Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989)
Article: Glossolalia at Azusa Street: A Hidden Presupposition?
Author: Charles S. Gaede

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WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989) p. 77

Glossolalia at Azusa Street:
A Hidden Presupposition?

Charles S. Gaede

Pentecost has surely come and with it the Bible evidences are following,” writes the editor of The Apostolic Faith; “…many are being converted and sanctified and filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues as they did on the day of Pentecost.”1 The modern Pentecostal Movement began on January 1, 1901, with Agnes N. Ozman at Charles Fox Parham’s Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas.2 Then on April 9, 1906,3 at 214 Bonnie Brae Street,4 “the first Pentecostal effusion came” to Los Angeles.5 Although those events delineate the beginning of the modern Pentecostal Movement, their foundations are clearly found in the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement.

Soon the Bonnie Brae Street group moved to Azusa Street6 where the meetings continued for the next three years.7 Both Agnes Ozman in Topeka, Kansas, and Jennie Moore, a participant in the Bonnie Brae Street meeting, responded with glossolalia at those meetings.8 Carl Brumback reports that seven people spoke in other tongues at

WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989) p. 78

the Bonnie Brae Street meeting on April 9th.9 From this beginning, history authenticates a statement by Watson Mills: “Certainly there is no more controversial aspect of charismatic religion than speaking in tongues.”10

The practice of glossolalia at Azusa Street was important for more reasons than its controversial nature. “The great significance of the Azusa Street revival,” writes William Menzies, “is its role in transforming the embryo Pentecostal outpouring into a worldwide movement.”11 Mills goes a step further:

Azusa Street was not only the spark that ignited the Pentecostal revival, but in its earliest days, most of the doctrinal issues surfaced there that would later become determinative for the formation of the major Pentecostal groups. Those issues were: 1) doctrine of sanctification; 2) Jesus only doctrine; 3) latter rain covenant; and 4) race as a basis for denominational division.12

Although Mills does not include glossolalia as a criterion f...

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