Pentecostal Pioneers

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>On Thu, 8 Feb 96 Tyler G. Nally wrote:
>
>Does anyone have info on African-American Pentecostal Pioneers such
>as William Seymour?
>
>>In His love
>>Floyd E. Avery
 
Sorry Mr. Avery for snipping what you wrote.
I have been studying Church history and I learnt that William Seymour,
Learnt his teachings from a Oneness brother.
I don't believe in the authors belief of trinity.
Frm, "Fire on Azusa Street," by A.C. Valdez, Sr. with James F. Scheer.
Published by Gift Publications, Copyright, 1980.

"Now I know that, although this revival reverberated from Azusa Street to all parts of the world from 1906, it actually began six years earlier and 1,500 miles to the east-in Topeka, Kansas. The awesome miracle of Charles Fox Parham, a bright, young, club-footed, Bible college student in Winfield, Kansas, helped to start it. One night Parham hobbled out on campus, gazed up at a skyful of sparkling stars, marveled at these masterworks of God, and stopped under a towering oak tree. Parham knew that God, through Jesus, could make his feet normal. He had faith-a deep, unshakable faith-even though modern churches insisted that divine healings were not for today. He prayed a simple prayer to jesus, and it happened. A surge of warmth coursed down through his feet, and he was instantaneously healed! 

His miracle brought him still greater faith that whatever Jesus did while on earth 1,900 years before, He could do today through the Holy Spirit. He realized more than ever that his own methodist church and other formal, highly institutionalized churches were making wrong Bible interpretations, discounting God's supernatural abilities. Men were trying to reduce God to an image and likeness of man.
At age sixteen, Parham was the youngest ordained Methodist minister in the nation. His personal miracle made him realize that he could not stay in his church. Miracles simply did not dare happen in Methodism. So he resigned and became a member of the Holiness movement, which believed in the full gospel.
Convinced that modern church needed more of the emphases of the first century church-faith, miracles, and even the baptism in the Holy Spirit-Parham decided to demonstrate that God was practical and responsive to calls from those who loved Him.

With nothing but pocket money and abundant faith, Parham, in 1898, took on a tremendous responsibility. He started Bethel Healing Home for the ill and crippled who were too poor to pay for care and lodging. Refusing to solicit funds, he called God's attention to needs through prayer. In mysterious ways, the place received beds, other equipment and steady supplies of food.
Prayer spoken in faith was the only medicine used, and many were healed. In Oct. 1900, Praham started a Bible school, Bethel College, and moved that and Bethel Healing Home into a two-story mansion, called "Stone's Folly," on Topeka's outskirts. . .Praham rented the place for forty dollars a month. The College, too, was financed by faith. Students paid no tuition or board. They were taught that God's Word was fully practical and dependable.
After teaching salvation, sanctification, and healing, Parham asked the students to find what the Bible said was the evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. The students later reponded unanimously. "Speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance."

On New Year's eve of 1,900, forty students and seventy visitors gathered in the top room to pray and seek the Lord. Parham, who had been away on a speaking engagement, came in and gasped in surprise. Illuminated only by coal lamps, the room was brighter than if lit by today's powerful electric lights. Tongues of fire danced above the heads of students! . . .
Once the novelty died away, Parham suffered ridicule and persecution from newspapers and organized religion. There was no pulpit that welcomed him and his followers. They had to preach about the Holy Spirit on street corners and in parks.
He closed down Bethel College and the Healing Home and left Topeka for Kansas City, but, once more, he and his group were treated like spiritual lepers. They moved on, financially broke and depressed. . . .
Upon arrival in Houston, Texas, Parham had no idea that his work there would lead to a world-wide Holy Spirit revival. He started a Bible School like that at Stone's Folly in a huge, old rented building at Fifth and Rusk. One day W. J. Seymour, a soft-spoken, blind-in-one-eye, black man, a member of the Nazarene Holiness Faith, hesitantly approached Praham. "I was wondering . . .can I just sit in the doorway and listen to the lessons?
There was then strong discrimination against blacks-especially in the south-but none in the hearts of Parham and his follers. Seeing the spiritual hunger in the face, Parham invited Seymour inside, where he listened for many weeks.
The power pf the Holy Spirit did not descend upon Seymour then, but guided him, without his awareness, toward a key role in the worldwide spread of Petecostalism . . .

Mr. Avery continues from were I left off.
In His servive, the ONE true God,
Lord Jesus.
Frank
2 Pe 3:18