Charles Fox Parham

He was the guy who organized revival.

He and his brother, Charles, they...

they had an experience, they were missionaries already, and then they had an experience of conversion, where he felt, he says he felt his heart strangely warmed, and that drove the Wesley approach, almost throughout his life.

He was certainly someone who allowed much more emotion and feeling to be brought into the conduct of the church.

One of the earlier generals of the charismatic movement, a man among whom they call one of God's generals.

Now, charismatic movement, they have lots of God's generals that they refer to them as, like John Alexander Dowie and Charles Fox Parham and William Seymour and Amy Semple McPherson, Smith Wigglesworth, even William Branham and Catherine Coolman and some of those people.

But another one was a man named John G.

Lake.

So now you don't know when they're doing it on purpose or when it's an accident, this whole thing.

But in the same year, Charles Parham opened Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas.

I've heard of that.

Right, yeah.

Frank Bartleman was not involved with the Topeka Revival.

He, he had come to Los Angeles from the East, but there was no connection between him and Charles Parham before he came and met William Seymour.

Bartleman used to come and, and, uh, see my father.

Uh, and I remember he was, uh, kind of a, a, a tall, stiff man and carried a little black bag.

We're looking at what we call the Azusa Street Revival.

The two personalities we're gonna look at is Charles Parham and William J. Seymour.

Charles Parham was born in Iowa, where Billy Sunday would also be born a few years later, and Seymour would be born in Centerville, Louisiana.

The other thing about them, one was born in the North, one was born in the South, but also one was white and one was African American.

And you have to remember, at this time in American history, the Black and white communities did not work together.

The Jim Crow laws were in force.

Uh, there was still a lot of prejudice going on, a lot of mistreatment of the African American community, but God had chosen something wonderful to happen in the world and chose the two unlikely characters to use them as the leaders of the modern Pentecostal movement.

Let's begin with Charles Parham.

But Frank Sanford had a doomsday cult.

And when I began studying Pentecostalism, and I learned that Charles Fox Parham, who was by all accounts the father of modern Pentecostalism, even William Joseph Seymour in the first newsletter, he said Parham is the father of this movement.

When I found out that he went to visit Frank Sanford's commune and learn from Frank Sanford, I started thinking critically about this and realizing that this just isn't right.

Picture a world in baseball where you have somebody who wants to play baseball and is kind of good at it, and they're holding a bat and swinging, and they're able to hit the ball, but their technique just isn't quite right.

Well, that's the same thing if you compare baseball to Christianity.

That is the same exact thing that happened here.

Charles Fox Parham heard about this guy that had a strong doomsday focus, insomuch that people were joining into his commune and giving their entire life savings.

And everything about it was anti-gospel and flipped upside down.