The Religion of Poor Whites and Negros

The world wide Pentecostal and Charismatic movement began over a hundred years ago with both blacks and whites in the same church. Modern leaders of both camps are seeking to return to that first idea.

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28 NIV)

By April of 1906, spirit-led fervor had broken out in Topeka, Kansas and there was a Welsh Revival a few years before that was still being felt around the world. These stirrings, with the early Pentecostal Holiness Church and Apostolic Faith movement, came together and found their launching pad at the Azusa Street Mission in the ghetto of Los Angeles. An LA Newspaper described it as a "tumbled down shack."

The leader William J. Seymour was by all accounts a humble, prayerful, black man who used two large shoe boxes for a pulpit. This allowed him to kneel and pray behind them with his head in the box. The low ceiling did not allow for a raised platform, but this was where he spend most of his time anyway, level with the rest of 'em.

Unplanned, around-the-clock, "Spirit-led" services, "speaking in tongues," divine healing, people being "slain in the spirit" and falling to the floor, songs inspired and sung in the same moment, times of prayerful silence followed by clapping and shouting had the races and classes of people sitting side by side. These were distinct breaks from normal church life. "The color line was washed away in the blood (of Christ)" wrote Frank Bartleman, one of the white leaders.

Many thousands were drawn to it in the fifteen or so years it was open.The movement soared and it's effects were felt world-wide, but it had much to learn and much to endure. Early on there were bitter attacks in the press and a painful fracture occurred between blacks and whites.

A hundred hears later, six hundred and fifty million people world wide now worship Christ under the Pentecostal or Charismatic banner. In November of 2013 the largely white Assemblies of God asked to meet with the mainly black Church of God in Christ. The next February the smaller black United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God joined them, and in February of 2015, leaders of six major groups, their total members at 90 million, met in Los Angeles. One of their goals was to discuss how to further racial harmony. Some have felt that had the movement stayed true to it's racial make up from the start, race problems in America would have been far less. Right now would be a great time to get it right.