Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture

4 Laying the Foundations for Azusa: Black Women and Public Ministry in the Nineteenth Century

| 65 4 Laying the Foundations for Azusa Black Women and Public Ministry in the Nineteenth Century Valerie C. Cooper Once, while lecturing in a course on Pentecostalism, I was struck by a student’s question.1 The student asked simply, “Why Azusa?” In a sense, this young person was asking if phenomena like glossolalia had reoccurred at various times during history, why did these experiences come together so powerfully in the Pentecostal Revival at Azusa Street that began in 1906?2 What particular circumstances—social, theological, political, or other— coalesced at Azusa to produce the wide-ranging, rapidly expanding movement we call Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement on earth, “accounting for one in every four Christians”?3 Azusa Street was unique in many ways. Media sources noted, often disdainfully , the leadership roles that blacks held in the movement.4 William J. Seymour, the African American who headed the Azusa Street Mission during its most influential early years, was surrounded by women—both black and white—who preached, operated in multiple gifts of the Spirit, and enthusiastically carried the message of Azusa and Pentecostalism around the globe. According to the Pentecostal scholar Cecil M. Robeck Jr., “From the outset, the leadership that surrounded Seymour was racially mixed and included both women and men.”5 Coming as it did during a period in the United States marked by the expansion of de jure Jim Crow segregation, Azusa Street represented a remarkable—even miraculous—period of religious racial integration that is quite unique in American history, even into the present. Although, as scholars like Iain MacRobert have documented, this period of integration was under constant assault and ultimately gave way to the formation of racially separated but nearly theologically identical Pentecostal confederations and denominations very early on, the Azusa Street Mission was nonetheless an amazing moment in American religious history.6 66 | Gender and Culture In addressing the question, why Azusa? we must not only examine the complexity that attended the emergence of Pentecostalism but also consider various influences, including the effect that women’s increasingly public ministries had on the precursor Evangelical and Wesleyan Holiness movements .7 One of the circumstances producing the critical mass that contributed to Azusa as a phenomenon was the changing role of women in Evangelicalism and in the African American community in the years just prior to the 1906 origins of the Revival. In addition to the dynamic leadership of men like Seymour, black women brought to their involvement in Azusa changing expectations about their roles in ministry and public life, biblically based arguments for women’s religious leadership, a developing pneumatology, and eschatological expectancy. These women’s views about public activism and theology had been shaped by debates over slavery, the Civil War, and the subsequent collapse of Reconstruction, and contributed to the dynamic sociological and historical factors that produced Azusa Street. The Pentecostal scholar, Joe Creech, has argued that the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 to 1909 has been mythologized as the “central point from which the worldwide Pentecostal movement emerged” and that such understanding presents a distorted picture of early Pentecostalism as having universally shared Azusa’s “unique social and religious dynamics—spontaneity, charismatic leadership, ecstasy, and the subversion of race, class, and gender categories.”8 Far from having shared such a “common sectarian, egalitarian ethos,” Creech argues that “Pentecostalism arose from multiple pockets of revival that retained their preexisting institutional structures, theological tendencies, and social dynamics,” 9 Azusa came to represent a myth of origin for Pentecostalism, despite the fact that the movement’s origins were not that precise historically or geographically. Creech’s analysis helps to explain the existence and significance of competing movements before, during, and after Azusa. It also argues for an understanding of Pentecostalism as a movement that evolved gradually from Holiness and other religious and social movements rather than abruptly at a single point in 1906. Pentecostalism’s Holiness precursors thus take on added significance as legitimate contributors to the theology and practice of what would later be labeled as Pentecostal. Indeed, even the use of the term “Pentecostal ” predates Azusa in Holiness circles.10 Even if the characteristics that distinguished Azusa were not universally experienced throughout early Pentecostalism, they have nonetheless fascinated historians and theologians. How did Azusa come to be defined by Creech’s description as “unique social and religious dynamics—spontaneity, Laying the Foundations for Azusa | 67 charismatic leadership, ecstasy, and the...