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In the early morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco residents were rudely awakened by the deadliest earthquake in North American history. A devastating fire, fed by ruptured gas lines, finished off what the earthquake, later estimated as 8.3 on the Richter scale, failed to destroy in its first deadly seconds. Some 700 people lay dead among the decimated 514 city blocks.

Angry men and women blamed God and the unstable earth sitting atop the unpredictable San Andreas Fault. A gospel tract, rushed to the printer and widely circulated in the area, called the tragedy a judgment and a warning from the God some were cursing.

That same morning, 400 miles south, the world took notice of another movement—one with aftershocks still spreading today. In a skeptical front-page story titled "Weird Babel of Tongues," a Los Angeles Times reporter attempted to describe what would soon be known as the Azusa Street Revival.

"Breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand," the story began, "the newest religious sect has started in Los Angeles."

The "newest religious sect" had, in fact, been around for a few years. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Midwestern Methodists and other Christians associated with the Holiness movement had become obsessed with divine healing and the possibility of speaking in tongues—doctrines and practices that dispensationalists argued had ended with the apostolic age. One of these Holiness Christians was an 18-year-old Kansas collegian named Charles Fox Parham.

Like other Methodists, Parham believed that sanctification was a second work of grace, separate from salvation. But he also adopted the more radical Holiness belief in a third experience—the "baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire." As early as 1891, Midwesterners heard young Parham claim that glossolalia—speaking in unknown or foreign tongues—should accompany this baptism in the Holy Spirit.

A handful of his listeners accepted him as a latter-day Elijah, ushering in Christ's return. Some wrote him off as another self-appointed prophet, while others branded the skinny and often sickly Parham as a fanatic.

To perpetuate his views, Parham opened a Bible school in 1900. It was housed in a three-story, turreted Topeka mansion dubbed "Stone's Folly" because it had bankrupted its builder. (Local residents had thought the building was haunted.) In developing his "Apostolic Faith" theology, Parham promoted a revolutionary but short-lived theory—which even Christian and Missionary Alliance leader A. B. Simpson would toy with. Simply put, Parham believed God would supernaturally give known, earthly languages to baptized believers so they could quickly evangelize the world. This end-time revival, accompanied by believers speaking in known languages they had never learned (xenolalia), would bring to an end the church age and bring back a triumphant Christ.

Even Parham's missionaries—and those later sent out from Azusa Street—found difficulties when it came to putting this belief into practice. For example, A. G. Garr, the first white man to speak in tongues at Azusa, went to India expecting the Spirit to enable him to speak Hindi. When this did not happen, Garr and his wife went to Hong Kong and studied Chinese. Though Parham never gave up his belief that he and his followers had spoken in earthly foreign languages, his followers discovered that if foreigners understood them, it was an exception rather than the rule.

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