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Healing and Revival

"Pentecost Brings Healing "

William Joseph Seymour was born May 2, 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana to Simon and Phillis Seymour. His parents had been slaves prior to the Civil War. Seymour was the oldest of ten children, but only three lived to adulthood. Information about Seymour's early years is generally sketchy. The family's religious affiliation appears to have been Catholic as the children were registered and baptized in the local Catholic church. There is a suggestion that Seymour had prophetic visions early in his life and would later emphasize the need for "special revelation" from God. Larry E. Martin in his book titled "William J. Seymour a History of the Azusa Street Revival" gives the best historical and geographical overview of Seymour's birthplace and family history.

Seymour left the rural south and moved north to Memphis in 1890, hoping to have a better life than was found in the south. While there he worked as a porter and a truck driver. In 1893 he moved on to St. Louis and worked as

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Church history: William Seymour and the Rise of Pentecostalism

April 2006 was the 100th anniversary of a momentous revolution in Christianity that began at 312 Azusa Street in a ramshackle part of downtown Los Angeles. A writer for a local newspaper captured the significance of the Azusa Street Revival when he noted that it is “now seen as the great awakening of the Pentecostal / Charismatic movement.”¹

The pastor at the Azusa Street church was William J. Seymour (1870-1922). Seymour, the son of former slaves, had been raised as a Baptist and later joined a radical Holiness church. There he came to believe in divine healing, the rapture of the saints and Premillennialism, justification by faith and “sanctification as a second work of grace.”²

Seymour had also been a follower of a Holiness preacher named Charles Fox Parham (1873-1929). He attended Parham’s Bible school in Houston, Texas, where he was taught the idea that tongues-speaking is the biblical evidence of being baptized in the Holy Spirit.

Seymour came to Los Angeles, where he was invited to minister to a house c

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Art by Stephen Chen

Christian history is marked by humble men and women whom God raised up and used for a special work. William J. Seymour was such a man. He was born in 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana, to parents who had only a few years earlier been freed from slavery. The social climate of America at that time was highly prejudiced and black people were largely segregated from much of mainstream American society. His parents continued working on a plantation, even after being freed, and Seymour spent much time while growing up doing the same. Lacking formal education, Seymour taught himself, mainly through reading the Bible.

Even from his early years, Seymour had a hunger and a drawing to spiritual things. He experienced visions and he began looking for the return of Jesus. His life was on a spiritual search and that search would take him to places, and lead him to make decisions, that many around him would not expect. At age twenty-five he did something few black men dared to do. He moved from the South to the predominately white, Indianapolis, Indiana, where he worked as