Many people date Pentecostalism to a mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906 and file everything else under emotion: the shout, the dance, the tongues. Both pictures miss the history. The Black Holiness and Pentecostal tradition joins a Wesleyan pursuit of holy living with the conviction, drawn from Acts 2, that the Holy Spirit still fills believers and gives gifts. Azusa Street, led by William Seymour, a Black pastor and son of slaves, is its American turning point, not its beginning.
Theologian Antipas Harris tells that story from inside it. His father planted a Holiness Pentecostal congregation in Manchester, Georgia, after coming to faith in the Church of God in Christ. “So all of my life, I’ve been holiness Pentecostal.” In his account, the tradition’s largest gift to the wider Black church was freedom in worship, and its clearest failure was holiness that hardened into a list of rules.
Acts 2 before Azusa Street
Harris traces his own heritage to Azusa Street, then refuses to let that address define the movement: “But we must not simply think that Pentecostalism is an American phenomenon that started in 19 hundreds.”
His starting point is Acts 2. On the day of Pentecost “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4). Peter explains the event by quoting the prophet Joel: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (Acts 2:17).
Acts is narrative. It describes what happened to the first believers, and readers have to decide what in it is meant to repeat. Pentecostals read “the last days” as the whole age of the church, so the outpouring belongs to every generation. Other Christians who love Scripture read the tongues of Acts 2 as a founding event marking the church’s birth. How spiritual gifts operate today remains a question faithful Christians answer differently. What the text plainly shows is the Spirit given broadly, to sons and daughters alike, and that breadth matters for what happened in 1906.
Harris goes further and claims the Spirit’s work never stopped between Pentecost and Los Angeles. “In fact, it never stopped moving.” Here a fair skeptic will object that scattered experiences do not make a continuous movement. Harris largely grants the point. He speaks of strands rather than movements, naming medieval figures such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience. He admits we cannot always say these figures spoke in tongues, and that many never described their experiences in detail. So the claim he can actually defend is modest: the Spirit’s presence did not vanish after the apostles. A hidden chain of tongues-speakers across fifteen centuries is not something his evidence shows, and he does not pretend it does.
Holiness had a longer root
The first half of the tradition’s name has its own history. Holiness was never Wesley’s private property. John Calvin prized it, and the Presbyterians and Puritans pressed hard on personal piety. Wesley’s distinct contribution was his insistence that there is no holiness but social holiness. Harris, who places his tradition in the Wesleyan strand, explains that this joined private devotion to “how we treat other people as a part of what it means to be holy.”
Behind Wesley stands something older still: “but holiness itself really dates back to the Old Testament,” Harris says. God commands Israel to be holy because he is holy (Leviticus 19:2), and Peter repeats the command to the church: “Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). The standard is God’s own character. Keep that in view, because the tradition later started measuring holiness by hemlines.
From a hallway to Los Angeles
The American turning point begins with one man. William Seymour was a Black preacher with one eye, born to parents who had been enslaved, and Harris notes he came from a Nazarene background. In the years after Reconstruction he wanted to study under Charles Parham, a white teacher drawing attention for his teaching on Acts 2. Segregation barred Seymour from the classroom, so he sat in the hallway and listened through the door. Parham taught that the gifts of the Spirit were for the church now. Harris sums up Seymour’s response: “if God is pouring this Holy Spirit out to us today, then I want it.”
Seymour went to Los Angeles, where Harris says a group of women were already seeking the Spirit. He became the leader of the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 and 1907. Black and white worshipers came from across the country into the same room. The Los Angeles Times covered it with contempt, and Harris says the papers mocked the worship as heathenish in racial terms and wrote scandalized accounts of Black and white people worshiping together. Hostile reporting has one value as evidence: the critics had no reason to invent the integration they were ridiculing. The participant and chronicler Frank Bartleman described the color line as washed away in the blood.
The revival spread. Charles Mason, a Black Baptist pastor, went to Azusa Street and was baptized in the Spirit. He then built the church that became the Church of God in Christ. The line runs straight from Seymour to Mason to Harris’s father.
The worship the tradition gave back
Freedom in worship is the gift Harris names first, and he explains it by describing what came before. Many established Black churches grew out of the folk religion of slavery and drew on two sources. They kept elements of the slave tradition, and they tempered it according to the slaveholders’ idea of church, “cleaning it up to be more proper.” Harris names the AMEs, Black Baptists and CMEs as bodies that did not keep the full expression of the Spirit practiced in the plantation meeting places.
Mason brought the ring dance back, a practice Harris calls clearly African. He is precise about Mason’s role: “he didn’t introduce it as much as he reintroduced it.” The dance had lived on the plantations, and similar expressions appeared at Azusa Street before Mason arrived. What Mason did was affirm it and make it central to his church’s identity.
The response from other Black churches was mixed. Some resisted, while some Baptist congregations allowed these expressions early without leaving their denominations. “So yes, he had pushback, but I’m not gonna say that everybody pushed back ’cause that’s just not the case.”
Harris watched the change reach his hometown. New Hope Baptist Church in Manchester began as one of two churches named Macedonia, one white and one Black, facing each other and dating back to slavery. The Black congregation later took its own name and kept a restrained style of worship, with no guitars and little dancing. In those days, Harris recalls, “you get excited and people sort of contain you.” A gospel group from his father’s church was the first to bring guitars into New Hope. At the door, someone asked whether the instruments were allowed, and the pastor said yes. That congregation now dances freely.
The phrases Harris grew up with name what the tradition was after: “let the spirit have its way, stir up the spirit, let the Spirit have free course.” He sees the influence now reaching past worship style to tongues, prophecy and the gifts of the Spirit across the wider church. In neo-Pentecostal settings, he observes, it can be hard to tell Black Pentecostal worship from Black Baptist or Methodist worship at all.
When holiness became a rulebook
The tradition that freed bodies in worship often bound them outside it. In the Holiness Pentecostal church, holiness took a practical turn, sometimes to a fault. “It became a list of things you should do and not do,” Harris says. No drinking, smoking, dipping or chewing. Required clothes, forbidden words. He calls the approach strict and admits “it was very task oriented.”
Lisa Fields recalls that when her mother became a Christian, makeup and shorts were out and long skirts were in. “So it was a lot of rules and kind of more legalistic,” she says. She understood the intent, but “it kind of got kinda outta hand in some instances with the extremes.”
Harris adds a historical point that changes how the rules should be judged. The lists did not always match the Wesleyan tradition the movement claimed. Wesleyans, for one, permitted alcohol. That suggests the rulebook was a local hardening of Holiness teaching, not its root. Wesley’s holiness reached outward to how people are treated. The rulebook turned inward to what a person wears and swallows. Harris’s remedy is to sort the strengths and failures of every holiness tradition rather than discard the whole idea: “we really do need to rethink holiness and own the tradition.” If holiness rests on God’s character, as 1 Peter 1:16 says, a distorted list cannot cancel the command. It only shows the command was measured by the wrong standard.
The charge of emotion without mind
The most persistent criticism of the movement is older than the rulebook. Los Angeles papers dismissed Azusa Street as heathen noise. Some Black church leaders pushed back on Mason. The academic form of the charge survives too: Lisa Fields notes that seminaries often caricature Pentecostals as hostile to scholarship. Put plainly, the objection is that this is a tradition of feeling with no serious thought behind it.
Harris does not deny the evidence. He grants that a strand of anti-intellectualism runs through Pentecostalism and through evangelicalism more broadly. He traces it to the early 1900s, when higher criticism in the academy seemed to work against what the Spirit was doing in the church. He calls the suspicion legitimate for its time, then faults the response: much of the movement “just sort of threw out the baby with the bath water.” He argues that Pentecostalism carries a strong intellectual tradition of its own that still needs to be articulated.
How well does that reply hold? The concession is its strength. Harris is not defending the tradition by pretending the anti-intellectual strand never existed. His claim of an embedded intellectualism is asserted more than demonstrated in his own account, and a critic could fairly ask to see it. Two facts in this history push back on the caricature, though. The movement’s founding spark was a teaching on a biblical text, heard by a man so eager to learn that he listened from a hallway. And scholars now write its history; Harris points readers to Estrelda Alexander’s book Black Fire as a starting place. The charge of pure emotion does not survive the record, even if the work Harris calls for is unfinished.
A color line crossed and redrawn
The hardest objection concerns race. If the Spirit really united Black and white worshipers at Azusa Street, why did the movement divide along racial lines so soon? Harris says the Assemblies of God came out of the Church of God in Christ, shared Charles Mason as founding bishop, and split over racial issues. That organizational account is his, and readers studying it further should check it against detailed denominational histories. The larger pattern does not depend on every detail: a revival that drew both races into one room gave rise to bodies that later separated by race.
A critic could conclude the unity was a passing burst of enthusiasm. Harris draws a different lesson. Noting that racial tension has resurged in the country, he says of the unity Azusa Street displayed, “we really need a renewal of that.” His answer concedes something important. Shared worship crossed the color line, but it did not by itself rebuild the institutions that would keep it crossed. The integration was real enough to scandalize the press, and its failure to last is just as much part of the record.
The debt nobody names
Harris makes one more claim, and it reframes everything above. The largest segment of Christianity worldwide is charismatic, he says, and it draws on the Black Holiness Pentecostal tradition in one way or another, including much of the faith now growing in the global South. That debt, in his words, is “not stated frequently. It’s not celebrated.”
Readers can weigh the full scope of that claim for themselves. Even in its smaller form, it reverses the usual picture. The tradition many still treat as the loud margin of American religion may have shaped the worship of churches far beyond the ones that carry its name. And the person at the center of that story learned its central conviction from outside a classroom door.