What was the Azusa Street Revival?

America, the land of origin of so many antichristian sects, is overrun with Pentecostalists of various shades. They all sprang from a modest beginning. In the month of April, 1906, in a mission hall in Azusa Street, Los Angeles, California, a band of coloured folk had heard of a man in Kansas upon whom a remarkable power had fallen, and who was apparently speaking with tongues. Coloured people are naturally very excitable, and these folks in Los Angeles held nightly meetings, crying earnestly to God that the same manifestation might be theirs.

At last the “power” fell upon them. One after another of them experienced this strange possession, resulting in their pouring forth a torrent of words in an unknown tongue, which was hailed by them as the ushering in of another Pentecost.

This excited a great deal of attention. Mission workers, ministers, Christians of all kinds, flocked to enquire into these strange happenings. The meetings went on for months, and hundreds claimed to have received the “power.”

America, the land of origin of so many antichristian sects, is overrun with Pentecostalists of various shades. They all sprang from a modest beginning. In the month of April, 1906, in a mission hall in Azusa Street, Los Angeles, California, a band of coloured folk had heard of a man in Kansas upon whom a remarkable power had fallen, and who was apparently speaking with tongues. Coloured people are naturally very excitable, and these folks in Los Angeles held nightly meetings, crying earnestly to God that the same manifestation might be theirs.

At last the “power” fell upon them. One after another of them experienced this strange possession, resulting in their pouring forth a torrent of words in an unknown tongue, which was hailed by them as the ushering in of another Pentecost.

This excited a great deal of attention. Mission workers, ministers, Christians of all kinds, flocked to enquire into these strange happenings. The meetings went on for months, and hundreds claimed to have received the “power.”

(For a number of years movements have started which claim to be a new Pentecost. The gift of tongues is the leading feature. They go by different names--Apostolic Faith--Pentecostal Faith--Latter-Day Rain, etc. But is it the work of the Holy Spirit? The divisions which exist in these movements, the unscriptural teachings which are held by some of them and the lack of love, besides other characteristics are not the marks of the energy and power of God's Spirit.)

Because the Lord does all this they are commanded to rejoice, the children of Zion, which does not mean a spiritual Zion, but God's only true Zion. The early and the latter rain is restored to the land. Of late this term, too, has been strangely misapplied. It has been claimed that the early and latter rain mean spiritual blessing. The early rain, it is said, means the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out, and the latter rain, these deluded people tell us, is another Pentecost, a greater manifestation of the Spirit. This latter rain, they teach, consists, according to their conception, in a restoration of "Pentecostal gifts" and is especially evidenced in making strange sounds, which, it is claimed, is the original gift of tongues. This unscriptural teaching has led to all kinds of fanaticism and worse things than that.

Nowhere in the Bible is there warrant for us to believe that "the early and latter rain" has a spiritual significance. To say that the early rain and the latter rain typify blessings and manifestations of the spirit of God, peculiar to the opening of this present age and to its close is extremely fanciful and cannot be verified by the Scriptures. It is strange that even men who seem to possess considerable light have endorsed this kind of exposition, which has worked such harm among so many Christian people. There is absolutely no prediction anywhere in the New Testament that the present age is to close with "a latter rain" experience, a time when the Holy Spirit is poured out and that in greater measure. This age, according to divine revelation, ends in apostasy and complete departure from God and His truth (2 Thess. 2:3-12). After the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, for the formation of the Church, the body of Christ, there is nowhere to be found a promise in the Church Epistles that another outpouring is to take place, by which a part of the Church is to get into possession again of the different sign gifts. The enemy of souls has made good use of these distorted teachings to bring in his most subtle delusions.

The writer of this article, a thoroughly reliable witness, well-known to us by good repute, says: “Desiring of looking into it [The Tongues Movement] first hand, I attended in all about a dozen meetings, in four different cities… In company with a sober brother, I went for the first time to San Francisco. The place was crowded. A large, stout woman was leading, amid great excitement. Strangely enough, we were hardly seated when she cried out, ‘We need to pray. Two enemies of the truth have come in. The Spirit tells me they are here to fight the truth’ … One thing soon struck us forcibly. No one said Lord Jesus. No one cried ‘Abba Father.’ Now, inasmuch as these are the two Scriptural evidences that the Holy Ghost is in control, we felt the incongruity of it all very soon… “Presently we were electrified by hearing, for the first time, the weird, piercing notes of a woman under ‘the power’ speaking in tongues. I took careful note of every syllable, and jotted them down. ‘Ku-ri-ah; Ku-ri-ah; Ku-ri-ah; Ku-ri-ah-ke.’ This she repeated over and over again, till almost out of breath, whilst the rest shouted with delight at this evidence of the Spirit’s control. “She finished in an exhausted state, and from a corner came what sounded like the wail of a lost soul. Another woman, on her knees, began to intone in most melancholy tones, ‘La-a-a-a-la-a-a-a-ah-la-la-la-la-ah-ah-oh-oh.’ This was all; but it was accepted as the great power of God. “At the close the leader came straight to us, and we withstood her to the face by meeting her declaration that she was living without sin with the counter-declaration that we could give her chapter and verse for a direct command of Scripture she had been disobeying all through the meeting. She challenged its production, and we referred her to 1 Corinthians 14:34. As we read it she raved in anger, till I felt justified in asking the ironical question, ‘Are you not afraid you will lose your sanctification altogether if you get much angrier?’ She cried out ‘You are possessed with a devil!’ and left us. “But five men followed us as we went out and plied us with questions, thanking us for opening their eyes as they had listened to our conversation.”

James exhorts his suffering brethren to be like the husbandman who has to wait between the sowing time and the harvest. But here is another wrong interpretation. The latter rain of which James speaks has been foolishly interpreted as meaning a spiritual latter rain, another Pentecost. This is one of the star arguments of present day Pentecostalism with its supposed revival of apostolic gifts. The former and latter rain of which James speaks has no such meaning; it is purely the rainfall in nature. In Palestine there are two distinct rainy seasons, one in the spring, the other in the fall. (See Deut. 11:14.)

“When Mrs. McPherson first came to Los Angeles, she was associated with the ‘tongues' movement at Victoria hall. I have many photographs of this woman and Mr. Fisher, leader of that movement, posing together on platforms and elsewhere. The movement at Victoria Hall was then a genuine ‘Holy Roller' movement so far as physical facts go... Her first husband was a ‘tongues' preacher, preaching in unknown tongues. She claims in her writings that she was convicted under his preaching while he was speaking in an unknown tongue. She claims that her second husband, from whom she is now divorced, received the gift of tongues under her ministry. During her first revival in Los Angeles, the ‘tongues' manifestations became so noisy in her meetings that people living nearby complained to the police and I have personally talked with the officers who were assigned the task of protecting the community about the tent from these demonstrations. “And yet I am told by a member of her Advisory Committee that Mrs. McPherson insists that there be no ‘tongues' demonstrations in her regular service at Angelus Temple. She insists that those who wish to have the ‘tongues' witness, following the infilling of the Holy Ghost, shall resort to either room 500 or room 120, one of which rooms is advertised as sound proof. “I have before me a little booklet very recently published by Mrs. McPherson. The name of the pamphlet is “The Narrow Line.” Here is what she says in that booklet: She says that recently God has called her to tread a very narrow line because of ‘Fanatical flesh masquerading as the Spirit.' She seems to have discovered the lust-lure of these movements. She continues: ‘The Holy Spirit is not marked by wildness, hysteria, screaming or unseemly manifestation.'... But that does not match up very well with what goes on in room 120, when people are pounded on the back, when the whole room is one babel of noises, when men begin to shake, when some fall in trances, and when the jabber of tongues is heard in high-keyed voices above the general pandemonium of the surroundings.” (McPhersonism, (fifth edition) pp. 91-93)

We set out to place their teaching alongside that of the Scriptures, and we have found a wide divergence between the two. We set out to see if the TEACHING of Scripture and the FACTS of this movement agree, and we have found most emphatically that they do not. On these counts we are bound to come to the conclusion that their claim to a special infilling of the Spirit of God is false. If so what spirit is at work? The answer is most serious.

We set out to place their teaching alongside that of the Scriptures, and we have found a wide divergence between the two. We set out to see if the TEACHING of Scripture and the FACTS of this movement agree, and we have found most emphatically that they do not. On these counts we are bound to come to the conclusion that their claim to a special infilling of the Spirit of God is false. If so what spirit is at work? The answer is most serious.

(The foolish theory that "latter rain" means a spiritual revival and is a special "outpouring of the Holy Spirit" has no foundation at all in the Word of God. Such "spiritualizing" leads and has led into confusion.)