William Seymour: A revival without hierarchies
Azusa Street is mentioned in reverential tones by historians of faith and thundered from Pentecostal pulpits as a past we must reclaim. The outpouring of the Spirit is mentioned often. The flouting of racial and gendered conventions less so. Meet William Seymour, the meek leader of the Azusa Street revival.
Words: Liz Cooledge Jenkins
Illustration: © HEBSTREITS Sketches
Black American preacher and evangelist William Seymour was first invited to Los Angeles in 1906 by a group of Black women. He began holding small prayer meetings seeking spiritual revival, where several people reported receiving the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues and singing loudly. As the prayer meetings grew in numbers, they moved to an old, abandoned church on Azusa Street, holding worship services there every day of the week for the next three years – and then less consistently for several more years after that. This is how the Azusa Street Revival, often credited with fanning the flames of a global Pentecostal movement, was born.
I had the chance to research women’s roles in the Azusa Street Revival for a seminary class on women in church history, and what I learned was fascinating. As the revival’s leader, Seymour empowered the spirituality and leadership of people of all races and genders. Women at Azusa Street spoke in tongues, interpreted tongues, prophesied, interceded, prayed with converts at the altar, prayed for healing, preached, taught, led worship for the congregation, performed administrative tasks, served as elders who sent out missionaries and evangelists, and served locally and globally as missionaries and evangelists themselves. A full half of the initial twelve people Seymour gathered as a leadership team at Azusa Street were women.
Seymour took to heart the idea that God’s Spirit had been poured out on all flesh (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel 2:28). He led in a co-operative way that fully included the gifts of all sorts of people, embodying the mindset that we all have much to learn from one another. Far from the benevolent but oblivious man in power who throws a bone to women to placate them, Seymour lived out a vision of people of all genders serving together as coworkers in the gospel, each one important and equally valued. And he made this radical egalitarianism work in a time and a society otherwise deeply enmeshed in both Victorian morality and Jim Crow segregation.
Seymour was a leader who lifted up others and encouraged them to lead alongside him. He operated out of a holy humility that made room for everyone’s gifts, not threatened by them in the least. Fellow Pentecostal pastor William Durham once said of William Seymour, “he is the meekest man I ever met.” Frank Bartleman, who wrote a wild eyewitness account of the beginnings of the revival, similarly described Seymour as a “very plain, spiritual, and humble” person. His humility created space for others around him to grow, lead, and use their gifts.
Seymour’s preaching reflected his vision of breaking down societal hierarchies of race, class, and gender, affirming the equality of all people before God. When it came to women in scripture, Seymour didn’t overlook them – or treat them simply as object lessons for male behavioral improvement. He spoke of the Samaritan woman at the well, for example, not as a shameful slut with a few too many men in her life, but as a “child of God” whose “heart was so filled with love that she felt she could take in a whole lost world.” As the Samaritan woman went back to tell her village about Jesus, then, she “ran away with a well of salvation.” Seymour spoke of this woman as a powerful evangelist with a passion worth emulating; she was someone with “something to tell.”
Seymour also preached about Rebekah, speaking of her as “the type of a sanctified soul.” He honored Rebekah as a woman who “wore her jewels” and “did not put them aside, or into her pocket” – just as we, too, are called to allow the “abiding anointing in our hearts” to “[shine] forth upon our faces.” She was an example of shining faith for us to follow, of God’s anointing for the world to see.
Whether in the Bible or in his own community, Seymour saw women as gifted partners in the gospel and treated them as equals. This mindset opened doors for women and allowed the movement as a whole to flourish. Under Seymour’s leadership, ministry at the Azusa Street Revival was based directly on a person’s sense of gifting and calling from God. It didn’t depend on a formal structure of church hierarchy. People felt a sense of God’s leading, and they were free to respond.
For Seymour, religious hierarchies were unnecessary and counterproductive. The important thing was to pay attention to God, to listen to God. Seymour preached, “the first thing in every assembly is to see that He, the Holy Ghost, is installed as the chairman. The reason why we have so many dried-up missions and churches today, is because they have not the Holy Ghost as the chairman. They have some man in His place.” The Holy Spirit was considered the founder, bishop, chairman, and manager of the revival – its real, powerful leader, while Seymour and other human ministers were instruments available for the Spirit to direct.
The way a philosophy like this works itself out in practice feels complicated to me, but I also think Seymour was sincere in it. And I’m with him in not wanting to see some man put himself in God’s place as the leader of our faith communities. I’m struck by Seymour’s faith that it was possible for Christian meetings to really be led by God, directly. That we could listen and have a sense of where God is, what God is doing. That we could put aside our human agendas and biases to follow the Spirit’s lead toward greater love and justice.
Seymour believed that social divisions are broken down and power dynamics inverted – or at least profoundly altered – by the Holy Spirit. In the words of the revival’s newsletter, The Apostolic Faith, God “recognises no flesh, no color, and no names.” In Seymour’s vision, all humans stood before God as equals. Neither their reputation nor their social status nor the colour of their skin mattered when they stepped into the mission. Bartleman wrote that at Azusa Street “the ‘colour line’ was washed away in the blood of Christ.”
At Azusa Street, people from all walks of life were brought together – the powerful made more humble and the powerless lifted up – by a common experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit and fellowship as siblings. The secular press considered this kind of equality and fellowship inappropriate – but for the women who ministered at Azusa Street, and especially for Black women who were otherwise doubly subjected by their race and gender, the radical equality they found at the revival must have felt like a deep breath of fresh air.
As a Black man, Seymour understood prejudice in a very personal way. His parents were enslaved, and he was raised in the US South during the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. When Seymour wanted to take classes at white Pentecostal leader Charles Parham’s Bible school in Texas, he was forced to sit outside in the hallway. I imagine he knew what he was talking about when he preached, “O beloved, the Lord Jesus knows all about our trials and tribulations, because He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Understanding subordination and rejection intimately, Seymour allowed his own suffering to make him compassionate toward the ways others were excluded or subjected for different reasons.
As a faith hero from the first part of the twentieth century, Seymour’s vision and leadership speaks to us today. It might inspire us not to settle for less than full equality, whether along lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, or other identities. His vision from another era might help us lose patience – in a good way – with suggestions that we can’t change too much, too fast.
We can refuse to accept arguments for gradual change when urgency is needed, or arguments for minuscule incremental changes when radical changes have been made in the past and could be made again. He shows us that it was possible, in 1906, to build the kind of community that really does treat people of all races and all genders as equals. And, though we don’t see it often enough, surely it is more than possible today.
This piece is adapted from "Brother Seymour and His Sisters” in Liz's book Nice Churchy Patriarchy (Apocryphile Press, 2023) and from Neither Male Nor Female, All Are One: Wome
n’s Brief Empowerment in the Azusa Street Revival, a paper for Fuller Theological Seminary
Liz Cooledge Jenkins is a writer, preacher, former college campus minister, and the author of Nice Churchy Patriarchy. Her work at the intersections of faith, feminism, and social justice can be found at places like Sojourners, The Christian Century, and Ms. Magazine, as well as on Instagram
(@lizcoolj and @postevangelicalprayers). More at: bit.ly/LizJenkins