For years, the building on Azusa Street has also been an enigma. Most people are familiar with the same three or four photographs that have been published and republished through the years. They show a rectangular, boxy, wood frame structure that was 40 feet by 60 feet and desperately in need of repair. Seymour began his meetings in the Mission on April 15, 1906. A work crew set up a pulpit made from a wooden box used for shipping shoes from the manufacturer to stores. The pulpit sat in the center of the room. A piece of cotton cloth covered its top. Osterberg built an altar with donated lumber that ran between two chairs. Space was left open for seekers. Bartleman sketched seating as nothing more than a few long planks set on nail kegs and a ragtag collection of old chairs.
What the new sources have revealed about the Mission, however, is fascinating. The people worshiped on the ground level — a dirt floor, on which straw and sawdust were scattered. The walls were never finished, but the people whitewashed the rough-cut lumber. Near the door hung a mailbox into which tithes and offerings were placed since they did not take offerings at the Mission. A sign greeted visitors with vivid green letters. It read “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” (Daniel 5:25, kjv), with its Ns written backwards and its Ss upside down. Men hung their hats on exposed overhead rafters where a single row of incandescent lights ran the length of the room.
These sources also reveal that the atmosphere within this crude building — without insulation or air conditioning, and teeming with perspiring bodies — was rank at best. As one writer put it, “It was necessary to stick one’s nose under the benches to get a breath of air.”
Several announced that the meetings were plagued by flies. “Swarms of flies,” wrote one reporter, “attracted by the vitiated atmosphere, buzzed throughout the room, and it was a continual fight for protection.”
A series of maps drawn by the Sanborn Insurance Company give a clear picture of the neighborhood. The 1888 map discloses that Azusa Street was originally Old Second Street. The street was never more than one block in length. It ended at a street paving company with piles of coal, along with heavy equipment. A small house, marked on the map by a “D” for domicile, sat on the front of the property with the address of 87. (See highlighted section.) A marble works business specializing in tombstones stood on the southeast corner of Azusa Street and San Pedro. Orange and grapefruit orchards surrounded the property. On the right of the map a Southern Pacific railroad spur is clearly visible. The City Directory indicates that the neighborhood was predominantly Jewish, though other names were mixed among them.
A second map of the property was published in 1894. Old Second Street had become Azusa Street, and the address had been changed to 312. The house had been moved further back on the property where it served as a parsonage. The dominant building at 312 Azusa Street was the Stevens African Methodist Episcopal Church. At the front of the building a series of tiny parallel lines on the map mark a staircase that stood at the north end of the building providing entry to the second floor, the original sanctuary.
The only known photograph of the church from this period shows three interesting features. First, it shows the original staircase. Second, and less obvious, the original roofline had a steep pitch. Third, three gothic style windows with tracery lines adorned the front wall.
By 1894, the citrus groves had largely disappeared. On the southern side they were replaced by lawn. The smell of orange blossoms and the serenity of the orchard were rapidly being replaced by the banging of railroad cars and the smell of new lumber. A growing number of boarding houses and small businesses, including canneries and laundries, were moving into the immediate area by this time. The property marked “YARD” on the map is the beginning of the lumberyard that soon came to dominate the area. The City Directory reveals fewer Jewish names, and more racial and ethnic diversity in the neighborhood, including African Americans, Germans, Scandinavians, and Japanese.
Stevens AME Church occupied the building at 312 Azusa Street until February 1904 when the congregation dedicated a new brick facility at the corner of 8th and Towne and changed their name to First AME Church. Before the congregation could decide what to do with the property on Azusa Street, however, an arsonist set the vacant church building on fire. The structure was greatly weakened, and the roof was completely destroyed. The congregation decided to turn the building into a tenement house. They subdivided the former second-floor sanctuary into several rooms separated by a long hallway that ran the length of the building. The stairs were removed from the front of the building and a rear stairwell was constructed, leaving the original entry hanging in space. The lower level was used to house horses and to store building supplies, including lumber and nails.
In 1906, a new Sanborn Map was published. (See 1906 map.) The building was marked with the words “Lodgings 2nd, Hall 1st, CHEAP.” The transition of the neighborhood had continued. The marble work still occupied the southeast corner of Azusa Street and San Pedro, but a livery and feed supply store now dominated the northeast corner. A growing lumberyard to the south and east of the property now replaced the once sprawling lawn. A Southern Pacific railroad spur curved through the lumberyard to service this business.
The Apostolic Faith, the newspaper of the Azusa Street Mission between September 1906 and June 1908, later referred to the nearby Russian community. Many of these recent immigrants were employed in the lumberyard. They were not Russian Orthodox Christians as one might guess; they were Molokans — “Milk drinkers.” This group had been influenced by some of the 16th-century Reformers. They did not accept the dairy fasts of the Orthodox Church. They were Trinitarians who strongly believed in the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit. Demos Shakarian, grandfather of the founder of Full Gospel Business Men’s International, was among these immigrants who were led to Los Angeles through a prophetic word given in 1855.
Henry McGowan, later an Assemblies of God pastor in Pasadena, was a member of the Holiness Church at the time. He was employed as a teamster. He timed his arrival at the nearby lumberyard so he could visit the Mission during its afternoon services.
This map suggests why some viewed the Mission as being in a slum. A better description would be an area of developing light industry.
In April 1906, when the people who had been meeting at the house at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street were forced to move, they found the building at 312 Azusa Street was for sale. The photograph below taken about the time that the congregation chose to move into the building shows the “For Sale” sign posted high on the east wall of the building, as well as the rear of the tombstone shop. Seymour, pastor of the Azusa Street Mission, and a few trusted friends met with the pastor of First AME Church and negotiated a lease for $8 a month.
An early photograph reveals what the 1906 version of the map indicates. The pitched roof had not been replaced. The building had a flat roof. The staircase that had stood at the front of the building had been removed.
In a sense, this building suited the Azusa Street faithful. They were not accustomed to luxury. They were willing to meet in the stable portion of the building. The upstairs could be used for prayer rooms, church offices, and a home for Pastor Seymour.
Articles of incorporation were filed with the state of California on March 9, 1907, and amended May 19, 1914. The church negotiated the purchase of the property for $15,000 with $4,000 down. It was given the necessary cash to retire the mortgage in 1908. The sale was recorded by the County of Los Angeles on April 12, 1908.
Toward a Pentecostal Strategy for the City
One of the questions that seems to come up in this course discussion is how to change the world around us with a more positive and effective approach toward using the Gospel of Salvation. In this particular module, the difficulty addressed is ethnocentricity. The particularity of our search then arrives at the more detailed question, how can we change the culture (respectively subcultures) of our church congregations? This is a drastic move from a closed circle toward an outreach community that many congregations are unable to accomplish. How do we then empower such congregations to be transformed into cultural reach-outs to a single ethnos or multiple ethnic groups?
Problem
The problem in the first quarter of the 21st century has been incongruity of our church strategy with the times we live in and the mindset they occupy. We’ve been preparing the church for the multicultural battle, all and while we should have been equipping the saints how to rebuild the walls since the battle has been lost.
We’ve been equipping leaders for the ministry while the church ship has been sinking only to end up with well trained captains of a sunken fleet. And in a doomed attempt to reconcile the reality of the ministry with their training, they have turned to wave walkers who briefly surface for breaths of fresh air during Sunday worship only to return to the deep blue walk of their daily ministry never finding their lost piece of eight.
For the battle was lost long ago before the present generation of ministers ever came to existence. They know not the battle. They’ve only seen the ruins that were left within the broken walls of the church. And they have been struggling to reconcile the incomputable of what church eldership has been teaching them to battle against with the Nehemiah calling for restoration, which God has placed upon them. For the answer has never been in building a New Jerusalem for a fresh start, but restoring the old Jerusalem and its former glory to a new state that reclaims our history and heritage.
Context
Recent analysis of migrant churches in the United States reveals that the predominant majority of them are located in cities which have a high influxation and concentration of immigrants. Such localities are called “gateway cities”. Immigrants typically enter the United States through one of these cities and settle there. These areas contain over half of the foreign-born population in the United States as follows:
Strategy
Asking the right questions is important, but the answers cannot be generic for all ethnic groups or cultural settings. There is a strong need to be flexible and observe changes in culture, but not to change the message of the Gospel or compromise our witness. Several common things are noted in any cultural setting where our ministry is involved:
First and foremost, people of all cultures prefer to be personal with a purpose, rather than being project driven. No one longs to be part of someone else’s project. Yet, our very existence demands personal purpose, which could serve as a great cultural catalyst in a church ministry.
Secondly, cross cultural ministry is not done merely on relationships, but on being real in the relationships. The greatest halt of ministry work is when people realize the relationship with the church has not been a real one, but merely a part of a program or a paradigm.
Finally, our cross cultural model for ministry should not be just salvation oriented, but soul oriented. There is a great difference between writing down the number of saved every Sunday and actually caring for the eternal well-being of the saved souls. In fact, this is so fundamentally determinative that it should be the goal in mind of every new church plant.
This new translation took several years to refine through multiple revisions, re-readings, and new re-translate where needed in order to produce an interlinear with priority advantages and distinctive features as follows:
The pastors who kept looking back imagined a culture governed by Christian values and refused to see the world for what it was increasingly becoming.
Over the last decade, Christian America died.
As much as some Supreme Court decisions in the early 2020s made religious conservatives think they were winning the culture wars, any sense of victory was short-lived.
The overwhelming identification of Generation Z and Generation Alpha as having no religious affiliation transformed America into a thoroughly post-Christian culture.
All of this put Christian church leaders into one of two camps: Leaders who wanted to move forward and leaders who wanted to look back.
The pastors who kept looking back imagined a culture governed by Christian values and refused to see the world for what it was increasingly becoming. Churches led by those leaders saw a decline.
And the culture wars of the early to mid-2020s that conservative Christians believed they were winning by ensuring their candidates ran for Congress and Governor positions proved only to momentarily shore up a dying worldview. Power and coercion couldn’t reverse the tide.
In the process, that faction in the church alienated the next generation of unreached people from Christianity even more deeply.
The leaders who looked forward acknowledged they were in a post-Christian culture and decided to advance a decidedly alt-Kingdom centered around the Gospel. They saw renewal and growth.
Bottom line? The leaders who kept looking back never moved forward.
In the last decade, dying churches saw digital church as an obstacle. Growing churches realized it was an opportunity.
As little as 15 years ago, most growing churches were primarily physical organizations with a nominal or underdeveloped digital strategy.
Throughout the 2020s and early 2030s, the dual trend of declining church attendance and decentralized attendance changed everything for growing churches.
Growing churches stopped treating church online as an afterthought, realizing that since everyone they’re trying to reach is online, becoming a digital-first church made them more effective.
The paradox, of course, is that the more leaders built community online as a church, the more it resulted in growth in their physical locations.
Ironically, churches that focus primarily on physical attendance only saw declining attendance. Churches that focused on digital connection saw the opposite.
Over the last decade, dying churches saw digital church as an obstacle. Growing churches realized it was an opportunity.
Dying churches confined ministry to their buildings. Growing churches didn’t.
As the digital revolution exploded over the last ten years, almost everything shifted out of central locations.
Everything from work, to shopping, to food, fitness, and entertainment shifted to digital and distributed access (i.e., accessed by people when they wanted and where they wanted.)
Dying churches confined ministry to their buildings. Growing churches didn’t.
Pastors of expanding ministries long ago made peace with the idea that the number of people not in the building on Sunday now greatly outnumbers the number of people who are inside the building.
They got over their insecurity about smaller in-person crowds and saw the expansive potential of reaching people wherever they were and connecting them with each other.
Pastors of growing churches long ago realized that full rooms never guaranteed a fulfilled mission.
Another shift happened regarding how church leaders think about church buildings:
Pastors of dying churches kept using church online to get people into the building.
Pastors of growing churches used their buildings to reach people online.
On-demand sermon access reaches people when they’re ready, not when you’re ready.
Live events still have a great role in the life of a vibrant church, but they’ve long since been eclipsed by people who access content and schedule gatherings on demand.
Leaders who released control of a centralized calendar to allow people to figure out for themselves when they wanted to meet saw a far greater impact than leaders who didn’t.
And when centralized gatherings happen, leaders of growing churches quickly got over the fact that, despite a full room, far more people accessed their ministry at other times. And as a result, their mission kept growing.
Pastors of growing ministries quickly understood two underlying realities behind on-demand access.
First, they knew that on-demand access reaches people when they’re ready, not when you’re ready.
Second, when it comes to accessing messages and ministry content, they realized people don’t care if a message is new nearly as much as they care if a message is great. Hence, access to their message archive continued to grow, and they positioned it for that.
In the 2020s, churches that gathered people kept falling behind, while churches that connected people continued to grow.
In the 2020s, churches that gathered people kept falling behind, while churches that connected people continued to grow.
The shift wasn’t that hard once the pastors of effective churches realized that for years, the culture had increasingly relied on services that leveraged existing infrastructure.
For example, what small groups accomplished for churches in the 1990s and 2000s changed how churches approached gathering people mid-week. Essentially, a decade before Airbnb and ride-share services like Uber and Lyft emerged on the scene, innovative church leaders stopped building massive Christian education buildings and started ‘Airbnbing’ people’s homes for community.
The home-based small group model morphed into micro-gatherings and home-based gatherings for worship and other church events.
Leaders of growing churches never felt threatened by the fact that they couldn’t ‘see’ the people they were ministering to. They built the structures and systems that led to the church being ‘one’ wherever it met, much like multi-site churches have done for decades.
Connecting people eclipsed gathering people for the same reasons that on-demand content eclipsed live content. You gather people when they’re ready, not when you’re ready.
Insecure leaders, operating out of power and control and needing to ‘see’ the results of their ministry, could never make this transition. Healthy leaders did.
Growing churches made community and connection the goal of their ministry, not content consumption.
Growing churches made community and connection the goal of their ministry, not content consumption.
In a world that started drowning in content in the 2010s, adept church leaders realized that great content was no longer the compelling advantage it used to be. Sure, bad preaching could kill a church. But great preaching alone no longer guaranteed its growth.
Here’s what astute leaders realized in the 2020s. Scarcity drives value. The more scarce something is, the more value it has.
When something is scarce, it has enough value to make people change their patterns (physical, financial, or time patterns, to name a few). Conversely, mass availability drives down prices and perceived value.
For centuries, attending a local church was the only place most people could access a sermon. The 21st century changed that forever.
What became increasingly scarce were community and connection. So among growing churches, all of their content drove people to community and toward connection.
Growing churches made community and connection the goal, not content consumption. Declining churches continued to make in-person and online content consumption their main goal (Watch this!!! Don’t miss this!!!) and paid the accompanying price.
Make the goal of all staffing (digital or in-person) community and connection.
Because, after all, that’s far more at the heart of what the Christian church is all about than content consumption ever was.
A final but important point.
Dying churches kept staffing for a world that no longer existed. Obsessed with getting people into a building, they continued to make digital ministry an afterthought.
Growing churches didn’t abandon physical gatherings. They continued to make their in-person services deeply personal and meaningful and staffed accordingly.
But they also doubled down on digital, realizing that everyone they wanted to reach was online and that many they would reach wouldn’t live near a campus or, if they did, would be willing to drive to one.
So pastors of growing churches followed Craig Groeschel’s advice back in 2020: They went 100% in on digital ministry and 100% in on physical ministry.
Then they went a step further: They made the goal of all staffing (digital or in-person) community and connection.
Because, after all, that’s far more at the heart of what the Christian church is all about than content consumption ever was.
Change, Critics, and Coaches
The leaders we criticize today will be the leaders who coach us tomorrow.
Snap back to today. Will all of this happen? Who knows. But if even parts of this are remotely true, it’s clear that the next decade will involve massive change.
Change also comes with a lot of criticism. But as the wiser leaders realized, the leaders we criticize today will be the leaders who coach us tomorrow.
The sooner you start to change, the brighter the future becomes, and the more effective your ministry will be. Change is hard, but irrelevance is even harder.
CAREY NIEUWHOF
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Bulgaria’s early Pentecostals insisted on a spiritual fullness that included: (1) salvation, (2) water baptism and (3) baptism with the Spirit.[1] As a formula of spiritual experience, it satisfied the witness of blood, water and Spirit (1 Jn. 5:8) on earth; but also corresponded with the triune God in heaven (1 Jn. 5:7), from whom the believer’s spiritual experience originated. Many conservative Pentecostals in Bulgaria today still uphold “the fullness” teaching and would not use Bibles that exclude Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7) for these three “bear record in heaven.”[2]
However, even with the already present Trinitarian experience of the believer and the enormous theological Methodist influence, it is astounding that the doctrine of sanctification was not taught as a separate work of grace among Bulgarian Protestants. Even when after Pentecostalism spread in Bulgaria, it was not included in the tri-fold formula for “spiritual fullness” of the believer. During the persecution of the Communist Regime, speaking in tongues during Communion was done as a spiritual confirmation that the person has “fullness in the Spirit” or is not a government agent sent by the police to spy on the rest of the church. Interpretation often followed to confirm the spiritual stand of the believer. Early Bulgarian Pentecostals did not distinguish between the initial evidence and the gift of speaking in tongues. Even communist propaganda author Boncho Assenov, who categorized Pentecostals as a sectarian cult, defined this fullness as fundamental for the sacramental theology of the early charismatic communities in Bulgaria.[3]
[1] Mollov, 209.
[2] Zarev, 28.
[3] Boncho Asenov, Religiite i sektite v Bŭlgariia (Sofia: Partizdat, 1968), 167, 367.
See also:
The Practice of Corporate Holiness within the Communion Service of Bulgarian Pentecostals
Sanctification and Personal Holiness among Early Bulgarian Pentecostals
Water Baptism among early Bulgarian Pentecostals
First Pentecostal Missionaries to Bulgaria (1920)
Since the beginning of the 21st century, only 6-10% of new born believers in America receive the Baptism with the Holy Spirit, which by 2018 has resulted in:
For this reason, WE are re-committing ourselves and ministry to revival and restoration of the Pentecostal Message through praying, fasting and preaching:
Please consider the URGENCY of this generation!
Let us reason together what can we do to prevent this rapid decline in Biblical spirituality.
Revival will not come without preaching!
Revival of Pentecost will not come without preaching the Message of Pentecost.
February 10, 2023 by Cup&Cross
Filed under 365, Featured, News, Publication
Since the beginning of the 21st century, only 6-10% of new born believers in America receive the Baptism with the Holy Spirit, which by 2018 has resulted in:
For this reason, WE are re-committing ourselves and ministry to revival and restoration of the Pentecostal Message through praying, fasting and preaching:
Please consider the URGENCY of this generation!
Let us reason together what can we do to prevent this rapid decline in Biblical spirituality.
Revival will not come without preaching!
Revival of Pentecost will not come without preaching the Message of Pentecost.
Speaking in Tongues in America Prior to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906
April, 1906 – The Azusa street revival swept the globe starting with California
January 1, 1901– The initial phenomenon of speaking in tongues occurred at Parham’s school in Topeka, Kansas
January 6, 1900 – Frank Sanford’s Shiloh school reported that “The gift of tongues has descended”
1896 – Over 100 people baptized in the Shaerer schoolhouse revival conducted by the Christian Union in the North Carolina mountains
1887 – People falling in trances and speaking in tongues were reported at Maria Etter’s revival meetings in Indiana
1874 – Speaking in tongues occurred during healing meetings reported in New York
1873 – William H. Doughty and the Gift People of Rhode Island spoke in tongues
1854 – V. P. Simmons and Robert Boyd reported tongue speaking during Moody’s meetings
FURTHER READING:
Church of God (Cleveland, TN)
Azusa Street Revival of 1906
Prior to Azusa Street Revival of 1906
