William J. Seymour (1870—1922)

Country of Origin

  • United States

Countries/Regions of Ministry

  • United States
  • Global

Traditions

  • Pentecostal

Ministries

  • Pastor
  • Evangelist
  • Revivalist

William J. Seymour is the authentic “father” of Pentecostalism, inaugurating the churches that belong to Pentecostal World Fellowship (PWF) and reach into almost all countries of the world. This can be affirmed in light of varied Pentecostalisms traced to seventeenth-century Finland, nineteenth-century Africa, nineteenth-century India, and early twentieth-century Korea. This is also seen in the New England Gift Adventists, who advocated tongues-speech and Spirit baptism in the mid-nineteenth century. Azusa historian Frank Bartleman, who spoke to PWF in 1907, referred to these events as "Azusa East."

William Joseph Seymour was born to Phillis Salabar Seymour, an African American slave emancipated by President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. His father, Simon Seymour, served three years in the Union Army to gain his freedom. Their second child of eight was William, born May 2, 1870, in Centerville, Louisiana. In concert with Catholic teaching, William was baptized four months later. In contrast to his parents, William’s education included reading and writing, which was evident by the time he was ministering in Los Angeles at age 35. The Apostolic Faith, first appearing in September 1906, was issued by Seymour and participants at the Azusa Street Mission. It was a small and unsightly paper, published monthly at first, and later on quite irregularly--but the contents were sensational.

Seymour experienced the reality of failed Reconstruction, post-Civil War. He dug deep into into his faith, which included dreams, visions, and the supernatural. Having taken care of his family, he left before the Great Migration (1896-99) and made his way to Indianapolis. There, blacks had equal protection as citizens, could vote, and be elected to public office. Coming fresh off the sugar cane fields of Louisiana, Seymour worked as a waiter at upscale restaurants in the downtown area. He joined the Simpson Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church that was part of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). The MEC was interracial, but internally, racial tensions were nonetheless on the rise.

Seymour moved to Cincinnati in 1900 and may have briefly attended God’s Bible School founded by Martin Wells Knapp. He joined the Evening Light Saints that would come to be known as the Church of God (Anderson, IN). He was licensed as an evangelist, and while he was in Cincinnati, he contracted smallpox and lost sight of his left eye.

He went on to Houston, Texas in 1903, in part looking for relatives scattered during the days of slavery. There, Lucy Farrow asked Seymour to take over her church. As governess to Charles F. Parham, she introduced Seymour to Parham. Jim Crow laws meant that when Seymour began his studies at the Houston Bible School in January 1906, he sat in the hallway or an adjacent room to overhear the lectures. He studied two to six weeks of a ten-week course, attending morning sessions while carrying out pastoral duties to prisons and hospitals throughout the day.

While Seymour adopted Parham’s Spirit baptism doctrine of xenolalia as initial evidence, he abhorred Parham’s belief in white supremacy, segregation, and annihilationism. He rejected Parham's theories that miscegenation caused Noah's flood and that the Anglo-Saxon race was linearly descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel, therefore being God's chosen race. In contrast to Parham, Seymour believed that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit inspired egalitarianism that breaks down all unbiblical racial, class, educational, social, denominational, and gender barriers of the day. His central message was love and born-again transformation, not limited to the individual, and not simply tongues or eschatology.

Neely Terry came from Los Angeles to visit relatives in Houston. She encouraged Julia Hutchins, co-pastor of a small Holiness Church in Los Angeles, to join in ministry with Seymour. Parham advised Seymour not to go, but Seymour saw it as a divine summons. After only a few sermons, however, Hutchins disbarred Seymour from her church.

Seymour was taken in by Richard and Ruth Asberry at 214 Bonnie Brae Street. On April 9, 1906, miracles and speaking in tongues broke out in a gathering that included neighbor Jennie Evans Moore, the future wife of Seymour. On April 12, 1906, Seymour himself spoke in tongues. Crowds came, collapsing the front porch; afterward, Seymour led the group to 312 Azusa Street, to a building originally used by the first African Methodist Episcopal church in Los Angeles. The first group, meeting on April 14, 1906, was white, black, and Hispanic. In the three years following, countless ethnicities and nationalities showed up at the Azusa Street Mission.

The first issue of The Apostolic Faith (September 1906) printed Seymour's defense of initial-evidence Spirit baptism as included in the Azusa Mission Declaration of Faith. The following is excerpted from The Apostolic Faith, December 1906, page two:

The baptism with the Holy Ghost...gives you power to speak in the languages of the nations.

You may not receive the gift of tongues when you receive the baptism with the Holy Ghost, but you receive the witness of tongues, that is to say -- you will speak in tongues when you are baptized with the Holy Spirit.

Seymour was central to Azusa proceedings, however, he did not dominate the pulpit. In fact, he shared the pulpit with Frank Bartleman, among others. A notable description of Seymour was given by a new Pentecostal, Arthur Osterberg, as told to the Los Angeles Times in 1906:

He was meek and plain-spoken and no orator. He spoke the common language of the uneducated class. He might preach for three-quarters of an hour with no more emotionalism than that there [sic] post. He was no arm-waving thunderer, by any stretch of the imagination.[1]

While Seymour was away on a mission trip, in May 1911, W. H. Durham mounted a campaign responding to a perceived divine impulse to replace Seymour as pastor. Seymour's elders urgently wired him and requested that he return home immediately. True to his conciliatory nature, Seymour left no stone unturned to find common ground with Durham and persuade him to reject the "Finished Work" theology, but Durham would not budge. Reminiscent of his own conflict with Julia Hutchins in 1906, Seymour locked Durham out of the mission. In response, Durham immediately set up a rival mission in Los Angeles, following Parham's pattern.

Durham's schism within the Apostolic Faith Mission decimated the revival and greatly reduced attendance. About two-thirds of participants followed Durham out of the Azusa mission. Rather than return to Seymour's after Durham died the following year, many joined existing white missions or formed their own independent Pentecostal churches. By 1912, there were at least twelve related Pentecostal missions.

By 1914, Seymour’s mission was reduced to about twenty to forty black and white participants, many of whom had been part of the original prayer group at Bonnie Brae Street eight years earlier. Nightly meetings had been reduced to just one meeting a week, all day Sunday. Seymour continued to pastor his small flock for almost another decade. He regularly visited black and white churches in Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Houston, and other cities. Between 1916 and 1917, Seymour made one last attempt to bring the various Pentecostal churches and missions together in Christian unity. Only two pastors bothered to attend.

When Seymour unexpectedly announced his marriage to Jennie Moore Evans, on May 13, 1908, it sent shock waves through the mission. Their marriage took place unannounced, in a private ceremony for family only, conducted by Reverend Ed Lee, who had been the first in Los Angeles to speak in tongues. Clara Lum, the Apostolic Faith's editor, and other Azusa Street participants decided the marriage was a betrayal of their "end-times" message. Lum, who may have wanted to marry Seymour, accused Seymour of having compromised on "sanctification." Lum then left the mission to join Florence Crawford's work in Portland, Oregon, taking the only copies of the national and international mailing lists with her. Without the newspaper spreading his message, Seymour would be voiceless and invisible. Not willing to give up, however, the newlyweds traveled north to Portland in pursuit of Lum and the lists. After rejecting his overtures for reconciliation and Christian charity, Lum refused to speak to the Seymours and kept back the lists.[2]

William J. Seymour shed his earthly tabernacle after a heart attack on September 28, 1922. Two hundred people came for his burial at the Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles. His legacy includes many aspects, including the foundationalism of Azusa and tongues-speech as a meaningful tool to create what was, in his day, a “prophetic egalitarian transformative message and transnational multicultural global fellowship of believers.”[3] It was precisely because he preached and practiced a message of civic responsibility--centered on racial reconciliation where everyone was treated equally regardless of race, class, gender, language, or education--that attracted people to the Azusa version of Pentecostalism. Azusa showed that blacks and Mexicans would not be forced to sit in the last pews in the back of the church. In light of the impressive Azusa women missionaries going to far-flung parts of the globe, no longer should devout Christian men require women with a passion to preach to sit silently in their churches or home. Espinosa would write about this prophetic aspect of Seymour's ministry, saying, “The fact that Seymour was a poor, unschooled black man has everything to do with his racially egalitarian transformative message and multiracial church that he willed to create.”[4]

Harold D. Hunter
Pentecostal-Catholic Dialogue USA

NOTES

[1] The original article was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times on September 9, 1956, according to Carl Brumback, Suddenly From Heaven (Gospel Publishing House, 1961), 37-38.
[2] Gastón Espinosa, “Ordinary Prophet: William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival” in The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, edited by Harold D. Hunter and Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Pathway Press, 2006), 21-22.
[3] Espinosa, “William J. Seymour,” 59.

[4] Ibid. 

 

For Further Reading:

  • Espinosa, Gastón. William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism. Duke, 2014. 

  • Hunter, Harold D., and Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., eds. The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy. Pathway Press, 2006. 

  • Synan, Vinson, and Charles R. Fox, Jr., William J. Seymour: Pioneer of the Azusa St. Revival. Logos, 2012.


©10/13/2026