The 2,100-seat auditorium at King's Park International Church in Durham is packed with a multi-racial sea of people who sway to the music -- a blast of electric guitars, saxophone, drums and keyboard.

"Jesus, I believe in you," they sing, their arms raised, their eyes shut.

"Jesus, I belong to you," they cry as if their very being depends on it.

At King's Park, Christianity is not just a set of beliefs, it's an intense spiritual experience. That experience has its roots in the Pentecostal movement, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary today -- Pentecost Sunday, the day Christians mark the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on Jesus' disciples 50 days after his resurrection.

It was in a former Los Angeles livery stable that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were revisited upon an interracial gathering of Christians, marking the start of the Pentecostal movement. The revival on Azusa Street in 1906 was marked by an exuberant worship and a set of spiritual gifts that King's Park and other churches uphold to this day. Those include gifts such as the power to heal, prophesy and work miracles, as well as speaking in tongues -- characterized by an intense prayer experience in which people are moved to speak in a language they may not know.

Since then, the Pentecostal movement has spread across the globe, becoming the fastest-growing expression of Christianity, with an estimated 580 million adherents worldwide. Many church historians consider it the most significant development of the the 20th century.

King's Park remains independent and has not joined the historic Pentecostal denominations. But the church's practices reflect the roots of the movement as well as its future. Like the historic Pentecostal churches, King's Park upholds the doctrine of "spirit baptism," in which Christians at their conversion or afterward are blessed with miraculous powers.

Unlike most mainline churches, King's Park is one of the most diverse congregations in the Triangle. While Sunday morning remains the most segregated time in America, the 1,400 members of King's Park have kept the promise of racial harmony that characterized the worship at Azusa Street. Forty percent of the church's members are black, 40 percent are white, and the remaining 20 percent are Asian American, Latino or other ethnicities.

"Our prayer is that God's kingdom will come on Earth as it is heaven: an undivided, unsegregated body of people who love and worship God," said Ron Lewis, King's Park founder and senior minister. "We want to see ourselves as a suburb of heaven."

King's Park is part of the second wave of the Pentecostal movement, sometimes called "charismatic renewal." The church began in the 1980s as a campus ministry at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University, organizing as a congregation in 1990. But in its short history, it has mirrored the expansion of Pentecostalism internationally.

On any given Sunday, worshippers hear about the 25-plus churches the congregation has helped start in places such as China and the Ukraine. Two weeks ago, the focus was Asia. On two big screens in the church auditorium, worshippers watched a video of a secret Christian gathering in China.

Christopher McKoy, a floor finisher at Duke Hospital, said that international focus is exciting.

"When I came here and saw everyone coming together, it was special to me," said McKoy, who attends a class for new members. "I feel the love here."

'Azusa Street East'

That a church such as King's Park should emerge in North Carolina is no surprise. In the early 1900s, North Carolina, and especially the Harnett County town of Dunn, were dubbed "Azusa Street East."

That's where Gaston Barnabas Cashwell, a one-time Methodist preacher, rented a three-story tobacco warehouse and on Dec. 31, 1906, started a prayer meeting that drew people from across the South. Months earlier, Cashwell had traveled by train to Los Angeles, where he was baptized in the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues.

"The first place in the world where Pentecostalism took deep roots was in the American South," said Vinson Synan, the dean of the divinity school at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., and a historian of the Pentecostal movement. "Southerners were more demonstrative and emotional in their worship. They had the predisposition to accept Pentecostalism when it came."

But the South was also the land of Jim Crow, and the movement quickly fractured over race. White Pentecostals organized under the Assemblies of God denomination, which now has about 2.3 million U.S. members. Black Pentecostals gravitated to the Church of God in Christ, which claims 5 million members. There are countless other Pentecostal denominations. The American Religion Data Archive lists 60.

As Pentecostals began increasing, mainline Protestant preachers began to take note. Harald Bredesen, 88, today's guest speaker at King's Park, was one of those.

In 1943, Bredesen was serving as a ministerial intern at a Lutheran church in Aberdeen, S.D., when he was asked to visit people who had quit church.

On his first visit, he met a couple who told him that their son was had almost died of pneumonia. Their Lutheran pastor told them, "You must be prepared to give him up." But the couple sent for a Pentecostal minister who came and prayed for the child. While he was praying, the boy was healed.

Bredesen found such stories everywhere, and it explained to him the declining support for mainline churches. In the 1960s, he coined the term "charismatic renewal" to describe the movement in mainline churches to embrace Pentecostal practices. Soon, many mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics were speaking in tongues and experiencing the other gifts of the Holy Spirit.

"These gifts are so practical, and they're so desperately needed," said Bredesen, a close friend of King's Park pastor Lewis. "As the world gets worse and worse, we'll need them more and more."

Today, even churches that reject Pentecostal beliefs cannot avoid their influence. At the Episcopal Church of Good Shepherd in downtown Raleigh, there is a weekly healing service. At Cleveland Community Church, a Baptist congregation in Clayton, worshippers raise their arms in the air and sway to the music.

Answering a call

Many people who come to King's Park have had an "Abraham experience." George Gregory, a senior associate minister, spoke about his experience last week in his sermon. God, he said, had summoned Abraham to leave his country, his people and his father's household to go to "the land I will show you." And just as God had called Abraham, so had Gregory been called to leave the AME Zion denomination, one of the country's historic black congregations, to join King's Park.

"This was the family God brought me to," Gregory said.

And so it is with many King's Park members.

There's Richard Cho, a Korean American pastor, who was serving a Presbyterian church in New Jersey but yearned for a more diverse congregation. He found in King's Park the perfect mix.

"I've experienced some prejudice and discrimination," he said of his youth. "Being in a multicultural church is healing."

In one respect, King's Park membership is not like that of the early Pentecostals. While they were predominantly poor and uneducated, members of King's Park span the spectrum. They include Duke professors, real estate developers, single mothers, teachers, dentists and nurses.

King's Park is an evangelical church that emphasizes orthodox Christian theology common to most conservative churches. But its main draw continues to be its diverse makeup and its openness to the Holy Spirit.

On a typical Sunday, visitors won't see people speaking in tongues or falling in the aisles in the tradition of being "slain in the spirit." Pastors at King's Park don't require evidence of the powers of the Holy Spirit. The practice is optional. Often, though, it draws people in.

Charles Kiefer, a native North Carolinian who grew up Baptist, was at a low point in his life when a guest preacher at King's Park made a prophecy to him, one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. He told him he was destined to become a minister.

"That was the defining moment for me in my Christian life," said Kiefer, 28, of Durham, the campus minister for King's Park at UNC-Chapel Hill. "It solidified my faith and knit me in."