Pentecostalism's Co-Founder Rejected Azusa Street

William Seymour and Charles Parham have been called “the co-founders of world Pentecostalism” (Antonio Arnold, We Are Living in the Finished Work of Christ, p. 143), but Parham did not accept the Azusa Street experience as a movement of God. Seymour was part of Parham’s Apostolic Faith movement and was a student in Parham’s Bible School in Houston when he received the call to move to Los Angeles. “Tongues speaking” had broken out in 1901 at Parham’s Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, before he moved to Houston. We even have a description of the exact words spoken in “tongues” by one of Parham’s Topeka students as recorded by a reporter for the Topeka State Journal. I found a copy of this newspaper on a visit to the Kansas Historical Society in 2002: “Mr. Parham called Miss Lilian Thistlethwaite into the room and asked her if she could talk some. She ... began to utter strange words which sounded like this: ‘Euossa, Euossa, use rela sema calah mala kanah leulla ssage nalan. Ligle logle lazie logle. Ene mine mo, sah rah el me sah rah me’ (“Hindoo and Zulu Both Are Represented at Bethel School,” Topeka State Journal, Jan. 9, 1901). It was pure gibberish. Lilian even forgot the meene in “Ene meene mine mo”! When Parham visited the Asuza Street meetings in October 1906, he was dismayed by the “awful fits and spasms” of the “holy rollers and hypnotists.” He said the Azusa Street meetings were largely characterized by manifestations of the flesh, spiritualistic controls, and the practice of hypnotism (Sarah Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham, Joplin, MO: Tri-state Printing, 1930, p. 163). When Parham arrived in Azusa Street in 1906, he began his first sermon by telling the people that “God is sick at his stomach” because of the things which were occurring at Azusa (Charles Shumway, A Study of the “Gift of Tongues,” A.B. thesis, University of California, 1914, pp. 178, 179; cited by Goff, Fields White Unto Harvest, p. 131). According to Parham, two-thirds of the people that professed Pentecostalism in his day were “either hypnotized or spook driven” (Sarah Parham, p. 164). (For more on this see The Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements: The History and the Error, available in print and eBook editions from Way of Life Literature.)

(Friday Church News Notes, February 21, 2014, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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