After many years in their separate wildernesses, Pentecostal churches are returning to their original vision of inclusion across racial and cultural lines -- a vision critics once branded as heretical. Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, commemorates the appearance of the Holy Spirit before the Apostles, and the Pentecostal movement is especially concerned with the Spirit, and uninhibited celebration of it. Though it was founded less than 100 years ago, the movement now numbers some 400 million adherents. PNS commentator Dan Ramirez, pursuing a Ph.D. in Religion at Duke University, belongs to the Apostolica Iglesia in East Palo Alto.

LOS ANGELES -- "Whites and blacks mix in a religious frenzy," was how local newspapers derided the Pentecostal movement's first meeting. The gathering of black and white worshippers in a "barn-like negro church" on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906 left the Daily Times surprised that "any respectable white persons. . . . cast in their lot with the negro ranters".

This month, some 400 million Pentecostals, charismatics and other "tongues-speaking" progeny of that Los Angeles revival will gather to celebrate the feast of the Pentecost. And this time, after succumbing to the racist mores of the wider culture for the better part of the century, more and more faithful are returning to the movement's original multiracial vision.

Some theologians call Pentecostalism "Christianity's Third Force" -- the most important religious collaboration of the century. Some two thirds of all Latin American (and U.S. Latino) evangelicals are pentecostals, and several traditionally Catholic countries, energized by the revivalist enthusiasm, are projected to transform into majority-Protestant status within the next fifty years.

Evangelists  based in the United States now make pilgrimages to Korean mega-churches, while media-savvy Brazilian missionaries are buying downtown theaters in US cities and converting them into centers of healing and empowerment for Spanish-speaking immigrants. Storefront "aleluya" churches muscle for dominance with "Santeria botanicas" in New York, Miami, Mexico City. Youth choirs in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Guadalajara sway and clap to Spanish language renditions of black gospel hits, while their counterparts in San Diego, El Paso and Los Angeles master the latest polka, cumbria, salsa and meringue compositions from gospel artists in Mexico and Central America.

In a sense this recalls the promising first years of the movement when "the 'color line' was washed away in the blood," in the words of historian Frank Bartleman, an eyewitness to the first revival meeting at Azusa Street. Those outside the movement, by contrast, seized on this mixing as a transgression, proof of the movement's heretical nature. The L.A. Daily Times was especially displeased with the way several white women testified about leaving home and husband to follow the "one-eyed negro leader" William Seymour. Even more scandalous, the paper told of a black "comely wench throwing her arms about the neck of some white man in the audience...begging him to 'come to the altar'."

Within two decades of its founding, U.S. Pentecostalism had fragmented completely along racial lines. William Seymour, undermined by his white co-religionists, died of a broken heart in 1922 in Los Angeles. In the years that followed, white Pentecostals pushed upward mobility and social and theological respectability in the American evangelical family, while black Pentecostals joined other African American churches in constructing alternative spaces. At the margin, Latino Pentecostals busied themselves ministering to fellow pilgrims in the Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrant diaspora.

So, predictably, black and white Pentecostals found themselves at opposite sides of the barricades during much of the civil rights movement. More recently, while one main champion of California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187 was an ordained Assembly of God minister (and former regional commissioner for the Immigration and Naturalization Service), many of his targets worshipped at Assembleads de Dios churches throughout the state.

Today a new wind is blowing. In Memphis recently, black and white Pentecostal leaders knelt and washed each other's feet in tearful repentance. Racial reconciliation and immigrant dignity have also made it onto the agenda of the Promise Keepers, an evangelical men's movement with a significant Pentecostal constituency. Successful suburban Pentecostal churches now boast a growing racial diversity -- in membership as well as in liturgy and black gospel music - albeit sometimes by draining parishioners and talent away from poorer black and Latino congregations.

This is not to say that for every fervent multicultural embrace at a Promise Keeper's rally there is an equally loving reception for the newest outsiders -- the illegal alien, the AFDC mother, the gang banger. But after seventy-five plus years, the primal power and piety revealed on Azusa Street is once again beckoning. And the response across the country offers a reassuring sign that racial reconciliation may yet guide us into the next millennium.

On May 17, the day before Pentecost Sunday, Pentecostal Heritage, Inc., the African American custodians of the building in Los Angeles -- which now houses a Filipino congregation, several doors away from a Latino Apostolic congregation -- will have a day long celebration of healing and restoration. For them this fire-ravaged district -- recently transformed yet again from Korean to Central American -- is in greater need than ever of the answer to the prayer of the original revival: "Lord, Send the Rain."