Frank Bartleman, Witness and Warning

In the spring of 1906, in a tired stable of a building on a backstreet of Los Angeles, something happened that would echo around the world. The place was called Azusa Street. The leaders were ordinary people, many of them poor, many of them black, gathered to pray for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit of God. And among the crowd, notebook in hand, eyes wide, heart burning, was a slight, restless man named Frank Bartleman. He was not the preacher. He was not in charge. But he would become one of the great rememberers of that fire, the man who told the story so that we could still hear it more than a hundred years later.

Bartleman had known sorrow before he ever reached Azusa Street. He had buried a child. He had walked through poverty and weakness and a long, aching hunger for revival. So when the meetings began, he did not watch them like a tourist. He prayed for them. He distributed tracts up and down the streets of the city. He wrote and wrote, sending out reports that carried the news far beyond Los Angeles. Picture him there in those crowded, sweltering rooms, where men and women of every colour knelt together on a sawdust floor, where the famous walls between rich and poor and black and white seemed, for a moment, to fall. Bartleman saw it, and he treasured it, and he set it down in ink.

But here is the part that makes him worth listening to. Bartleman did not only celebrate the power. He watched the danger too. He saw, even in those early days, how quickly a movement of prayer can curdle into a contest of pride. He warned that men would try to seize the work, to control it, to brand it, to make it their own platform. He had seen the Spirit fall where no one was being flattered. And he feared what would happen when names got famous and factions formed and the holy thing became a possession to be fought over.

That warning cost him something. It is easier to write only of glory. It is harder to write of glory and then say, plainly, beware. Bartleman did both. He wanted the fire remembered, and he wanted it remembered honestly, with its hunger and its humility intact, before the celebrity and the squabbling crept in. He understood something many forget: that the telling of a revival is itself a sacred trust. Words can guard a memory or corrupt it. A report can call people to Christ, or it can puff up a personality and sell a sensation.

So what did this watching, writing, warning man leave behind? Not a denomination bearing his name. Not a great pulpit. He left a record, written by a poor man who carried tracts through the streets and refused to pretend the revival was tidier or grander or purer than it really was. Because of Frank Bartleman, we can still kneel, in our imagination, on that sawdust floor, and feel the heat of a hunger for God that crossed every line society had drawn.

And because of him, we are also warned. The Spirit who fell at Azusa Street was the same Spirit who fell at Pentecost in Jerusalem, not as a show, but to make trembling people into truthful witnesses of the risen Christ. Bartleman knew the difference between fire and fireworks. He knew that a movement begins in repentance and can die in vanity. He knew that the way you remember a holy thing reveals whether you have truly understood it. His life leaves one quiet, stubborn question hanging in the air over every revival, every report, every famous name. Will you tell the truth about what God has done, even the parts that humble you?