Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about the centennial of Pentecostalism with Gary McGee, professor of church history and Pentecostal studies at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri:

Q: What happened at Azusa Street, and how important was it to the growth of Pentecostalism?

A: The Azusa Street revival has a special place in the collective memory of world Pentecostalism, because something unusual happened here. You'll notice the interracial makeup of the pictures of Azusa leaders. The revival at Azusa Street was inspired by earlier Pentecostal revivals right after the turn of the century and also the revival in Wales that had tremendous success. William Seymour was an African-American Black Holiness preacher, originally from Louisiana, who had come into awareness of the Pentecostal movement, had studied under Pentecostal pioneer Charles Parham in Houston, Texas, and then he was invited to go to Los Angeles and pastor a Black Holiness mission. The Holiness leaders there rejected his Pentecostal message that when you are baptized in the Spirit you would speak in tongues, which they understood to be the languages of the world. So God might give you the Bengali language of India, and that would be a signal to what your calling might be, so you would go to India and evangelize. So many different languages were already being spoken at these Pentecostal services, and Seymour accepted that theology. But the leaders of the Holiness mission didn't, and he found himself outside of a church. Several church members were sympathetic with his ministry, and so they began to have prayer meetings. Eventually, the first person "in the Spirit" was in the home of Edward Lee, who was an African American, on North Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles. These services became very popular and more and more people were coming to the meetings, and they were preaching from the porch here on this house to people on the lawn and down on the street, and eventually the porch broke, so they had to find larger facilities. That's when they found out about this church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. This was in the industrial part of the city. It had been the Stephen's African Methodist Episcopal Church, and they had left for larger quarters. Seymour was able to rent it for $8 a month, and that is really where the revival got off the ground. Pentecostal revival started there about 1906 and continued until about 1909. The makeup of the people who came there was African Americans, whites, Mexicans. There were Armenians in the California area who came to those services, and many others. The services went every day basically for three years.

Q: What were the services like?

A: Contrary to regular church services, which would be more liturgical and structured and so forth, these services were really noted for their spontaneity. So when people would come to the services, there was singing, there was a lot of prayer, there were people who were seeking to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. There were people who were being converted. Anyone could be used by the Holy Spirit in these services. It didn't make any difference what your race was, what your gender was, even if you were an adult or a child. If someone was led to be used in one of the charismatic gifts of the Spirit, like the gift of prophecy, they had the freedom to do that. So the services were often very long. They were very emotional. And at times there was great quiet. But there was a sense of an equalizing factor, that according to the Old Testament prophet Joel, the Spirit was being outpoured in the last days of human history, and so the Spirit was outpoured on both men and women and many different races so that the world could be evangelized in the few remaining days left in human history.

Q: How revolutionary was what happened at Azusa Street?

A: That's a good question, and there are several aspects to it. One of the unusual aspects was the fact that the meetings were integrated, and in a largely segregated America in 1906 this was very unusual. Now, granted, it could more easily happen on the West Coast than in the American South or even the American North. It was unusual to have the mixing of the races together. Another thing that was unusual was this sense that the Spirit was pouring out gifts upon people and in the baptism of the Holy Spirit that virtually qualified everybody for ministry and evangelism, whether they were professional clergy or not. So women had a very prominent role in this revival and in the revivals that followed subsequently. They published a newspaper called the APOSTOLIC FAITH. APOSTOLIC FAITH newspaper went out telling about the events, and their print runs would be 40 to 50,000 copies. They went around the world. People in China and elsewhere learned that the Spirit was being outpoured, and people came here. This became kind of a pilgrimage site. People would come here, receive their Pentecostal baptism, and then go back home to evangelize or go overseas somewhere else to evangelize. William Seymour helped to edit APOSTOLIC FAITH. He had been blinded in one eye from having smallpox as a child, but he is considered the leader of the Azusa Street mission.

Q: Tell me more about the role of women, especially early on in the Pentecostal movement.

A: The prophecy of Joel, which begins to be fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, is that the Spirit is outpoured on men and women. Both will prophesy, both can be used of the Holy Spirit. So both in the Holiness movement and the Pentecostal movement, women had a very prominent role, [for example,] Aimee Semple McPherson, who became one of the most famous evangelists in American history. My grandmother was converted under her ministry in 1921 when she was holding a campaign in Canton, Ohio. I think for my grandmother, Aimee represented the potential of what a woman could become, and women had only been give the vote two years before that.

Q: The impulse for evangelism was so strong for the early Pentecostals and certainly has continued. How central was that to the faith?

A: It was a commanding impulse. While we remember the Azusa Street revival for the interracial makeup, the heart of Azusa was about evangelizing the world in the last days before Christ came -- the sense at the turn of the twentieth century that time was running out, so the Spirit was empowering people to go overseas and preach the gospel. That's why, you know, most people came to Azusa and then left after they received their Spirit baptism.

Q: They saw the Spirit baptism as a sign that the end times were coming?

A: Yes, it was a sign that the end times were coming. It was a sign of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, that one had received this empowering experience which God intended for everybody to receive after conversion. So you received this empowering experience, and the earliest idea was that when you spoke in tongues, these were actually known human languages that God was giving you. There were people who claimed they had received Bengali, Swahili, Chinese, and so forth. And if that was the language you received, then that was probably a strong indicator that's where God wanted you to go as a missionary.

Q: To what extent is this idea of the imminent return of Christ, the end times, still emphasized in the Pentecostal movement?

A: It's declined considerably, although it's still very influential. You know, the Azusa Street centenary is a centenary that never should have taken place, because the people at Azusa Street could not imagine that they had another week left before the Lord returned, let alone 10 years or 100 years.