Carrying banners and making music, about 3,000 exuberant Christians on Saturday kicked off a weeklong centennial celebration of the birthplace of modern Pentecostalism in Little Tokyo with a "Holy Spirit Procession" through downtown Los Angeles.
Thousands of Christians worldwide are coming to Los Angeles this week to mark the 100th anniversary of what is called the Azusa Street Revival, considered the cradle of the global Pentecostal movement, the fastest growing branch of Christianity, with 500 million adherents.
Saturday's march began at a modest house on Bonnie Brae Street where William J. Seymour, an African American preacher, once held prayer meetings, and ended on Little Tokyo's Azusa Street, where he established a multiracial mission that church historians say grew into the modern Pentecostal movement.
"It's so incredible to see all the nations coming together, not just to celebrate but to ask God for another outpouring of the Holy Spirit," said the Rev. Jonathan Ngai, pastor of Transformations Community Church in Arcadia, which is not affiliated with the Pentecostal movement.
Many in the procession carried flags of various nations and banners referring to Jesus as "King of Kings" and "Prince of Peace."
Some cried out "Praise the Lord!" and "Hallelujah! as they marched and danced down Beverly Boulevard to 1st Street, and then to Noguchi Plaza in front of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, where Seymour's ramshackle church once stood.
There, under a large tent replicating the original size of the old church, event organizers, internationally known pastors, community leaders and invited guests held an opening ceremony and dedicatory prayer.
Then, with the blowing of the shofar -- a ram's horn -- by a contingent of Messianic Jews, the festivities began with hundreds of people spreading out across Noguchi Plaza singing and playing music.
Several thousand people, some with babies in strollers, lingered at the plaza well into midafternoon to worship with songs and dances.
Pentecostals are known for their spontaneous, fervent worship style and praying aloud.
There are many groups within the Pentecostal movement, but what unites them is their belief that the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues, witnessing signs and performing miracles are available to them through baptism, as they were to Jesus' apostles.
