Hi Andrew,
I am sending you a response from David Smithers
who was replying to a question that I had asked him, about
racism being one of the factors that brought the Azusa Street
Revival to an end. Brother David puts out a revival newsletter
called "The Watchword". He is a revival historian and has
written some excellent revival articles of which I have
forwarded some of them to you. I thought that you would
find his comments interesting...
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From: David Smithers <[email protected]>
...Concerning your questions about what contributed to the
decline of the Azusa Street Revival - "was it racism"? There
is no doubt that racism greatly contributed to quenching
the Spirit in the latter stages of the revival, but I believe that
there is still a serious question if this was the sole cause
or just one of several works of the flesh that surfaced as
God's presence withdrew from the meetings.
Roberts Liardon stated in his video series "God's Generals"
that one important factor in the decline of the Azusa Street
revival was that spiritualist and palm readers crept into the
meetings and began to indirectly influence the services.
William Seymour always allowed the Holy Spirit to have
total control of the meetings and therefore the revival
prospered under his wise leadership. However, because
God had so greatly honored his "HANDS OFF" style of
service, he later had great difficulty in bringing himself to
properly correct those who persisted to manipulate and
grieve the Holy Spirit. I have yet to thoroughly document
this information, but I do know that similar issues have
quenched many other revivals. Evan Roberts had similar
difficulties in many of his services during the Welsh revival
of 1904.
It seems that several good leaders throughout revival
history have been tempted to be either very heavy handed
and controlling with the Holy Spirit or extremely lenient
with those who would try to use a revival for their own
selfish purposes. Both of these ABUSES of authority
will quench the Spirit of revival. I hope this helps a little
with your questions. This in no way explains all the
problems that contributed to the Azusa revival coming to
an end but I do believe it is worthy of careful consideration.
-David.
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