Azusa!

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with nine million new members a year. Pentecostal churches in South Korea, Brazil and South Africa share a common trait: they can trace their roots back to a two-story, white-washed building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles where, in the early 1900's, an unlikely congregation of blacks, Hispanics, whites and Asians gave birth to a religious revival that would sweep the globe.

Azusa! will weave together a current-day portrait of a dynamic Pentecostal congregation with the remarkable history of the Azusa Street Revival. It all started in February of 1906 when a quiet and unassuming man, a bit disheveled and blind in one eye from smallpox, stepped off a train in Los Angeles. William J. Seymour was a black Holiness preacher who had come to pastor a newly formed storefront church on Azusa Street.

Word of his ministry spread quickly and the curious, faithful and skeptical came in droves. At the heart of Seymour's message was the belief that the many different tongues pouring forth at Azusa Street, from Arabic to Tibetan and Japanese to German, had the power to break down racial and national barriers.

The film will explore the later global racial schisms that began during Seymour's late ministry, as well as scandals that plague prosperity-oriented churches, charges of egotism and illegal activity at megachurches and concerns that Pentecostal worship is often just indigenous religion in disguise.