Answers · The Church & Its History
What happened at Azusa Street?
In April 1906, prayer meetings led by William J. Seymour — an African American holiness preacher who had sat under Charles Parham's teaching in Houston — moved into a former church building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles. The revival that followed ran day and night for roughly three years. Seymour's paper, The Apostolic Faith, reported it, and through departing visitors and missionaries the Pentecostal message traveled from that one building across the United States and around the world.
The History page's timeline records what flowed out of it: leaders who visited Azusa and carried the message home — among them R. E. McAlister, who seven years later would preach the Arroyo Seco sermon of 1913 — and the fellowship formed at the mission that fall from which the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the oldest of the Oneness bodies, traces its origins. Azusa is not the start of the story — the History page begins at Pentecost itself — but it is the modern movement's fountainhead.