The Azusa Street Mission and Revival by Cecil M. Robeck

Author:Cecil M. Robeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

This cartoon was published on the Front Cover of The Burning Bush, January 24, 1906. Just below the cartoon, the caption containing words loosely based upon 1 Corinthians 12:14–26 read, “THE FOOT CANNOT SAY TO THE HEAD, I HAVE NO NEED OF THEE.” The caricatures and stereotypes portrayed in the cartoon are evident, though it is interesting to note that there are no black faces in the crowd.

Not all “deliverance” involved exorcism, however. One man came to the altar with a plug of tobacco in his pocket. After twenty-five years of using the stuff, he had decided it was time to be delivered of it. He reportedly took it out and gave it to one of the altar workers, “and immediately the Lord began to bless his soul, and he got victory over his old enemy.”

One of the more colorful people who attended the Azusa Street Mission was a woman named Bridget Welsh. Everyone knew Bridget. She had an extensive criminal record, and she had a powerful testimony that she gave everywhere she went. This former woman of the streets with her piercing blue eyes and her flaming red hair would become a household name in early Pentecostal circles. Born about 1861, she had been placed in the care of a convent in St. Louis by her parents, who hoped that institution would provide the discipline she needed. As a young teenager, she ran away from the convent and worked her way around the country as a “dance hall girl.” She married a well-known gambler named Joe D. Nesbit and traveled with him from Montana to Mexico. He introduced her to drugs, and before long they were both addicted to alcohol, morphine, and cocaine. Eventually they separated, and Bridget ended up in San Francisco working as a prostitute in an attempt to earn her drug money. Over the next twenty-five years she moved in and out of asylums and hospitals, and she served time in prison. Her addictions grew and her health declined.

On March 31, 1902, Bridget Welsh was converted while staying in a “rescue home” in San Jose. Following her conversion and sanctification her life was utterly transformed—she began to share the testimony of her conversion wherever she went. In 1906 she traveled to Los Angeles and attended the Azusa Street Mission. There, in her uniquely demonstrative way, she testified of her experience to that time and then proceeded to be baptized in the Spirit. Bridget adopted Romans 8:11 as her lifelong theme: “My mortal body is quickened by His Spirit, and I can witness that I am never tired,” she said. As itinerant printer Ned Caswell put it, Welsh was “a miracle of God’s saving grace.” In 1912 she was still at the mission, and though her arms were covered with the scars of the needle marks that witnessed to her past life, according to British Anglican pastor Alexander A. Boddy she was now “full of faith and good humor.”

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