In this powerful message, Rachel Sizelove reveals how an ordinary wife and mother of nine — a circuit-riding evangelist with no title, no budget, and no platform — carried fire from Azusa Street to a bloodstained Missouri city and ignited a movement that would grow to 67 million people across 366,000 churches worldwide. Through her story, you will witness the secret disciplines of intercession, travail, and total surrender that transformed obscurity into world-changing power, and learn why the revival that shook Springfield was born on a midnight train ride where nobody watched.
The year is 1907.
A taxi wagon rolls down a dirt road in Springfield, Missouri on a rainy May afternoon. A woman sits inside, middle-aged, plainly dressed, carrying no impressive credentials, no letter of endorsement, no invitation from any church or denomination.
She has no money worth speaking of.
She is not famous by every visible measure. She is completely ordinary.
The wagon pulls up to a white clapboard farmhouse on East Division Street. Two children are playing on the front porch. a boy of seven named Fred and his 10-year-old sister, Hazel. They see the wagon coming up the road and tear toward the house, screaming, "Mama, mama, she's here." The woman steps out and something is wrong. Or rather, something is extraordinarily terrifyingly right. From behind his mother's apron, young man watches his aunt step through the doorway. Her face glowing, her countenance radiant, her hands lifted high, speaking in a heavenly language. She had not yet said hello. She had not set down her bag. She stepped through that door with both hands raised toward heaven, speaking in tongues. And her first words in English were a prophetic declaration over the house. The dove of peace shall hover over this house. That night, a fire fell on Springfield, Missouri that would not go out for a century.
In the early hours of June 1st, 1907, in that farmhouse on East Division Street, a woman was baptized in the Holy Spirit who said she wanted 10,000 tongues to praise God. That woman's living room prayer meetings became a church. That church became the mother church of the Assemblies of God.
That denomination grew to 67 million people in 366,000 churches across the earth. And it all started because one ordinary woman refused to keep the fire to herself.
Have you ever wondered what it looks like when one available praying woman changes the spiritual geography of an entire nation? Have you ever wondered what God can do through someone with no title, no budget, and no plan except obedience?
You are about to find out. Her name was Rachel Caizelov. She was not extraordinary by the world's estimation. She was a wife, a mother of nine children, a circuit writer who had given 20 years to ministry before the fire ever fell. She was simply available.
And that turned out to be enough to alter the course of church history.
If something in you is still hungry, if something in you says there has to be more, comment below with, "Lord, I want my inheritance right now and stay with us for the full story." Here is what most people never know about Rachel size love. She was not a young woman stumbling accidentally into revival. Born on September 3rd, 1864 in Morango, Indiana. The sixth of 10 children, Rachel Harper grew up in a household of faith that forged something deep in her from the beginning. By the time she walked through the doors of the Azusa Street Mission in 1906, Rachel and her husband Joseph had already been free Methodist Holiness Circuit Writing Evangelists for more than 20 years. They had arrived in Los Angeles as far back as 1895.
11 years before any fire fell on Azusa Street. Think about that. 20 years of faithful, unglamorous, underpaid ministry. 20 years of riding circuits, preaching in difficult places, raising nine children, and serving without recognition. They gave their lives to God long before Pentecost had a name. And after all of that, Rachel Sizelove was still dry inside. Not faithless, not backslidden, but dry. She could feel the edge of something she had never fully touched. A depth of God's presence, a dimension of power that all her years of sincere ministry had pointed toward, but never delivered. She prayed in private. She fasted when no one knew. She wrestled with scripture on her knees in the early hours, not for sermon preparation, but out of a hunger she could not fully name. Now, have you ever served God [music] faithfully for years and still felt that something essential was missing? That dry hunger was not a sign of spiritual failure in Rachel's life. It was the sign that God was about to do something extraordinary. Revival does not begin at the altar. It begins in the private dissatisfaction of someone who refuses to settle for less than everything God has. Then one day in 1906, walking through Los Angeles with Joseph, Rachel heard singing coming from a building no respectable person would enter, a run-down former stable at 312 Azusa Street. The newspapers had been mocking it. The established church was distancing itself. Rachel Sizelove walked toward the sound. Picture what she found inside. A warehouse with no stage, no program, no polished worship leader. The floors are bare wood. The benches are rough and plain. And leading the gathering is a nearly blind black man named William Seymour, who sometimes prays with his head bowed inside an empty shoe box between sermons because he has decided the only posture worthy of this moment is total childlike humility before God. When Rachel crosses the threshold, she writes that she was touched by the presence of God, not moved by good preaching, not stirred by musicians, but touched directly, personally, unmistakably by God himself.
She raised both hands and spoke five words that define everything that follows. Lord, I want my inheritance, the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Study those words carefully.
She did not say, "Lord, bless me if you see fit." She declared, "I want my inheritance."
That is covenantal language. The language of a daughter who has served the father for 20 years and is finally standing at the counter saying, "I know what belongs to me, and I am not leaving without it." Scripture rose within her immediately. As the deer pants for the waters, so my soul longs after thee. She received a vision of the Holy Spirit descending as a dove into her life. Within weeks, July 1906, Rachel and Joseph were both baptized in the Holy Spirit. She wrote later that the experience gave her a new sense of the Holy Peace of God. And then she said something that every believer who has ever struggled to hear God needs to hear. She wrote that after the baptism, the voice of the Lord grew clearer while the voices of the world grew distant. That is what the fire does. It does not make you louder to the world. It makes God louder to you. In the very middle of this glorious encounter, God gave her a burden that was not for herself. A precise geographic unmistakable call. Go to Springfield, Missouri. Your mother is there. Your sister Lily, your family. Carry this fire to them. The greatest spiritual experience of her life. And God immediately converted it into a commission because that is how the Holy Spirit always works. He does not fill you and leave you sitting. He fills you so he can send you. Before she left Los Angeles, Rachel went to the elders of the Azusa Street Mission and asked for their blessing. She would not move without covering. An elder responded with words she would carry across a continent. My child, you may go and I will be with you. Before Rachel ever packed for Springfield, she picked up a pen. For months before she boarded any train, she wrote letters to Lily, detailed,urgent, glowing accounts of what God was doing at ISUsa Street. She enclosed copies of William Seymour's apostolic faith paper. Back in Springfield, Lily read them aloud. She began to seek. She began to pray specifically for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The ground was being prepared from a distance. The carrier was already carrying before she ever left Los Angeles.
May 31st, 1907. Rachel boards the train for Missouri.
While every other passenger sleeps, Rachel does not sleep.
She is in travail, that grinding private intercession with no audience and no applause, weeping quietly over the miles, pressing into God through the night. What you must understand about the revival that broke out in Springfield is this. It did not happen because Rachel arrived. It happened because she had already prayed it into existence. The work on the train was more important than the work in the tent. The hidden always precedes the visible and the visible is always proportional to what happened in the hidden. What are you doing right now with the ordinary invisible hours of your life?
The train ride always comes before the arrival and the arrival is always proportional to the travail. And her first words in English declare over the house, the dove of peace shall hover over this house. That night, the family gathers in the parlor. In the early hours of June 1st, 1907, Lily Harper Cororum is baptized in the Holy Spirit. Listen to Lily's own words.
I wanted 10,000 tongues to praise the Lord. He lifted me up in his mighty power while myriads and myriads of angelic hosts sang with me as the spirit gave me utterance. That is not emotion. That is encounter. Lily Cororum became the first recorded person to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit in Springfield, Missouri.
Overcome with joy, Lily ran to her Baptist pastor to share the testimony. He scoffed, rejected her. The Korum family was forced to leave their church. Hurt and baffled, they went home and they began prayer meetings in their living room. Do not miss what that rejection accomplished. The Mother Church of the Assemblies of God, serving 67 million people worldwide, was born because a Baptist pastor closed a door. God moved the fire out of the institution and into a farmhouse. Rachel herself left Springfield shortly after, not because the fire had burned out, but because she had made a prior commitment to serve at a camp meeting in Los Angeles before she ever came. She planted the seed and honored her obligation. She trusted God to tend what she had started. That is not abandonment. That is the posture of someone who genuinely believes the fire belongs to God, not to them. The prayer group grew through homes, rented halls, and eventually a large gospel tent on Center Street near the Springfield Courthouse. Large crowds gathered. Men threatened to organize a posi and drive the Pentecostals out of town. One man from First Baptist stood up. Let them alone. If it is not of God, it will fall through. But if it is of God, it will stand. It stood. Here is something history rarely places side by side, [music] but must. On April 14th, 1906, a mob of over a thousand people gathered on the Springfield town square.
Three African-American men, Horus Duncan, Fred Coker, and Fred Allen, were lynched. Hundreds of black residents fled Springfield permanently. The ethnic makeup of that city still reflects that horror today. On that exact same day, the Saturday before Easter, William Seymour opened the first services at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Heaven came down in Los Angeles while all hell broke loose in Springfield. And God chose that city, that specific bloodstained city as the place where he would plant his fire.
Rachel was not carrying the fire to a neutral location. She was carrying it to a battlefield. The proof came in the testimony of a man named Gistler. He had personally participated in the Springfield lynching, an unsaved alcoholic consumed by racial hatred.
Around 1907, he traveled to Joplain and encountered a Pentecostal street preacher who confronted him directly. Everybody who gave their consent for killing those men was a murderer. Geisler went into the mission intending to argue. He came out repentant, saved, and baptized in the Holy Spirit. He returned to Springfield and spent the rest of his life as a faithful member of the congregation Rachel had ignited. His story was repeated regularly in that church because the community believed that a heart genuinely full of the Holy Spirit had no room left for racial hatred. The fire Rachel carried did not merely bless Springfield. It began to heal it, but the road was not smooth. In 1911, local boys repeatedly disrupted tent meetings and physically tore the tent apart. The evangelistic efforts seemed to produce little visible impact. The believers were demoralized. What held them was not momentum. It was a circle of three women, Lily Cororum, Birdie Hoy, and Amanda Benedict, who joined in sustained prayer and refused to let the flame die. And into this struggling company came a hardened former sailor named Joe French who testified that God had literally raised him from the dead during the the revival of 1909. That resurrection sent him to Springfield where he opened a restaurant and became one of the lay preachers in the congregation. No platform, no title, just a man with a resurrection testimony serving the church from a table. Meanwhile, from the same Theer revival, word spread of horse thieves and a woman who operated a local brothel running to the altar in repentance. The fire that Rachel had carried from Azusa Street was reaching not just the religious. It was reaching the broken, criminal, and the outcast in every direction. I need to stop and tell you about Amanda Benedict, an intercessor in the shadows. Because this story cannot be honestly told without her. Educated in New York, she had run a rescue home for girls in Chicago and served a faith home for children in Iowa. She moved to Springfield and met Lily Cororum while working door to door as a salesperson.
When she heard that the Holy Spirit had fallen at the Cororum farmhouse, she sought [music] the baptism immediately.
And when the fire fell on Amanda, God dropped into her spirit a vision.
Springfield was going to become a global center from which the blessings of God would radiate to the ends of the earth. Amanda Benedict decided she was going to pray until it happened.
For one full year, 365 consecutive days, she lived on bread and water alone. She would go to a nearby grove of trees during tent meetings and pray through the entire night alone in the dark on her face before God. No audience but heaven. At her funeral, a woman stood and testified. I believe this present assembly, the Gospel Publishing House, and the Central Bible Institute are all here as a result of that praying in the Holy Ghost on the part of Sister Benedict. One woman, bread and water, one year, three world changing institutions.
11 days before her death, Amanda wrote a final letter to Lily Cororum. Pray, fight, hold till hell gives way till the real power of His might shall fall with such invincible force that sin shall go down before it. Our fighting force is small, but it is gaining ground. Every forward step is hotly contended. But our flag is flying. Our bugle is sounding an advance to our forces. A retreat to the foe. She died 11 days later. Her grave in East Lawn Cemetery went unmarked for 82 years.
Heaven had not forgotten her. In August 1913, Rachel returned to Springfield for a season. One afternoon, alone in prayer, she received a vision. [music] A beautiful bubbling sparkling fountain rising from the very heart of Springfield, its waters flowing east and west, north and south, until the whole land was covered with living water. She walked into the dining room with a holy glow on her countenance and declared, "I have been in the presence of the Lord. I saw the Lord sounding a bugle for the angels of heaven to go and [music] do battle for the city of Springfield. Then the word of God came directly. I am going to do a mighty work in Springfield that will astound the world. This vision arrived 8 months before the Assemblies of God was founded at Hot Springs in April 1914 and 5 years before the AoG moved its headquarters to Springfield.
At the time, no one had [music] any plan or reason to believe this struggling Ozark city held any significance whatsoever. But Rachel initially held something back. Even after all she had seen and planted, she was opposed to the kind of denominational structure the Assemblies of God represented. She valued the freedom of the spirit and feared organization would quench it. It was a real tension, a genuine struggle. But as she watched her vision come to pass, brick by brick, institution by institution, she changed. She wrote, "But when I think of the vision the Lord brought before me of the waters flowing out from Springfield, I have to say, surely the general counsel at Springfield is of God." She was willing to be wrong. She was willing to grow. That teachability was as much a part of the fire as any miracle. January 1st, 1915. Five teenage boys, Fred Cororum, his brother Paul, their cousin Laurel Tiaoh, and two others cut through a loose board in the fence of White City Park, a Springfield amusement park with a reputation for wickedness. One stops and says, "This place is unclean." Another, "Do you suppose it could ever belong to God?" Laurel responds, "Let's claim it for the Lord." Five boys knelt on that ground in the dark of New Year's morning and prayed with everything in them. When they rose, one looked at the stars overhead and said, "When God told Abraham to count the stars, those were the same stars we see tonight." Another replied, "Let's pray that the gospel will reach as many people as there are stars."
Every piece of that property eventually came into the possession of the Assemblies of God. It became the national leadership and resource center, shipping gospel literature and curriculum to the ends of the earth every single working day. When Fred Cororum stood on that ground in 1972 and saw what it had become, he wrote, "When I look on this area now and see the general council headquarters complex, central assembly and the district headquarters all on this property, I am overwhelmed. When I see the presses turning out the printed word and the missionaries being commissioned and the radio programs going to the ends of the earth, I know there is a God who hears our sincere prayers. How insignificant one feels to behold His mighty works that are exceedingly and abundantly above all that five teenage boys or grown folk either could ask Him to do.
The seven-year-old boy who watched Rachel step through the doorway became a Harvard attorney and he stood on transformed ground 60 years later. Overwhelmed, Rachel's size love watched the Assemblies of God be organized in 1914.
She saw it moved to Springfield in 1918.
She witnessed Central Bible College open in the basement of a church that was born in her sister's living room. She watched the movement she helped ignite reach across the earth. and she died on May 20th, 1941, aged 76 at her home at 115 South Cresant Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. The Los Angeles Times called her a retired evangelical minister. She left behind her husband, Joseph, and nine children. Nine children she had raised while writing circuits, carrying fire, writing letters to sisters, praying on trains, and planting rivers in cities that did not yet know they needed them.
No stadium bears her name. No theological institution claims her as a founder. History gave her a paragraph, maybe a chapter. One historian summarized it this way. Her greatest contribution was not what she did at Azusa Street. It was what she carried away from it. Rachel's size love was not a special woman. She was an available one. She was not more gifted than you.
She was more hungry. She did not have more resources. She had more surrender. She was a mother of nine who still found the hours to pray on a train. She was a 20-year veteran of ministry who still raised her hands and said, "Lord, I want more." She was a woman who planted a fire and left, trusting God to tend it. She was a woman who was wrong about something important and humble enough to change. She raised her hands in a broken down warehouse in Los Angeles and staked a claim that changed the history of a movement. Lord, I want my inheritance.
The fire is still available. The commission is still open. The question is not whether God will send the fire.
The question is, are you willing to be the one who carries it? The woman who changed the destiny of a city did not do it from a platform. She did it on her knees, in prayer closets , on train rides, in farmhouse living rooms, in all night intercessions witnessed only by God. Rachel's size love secret was not strategy. It was surrender.
And surrender is available to every single person right now.
This week, set aside 30 minutes of prayer every morning, not to present requests, but to declare hunger. Speak Rachel's exact words aloud. Lord, I want my inheritance.
Do this every day for seven consecutive days. Watch what God begins to awaken in your spirit. Now, if Rachel's carrying fire on a train moved you, wait until you encounter a woman who carried that same fire across an ocean while every institutional door slammed in her face.
Who was Florence Crawford?
How did a woman with no title and no formal ordination plant Pentecostal fire across an entire continent?
What did she discover about spiritual endurance that most believers never find?
And could her refusal to quit be the answer your own calling has been waiting for?
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