Seymour, William Joseph 1870-1922

SEYMOUR, WILLIAM JOSEPH 1870-1922

Pentecostal preacher

Background

William Joseph Seymour was born in Louisiana in 1870, the son of recently freed slaves Phyllis Salabarr and Simon Seymour. Few particulars are known of his early life, except that he received scant formal education and reported having had visions of God as a young man. He was associated with the Evening Light Saints, a Holiness group that believed in faith healing and total sanctification. In 1895 Seymour arrived in Indianapolis and worked as a waiter. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church there but in 1900 moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and affiliated himself with the Church of God in Anderson, Indiana, a group that had an interracial membership. After a bout with smallpox, which caused him to lose his left eye, Seymour became ordained as a Church of God minister in 1902 and began his career as an evangelist.

Preparation

He settled in Houston, where his family then lived. It was there he met Charles F. Parham, who had founded the first Pentecostal Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. Having witnessed Parham's governess speak in tongues at a Negro mission, the first time he had ever seen glossolalia, Seymour had asked to be admitted to Parham's Houston school. Parham's initial reluctance was because of racial considerations as he feared provoking his white students, but he eventually admitted Seymour, who did not actively seek the full Pentecostal experience of speaking in tongues. Seymour also met Neeley Terry in Houston. She had come from Los Angeles, where she followed Sister Hutchinson, an itinerant evangelist who had a storefront mission there. Terry would lead Seymour, backed by Parham's money, to Los Angeles in January 1906. Seymour would start a ministry that would shake the world.

Azusa Street

Within a week of arriving Seymour had alienated his new congregation with the message of the Pentecost. He was locked out. It took months for him to convert the leaders of the group and attend prayer meetings. On the evening of 9 April 1906 Seymour's preaching evoked speaking in tongues among the congregation at a meeting in a home on Bonnie Brae Street. Three nights later Seymour himself received the baptism in the Spirit and began speaking in tongues. Within days the group had moved into a building on Azusa Street. A mixed-race congregation began to attend, and on 18 April, the same day as the San Francisco earthquake, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about Azusa Street. The story, along with the aftereffects of the earthquake, brought a flood of people to the mission. Within months Seymour had ordained ministers, raised other congregations, and was publishing The Apostolic Faith.

New Messengers

People from around the country came to experience the revival. In 1907 the mission officially became the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles. That year and the next saw even more success for the mission. Those who had come to Los Angeles returned home carrying the Pentecostal message. Charles H. Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ, came and took the message to churches in the Southeast. Ira Campbell took the movement to Akron, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other places. Glenn A. Cook spread the word to Indianapolis. Parham, encouraged by Seymour's success, sent more missionaries out, though shortly thereafter he was humiliated by civil charges brought against him. Seymour and the Azusa Street Mission repudiated him, and Seymour was left to carry on the work alone.

Decline

Though Azusa Street was the longest continuous revival in American religious history, Seymour's fame was essentially short-lived as a series of problems developed. An administrative assistant stole Azusa's mailing list, damaging the mission's nationwide impact. In 1911 William Durham, a white man, left the mission over racial conflicts as well as doctrinal ones. Seymour alienated his group by building a "throne" for himself. Traditional Christians had opposed the revival from the beginning, and the mission's energy could not be sustained. By 1913 Seymour had only about twenty members in his congregation. He spent the final nine years of his life traveling and speaking to black audiences. He wrote Doctrines and Discipline (1915), a handbook for his faithful followers. He died of a heart attack in 1922, leaving his work to his wife, Jennie Moore, who continued it until her death in 1936, even after losing the Azusa Street Mission in 1931.

Sources:

Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1979);

J. Gordon Melton, ed., Religious Leaders of America (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991).