The Grandfather of Azusa
Charles Fox Parham (1873-1929) presided over a Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. He was a true spiritual father, and many consider him the father of the modern Pentecostal movement. Even though he would later reject many of his own spiritual children, his part in this movement must be recognized and understood.
Parham was a seeker of God who was constantly challenged by what he viewed as the great chasm between biblical Christianity and the then-present state of the church. He sought the Lord for what he considered to be a true, biblical expression of Christianity. As he was keeping a prayer vigil on New Year’s Eve of the year 1900, he experienced the spiritual gift of “speaking in tongues,” or “glossolalia,” right after midnight on January 1, 1901, has understood then how this one event would be used to define Christianity in the twentieth century. Speaking in tongues or the use of other spiritual gifts is by no means unique in the history of the church. Many
Many reformers and revivalists had such experiences. Even so, Parham’s experience came at what could be called “the fullness of time,” or a time that was ripe for the harvest of a recovered truth. His experience created a high interest, at least partly because of the dry and lifeless state of the church at the time. Also, Parham was not known for emotionalism or exaggeration, but rather the opposite. He was conservative and resolute, which at the time gave even more credibility to his experience.
A couple of years after his baptism in the Holy Spirit, Parham’s health broke down and he was forced to move t Houston where he could stay wit friends. His strength was recovered and he began another Bible school in the Texas port city. William Seymour later became one of his students.
William Seymour was born in Centerville, Louisiana in May of 1870. Centerville is around 12 miles from the southern coast of Louisiana. His parents, Simeon and Phyllis were former slaves. Most immigrants entered the region through the New Orleans port in the 1700s and brought their languages and cultures with them. Many of the immigrants who moved into the area were of the Roman Catholic faith. To help settle the land many of them brought slaves with them. The fact that the control of this region moved back and forth between the Spanish and the French meant that ultimately a culturally diverse representation of French, Cajun, Spanish, Portuguese, and Afro-Caribbean cultures such as Creoles dominated in the region. This also resulted in a population of slaves who came in varying shades of color. Those of a lighter hug-often the offspring of forced interracial unions between female slaves and their white owners- were designated as “mulatto” and often were assigned jobs to work around the house. Slave’s weight darker skin was designated as “blacks” and had the difficult labor of working in the fields in hot and humid conditions.
