It has been 120 years since Azusa Street.
Pastor Will Ford has been praying about that number — because 120 is also how many were in the upper room. His question: is there still an upper room in the church in the Black community?
Ford pastors Mercy Culture Church in East Fort Worth and founded 818 The Sign with his wife. He posted a carousel that got a lot of attention, and it opens with a claim: the lid is coming off.
His argument goes back to 1906. Revival breaks out at Azusa Street under William Seymour, and it raises up prophetic voices — C.H. Mason, who founded the Church of God in Christ, who was surveilled by the FBI for what he said, and who took a hard public stand against Freemasonry. Mother Lizzie Robinson had rocks thrown at her and was jailed for speaking against the lodges.
Ford’s contention is that something else began the same year, and that it wasn’t a coincidence.
He walks John through the history he’s spent thirty years studying: Charles Finney, the Second Great Awakening revivalist who had been a Grand Lodge Freemason before renouncing it and writing a book against it — and Finney’s own observation that revival lingered over regions where people repented of two things, slavery and Freemasonry.
Then the Anti-Masonic Party, America’s first third party, which ran William Wirt for president in 1832, preached the gospel at its own conventions, and gave both modern parties the nominating convention system we still use. Ford’s read: those men became the leaders of the Republican Party and took the stand against slavery. Transformation first, then reformation.
And the story of how it entered the Black church, which is the most compelling stretch in the hour. Prince Hall, refused entry by a colonial lodge because of his color, chartering African Lodge No. 459 from England instead. Richard Allen, who came to faith through a white circuit rider named Freeborn Garrettson, who had freed his own family’s slaves after his conversion — and who later walked out of St. George’s Church to found the AME, was sued by the Methodists, and paid $10,000 for a building he already owned.
Two men who had both been humiliated by the same church. Ford’s line about what brought them together: the thing that united them was the pain.
John stops him there for the application, and it’s the best exchange in the episode. When you’re at your lowest, be careful who you link up with. There are people as low as you or lower, and you can find yourself united in the hurt and drifting from God without noticing.
Ford also connects it to abortion. Margaret Sanger’s December 1939 letter to Clarence Gamble about the Negro Project, and the line about not wanting word to get out. The eugenics sermon contests of the 1920s and ’30s, where pastors were paid up to $1,000 to preach in favor. And the Birth Control Review itself — including passages written by prominent Black figures of the era about the “unfit” and about quality over quantity.
The historical claims in this episode reflect Pastor Ford’s research and framework. Where he describes internal rituals of specific organizations, he is recounting documents and testimony provided to him.
Also in this episode: a viral video of a high school teacher weeping on the second day of class because his seniors couldn’t complete a four-word sentence stem. John and Ford on the school-to-prison pipeline, why the policies bear the blame and why parents still can’t be let off the hook, and the three-legged stool John says holds a life up.
Plus the story of Ford’s youngest son, who accused his father of putting too much pressure on him — and what Ford told him about an enemy named average. Two years later the boy was reading at twice his grade level. Ford asked what turned it around. Daddy, you told me I had an enemy.
