in 1906 around the same time of the azu street revivals minnie abrams an american methodist missionary to india was reporting on a revival that started a year earlier in 1905 and this is what she wrote god is teaching the indian christians to know and understand spiritual things many are being anointed with a spirit of intercessory prayer spending hours lost to time and surroundings pleading for the unsaved young men and women are receiving the gifts of the spirit speaking with tongues interpreting tongues previously unknown to them the sick are being healed and unclean spirits cast out in answer to prayer let's pause for a second she's writing 1906 about something happened in 1905. so we're talking about a pentecostal revival happening a year before azusa street and it's happening not in l.a but in india and it's led not by foreign missionaries many abrams missionaries she's writing she's reporting on this but rather a local is happening in a local christian mission for women founded and led by a local indian woman named pandita ramabai in the previous lecture i gave you the conventional origin story of the pentecostal movement it's absolutely true there's nothing i didn't tell you anything that was false but for many of us and the way it's usually told we think about this single origin story where there's azusa street and obviously there's a few predecessors right the holiness movement and the keswick revivals and the welsh you have so few predators azusa street and then everything else flows from there that's often the way we teach it often i assume things are happening and you can kind of trace the lines back to azusa even while recognizing certain sort of predecessors but what we have here with this revival that mini abrams writes about led by pandita rambai at the mukti mission in india is an alternative origin story or a parallel origin story to the pentecostal movement and i think it's important to recognize in most historians of pentecostalism now we often don't talk about pentecostal historians recognize that azusa as important as it was was not the only and it was not the first pentecostal revival it was a point where lots of things came to a head and had had a remarkable ripple effects around the world which is why we talk about it which is why it's so important the revival at the mukti mission in india that started the year before and experienced the same kinds of manifestations before they happened in l.a is another story that's not told often enough it was something i actually was not familiar with when i first began teaching church history for leadership 215 i i stumbled upon it someone was uh was telling me have you heard about the mukti mission or how i said no i heard of it then i began reading and then i added some of my teaching later but let's unpack this but before i do just to push this even further back than 1905 again something that i wasn't that familiar with until until rather recently not only were their theological predecessors or early moments there were movements in the 19th century revivals where not only do you have a desire for the best of the holy spirit but you actually had the manifestations of tongues interpretation healing prophecy and the thing is none of them broke out beyond the local it's not that there weren't people some sort of cross-pollination people who became evangelists afterwards but they didn't become global movements they were these sort of things that sparked up i'll give you just a handful of examples edward irving in 1830 was a pastor in london he had he was a presbyterian but had this expectation for the outpouring of the holy spirit and sort of this pre-millennial expectation of jesus coming back after the gospel and preached around the world and he was believing four spiritual gifts in his church he hears about this happening in glasgow scotland he goes there he hears in the church building a woman speaking in tongues to someone interpreting so he's just blown away by this he goes back to his church prays with it with great expectation it happens in his presbyterian church in london and a small kind of mini pentecostal movement was started in his congregation he ends up getting kicked out of the presbyterians starting his own catholic apostolic church it goes on for several decades but doesn't end up becoming it kind of fizzles out in russia and armenia near the black sea in 1855 there was a revival that also had reports of people speaking in tongues and they began what they called pentecostal christian congregations right before they were a half century before pentecostal nominations they had their own pentecostal christian group again they used the word pentecostal because they were referring back to acts 2. so you think uk russia and armenia let's go to india in the 1860s prior to the mukti mission revivals they were and we'll talk about this more in the case there are some revivals led by a south indian evangelist a local event with john arulepa i'm sure i'm pronouncing that incorrectly i apologize to my apologies myself asian friends but john roloff on begins and he's connected with some missionary groups but he's an independent evangelist and there are some significant revivals that go on there and healings visions prophecy and speaking in tongues happen in the 1860s and then in 1902 at an estonian baptist church in the baltic right there's a revival there and there's reports independent reports people speaking in tongues and interpretation of tongues so i've given you five in the 19th century things that i'd never heard of uh until rather recently these proto-pentecostal revivals that have all the marks of what you see as news as a street and they happen all over the world really but none of them had this major global impact they were all kind of isolated for a variety of reasons right they didn't get the global exposure they were tamped down by local denominations or they were in kind of areas where there wasn't a lot of global impact estonia for example but the mukti mission was different the mukti mission the revivals of the multi mission which were actually weren't the only revivals going on in india at the time there are others around southern india and north east india but here we're sort of the western part of india this revival actually does take on a sense of international renown and we'll talk about and it also has a global impact so in many ways it can be seen as this parallel story to azusa street it's happening at the same time actually just a little before but there's overlapping time here there's overlapping people that end up going back and forth so let's take a look at this underreported but fasting and revival at the mukti mission and let's talk about the leader of this revival pandita ramabai she was born in 1858 to a high caste brahmin hindu family her father was a hindu scholar and teacher but he died when she was 16 during a famine so rabbi continued her father's work she was a sanskrit scholar expert on sacred hindu text she would travel around and speak she got married at the age of 22 but her husband died when she was 23 and she had a young baby right so 23 year old widow single mom and she experiences this extreme vulnerability that orphans and widows in hindu society have where there's just no opportunity for them when they're in that super vulnerable position of of having of being a widow because they were widows at a very young age they couldn't read mary and there was just a remarkable vulnerability in that moment she ends up becoming an activist for women's rights in in in modern india she seeks to end child marriages which which obviously if you get married when you're 14 and your husband's older and you're widowed when you're in your teens early 20s it means the rest of your life you're in this very very disadvantaged social class she takes a child marriage she seeks to create opportunities for women's education she expects to help work on women's health care she becomes this advocate and at age 25 she travels to england to study medicine and hopefully to come back to india as the first woman doctor in india the reality is that in the 1880s there weren't even many female doctors in england or the united states but she tried and she she was working on becoming a doctor trying to get into medical school but had lots of obstacles and she ended up not not being able to finish medical school get her full medical training but one thing that happened when she was in england was she was exposed to christianity and began this journey to christ after much study and conversation she and her daughter were baptized in england she ended up going to the united states to meet with more public health officials working on thinking about how she could improve public health in india and she also kind of went on a speaking tour talking about her own life and talking about the vulnerabilities of women in india particularly sort of uh widows and young orphans in india she returned she became somewhat famous because she was a very very very um remarkable story very well educated very articulate she wrote a book about the plight of hindu women in india so after being in the uk united states at the age of 30 she goes back to india to really begin the series of work work of alleviating women's women's poverty and oppression in india she founded several schools but in eight most importantly 1895 she founded the mukti mission she bought a farm in western india and mukti means freedom or salvation and the goal was to have the self-sustaining community where orphans and young widows could come live on the farm help work the farm it was this comprehensive mission where there was free housing there was free education there was vocational training uh there was industries that to make money for the community and most importantly right for this newly converted uh former hindu new now christian female women's activist it was a very very very concerted effort toward discipleship and evangelists so women of all castes and of all religions could come but it was a very clearly evangelical and christian organization so there was discipleship in a bible school they had that people didn't have to go to but it was kind of it was part of the mission ramabai her her life is fascinating taught her for a long time but i'll just say she had a remarkable conversion experience discipleship journey but through this process he began to identify with many of the holiness traditions that were prevalent in late 19th century she talks about experiences he had with the holy spirit this desire for a second work of holiness to happen in her life she actually attended the keswick conference right in the uk in 1898 she was one of the speakers there and at the conference in 1898 she asked everyone the conference to help pray with her and believe god with her for a revival that happened in india like would have been going on in the uk and when she heard a few years later of the welsh revival she sent her daughter who's already a young adult then and her colleague minnie abrams i talked about the american methodist missionary she sent her daughter to many abrams to wales to go see what was going on in his revival to see what god was doing there and how that might happen also in india so with that in the backdrop let's begin at the revival that happened at the mukti mission a year and a half before it happened in azusa in january 1905 ramabai felt this strong sense from the holy spirit thinking about her experience at keswick and what happened in wales of going we want something like that we want a fresh outpouring of the holy spirit here in india not just in our mission but all over india so in january 1905 she began early morning prayer meetings with women from the mission again her mission i forgot to mention had grown so rapidly they had taken in so many widows and orphans they were grew around a community of about two thousand like a small they're a small town again free housing education vocational school they had a farm they at a bible school it's just very complex and she's leading the whole thing she bought the farms leads the whole thing it's only women um they have a large staff they're they're not all christian she's a christian and the staff are christians but they're welcoming from all over so she begins this early morning prayer meeting it's optional and the focus was believing for an outpouring of the holy spirit in india it began with seven girls from the community who were meeting early in the morning to pray every day and that prayer meeting of 70 grew to about 500 over the next few months and in july about seven months later that same year the revival came and here's what rabbi writes about the very beginning and it's it's so subtle right her her accounting of it many many of the stories we have from other people because she didn't really she didn't promote what was going on it's all coming just stunned what they saw so she wrote i quote the lord graciously sent a holy ghost revival among us and also in many schools and churches in this country that was it that was her commentary on things starting but the prayer meetings went from every morning every day to running through the day and going overnight and we saw you see acts 2 like experiences the people weeping and crying and laughing and shaking and speaking in tongues and prophecy and laughter rabbi also writes and i quote some have laughed at us for ye have become fools the spirit-filled girls cannot suppress their sorrow for their sin or their joy and salvation they burst into loud crying and laughing they shake they tremble some of them dance with joy and almost pray simultaneously in loud voices the news of survival has begun to spread that there were these gifts these supernatural manifestations of revival happening happening at the mukti mission the it wasn't just the news spread people came to watch but they began sending out some of those original people in the prayer to begin sending out they called them praying bands they would go out and they would preach they would heal the sick and they would travel let's think about it these are the these are the poorest of the poor the most vulnerable women in indian society they came to the mission because they were child widows or they were orphans or they were sexually exploited they bring them in and then they sent out are sent out as missionaries right uh ramabai's daughter writes about the middle of august last year talking about 1905 the lord began to call out praying bands of girls and women's from women from mukti to carry the message of salvation to those other places and they're going all over india another a newspaper a journalist commented that these praying bans from the mukti mission of all women right we're going and i quote in every direction to scatter the fire that has filled their own souls so here completely independent and actually just prior to azusa you have this outpouring of the holy spirit after months and months of prayer and expectation and then this missionary impulse from the least likely people in all of society the revival would last a year and a half and during that time over a thousand girls would be baptized at the milk dimension or they had about two thousand many of them weren't most of them weren't christian but there was this revival that happened in their midst and began spraying and spreading and then 700 of them joined these praying bans and they would do evangelistic work and healing ministry they'd leave the mission to do work and they'd come back so you might say sort of local regional missions but in india just going to know the province is actually quite far away geographically and there's all these different linguistic groups the cultural language groups say we're still going across culturally even just by spreading around india it's interesting to note that there are similar revivals happening in south india at the same time and north east india at this time but the mukti mission received the most international attention probably because ramabai was already an international figure she traveled the uk traveled the united states she had connections so what was going on there was getting publicized and don't forget her her uh partner in crime minnie abrams was writing about this and really spreading the word she was writing lots of lots of missionary sort of newsletter accounts but also she wrote several books about what was going on and she was really publicizing what was happening in mukti uh is quite a remarkable thing what's interesting is that they were this revival was so was gaining his international attention even seymour william seymour and azuza they had a a periodical they wrote called the apostolic faith and they would write about what had been they had kind of hearing reports from around the world and they wrote up the multi mission saying that the same thing is happening in india so they connected even though there was no there was no influence from azusa they when they were attitudes they connected what was going on and saying that god's doing the same thing and for them that was a con they didn't care that it happened here before it was a confirmation right the spirit was being poured out on all flesh it wasn't just something happening in one place it was happening in other places as well completely independent of what they were doing let's talk about a few takeaways and kind of analyze this as we as we um consider this alternative origin story first mukti the mukti mission becomes a pentecostal center in india with people from all around coming to receive the baptist holy spirit so become something like an azure street of india and south asia where people like remember ch mason goes from memphis to l.a to ex to receive the baptism you have people from all over india coming to the muti mission right this place this was was founded as a as a center for for vulnerable young girls and it becomes this side of revival and you have these women going out to be missionaries and what's interesting is that rambai saw the revival there and especially these emotional ecstatic experiences as a particularly indian contextualization of christianity that was going against the colonial british decorum and the way the brits had taught them to worship she saw it as in many ways an anti-colonial and i don't know if she used that language that strong but sort of a a pushback against colonial christianity because many of the the nominational heads were wondering what on earth is going on here she saw it as something that was many ways more in line with the indian ethos with this very expressive worship ecstatic experience and these encounters with the divine so mukti but it wasn't just a center of pentecostalism in south asia there are people who they were pastors who traveled from all over the world to see what was going on at the mukti mission it wasn't maybe as famous as azusa but it was also a famous site at the same time i'll give you an example in 1908 tb barrett who's a pastor in oslo and and really the founder of pentecostalism in western europe he had never been to azusa but he heard about azusa and ended up bringing a pentecostal revival to the uk and to the scandinavian countries but he traveled to the mukti mission 1908 so pretty early on uh to see what was going on there he wanted to really experience what god had been doing there he also spoke and it was this fascinating cross-pollination right between european and south asian pentecostalism next carrie judd montgomery who is an american healing evangelist in 1909 also went there to see what god was doing in this place she had read about and sort of these revivals led by these two women one an indian uh activist and a social reformer and then a a holiness american missionary both these single women leading this revival in india one thing that people often don't know is that latin american pentecostalism uh though it has many interesting roots can be rooted especially in the nation of chile it can be rooted to the mukti mission revival not azusa street right there are other latin american connections with azusa street but abrams right many abrams who was working alongside rabbi and writing a lot of what was going on she wrote a book about the baptism of the holy spirit and what was going on in mukti and she sent that book to a friend of hers who had been in in bible college with her and those friends the hoovers they were missionaries in chile they read the book and they say that is remarkable what's happening in india we want it to happen in chile so they become they begin to pray with expectation and they experience a similar revival 1909 and this would end up becoming they they began what they called the methodist pentecostal church but they would uh that would spur the pentecostal revival in southern latin america right and that would be sort of the main um early epicenter of pentecostal revivals in latin america and it wasn't rooted to it it was rooted to the mukti mish one final interesting first if you will in the early 1900s right that first decade there's all these revivals all this stuff going on very little organization very little theologizing is just happening right things are happening it's pretty chaotic at the mukti mission you have one of the first written articulations theological doctrinal statements about the baptism of the holy spirit and his connection with the spiritual gifts and many abrams wrote about it saying the creed of the mukti mission right they had a statement of faith for all their staff is this and i quote the baptism of the holy s the holy ghost giving power for service is power for service is given with the gifts of the spirit as recorded in first corinthians 12 4 through 11. it's a short statement and then many abras remarks that all the staff at mukti believe and are taught these doctrines so what you have here historians identified in 1907 is one of the earliest articulations of pentecostal theology in in writing in the baptist holy spirit and this predates the assemblies of god's statement of faith by over a decade so it's a remarkable moment when we think about the origins of pentecostalism and the significance of this much lesser known i mean it's you can read about it it's in the chapter you read it's mentioned elsewhere and it was known during the time even during jesus they knew it was happening but it's not often given the same level of prominence as zeus and i think it's worth recognizing that there's another origin story there's there are other places where god was doing similar things even earlier and other movements that had a worldwide impact not just a remarkable story about something happening in armenia in 1855 and nothing but nothing comes of it something really came of this we think about what do we do with all this this fascinating alternative origin story i'll just say three points and close one the more i study the history the more i'm convinced that god has been pouring out his spirit on all flesh in more times and places than you ever thought in more times and places than we can ever know think about armenia russia estonia india how do we know that god wasn't doing similar things in other places they were just disconnected from globalism never think that the first place people spoke in tongues since acts 2 was 1906 in los angeles never think that we'll do a bigger sweep in church history in pneumatology god has been pouring out a spirit on all flesh second i think it's important to recognize that both as it go as it as it's prophesied in joel sons and daughters are prophesying you see the significance not only of people like seymour and parham men but both of them were poor and seymour was an african-american so greatly disadvantaged league in the united states but you also have women you have rabbi and abrams leading this movement and an entire revival among women in a women's mission and there was this taking whole idea that no your daughters are going to prophesy and there is something remarkable one of my favorite um earliest story i talked about about irving's early pentecostal movement in the 1830s he's a presbyterian he ends up getting kicked out of the presbyterians presbyterian presbytery in uh in london not because primarily because uh someone was speaking tongues in the middle of his service but because it was a woman speaking in tongues that's why he got in trouble and there was this sense all throughout whether you're talking about la or in india this sense that god was breaking beyond the original the conventional traditional gender hierarchies and he was empowering women to testify whether to dreams visions to pray for the sick to preach to spread the gospel missionaries there was something unique that was happening and sort of breaking people's expectations we'll talk about this more and i hope this stirs some interesting conversation uh in online and on zoom but when we think about the global pentecostal missionary movement i i hope we recognize this is not just a revival where really weird things happen and we'll talk about those really weird things during the case study lots of weird stuff happen a lot of remarkable encounters a lot of strange happenings a lot of oh that's weird is that biblical a lot of that happened but i hope we recognize more than anything that the spirit was poured out and it caused a missionary movement to go to the ends of the earth there was a inextricable missionary character to pentecostal revival it was completely unavoidable when you consider that they were rooted in acts 2 and they believed that there was a purpose to even the people who had the weirdest stuff going on in their meetings and blessed the weirdest things and particularly the weirdest things they still became missionaries so let's not forget both when we look at history but also in our own churches our own movements that the point of the spirit is something that should spur us for something to be witnesses to the ends of the earth just to put a a a close on the story of pandita ramabai she died in 1922 right 17 years after the revival she was the age of 63 so she lived quite a long time but the mukti mission this center of international revival is still around today over 100 years later and you can look up their website see what they do online they still do the same thing serving disadvantaged women in india and over the last century over a hundred thousand women and children have been impacted through that movement so it wasn't just a revival for the sake of revival that died it was a larger missionary and social movement that really helped transform india and there's so much more we can do there but let's pray before we do our case study lord i thank you for you fulfilling the prophecy in joel and pouring out your spirit on all flesh well i thank you that even we look in church history we that that idea that reality is made more concrete and we see all the different people and places and context in which you part your spirit and the the these similarities that we see anywhere we look and then the unique differences that cause us to think and cause us to change our paradigms and see that you do new things and you don't work in our categories you don't work around our expectations so i pray that that would um that message would be sealed in our hearts so as we look at pentecostal revival and pentecostal mission sending in the 20th century i pray that we would be open to the move of your holy spirit we wouldn't quench the spirit where we wouldn't be skeptical or cynical or that we would be open and we'd be expectant for you to do something new in our own time and place jesus name amen [Music]