasions. First Series. London: James Nichols, 1771. This version was edited by Anne-Elizabeth Powell, with amendments by Ryan Danker and George Lyons. Available on Northwest Nazarene University, Wesley Center for Applied Theology website.

2. Wikipedia. "Covenant Theology."

3. She documented her struggles in faith in her journal. It later was published as The Life and Letters of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer. Edited by Richard Wheatley. New York: W. C. Palmer, Jr., 1876.

4. She upended the idea condemned by Martin Luther and others that doing good deeds would ensure her entry into Heaven. She performed good deed only after she was assured of her eternal fate. In 1850, she helped found the Five Points Mission to service Irish immigrants in Lower Manhattan. (John G. McEllhenney. "Phoebe Palmer." The United Methodist Church General Commission on Archives and History website.) Her example contributed to the rise of the Social Gospel.

5. Chronologically, William Kostlevy noted premillenialism became part of the Holiness movement during the depression that followed the panic. ("Introduction." " xxxiii-xl in Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2009, second edition. xxxviii).

Vinson Synan observed the significance of Willam Jennings Bryan’s campaign for president in 1896 to the growth of the radical Holiness movement in the Midwest. (The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 edition. 42.)

A revival in Wales that began in1904, a few years before Azusa Street, "swept the rest of Britain, Scandinavia, parts of Europe, North America, the mission fields of India and the Orient, Africa and Latin America." (Wikipedia. "1904–1905 Welsh revival.") Many believe it prepared the way for many to accept Pentecostalism.

6. The call to exit the church led the Southern Methodist hierarchy to denounce Holiness preachers and to close its facilities to them. Synan noted, "most of the holiness groups began in the decade after 1894, although a few began earlier and some as late as 1917. The majority of these new churches, however, were organized during the four years following the 1894 General Conference of the Southern Methodist Church." (Synan, Holiness. 48.)

7. Act 1:24-26, King James translation.

8. Act 2:3, King James translation. Thereafter, casting lots and other resorts to chance were condemned as pagan; later card playing and gambling were condemned for the same reasons.

9. Acts 2:4, King James translation.

10. Glossolalia was the linguist’s term for the various forms of incomprehensible speech attributed to divine inspiration. (Wikipedia. "Glossolalia.")

11. Seymour was raised in a part of southern Louisiana where sugarcane was the primary crop. He escaped farm labor for Memphis in 1891, and was in Saint Louis by 1893, converted by Methodists in Indianapolis in the 1ate 1890s, and exposed to Holiness theory by Daniel Warner’s Evening Lights Saints when he was living in Cincinnati around 1900. For unknown reasons, he returned to the South where he joined the prayer group led by Farrow in Houston in 1905. A woman, who had heard him preach, recommended him for a vacancy that took him to California.

See: Charles R. Fox Jr. "William J. Seymour: Pioneer of the Azusa Street Revival." 15-167 in William Seymour: Pioneer of the Azusa Street Revival. Edited by Vinson Synan and Fox. Alachua, Florida: Bridge Logos Foundation, 2012. On Indianapolis, 30; on Cincinnati, 32.

Roberts Liardon. The Azusa Street Revival. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Destiny Image Publishers, 2006. On Memphis and Saint Louis, 90.

Synan, Holiness. On Houston, 94.

12. Seymour himself had not spoken in tongues when he arrived in California. After the church that called him rejected his doctrine, he continued to board with one the members of the congregation. It was while he was living there that he invited Farrow to come to Los Angeles. (Eddie L. Hyatt. "Lucy Farrow: The Forgotten Apostle of Pentecost." Charisma 20 February 2014.)

13. Ernest S. Williams. Pentecostal Evangel 4 April 1966. Reproduced on 312 Azusa Street website. He later was a General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God.

14. Arthur Osterberg. Quoted by Vinson Synan. "The Lasting Legacies of the Azusa Street Revival." Enrichment Journal, February 2006. The General Council of the Assemblies of God website.

15. Wikipedia. "Azusa Street Revival."
16. Wikipedia, Azusa Street.

17. Glenn Clark. "Jennie Evans Moore Seymour - Vanguard of Pentecost." Charisma Magazine website. 30 November 2003.

18. Stephen Dove. "Hymnody and Liturgy in the Azusa Street Revival, 1906-1908." Pneuma 31:242-263:2009. Quotation from abstract.

19. Rudi Blesh. Shining Trumpets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946. 69. Bolded words reflect the Protestant view that there was a prescribed order of service, and the shout, which slaves added after the service, was seen as a deviation from the official program.

20. Sydney E. Ahlstrom. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. 821. The editor was Eudorus N. Bell. His publication was Word and Witness.

21. Liston Pope. Millhands and Preachers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942. He noted "Negroes, comprising a relatively small percentage of the population of the county and its surrounding territory, were excluded from the mills almost entirely." (12) He added that on the piedmont, "The rise of the mills represented to considerable degree the economic triumph of the poor white man over the emancipated black. As the whites moved into the cotton mills. The Negroes drifted rapidly into farm tenancy and to Northern cities." (12-13) Pope was a sociologist studying the community after a particularly ugly strike in 1929. (Wikipedia. "Loray Mill Strike.")

22. Pope. 130.
23. Pope. 130-131.

24. I try to use the term Pentecostal only for people who apply it to themselves.