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The Church Returns to the Upper Room

personally studied Kiswahili for years to learn it fluently. The point is
that God heard the cry of His people and answered with an Upper Room
outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

On January 1, 1901, the first day of the twentieth century, at a Bible
school in Topeka, Kansas, United States of America, a young lady was
baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues as evidence. What
made it so significant was that she, along with other students, was
seeking for renewal of the New Testament “baptism in the Holy Spirit.”
These students and their principal, Charles Parham, concluded that it
was the same baptism that the Lord poured out on the Day of Pentecost,
and it was the same empowerment the early church used to reach the
contemporary world with the gospel. What took place in a small Bible
school was the beginning of a Pentecostal century. Earlier I used the
analogy of the river, and I believe it is appropriate to say that another
Pentecostal river began to flow at the outset of the twentieth century.
This amazing river began to flow with a specific purpose—missio Dei—
to accomplish God’s purpose of world evangelization.

The Azusa Revival

Early in 1906, just about five years after the phenomenon in Topeka,
Kansas, another Pentecostal out-
pouring occurred in a city near
Los Angeles, California. William
Seymour, an African-American
preacher, was the catalyst in this
divine visitation. Seymour had
learned about the Pentecostal
experience—the baptism in the
Holy Spirit—while he attended
a short-term Bible school in Figure 11.1—Azusa Street Church
Houston, Texas. Because of his
social status and his race—the United States of America was steeped in
racism at the time—he was not permitted to sit in the same classroom
as the white students. However, Seymour would not be dissuaded. He
sat humbly in the hallway and listened to the teaching. While he did not
receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit at this time, he was convinced that
it was scriptural, and he greatly desired what the Scriptures had promised
(Acts 1 and 2).

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