Throughout the centuries after the life of Jesus, the progress of the church has ebbed and flowed. Sometimes God’s people have done well, and at other times they have strayed far from God and His truths. Whenever He could find them, God used people to restore the church to the right paths. The church, at large, began straying away from a Biblical view of “the Godhead” and “the plan of salvation” as early as the 2nd century. But through movements such as the reformation and the awakenings He has been able to incrementally restore the truths that were originally established. One such movement that helped restore an understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as experienced by the disciples on the Day of Pentecost was the Asuza St .revival.
An important precursor to that great revival in Los Angeles was what happened in Topeka Kansas, in 1901. Charles Parham was a minister who established Bethel Bible School – a Bible School where people lived by faith. He was at a place in his spiritual and theological journey where he was understanding that there had to be a greater experience with God than just a confession of faith. So, in December of 1900 when the semester was coming to an end and Parham was leaving for a few days, he challenged his students to study the Bible to determine what evidence was consistently present when the first century Christians received the Holy Spirit.
As the students studied the book of Acts, they discovered a consistent event associated with salvation was that believers were baptized with the Holy Spirit. They also noticed that was usually accompanied by them “speaking in tongues.” In other words, early Christian converts spoke in a language they had never learned as a part of their salvation experience.
The students spent several days in prayer and worship, and held a New Year’s Eve watchnight service at Bethel on December 31, 1900 and then another on January 1, 1901. They were fighting a war to see the power of the church restored. Prayer was the weapon they used to break long-held beliefs in order to embrace biblical theology.
God responded with a demonstration of truth. In the New Year’s service, a woman by the name of Agnes Ozman felt impressed to ask everyone to pray for her to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit. While people were praying for her, she immediately began to speak in a language she had never learned. What a pleasant surprise!
During this period of time, there was an African-American man by the name of William Seymour who, because for Jim Crow laws, sat outside Parham’s classrooms and listened to the teaching about the HG. He would later move to LA where he eventually received the baptism of the HG, speaking in tongues. He became a key leader of the Asuza St, mission that was an epicenter of a movement that has now seen millions baptized with the Holy Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues. It is a delightful and surprising experience awaiting anyone who will seek Him.