The Church Of Jesus Christ
Resulted from the Azusa Street revival that began in 1906 at the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Its leader, William Seymour, a oneness Holiness church pastor and former member of the African Methodist Episcopal church, had been exposed to Parham’s teachings at a Bible school in Houston, Texas. Under Seymour’s guidance, the old frame building on Azusa Street became a great spiritual center that for many years attracted rich and poor, blacks and whites, Anglos and Latinos, as well as many preachers whose own ministry had become staid.
Spiritually energized and convinced that they had been charismatically endowed, scores of men and women from Azusa and other Pentecostal churches began extolling the reality of speaking in tongues. Pentecostal Christians were linked only by an amorphous “spiritual union,” in part because no thought was given to forming a separate “Pentecostal” branch of the Christian church. As members of the historic Protestant churches embraced Pentecostal beliefs and practices, they did so without any intention of withdrawing from their own churches. They merely wanted to be agents of reform and revival, helping to rid their churches of formalism and worldliness.