Personalities

Affiliation

Catholic priest; people's priest at the Grossmünster, Zürich, from 1519; leader of the Swiss Reformation

Appears in

Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists, The Radical Reformation

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Life

Toggenburg, Basel and Vienna

Huldrych Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 at Wildhaus in the Toggenburg valley, in the eastern Swiss Confederation, the son of a prosperous farmer and local magistrate. His uncle, a priest, took charge of his education. He studied at Vienna and Basel, where he took his master's degree in 1506 and absorbed the humanism of the age, and was ordained priest that year.

Glarus and Einsiedeln

From 1506 to 1516 he was parish priest at Glarus. He taught himself Greek, read the Church Fathers and corresponded with Erasmus, whom he met in 1516 and revered. Twice he went with the Glarus troops as chaplain to Italy, where Swiss mercenaries fought for the Pope, and the slaughter at Marignano in 1515 turned him into an opponent of the mercenary trade. From 1516 he was priest at the pilgrimage shrine of Einsiedeln, where he preached against the abuse of pilgrimages and indulgences, though he had not yet broken with the Church's doctrine. He later admitted to a sexual lapse during his years at Glarus and Einsiedeln, which nearly cost him his appointment at Zürich.

Zürich

On 1 January 1519, his thirty-fifth birthday, he became people's priest at the Grossmünster in Zürich. He announced that instead of following the lectionary he would preach through the Gospel of Matthew from beginning to end - the lectio continua that became a mark of the Reformed tradition. Later that year he nearly died of the plague, which deepened his sense of dependence on God's providence.

The break with Rome

In Lent 1522 a group of his friends, meeting at the house of the printer Christoph Froschauer, ate sausages in defiance of the fast; Zwingli, who was present but did not eat, defended them in a sermon, On the Choice and Freedom of Foods. That year he also married Anna Reinhart, a widow, in secret, making the marriage public in 1524. In January 1523 the city council held a public disputation at which Zwingli defended his Sixty-seven Articles, and the council resolved that he should continue to preach from Scripture. A second disputation in October 1523 debated images and the Mass. Images were removed from the churches in 1524, and at Easter 1525 the Mass was abolished and replaced by a simple communion service, with bread and wine on wooden plates carried to the people in their pews.

The radicals

Among Zwingli's most ardent early followers were young men, including Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, who wanted him to move faster and to abolish the Mass without waiting for the council. When at the second disputation he deferred to the council's timetable, they broke with him. They came to reject infant baptism, and in January 1525 began baptising adults. Zwingli opposed them in writing, and the council imprisoned and banished them; in March 1526 it decreed death for rebaptism, and Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527. Zwingli supported the council's measures.

Marburg

Zwingli's view of the Lord's Supper as a memorial brought him into conflict with Luther. After years of pamphlet warfare, Philip of Hesse brought the two together at Marburg in October 1529, hoping to unite the Protestants politically. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles but not on the presence of Christ's body and blood in the Supper. Luther chalked "Hoc est corpus meum" on the table, and at the end refused Zwingli's hand of fellowship as a brother.

Kappel

Zwingli worked for an alliance of the Reformed cities and pressed Zürich to use force to open the Catholic cantons to evangelical preaching. A first war at Kappel in 1529 ended without battle. In 1531 Zürich imposed a food blockade on the inner cantons, which responded by attacking. On 11 October 1531 the Zürich forces were defeated at Kappel, and Zwingli, who had gone out as chaplain and armed, was killed on the field.

Key dates

• 1 January 1484 - Born at Wildhaus
• 1506 - Ordained; parish priest at Glarus
• 1515 - Chaplain at Marignano
• 1516 - Priest at Einsiedeln; meets Erasmus
• 1 January 1519 - People's priest at the Grossmünster, Zürich
• Lent 1522 - The affair of the sausages
• January 1523 - First Zürich disputation; the Sixty-seven Articles
• October 1523 - Second disputation
• 1524 - Images removed; marriage to Anna Reinhart made public
• Easter 1525 - Mass abolished in Zürich
• 1525 - Commentary on True and False Religion
• 1527 - Felix Manz drowned
• October 1529 - Marburg Colloquy
• 1531 - Zürich Bible (Froschauer) completed
• 11 October 1531 - Killed at Kappel

Teachings and claims

Scripture alone

Zwingli taught that Scripture is clear and sufficient, and that whatever is not commanded in it is to be removed from the Church's worship. He applied this more strictly than Luther, who retained what Scripture did not forbid.

The Lord's Supper

He taught that in "This is my body" the word "is" means "signifies", that Christ's human body, ascended into heaven, is at the right hand of God and cannot be present in many places, and that "the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63). The Supper is a memorial of Christ's death, a thanksgiving (eucharist) and a public pledge by which believers declare their faith and their membership of the body. In his later writings he spoke of Christ being present to the contemplation of faith.

Baptism

Against the Anabaptists he defended infant baptism as a covenant sign, the successor to circumcision, by which children of believers are marked as belonging to God's people. He did not, however, hold that baptism conveys grace.

Providence and election

He taught a strong doctrine of providence and of God's free election, and held that God might elect even virtuous pagans; he expected to see Socrates and other ancients in heaven.

Church and state

He saw the Christian city as one community, in which the magistrate, guided by the preacher, orders the outward life of the Church.

Christology

To defend his eucharistic teaching, he used a figure of speech he called alloeosis, by which what Scripture says of one of Christ's natures is attributed to the other. Luther believed this divided the person of Christ.

Documented controversies

The Anabaptists

He supported the persecution of his former followers, including the death penalty for rebaptism. Mennonite and Baptist historians, and many Reformed scholars today, regard this as a grave wrong.

Marburg

His disagreement with Luther divided Protestantism permanently. Luther believed his teaching on the Supper and on Christ's person to be a different spirit; Zwingli regarded Luther's view as a remnant of the papacy.

War

His advocacy of armed force against the Catholic cantons, and his death on the battlefield, were criticised by Luther and others as the fruit of mixing the gospel with the sword.

Death

He was killed at the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531, aged 47. The victorious Catholic troops found his body on the field, tried it as a heretic and traitor, quartered it and burned it with dung, so that no relics would remain.

Legacy

Zwingli is the founder of the Reformed tradition, though its classic form was given by Heinrich Bullinger, his successor at Zürich, and by John Calvin, who modified his eucharistic teaching to affirm a true, spiritual feeding on Christ. The Consensus Tigurinus of 1549 united the Zürich and Genevan churches. His memorial view survived among the Anabaptists' successors, the Baptists and the free churches, and is now the common view of most evangelical and non-denominational churches. His lectio continua, his simplified worship and his ideal of a reformed Christian commonwealth shaped Reformed Protestantism for centuries.

Measured against the creeds

Zwingli confessed the creeds and the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, and his preaching recovered the reading of Scripture in the language of the people.

His teaching on the Supper, however, departs from what the Church had confessed since the Fathers. Ignatius of Antioch called the Eucharist "the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ"; Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem and Augustine all confessed that the bread and cup are Christ's body and blood. The Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran churches hold to the real presence, and the Anglican Articles reject a "bare figure" (Article 28 speaks of partaking of the body of Christ). Luther's response, in Confession Concerning Christ's Supper (1528) and the Formula of Concord (Article 7), was that Zwingli's argument from the location of Christ's body divided His person and made human reason the judge of His words. The Formula of Concord rejects the teaching that the words of institution are to be taken figuratively.

On baptism, he defended the practice of the Church but emptied it of its gift; the historic churches confess "one baptism for the remission of sins". And in the persecution of the Anabaptists, the Reformed churches, like the Lutheran and Catholic, share a guilt that their modern heirs have acknowledged.

Major writings

• Sixty-seven Articles (1523)
• Commentary on True and False Religion (1525)
• On Baptism, Rebaptism and Infant Baptism (1525)
• On the Lord's Supper (1526)
• Friendly Exegesis (1527)
• Fidei Ratio (1530)
• An Exposition of the Faith (1531)

Affiliation

Professor at Wittenberg and Luther's senior colleague; later a Reformed theologian at Basel

Appears in

The Radical Reformation, Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists

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Life

The Wittenberg professor

Andreas Rudolff-Bodenstein was born in 1486 in the town of Karlstadt am Main in Franconia, from which he took his name. He studied at Erfurt and Cologne and in 1505 went to the new University of Wittenberg, where he became a doctor of theology in 1510, archdeacon of the Castle Church and a leading member of the faculty. A scholastic theologian of the Thomist school, he was Luther's senior colleague; in October 1512 he presided over the ceremony at which Luther received his doctorate. In 1515-16 he studied law in Rome.

Converted to Augustine

In 1517, after reading Augustine, he turned against scholastic theology, and in April of that year, months before Luther's Ninety-five Theses, he posted 151 theses on grace and the will. He became one of Luther's most energetic allies. At the Leipzig Disputation of 1519 he debated Johann Eck for a week before Luther took his place, and in 1520 the papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication named him also.

The Wittenberg movement

While Luther was hidden at the Wartburg in 1521-22, Karlstadt led the reform in Wittenberg. On Christmas Day 1521 he celebrated the first evangelical communion, without vestments, in German, omitting the sacrificial prayers and giving the cup to the laity. In January 1522 he married Anna von Mochau, a girl of fifteen; the city council adopted an ordinance abolishing private Masses and removing images, and in the following weeks images were destroyed in the churches. The disorder alarmed the Elector, and in March 1522 Luther returned and, in his eight Invocavit sermons, reversed much of what had been done, insisting that changes must be made in love and with regard for the weak.

Orlamünde

Karlstadt withdrew from academic life. He renounced his doctorate, dressed as a peasant and asked to be called "Brother Andrew". In 1523 he took the parish of Orlamünde, which was attached to his archdeaconry, and there carried out his reforms: images removed, infant baptism dropped, the Supper as a memorial. In August 1524 Luther, on a visitation tour, met him at the Black Bear inn at Jena; after a heated exchange Luther gave him a gold gulden as a pledge that he should write against him openly. Shortly afterwards the Elector expelled Karlstadt from Saxony.

Exile

He travelled to Strasbourg, Basel and Zürich, publishing tracts against the real presence which Luther answered in Against the Heavenly Prophets (1524-25). During the Peasants' War of 1525 he was at Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where he was suspected of sympathy with the rebels. Destitute and in danger, he wrote to Luther, who sheltered him secretly in his own house in Wittenberg in June 1525 on condition that he submit his writings for approval. He lived for some years as a farmer and shopkeeper near Wittenberg, under restrictions, but in 1529 he fled again.

Basel

After time in Holstein and East Frisia, where he took part in the sacramental controversies, he went to Zürich in 1530, where Zwingli found him work, and in 1534 became preacher at St Peter's in Basel and professor at the university, where he spent his last years in comparative peace.

Key dates

• 1486 - Born at Karlstadt am Main
• 1510 - Doctor of theology at Wittenberg
• October 1512 - Presides at Luther's doctoral promotion
• April 1517 - Posts 151 theses on grace
• 1519 - Leipzig Disputation with Eck
• Christmas Day 1521 - First evangelical communion in Wittenberg
• January 1522 - Marries; the Wittenberg ordinance
• March 1522 - Luther returns and reverses the reforms
• 1523 - Pastor at Orlamünde
• August 1524 - Meeting with Luther at Jena
• September 1524 - Expelled from Saxony
• 1524-25 - Luther's Against the Heavenly Prophets
• June 1525 - Sheltered in Luther's house
• 1529 - Flees Saxony
• 1534 - Preacher and professor at Basel
• 24 December 1541 - Dies of plague at Basel

Teachings and claims

Images

Karlstadt taught that images in churches are forbidden by the first commandment and must be removed, and that the magistrate and the congregation have a duty to remove them without waiting for the weak.

The Supper

He came to deny that Christ's body and blood are present in the sacrament. In "This is my body", he argued, Christ pointed to His own body, not to the bread (the Greek touto, "this", being neuter while artos, "bread", is masculine). The Supper is a remembrance of Christ's death, and its benefit lies in the believer's ardent remembrance of it.

Baptism

He held that baptism without faith is of no value and gave up the baptism of infants at Orlamünde, though he did not practise rebaptism.

Lay religion and mysticism

Influenced by German mysticism, he taught that true religion is the inward "abandonment" (Gelassenheit) of the soul to God, and he valued the lay Christian and the peasant above the learned doctor.

Documented controversies

Wittenberg 1522

His reforms, made in Luther's absence and accompanied by iconoclasm, caused disturbances which Luther and the Elector regarded as dangerous. Luther's Invocavit sermons established the principle of reform through preaching and patience.

Against the Heavenly Prophets

Luther's long reply, written in 1524-25, accused Karlstadt of making outward law of what should be freedom, of confusing the inward and outward word, and of reading his own reason into Christ's words. Luther grouped him with Müntzer and the "fanatics", which Karlstadt resented, since he rejected violence.

The Peasants' War

His presence at Rothenburg during the revolt led to suspicion that he supported it; he denied this and wrote an apology.

Death

He died of plague at Basel on 24 December 1541, aged about 55.^†

Legacy

Karlstadt has been called the first Puritan. His insistence that worship must be restricted to what Scripture commands, his iconoclasm and his symbolic view of the Supper anticipated, and in part influenced, Zwingli and the Reformed tradition. Some historians also regard him as a forerunner of the Anabaptists and of later lay and spiritualist movements. His conflict with Luther shaped the Lutheran Reformation's conservative attitude to liturgy and images.

Measured against the creeds

Karlstadt's early recovery of Augustine on grace stood within the catholic faith, and his concern for the participation of the laity and the reform of abuses was shared by Luther.

His later teaching, however, departs from the historic faith. On the Supper, he denied what the Church had confessed since the Fathers - that the bread and cup are the body and blood of Christ - and his grammatical argument from touto was rejected even by Zwingli. The Formula of Concord (Article 7) rejects his interpretation by name among the figurative readings. On images, the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) defended the veneration of images as an expression of the Incarnation, and while the Lutheran and Anglican churches did not follow Nicaea II in every respect, Luther insisted that images were not forbidden and that their removal by force was a new law imposed on consciences.

Luther's central objection remains the most searching: that Karlstadt replaced the outward word and sacrament, through which God gives the Spirit, with an inward spirituality that made the Christian's own experience the measure of the gospel. "God will not give you his Spirit without the external word," Luther wrote, "but through it."

Major writings

• 151 Theses (1517)
• On the Removal of Images (1522)
• Whether One Should Proceed Slowly (1524)
• Dialogue on the Abominable and Idolatrous Misuse of the Most Worthy Sacrament (1524)
• Apology (1525)

Affiliation

Catholic priest; briefly a follower of Luther; preacher at Zwickau and Allstedt; leader in the Thuringian Peasants' War

Appears in

The Radical Reformation

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Life

Early life and education

Thomas Müntzer was born at Stolberg in the Harz mountains, probably in 1489 or a little later; the exact year is not recorded. His family seems to have been comfortably off. He studied at Leipzig (1506) and Frankfurt an der Oder (1512), took degrees in arts and possibly theology, and was ordained priest in the diocese of Halberstadt by about 1514. He read widely - the Church Fathers, the German mystics Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, the abbot Joachim of Fiore - and that reading shaped everything he later taught.

From Luther's camp to his own

By 1517-19 he was in contact with the Wittenberg reformers and was seen as one of Luther's men. In May 1520, on Luther's recommendation, he became preacher at St Mary's in Zwickau, a weaving town in Saxony. There he quarrelled bitterly with the Franciscans and then with the humanist preacher Johannes Egranus, and fell in with a group of artisans around the weaver Nikolaus Storch who claimed direct revelations from God. These were the "Zwickau prophets" who later unsettled Wittenberg in Luther's absence. The town council dismissed Müntzer in April 1521 after unrest that his sermons had stirred.

He went to Bohemia, the land of Jan Hus, and in November 1521 posted the Prague Manifesto, announcing that the Church had been a whore since the death of the apostles' disciples and that a new apostolic Church would rise in Bohemia. It did not; he was expelled, and spent 1522 wandering through central Germany without a post.

Allstedt

At Easter 1523 he became pastor of St John's in Allstedt, a small town in electoral Saxony. This was his most constructive period. He married a former nun, Ottilie von Gersen, and produced the first complete German-language orders of worship - a German Mass and German offices with Gregorian chant set to German words - well before Luther's own German Mass of 1526. Crowds came from surrounding Catholic territories to hear him. He also formed a "League of the Elect", a covenanted band sworn to defend the gospel, and in March 1524 his followers burned a pilgrimage chapel at nearby Mallerbach.

In July 1524 Duke John of Saxony and his son visited Allstedt, and Müntzer preached before them on the second chapter of Daniel - the Sermon to the Princes. He urged them to become the new Daniels, take the sword and root out the godless, warning that if they did not, the sword would be taken from them. The princes did not take up his offer. Summoned to Weimar for questioning, he fled Allstedt by night in August 1524.

Mühlhausen and the Peasants' War

He moved to the imperial city of Mühlhausen in Thuringia, where the former monk Heinrich Pfeiffer was already agitating for change. Expelled within weeks, he travelled to Nuremberg, where he had his Highly Provoked Vindication - a savage attack on Luther - printed, and to the south-west, where the peasants' risings were beginning. He returned to Mühlhausen in February 1525, where a new "Eternal Council" had taken power.

When the Peasants' War spread into Thuringia that spring, Müntzer became its prophet. He signed his letters "Thomas Müntzer with the sword of Gideon" and wrote to the miners of Mansfeld: "At them, at them, while the fire is hot! Do not let your sword grow cold!" In May 1525 he led some 300 men from Mühlhausen to join the peasant army gathered at Frankenhausen.

Key dates

• c. 1489 - Born at Stolberg in the Harz
• 1506-12 - Studies at Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder
• 1520 - Preacher at Zwickau on Luther's recommendation; meets the "Zwickau prophets"
• 1521 - Dismissed from Zwickau; issues the Prague Manifesto
• 1523 - Pastor at Allstedt; publishes German orders of worship; marries Ottilie von Gersen
• July 1524 - Preaches the Sermon to the Princes
• August 1524 - Flees Allstedt; Luther publishes his Letter to the Princes of Saxony
• February 1525 - Returns to Mühlhausen
• 15 May 1525 - The peasant army is destroyed at Frankenhausen
• 27 May 1525 - Beheaded outside Mühlhausen

Teachings and claims

The inner word

Müntzer's central claim was that Scripture is a dead letter unless God speaks His "living word" directly into the soul. He accused Luther of preaching a "honey-sweet Christ" and of trusting in the bare text, which, he said, anyone could read without being changed. True faith comes only after the soul has been stripped of every creaturely comfort in a long agony of doubt and desolation; then God speaks, as He spoke to the prophets, through visions, dreams and inner certainty. The elect can be recognised by having passed through this ordeal.

The fallen Church and the age of the elect

He held that the Church had fallen away soon after the apostles, that the clergy of every party were scribes and Pharisees, and that the present age was about to end with the separation of the elect from the godless. Drawing on Daniel and on Joachim of Fiore, he expected a final age of the Spirit in which the elect would rule.

The sword

In his reading of Romans 13 and Daniel 2, rulers hold the sword to protect the godly and destroy the godless. If rulers refuse, the power passes to the common people. "The godless have no right to live," he preached at Allstedt, "save what the elect choose to grant them." This joined the claim to direct revelation with a programme of holy violence.

Worship

Against both the old Latin Mass and the Wittenberg reformers' gradualism, he insisted that the people should worship in their own language at once. His liturgies kept a great deal of the traditional structure and chant.

Documented controversies

• Attacks on Luther. In the Highly Provoked Vindication (1524) he called Luther "Doctor Liar", "Brother Fatted Pig" and "the soft-living flesh at Wittenberg", and accused him of flattering princes.
• Violence at Allstedt. His followers burned the Mallerbach chapel in March 1524; he defended the act and resisted the authorities' attempts to punish those involved.
• Luther's response. Luther's Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit (1524) warned that a spirit that refuses to be examined and turns to the fist is not the Holy Spirit. In 1525 he wrote Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, which in its turn has been heavily criticised.
• The peasants' defeat. At Frankenhausen Müntzer assured the peasants that God would protect them and that he would catch the cannon-balls in his sleeves.

^† A rainbow seen over the field was taken as a sign of victory. The princes' army attacked during negotiations; some 5,000-6,000 peasants were killed and the princes lost only a handful of men.

Death

After the battle on 15 May 1525 Müntzer was found hiding in a house in Frankenhausen, reportedly in bed pretending to be ill. He was handed to Count Ernst of Mansfeld, interrogated under torture, and signed a confession. Before his death he wrote a letter to the people of Mühlhausen urging them not to rebel further, received communion in one kind according to the old rite, and was beheaded with Pfeiffer outside Mühlhausen on 27 May 1525. Their heads were displayed on stakes.

Legacy

Müntzer became a hero of later revolutionary movements. Friedrich Engels made him a forerunner of class struggle, and the German Democratic Republic named towns and streets after him and put him on its five-mark note. Among historians, the Marxist reading has given way to a picture of an apocalyptic mystic for whom social revolution served a religious end.

For the history traced in this section, he is the first and clearest example of a pattern that recurs: the claim to direct revelation above Scripture, the conviction that the Church has fallen and must be restored by a new elect, and the expectation of an imminent kingdom to be established by the saints. His influence on the peaceful Anabaptists is disputed; Hans Hut, who spread Anabaptism in south Germany, had been his follower, but the Swiss Brethren wrote to him in 1524 to reject his use of the sword.

Measured against the creeds

Müntzer did not deny the Trinity or the person of Christ; his departure was elsewhere. By setting an inner word above the written word, he made each believer's private experience the test of truth and left no way for the Church to examine a prophet - the very thing St John requires ("test the spirits", 1 John 4:1). The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church"; Müntzer taught that the Church had ceased to exist for fourteen centuries. And his call to slay the godless contradicts the Lord's own refusal of the sword (Matthew 26:52; John 18:36). Luther's verdict, that a spirit which will not be tested and reaches for the fist is not the Holy Spirit, has been shared across the four traditions.

Major writings

• Prague Manifesto (1521)
• German Church Office and German Evangelical Mass (1523-24)
• Protestation or Proposition and On Counterfeit Faith (1524)
• Sermon to the Princes (1524)
• Special Exposure of False Faith (1524)
• Highly Provoked Vindication (1524)

Affiliation

Benedictine prior of St Peter's in the Black Forest; Swiss Brethren leader

Appears in

The Radical Reformation

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Life

The monastery

Michael Sattler was born around 1490 at Staufen im Breisgau, in Austrian-ruled south-west Germany. Almost nothing is known of his early life. He entered the Benedictine abbey of St Peter's in the Black Forest, near Freiburg, and rose to be its prior, second in authority to the abbot. He probably studied at the University of Freiburg, and he had a good knowledge of Latin and Scripture.

Leaving the cloister

During the early 1520s the reforming writings of Luther and others reached the Black Forest, and Sattler, by his own later account, was troubled by the worldliness of monastic life and by Paul's epistles. In 1525, during the Peasants' War, rebel peasants occupied St Peter's; it is possible that Sattler sympathised with their grievances. He left the monastery about this time and married Margaretha, a former Beguine.^†

Zürich and Strasbourg

By 1525 he was in the Zürich area among the Swiss Brethren, and he was probably rebaptised there. He was among those arrested in Zürich and expelled in November 1525. He then worked as an evangelist in the region north of Zürich and in Württemberg, and in 1526 spent some time in Strasbourg, where he discussed baptism and the Church with the reformers Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. They treated him with respect, though they could not agree. On leaving the city he wrote them a courteous letter setting out twenty points of disagreement.

Schleitheim

On 24 February 1527 a meeting of Swiss Brethren leaders was held at Schleitheim, near Schaffhausen. The movement had been troubled by disagreements and by some who claimed that spiritual freedom placed them above moral rules. The assembly agreed on seven articles, the Brotherly Union, now known as the Schleitheim Confession. Sattler was almost certainly its principal author, and its cover letter is in his style.

Arrest and trial

Shortly after Schleitheim, Sattler, his wife and members of the Anabaptist congregation at Horb, on the Neckar in Austrian territory, were arrested. Letters and papers found on him, including the Schleitheim articles, were used against him. He was tried at Rottenburg on 17-18 May 1527 before a court of the Austrian authorities. The charges included violating the imperial mandate, denying the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament, rejecting infant baptism, rejecting the sacrament of extreme unction, despising the Mother of God and the saints, refusing oaths, leaving the monastery and marrying, and saying that if the Turks invaded he would not resist them, and that if war were right he would rather fight Christians who persecute the faithful than Turks.

He answered each charge from Scripture, calmly. The court sentenced him to have his tongue cut, to be torn with red-hot tongs at the market place and five more times on the way to the place of execution, and then to be burned to powder.

Key dates

• c. 1490 - Born at Staufen im Breisgau
• c. 1515-25 - Benedictine monk and prior of St Peter's in the Black Forest
• 1525 - Leaves the monastery; marries; joins the Swiss Brethren
• November 1525 - Expelled from Zürich
• 1526 - In Strasbourg with Bucer and Capito
• 24 February 1527 - Schleitheim assembly; the seven articles
• Spring 1527 - Arrested at Horb
• 17-18 May 1527 - Trial at Rottenburg
• 20 May 1527 - Executed at Rottenburg
• c. 28 May 1527 - Margaretha Sattler drowned in the Neckar

Teachings and claims

The seven articles of Schleitheim

1. Baptism is to be given only to those who have learned repentance and amendment of life, believe that their sins are taken away by Christ, and ask for it. Infant baptism, "the highest and chief abomination of the pope", is excluded.
2. The ban: those who fall into sin are to be admonished twice privately and then publicly, according to Matthew 18, before the breaking of bread.
3. The breaking of bread is a remembrance of Christ's broken body for those united by baptism into one body.
4. Separation: believers must separate themselves from the "abomination" of the world - from the churches, civic life and the use of force.
5. Pastors are to be chosen by the congregation, of good report, and supported by it.
6. The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ; Christians may not use it, serve as magistrates, or go to law.
7. Oaths are forbidden, according to Matthew 5:34-37.

Love and suffering

His letters and the Schleitheim articles stress that the Christian life is obedience to Christ in love, with suffering as its expected portion.

Documented controversies

Separation

Schleitheim's sharp division between the Church and "the world" was criticised by Zwingli, who wrote a refutation of it in 1527, and by Calvin, who answered it in his Brief Instruction (1544). They held that it denied that a Christian could serve God as a magistrate.

The Turks

His statement about the Turks, reported at his trial, horrified his judges and was used against the Anabaptists for generations as proof of disloyalty.

The execution

Contemporary reports of his execution circulated widely, and Bucer and Capito, though they disagreed with him, called him a martyr of Christ. Wolfgang Capito wrote to the authorities of Horb pleading for the other prisoners.

Death

The sentence was carried out at Rottenburg on 20 May 1527. Before he was burned, according to the account that circulated among the Brethren, he prayed for his persecutors, and when the ropes on his hands had burned through he raised two fingers, the sign he had promised his friends to show that the suffering was bearable. His wife Margaretha refused to recant, and was drowned in the Neckar some eight days later. Several other members of the Horb congregation were also executed.

Legacy

The Schleitheim Confession remains the classic statement of Anabaptist teaching on separation and non-resistance, and the Amish, Hutterites and conservative Mennonites still recognise it. Sattler's trial and death, recorded in the Martyrs Mirror, are among the most honoured in Anabaptist memory. His insistence on discipline, on a believers' church and on the refusal of the sword passed into the Mennonite, Baptist and free-church traditions.

Measured against the creeds

Sattler confessed the Trinity and the creeds' teaching on Christ, and his courage, his charity towards his judges and the manner of his death command respect. The cruelty of his execution was a crime; the Catholic and Protestant churches alike have since repudiated the killing of heretics.

His teaching, however, departs from the historic faith on baptism and the Church. The creeds confess one baptism, which the Church had given to infants from the earliest centuries, and which the Anabaptists rejected as no baptism. Schleitheim's separation of believers from all civil life, including the office of the magistrate, goes beyond the New Testament, which calls the ruler "the minister of God to thee for good" (Romans 13:4), and records soldiers and officials who believed without being told to leave their posts (Luke 3:14; Acts 10; 13:12). The Augsburg Confession (Article 16) and the Anglican Articles (Articles 37-39) explicitly reject the teaching that Christians may not bear civil office, serve as soldiers or take oaths.

His teaching on the Supper as a memorial of the body only, and his rejection of the real presence, also departs from the faith of the Fathers and of the Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran churches.

Major writings

• Brotherly Union of a Number of Children of God Concerning Seven Articles (Schleitheim Confession, 1527)
• Letter to Bucer and Capito (1526)
• Letter to the church at Horb (1527)
• On the Satisfaction of Christ and other tracts attributed to him

Affiliation

Catholic priest in Friesland; from 1536 an Anabaptist elder; founder of the Mennonites

Appears in

The Radical Reformation

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Life

A village priest with doubts

Menno Simons was born in 1496 at Witmarsum in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands. Little is known of his family or schooling; he learned Latin and some Greek, probably in a monastery school, and was ordained priest at Utrecht in

1. He served as a parish priest first at Pingjum and then, from 1531, in his

home village of Witmarsum.

By his own account in his later Reply to Gellius Faber, he spent his first years as a priest playing cards and drinking with his fellow priests. Within a year of ordination he began to doubt that the bread and wine at Mass became the body and blood of Christ. He had not read Scripture, he wrote, for fear of being misled; when he did, he found no support for transubstantiation as he understood it, and Luther's writings encouraged him to trust Scripture above human authority.

In 1531 he heard that a tailor named Sicke Freerks had been beheaded at Leeuwarden for being rebaptised. "It sounded very strange to me to hear of a second baptism," he wrote. He searched Scripture and the Fathers and concluded that infant baptism had no basis in the New Testament - but he remained a priest, preaching what he now believed in parts while keeping his comfortable post.

Münster and the turning point

In 1534-35 Anabaptists inspired by the prophet Jan Matthys seized the city of Münster in Westphalia and proclaimed it the New Jerusalem. Their cause drew followers from Friesland. In April 1535 some three hundred Frisian Anabaptists, among them Menno's brother Pieter (on most readings of the evidence), seized the Oldeklooster monastery near Bolsward and were killed when it was retaken. ^†

Menno blamed himself for having taught the truth about baptism while leaving simple people without shepherds against false prophets. He wrote a tract against Jan van Leiden, The Blasphemy of John of Leiden, condemning his claim to be king. On 30 January 1536 he left the priesthood and went into hiding. Within a year he was rebaptised, probably by Obbe Philips, and was asked by a group of peaceable Anabaptists to become their elder. He accepted, he says, only after long reluctance, and was ordained by Obbe around January 1537.

Twenty-five years on the run

For the rest of his life Menno lived as a fugitive. In 1542 the Emperor Charles V put a price of 100 gold guilders on his head, and anyone who sheltered him risked death; in 1539 a man named Tjard Reynders was executed for having taken him in. He married a woman named Geertruydt, who travelled with him with their children.

He worked first in Groningen and Friesland, then from 1543 in East Friesland and the Rhineland, and finally along the Baltic coast. He preached, baptised, ordained elders and, above all, wrote: some twenty-five books and tracts, in Dutch, aimed at both his own people and their persecutors. His Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539-40) became the movement's basic text.

Last years

From about 1554 he found refuge on the estate of a sympathetic nobleman, Bartholomäus von Ahlefeldt, at Wüstenfelde in Holstein, where he had a printing press. These years were darkened by the movement's internal quarrels over discipline. He was lame by then and walked with a crutch.

Key dates

• 1496 - Born at Witmarsum, Friesland
• 1524 - Ordained priest at Utrecht; begins to doubt transubstantiation
• 1531 - Hears of Sicke Freerks's execution and questions infant baptism; priest at Witmarsum
• 1534-35 - The Anabaptist kingdom at Münster
• April 1535 - Oldeklooster seized and retaken; many Frisian Anabaptists killed
• 30 January 1536 - Leaves the Catholic priesthood
• c. 1537 - Ordained an Anabaptist elder by Obbe Philips
• 1539-40 - Foundation of Christian Doctrine
• 1542 - Imperial price on his head
• 1554 - Settles at Wüstenfelde, Holstein
• 31 January 1561 - Dies at Wüstenfelde

Teachings and claims

A church of the reborn

Menno's chief theme was the new birth. The true Church, he taught, consists of those who have been regenerated, have repented, believe, and show it in an obedient life - "a church without spot or wrinkle" (Ephesians 5:27). Baptism belongs only to those who can confess faith; infant baptism, he wrote, was an invention of men. The Lord's Supper was a memorial and a sign of the fellowship of the reborn, not a sacrifice or the true body and blood.

Non-resistance and separation

He rejected Münster completely. Christians, he taught, may not use the sword, swear oaths, take part in war or hold the office of magistrate in which they would have to shed blood. "The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife... They are the children of peace who have beaten their swords into ploughshares." The Church should be visibly separate from the world in dress, conduct and association.

The ban

Discipline was essential. Members who sinned openly and did not repent were to be excluded from the Supper and shunned in daily life, so that the Church would stay pure and the sinner might be shamed into repentance.

Celestial flesh

Following Melchior Hoffman, Menno held that Christ did not take His human flesh from Mary but that "the Word became flesh" in her, passing through her "as water through a pipe" - so that Christ's humanity was heavenly, not inherited from fallen Adam. He defended this at length against Reformed critics such as John a Lasco. Later Mennonites quietly abandoned it.

Documented controversies

• The ban and shunning of spouses. In the 1550s stricter leaders, notably Leenaert Bouwens and Dirk Philips, insisted that shunning extend even to husbands and wives (marital avoidance). Menno at first resisted, then largely sided with the strict party. The disputes split the Dutch movement into "Waterlanders" (milder) and stricter groups, and the divisions multiplied after his death.
• His Christology. Reformed and Lutheran opponents, and Catholic ones, charged that the celestial-flesh doctrine revived ancient errors about Christ's humanity; the debate with a Lasco at Emden in 1544 is the best-known exchange.
• Persecution. He was the target, not the agent, of persecution: Catholic and Protestant authorities alike executed Anabaptists, and Menno's writings include pleas to magistrates to stop shedding innocent blood.

Death

Menno died at Wüstenfelde in Holstein on 31 January 1561, apparently of natural causes after years of illness, twenty-five years to the day after leaving the priesthood. He was buried in his own garden. The village was later destroyed in the Thirty Years' War and the grave lost; a memorial stone now marks the area.

Legacy

The Mennonites, and through a 1693 schism led by Jakob Ammann the Amish, carry his name and tradition. They emigrated in waves - to Prussia, Russia, Pennsylvania, Canada, Paraguay - and today number some two million baptised members, more than half of them in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Mennonite communities are among the most peaceable Christian communities in the world: pioneers of conscientious objection, disaster relief (Mennonite Central Committee, from 1920) and restorative justice. They also carry forward a lasting tension in his teaching between purity and love, seen in repeated splits over discipline.

Measured against the creeds

Menno affirmed the Trinity and the Apostles' Creed, and his life showed courage, humility and care for the persecuted. He also turned Anabaptism away from Münster's violence - something the four traditions can only honour.

His teaching departed from the historic faith in three ways. First, by rejecting infant baptism and treating the sacraments as signs of a regenerate community, he broke with the universal practice of the ancient Church, East and West. Second, his "celestial flesh" Christology is incompatible with the Council of Chalcedon (451), which confesses Christ "of one substance with us as regards His manhood... born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, as regards His manhood". If Christ's flesh was not taken from Mary, He did not take our nature in order to heal it - the point St Gregory of Nazianzus made: "what is not assumed is not healed". Third, his ideal of a pure church of the visibly reborn sets aside the Lord's parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30), which the Church has long read as warning against trying to separate the true from the false before the judgement.

Major writings

• The Blasphemy of John of Leiden (c. 1535)
• The Spiritual Resurrection and The New Birth (c. 1537)
• Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539-40, revised 1558)
• True Christian Faith (c. 1541)
• Brief and Clear Confession (1544), against John a Lasco
• Reply to Gellius Faber (1554), which contains his account of his conversion
• Instruction on Excommunication (1558)

Affiliation

Zürich patrician and humanist; disciple of Zwingli; founder of the Swiss Brethren

Appears in

The Radical Reformation, Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists

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A patrician son

Conrad Grebel was born around 1498, probably at Grüningen near Zürich, into one of the leading families of the city. His father, Jakob Grebel, was an iron merchant, magistrate and member of the Zürich council. Conrad was educated at the Latin school of the Grossmünster and then at the universities of Basel (1514), Vienna (1515-18), where he studied under the humanist Joachim Vadian, and Paris (1518-20), on scholarships from the Emperor and the King of France. His student years were turbulent: he quarrelled with his father over money, and his letters speak of brawling and dissipation. He returned to Zürich in 1520 without a degree. Vadian married his sister Martha.

Zwingli's disciple

In Zürich Grebel joined a circle of young humanists who studied Greek, Hebrew and the Scriptures with Huldrych Zwingli. In 1522 he married Barbara, a young woman of lower rank, against his parents' wishes. About the same time he experienced a religious conversion and became one of Zwingli's most zealous supporters, and his letters to Vadian show his growing conviction that the Church must be restored to the New Testament pattern.

The break

At the second Zürich disputation in October 1523, Zwingli agreed that the Mass was unscriptural but left the timing of its abolition to the city council. Grebel and his friends, among them Felix Manz and Simon Stumpf, objected that the council had no authority over the word of God. From that point they began to meet separately for Bible study. Over the following year they concluded that infant baptism had no warrant in Scripture and that the true Church was a gathered community of committed believers, separate from the state.

The letter to Müntzer

In September 1524 Grebel wrote, for the group, a long letter to Thomas Müntzer, whose writings they had read. They praised his opposition to infant baptism but urged him to abandon liturgical chant and German Masses for the simple Supper of believers, and to renounce the sword: "true believing Christians are sheep among wolves". The letter was probably never delivered, but it is the earliest statement of the Swiss Brethren's views.

The first baptisms

In January 1525 the council held a disputation on baptism, ruled against the radicals, ordered all unbaptised infants to be baptised within eight days and forbade the group to meet. On the evening of 21 January 1525, in the house of Felix Manz's mother in Zürich, the group prayed, and George Blaurock, a former priest, asked Grebel to baptise him. Grebel did so, and Blaurock then baptised the others present. A few days later a congregation of believers was formed at the village of Zollikon. This is usually regarded as the beginning of the Anabaptist movement.

Mission and prison

Grebel preached in Schaffhausen, St Gallen (where hundreds were baptised in the river Sitter in April 1525) and the Grüningen district. He was arrested in October 1525, tried with Manz and Blaurock in March 1526 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Within two weeks the prisoners escaped. The same month the council decreed death by drowning for anyone who rebaptised. Grebel's father was executed in October 1526 for having received foreign pensions, a charge some historians connect with the pressures of the family's position.^†

Key dates

• c. 1498 - Born near Zürich
• 1514-20 - Studies at Basel, Vienna and Paris
• 1522 - Marries; joins Zwingli's circle; conversion
• October 1523 - Second disputation; the break with Zwingli
• 5 September 1524 - Letter to Thomas Müntzer
• 17 January 1525 - Disputation on baptism; radicals ordered to desist
• 21 January 1525 - First believer's baptism in Zürich
• April 1525 - Mass baptisms at St Gallen
• October 1525 - Arrested
• March 1526 - Sentenced to life imprisonment; escapes
• Summer 1526 - Dies of plague at Maienfeld

Teachings and claims

The gathered church

Grebel taught that the Church consists only of those who have repented, believed and committed themselves to follow Christ, and that it must be separate from the civic community. Membership is voluntary and marked by baptism.

Believer's baptism

He held that baptism must follow faith and the person's own request, since the New Testament records no infant baptisms and since infants cannot repent or confess. He regarded infant baptism as the "greatest and first abomination of the pope".

The Supper

He taught that the Supper is a memorial meal of the gathered church, to be eaten with ordinary bread, without vestments or chant, and only by those living in brotherly love.

Non-resistance and discipline

He held that Christians must not use the sword, either in war or as magistrates, and that the church must exercise discipline by the "ban" of Matthew 18.

Documented controversies

Breaking from the Reformation

His insistence that the Church's reform be carried out without regard to the city council was regarded by Zwingli as sedition and by the council as rebellion. To the Reformers, the Anabaptists threatened the unity of Christian society.

Rebaptism

The act of 21 January 1525 was, in the eyes of every established church, a repetition of a sacrament already validly given, and in imperial law a capital crime. The Anabaptists held that infant baptism was no baptism, so that theirs was the first true one.

Persecution

Grebel was imprisoned for his faith, and his friends were executed: Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527 and Blaurock burned in the Tyrol in 1529.

Death

He died of plague at Maienfeld in the Grisons in the summer of 1526, aged about twenty-eight, perhaps eighteen months after the first baptisms.^†

Legacy

Mennonites, Amish and many Baptists regard Grebel as a founder of their tradition, and the Swiss Brethren, who produced the Schleitheim Confession in 1527, continued his teaching. The Mennonite college Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario bears his name. Historians honour him as the first to put into practice the idea of a free church of believers separate from the state.

Measured against the creeds

Grebel confessed the faith of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and his longing for a Church of holy lives, his refusal of violence and his courage under persecution deserve respect. The persecution he and his friends suffered at the hands of the Reformed authorities was a wrong that the Reformed churches have since acknowledged; the Lutheran World Federation also asked Mennonites' forgiveness in 2010 for the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutherans.

But his doctrine of baptism departs from what the Church had received. The creed confesses "one baptism for the remission of sins"; the Church from the second century baptised infants (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyprian), and the household baptisms of Acts (16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 1:16) and the promise "to you and to your children" (Acts 2:39) were read in that light. To baptise those already baptised in the triune name treats Christ's baptism as no baptism, which the Church had rejected in the Donatist controversy. Luther's Concerning Rebaptism (1528) argued that baptism rests on God's word and command, not on the faith of the one baptised, and that the Anabaptists made their own faith the foundation of the sacrament.

His idea of the Church as a gathered community of the visibly holy also differs from the creeds' "holy catholic Church", which the Fathers and Reformers alike understood as a mixed body in which wheat and tares grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30).

Major writings

• Letter to Thomas Müntzer (5 September 1524)
• Letters to Joachim Vadian (1517-25)
• Protestation and Defence (1524-25)

Affiliation

Dutch tailor; Melchiorite Anabaptist; "king" of Münster

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The Radical Reformation

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Tailor and actor

Jan Bockelson (Beuckelszoon) was born in 1509 near Leiden in Holland, the illegitimate son of a village mayor and a serving woman from Westphalia. He was apprenticed as a tailor, travelled as a journeyman to England and Lisbon, and on his return married a widow and kept an inn in Leiden. He was a member of a chamber of rhetoric, the amateur dramatic societies of the Low Countries, where he wrote and acted in plays - a talent his enemies later saw in his conduct at Münster.

The Melchiorites

In the early 1530s he came under the influence of the followers of Melchior Hoffman, the apocalyptic Anabaptist preacher who taught that the end of the world was near and that Strasbourg would be the New Jerusalem. After Hoffman's imprisonment in 1533, leadership of the movement in the Netherlands passed to Jan Matthys, a baker of Haarlem, who declared himself the prophet Enoch and abandoned Hoffman's peaceful waiting: the godly, he taught, must now take the sword against the ungodly. In November 1533 Matthys baptised Bockelson and sent him as an apostle.

Münster

In the Westphalian city of Münster, the Lutheran preacher Bernhard Rothmann had moved towards Anabaptist views, and the city council had largely accepted the Reformation. In January 1534 Bockelson arrived, followed in February by Matthys. That month the Anabaptists gained control of the council in elections; Catholics and Lutherans who refused rebaptism were driven out of the city in a snowstorm, and the city's property was held in common. The prince-bishop, Franz von Waldeck, laid siege.

King of the New Israel

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1534, Matthys, convinced by a revelation, rode out against the besiegers with a handful of men and was killed. Bockelson succeeded him. He replaced the council with twelve elders, on the pattern of the tribes of Israel, and imposed a severe code of laws in which many offences carried the death penalty. In July 1534 he introduced polygamy, citing the patriarchs and the shortage of men in the city; an uprising against it was crushed and its leaders executed. He married Divara, Matthys's widow, and took about fifteen more wives.

In September 1534, after the repulse of a major assault, a prophet named Johann Dusentschuer declared that God had made Bockelson king of the whole world. He was crowned, held court in splendour with a royal guard, and ruled as King John of the New Zion, while emissaries were sent out to raise support in the Netherlands and Westphalia.

Famine and fall

Through the winter and spring of 1535 the blockade tightened, and the city starved. The king told his people that the cobblestones would be turned into bread; many died of hunger, while the court ate. Dissenters and those who tried to leave were executed. One of his wives, Elisabeth Wandscherer, who asked to leave, was beheaded by Bockelson himself in the market place, and he and the other wives danced round her body.^† On the night of 24-25 June 1535 two deserters guided the besiegers through a gate, and the city fell after fierce fighting. Most of the defenders were killed.

Captivity

Bockelson was captured alive. For months he was exhibited in chains in the towns of the region and interrogated by Catholic and Lutheran theologians, including the Lutheran Antonius Corvinus, to whom he admitted some errors but defended others.

Key dates

• 1509 - Born near Leiden
• November 1533 - Baptised by Jan Matthys
• January 1534 - Arrives in Münster
• February 1534 - Anabaptists take control; non-Anabaptists expelled; siege begins
• 5 April 1534 - Matthys killed; Bockelson succeeds him
• July 1534 - Polygamy introduced
• September 1534 - Proclaimed king of the New Israel
• 1535 - Famine in the besieged city
• 24-25 June 1535 - Münster falls
• 22 January 1536 - Executed at Münster

Teachings and claims

The New Jerusalem

He taught, following Matthys, that Münster was the New Jerusalem, that Christ's kingdom had begun there, and that the godly must destroy the ungodly to prepare for His return.

Kingship

He claimed to be the king of the last days foretold in Scripture, the successor of David, whose rule would extend over the whole world.

Community of goods and polygamy

He enforced common property on the model of Acts 2-4, and justified polygamy from the Old Testament and from the command to "be fruitful and multiply".

Prophecy

He claimed direct revelation from God, and governed by prophetic decrees given in visions and in trances.

Documented controversies

Violence and tyranny

His rule was a theocratic dictatorship in which dissent was punished with death. Accounts of the executions come mainly from hostile sources, notably the Catholic chronicler Hermann von Kerssenbrock, but they are corroborated by the testimonies of survivors and the confessions of the leaders.

Polygamy

The introduction of polygamy, and the coercion of women into marriage, scandalised every church of the time and has remained the most notorious feature of the Münster kingdom.

Responsibility for the Anabaptists

His kingdom was used by both Catholics and Protestants to justify the persecution of all Anabaptists, including the peaceful majority who had rejected him.

Death

On 22 January 1536, in the market place of Münster, he and two other leaders, Bernhard Knipperdolling and Bernhard Krechting, were tortured for about an hour with red-hot tongs and then killed with a dagger to the heart. Their bodies were hung in three iron cages from the tower of St Lambert's Church as a warning. The cages still hang there.

Legacy

Münster became the standard warning against Anabaptism for every church of the sixteenth century and long after; the Augsburg Confession's condemnations and countless sermons pointed to it. The peaceful Anabaptists, under Menno Simons, Dirk Philips and others, spent generations distancing themselves from Münster, and Menno's conversion was partly a response to it; he wrote against Jan's teaching in 1535. Historians debate how far the Münster kingdom reflected Anabaptist ideas and how far it was produced by apocalyptic fervour and the pressure of the siege.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead: whose kingdom shall have no end". The Münster kingdom represents, in its most extreme form, the error that this kingdom can be established by human force before His coming. The Augsburg Confession (Article 17) condemns "certain Jewish opinions" that before the resurrection of the dead the godly will take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed - a condemnation written with Münster's forerunners in view.

His polygamy contradicted Christ's teaching on marriage (Matthew 19:4-6), his claim to kingship and prophecy placed his own revelations above Scripture, and his tyranny was the opposite of the kingdom of Him who said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). The torture of Bockelson and his companions was itself a cruelty that the Church now repudiates.

Affiliation

Church of England clergyman (ordained 1594); Separatist pastor at Gainsborough; founder of the first English Baptist congregation, in Amsterdam

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Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists

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Cambridge and the Puritan pulpit

John Smyth was probably born around 1570 in Nottinghamshire or Lincolnshire; the details are uncertain. He studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, then a centre of Puritan teaching, where his tutor was the Separatist-leaning Francis Johnson. He took his BA in 1590 and MA in 1593, became a fellow of the college, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1594.

In 1600 he was elected city lecturer (preacher) at Lincoln. His sermons attacked the city's leading men, and in 1602 he was dismissed for "personal preaching" - naming and criticising individuals from the pulpit. He published sermons on the Lord's Prayer (A Paterne of True Prayer, 1605) that were still conventionally Puritan and even defended set forms of prayer.

Separation

Over the next few years, under pressure from the bishops' drive for conformity after 1604, Smyth concluded that the Church of England was not a true church at all. Around 1606-07 he became pastor of a Separatist congregation at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire; a sister congregation met at Scrooby, among them William Brewster and William Bradford, later of the Mayflower. Facing arrest, both groups moved to Amsterdam in 1607-08.

Amsterdam and the self-baptism

In Amsterdam Smyth's congregation lived beside the "Ancient Church" of English exiles led by his old tutor Francis Johnson. Smyth's views moved quickly. In The Differences of the Churches of the Separation (1608) he argued that during worship no translation of Scripture should be read and no book used at all, since spiritual worship must come from the heart; the original-language text could be read before worship and translated aloud.

By late 1608 or early 1609 he had concluded that infant baptism was invalid and that the Separatists, having rejected the Church of England as false, could not keep the baptism it had given them. Since he knew of no true church anywhere from which to receive a valid baptism, he baptised himself - probably by pouring, not immersion - and then Thomas Helwys and the rest of the congregation. He defended this in The Character of the Beast (1609).

Second thoughts

Within months, Smyth met the Waterlander Mennonites in Amsterdam and concluded that they were a true church after all, with a succession of baptism. He had therefore been wrong to baptise himself, and he and most of his congregation applied to join them. Helwys and a minority refused, excommunicated Smyth, and returned to England in 1612 to found the first Baptist church on English soil. Smyth's last writings are gentle and self-reproaching; he regretted the harshness of his earlier polemics and wrote that he would no longer quarrel over outward forms.

Key dates

• c. 1570 - Born, probably in the East Midlands
• 1590-93 - BA and MA, Christ's College, Cambridge
• 1594 - Ordained in the Church of England
• 1600-02 - City lecturer at Lincoln; dismissed
• c. 1606-07 - Pastor of the Separatist church at Gainsborough
• 1608 - Moves to Amsterdam; The Differences of the Churches of the Separation
• 1609 - Baptises himself and his congregation; The Character of the Beast
• 1610 - Seeks admission to the Waterlander Mennonites; excommunicated by Helwys's group
• August 1612 - Dies in Amsterdam
• 1615 - His followers are received into the Mennonite church

Teachings and claims

The gathered church

Smyth taught that a true church is formed when believers covenant together to walk in God's ways. Membership is by profession of faith, not by birth in a parish. The church elects its own officers, and no bishop or magistrate has authority over it.

Believer's baptism

He came to hold that baptism belongs only to those who repent and believe, and that infant baptism was "the mark of the beast" in Revelation - the sign of a false, national church. He saw the act of baptising himself as the restoration of a true church that had been lost.

Arminianism and freedom

Under Mennonite influence he abandoned Calvinist predestination, teaching that Christ died for all and that grace can be resisted. His final confession (1612) also argued that the magistrate has no authority over the conscience in religion, an idea Helwys developed into a plea for universal religious liberty.

Documented controversies

• The self-baptism. Contemporaries mocked him as the "Se-Baptist". Puritans and Separatists alike - among them Richard Clyfton, John Robinson and Richard Bernard - wrote against him.
• The turn to the Mennonites. Helwys's party regarded it as a denial of the very act that had founded their church and excommunicated him; the dispute was bitter on both sides.
• Worship without books. His refusal of translations and set forms during worship was rejected even by most Separatists.

Death

Smyth died of tuberculosis in Amsterdam in August 1612 and was buried on 1 September, before the Mennonites had completed his admission. His remaining followers were received in January 1615.

Legacy

Smyth is counted the founder of the General (Arminian) Baptists, through Helwys, and his congregation is often called the first Baptist church. Baptists today number some 100 million worldwide across many unions and conventions. His insistence on the gathered church of believers, believer's baptism and freedom of conscience became characteristic of much of English-speaking Protestantism.

His life is also a parable of the restorationist dilemma described in this section. Having concluded that the Church had lost true baptism, he could not restore it in a way that satisfied even himself, and spent his last months seeking a church with a continuous succession.

Measured against the creeds

The Nicene Creed confesses "one baptism for the remission of sins" and "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". Smyth's position required that for centuries there had been no true baptism and, in effect, no true Church - a view no ancient writer held. The early Church baptised infants; St Cyprian and a council at Carthage in 253 debated only whether to wait until the eighth day, and St Augustine treated infant baptism as the unquestioned tradition of the whole Church.

The Church has also always held that baptism is received, not self-administered: no one is the source of his own new birth. Smyth's own second thoughts - that he should have sought baptism from an existing church - came close to recognising this. His humility at the end, and his insistence that conscience cannot be forced by the state, deserve respect; his view of baptism and the Church remains the point of division.

Major writings

• A Paterne of True Prayer (1605)
• Principles and Inferences Concerning the Visible Church (1607)
• The Differences of the Churches of the Separation (1608)
• The Character of the Beast (1609)
• A Short Confession of Faith in Twenty Articles (1609-10)
• The Last Booke of John Smith, called the Retractation of his Errours (1612)

Affiliation

Nottinghamshire gentleman and lawyer; member of Smyth's Separatist church; founder of the first Baptist church in England

Appears in

Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists

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Life

A Nottinghamshire gentleman

Thomas Helwys was born around 1575, probably at Broxtowe Hall near Nottingham, into a family of minor gentry. He inherited Broxtowe Hall on his father's death. He studied law at Gray's Inn in London from 1593, and in 1595 married Joan Ashmore at Bilborough parish church; they had seven children. Broxtowe Hall became a meeting place for Puritans dissatisfied with the Church of England, and Helwys was drawn towards the Separatists, who held that the national church was so corrupt that true believers must leave it.

With John Smyth

By about 1606 Helwys had joined the Separatist congregation at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire led by John Smyth, a former Church of England clergyman. Under the pressure of persecution, the congregation emigrated to Amsterdam in 1608, and Helwys was a leading member and financial supporter of the move. His wife was arrested in England and imprisoned in York for refusing to take an oath; she was later released.

Baptism

In Amsterdam, Smyth concluded in 1609 that the church's baptism, received in the Church of England, was invalid, since that church was false, and that infant baptism was no baptism. He baptised himself, and then Helwys and the others. Shortly afterwards Smyth came to believe that he had acted wrongly by not seeking baptism from the Waterlander Mennonites, a true church already existing, and he and most of the congregation applied to join them. Helwys and a small group refused, holding that any company of believers could restore baptism and that seeking it from another church implied a succession that Scripture did not require. In 1610 they excommunicated Smyth's party.

Declaration and return

In 1611 Helwys's group issued A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland, in twenty-seven articles - the first Baptist confession in English. It affirmed general redemption (that Christ died for all) against Calvinist predestination, believer's baptism, the independence of the local church and the lawfulness of magistracy. Helwys became convinced that the English Separatists had been wrong to flee persecution, and in 1612 he and about ten others returned to England and founded a congregation at Spitalfields, outside the walls of London - the first Baptist church on English soil.

The Mystery of Iniquity

The same year he published A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, which attacked the Church of England, the Puritans who remained within it, and the Separatists who had fled. Its final section argued that the king had no authority over the consciences of his subjects. On the flyleaf of a copy sent to James I he wrote: "The king is a mortal man and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual lords over them." Helwys was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate, apparently for refusing the oath of allegiance.

Key dates

• c. 1575 - Born, probably at Broxtowe Hall, Nottinghamshire
• 1593 - Admitted to Gray's Inn
• 1595 - Marries Joan Ashmore
• c. 1606 - Joins John Smyth's Separatist congregation
• 1608 - Emigrates to Amsterdam
• 1609 - Baptised by Smyth
• 1610 - Separates from Smyth's party
• 1611 - A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam
• 1612 - Returns to England; founds the Spitalfields church; publishes The Mystery of Iniquity
• 1612-13 - Imprisoned in Newgate
• by 1616 - Dies in prison

Teachings and claims

Believer's baptism

Helwys taught that baptism belongs only to those who repent and believe, that infant baptism is invalid, and that a church may restore true baptism among its own members.

General redemption

He rejected Calvinist predestination, holding that Christ died for all and that the grace of God may be resisted. His congregation was the ancestor of the "General" (Arminian) Baptists, as distinct from the Particular (Calvinist) Baptists who emerged in the 1630s.

The local church

He taught that each congregation is a complete church under Christ, with power to choose its own officers and exercise its own discipline.

Liberty of conscience

Most remarkably, he argued that religion is a matter between God and the soul, that the state may punish crimes but not belief, and that this liberty belongs to all: "Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."

Documented controversies

The break with Smyth

The quarrel over who could restore baptism divided a congregation of fewer than fifty people and left the two parties in mutual excommunication. Smyth's party eventually merged with the Mennonites.

Return to England

His decision to return, against the judgement of most Separatists, exposed his followers to persecution and led to his own imprisonment.

Polemics

The Mystery of Iniquity identified the Church of England with the second beast of Revelation, and condemned the Puritans and other Separatists in harsh terms.

Death

He died in Newgate prison. The date is not known, but a will of 1616 refers to him as dead.^† His congregation continued under John Murton, who also wrote in defence of religious liberty.

Legacy

Baptists honour Helwys as the founder of their tradition in England, and Regent's Park College in Oxford holds a copy of The Mystery of Iniquity with his inscription to the king. Historians of religious liberty regard his plea, extending freedom of conscience to non-Christians, as the first of its kind in English, decades ahead of Roger Williams and John Locke. The General Baptists he founded became, in part, Unitarian in the eighteenth century, while the New Connexion of General Baptists (1770) returned to evangelical orthodoxy.

Measured against the creeds

Helwys confessed the Trinity and the creeds' doctrine of Christ, and his 1611 Declaration is orthodox on these points. His defence of liberty of conscience, made at the cost of his life, has come to be widely accepted, including by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council (Dignitatis Humanae, 1965), and the historic churches now acknowledge their own past persecution of dissenters.

His doctrine of baptism and the Church, however, departs from the historic faith. The creeds confess "one baptism", which the Church had given to infants since the earliest centuries; to declare all such baptisms void, and to restore baptism by the decision of a small group of believers, assumes that the Church had ceased to exist - a conclusion the Lord's promise forbids (Matthew 16:18; 28:20). The judgement that a church of a few dozen could excommunicate the rest, and the speed with which the founding congregation divided, illustrate the difficulty that follows when there is no Church beyond the local congregation to which an appeal can be made.

Major writings

• A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland (1611)
• An Advertisement or Admonition unto the Congregations, which Men Call the New Fryelers (1611)
• A Short and Plain Proof by the Word and Works of God that God's Decree is not the Cause of any Man's Sin (1611)
• A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (1612)

Affiliation

Priest of the Church of England; founder and leader of the Methodist societies

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Revivalism and the "second blessing"

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Life

The rectory at Epworth

John Wesley was born on 17 June 1703 (Old Style) at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth child of Samuel Wesley, the rector, and Susanna Annesley, both children of Dissenting families who had returned to the Church of England. Susanna taught her children herself, methodically, and her influence on him was lifelong. In February 1709 the rectory burned down; John, aged five, was rescued from an upstairs window at the last moment, and his mother afterwards spoke of him as "a brand plucked out of the burning" (Zechariah 3:2).

Oxford and the Holy Club

He went to Charterhouse School and then Christ Church, Oxford (1720), was ordained deacon in 1725 and elected a fellow of Lincoln College in 1726, and was ordained priest in 1728. Reading Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor and William Law convinced him that the Christian life meant the total dedication of heart and life to God. With his brother Charles and a few others he led a small society - mocked as the "Holy Club" or "Methodists" - who kept a strict rule of prayer, frequent communion, fasting, study, and visiting prisoners and the poor.

Georgia

In 1735 the brothers sailed to the new colony of Georgia as missionaries under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. On the voyage a storm terrified Wesley, while a group of Moravian Germans calmly sang hymns. In Savannah he was a strict High Church pastor, and an unhappy courtship of Sophia Hopkey ended when he refused her communion after her marriage to another man; her husband sued, and Wesley left Georgia in December 1737 in some disgrace.

Aldersgate

Back in London, the Moravian Peter Böhler convinced him that saving faith brings an assurance of forgiveness that he lacked. On 24 May 1738, at a society meeting in Aldersgate Street where someone read Luther's preface to Romans, "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine." He visited the Moravian settlement at Herrnhut that summer.

The Methodist movement

In April 1739 George Whitefield persuaded him to preach in the open air at Bristol to the coal miners of Kingswood. Wesley, who had thought "the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church", did so, and continued for fifty years. He travelled perhaps 250,000 miles on horseback and preached some 40,000 sermons. He organised converts into societies, classes of about twelve under a leader, and bands; built preaching houses (the "New Room" in Bristol, the Foundery and later City Road Chapel in London); appointed lay preachers on circuits; and held an annual Conference from 1744. He separated from the Moravians in 1740 and from Whitefield's Calvinism in 1741.

He insisted throughout that Methodism was a movement within the Church of England, told his people to attend their parish churches and receive the sacrament there, and refused to let his preachers administer it.

Later years

The American Revolution left American Methodists without sacraments, as most Anglican clergy had left. In 1784 Wesley, convinced from his reading that bishops and presbyters were of the same order, ordained Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey as elders and "set apart" Thomas Coke as superintendent for America. The same year his Deed of Declaration gave the Conference legal control of the chapels. He kept preaching into his late eighties.

Key dates

• 1703 - Born at Epworth, 17 June (Old Style)
• 1709 - Rescued from the burning rectory
• 1725-28 - Ordained deacon and priest; fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford
• 1729-35 - Leads the Oxford "Holy Club"
• 1735-37 - Missionary in Georgia
• 24 May 1738 - Aldersgate experience
• 1739 - Begins field preaching at Bristol
• 1744 - First Methodist Conference
• 1751 - Marries Mary Vazeille
• 1766 - A Plain Account of Christian Perfection
• 1784 - Ordains preachers for America; Deed of Declaration
• 2 March 1791 - Dies in London

Teachings and claims

Grace, faith and assurance

Wesley taught that all are sinners, that Christ died for all, and that God's "prevenient grace" goes before every person and enables them to respond. Justification is by faith alone, and the Spirit normally gives the justified an inner witness that they are children of God. He rejected the Calvinist doctrine that God has chosen some and passed over others.

Christian perfection

His most distinctive teaching was "Christian perfection" or entire sanctification: a state in which love for God and neighbour fills the heart so fully that no deliberate sin remains. He defined sin "properly so called" narrowly as "a voluntary transgression of a known law", so that a perfected Christian still makes mistakes and needs Christ's atonement. Perfection is usually received in an instant by faith, after a gradual work of growth, and can be lost. He confessed that he had never claimed it for himself.

Over time this opened the way to a two-stage pattern - conversion, then a second crisis experience - that the Holiness movement made central and Pentecostalism inherited.

Means of grace

He held a high view of the sacraments. In his sermon "The Duty of Constant Communion" he urged receiving the Lord's Supper as often as possible, and his diary records that he received it on average every four or five days. He also urged prayer, Scripture, fasting and "Christian conference" as means of grace.

Documented controversies

• "Enthusiasm". Bishops and clergy accused him of claiming special inspiration and encouraging disorder. In 1739 Bishop Joseph Butler of Bristol told him: "Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing - a very horrid thing." His early meetings saw people cry out, fall and convulse, which Wesley at first took as signs of God's work but later treated more cautiously.
• Perfectionist excess. In 1762-63 one of his London preachers, George Bell, claimed perfection and the gift of healing and predicted that the world would end on 28 February 1763. Wesley disowned him and tightened his teaching.
• The ordinations of 1784. His brother Charles protested that ordination is separation from the Church of England, and Anglicans have generally regarded the ordinations as irregular. The American Methodists formed the Methodist Episcopal Church that December.
• Calvinist controversy. His breach with Whitefield and later bitter pamphlet wars with Augustus Toplady and others over predestination.
• Marriage. His 1751 marriage to the widow Mary Vazeille was unhappy; she objected to his constant travel and correspondence with women, and they lived apart from the 1770s.

Death

Wesley died at his house beside City Road Chapel, London, on 2 March 1791, aged 87, still a priest of the Church of England. His reported last words were "The best of all is, God is with us." He was buried behind the chapel; at his wish there was no hearse, and six poor men were paid to carry the coffin.

Legacy

Methodist and related churches - Methodist, Wesleyan, Holiness and many others - number some 80 million people worldwide. Methodism separated from the Church of England in the years after his death, which he had always said should not happen.

Through his doctrine of perfection, he is the ancestor of the Holiness movement and, through it, of Pentecostalism. He was also a man of extraordinary discipline, organisational genius and care for the poor: he opened schools, dispensaries and a lending fund, wrote a popular book of remedies (Primitive Physic, 1747), and in his last letter urged William Wilberforce to fight the slave trade.

Measured against the creeds

Wesley affirmed the creeds, the Thirty-Nine Articles (abridged for America into twenty-five) and the Book of Common Prayer, and he was steeped in the Fathers - especially the Eastern writers on holiness, such as "Macarius". His insistence on grace for all, on the sacraments and on holiness of life has much in common with the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which also teach that the Christian is called to real transformation (theosis, in Orthodox language).

The difficulty lies in how he defined and timed perfection. By narrowing sin to voluntary transgressions and expecting an instantaneous second blessing, he made possible a teaching in which Christians claim to be free of sin by a single act of faith. Lutherans hold that the Christian remains simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and sinner, until death; Catholics and Orthodox hold that sanctification is a lifelong co-operation with grace through the sacraments, not a datable second event. Wesley himself hedged his teaching with care; his heirs often did not.

His ordinations of 1784 also departed from the order of the historic Church, which reserves ordination to bishops.

Major writings

• Sermons on Several Occasions (from 1746), including "Salvation by Faith", "The Witness of the Spirit" and "The Duty of Constant Communion"
• Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755)
• Journal (published in parts, 1740-91)
• A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766, revised to 1777)
• Primitive Physic (1747)
• With Charles Wesley, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)

Affiliation

Presbyterian minister; host of the Cane Ridge revival (1801); leader of the "Christian" movement that merged with the Campbells' Disciples in 1832

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Restorationists and date-setters, Revivalism and the "second blessing"

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Life

Maryland and North Carolina

Barton Warren Stone was born on 24 December 1772 near Port Tobacco, Maryland. His father died when he was a child, and the family moved to Pittsylvania County, Virginia. In 1790 he enrolled at David Caldwell's academy in Guilford, North Carolina, intending to study law. There he heard the revival preaching of James McGready and, after a long struggle over whether he was among the elect, was converted under the preaching of William Hodge, who spoke of God's love.

A Presbyterian minister

He was licensed to preach by the Orange Presbytery in 1796 and moved west to Kentucky, where in 1798 he was ordained pastor of the congregations of Cane Ridge and Concord in Bourbon County. When asked at his ordination whether he accepted the Westminster Confession, he answered, "I do, as far as I see it consistent with the word of God."

Cane Ridge

In 1801, after attending the revival at Logan County led by McGready, Stone invited neighbouring ministers to a communion season at Cane Ridge. The meeting, held from 6 to 12 August 1801, drew crowds estimated at between ten and twenty-five thousand. Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist preachers spoke from several stands at once, day and night. Many fell, some lay unconscious for hours, and others experienced "jerks", dancing, running, laughing and barking. Stone defended these "exercises" as the work of God, though he warned against excess. Cane Ridge became the most famous event of the Second Great Awakening in the West.

The Springfield Presbytery

The revival exposed tensions in Presbyterianism over predestination and the creeds. Several revival preachers, accused of Arminian teaching, withdrew from the Synod of Kentucky in 1803 with Stone and formed the independent Springfield Presbytery. On 28 June 1804 they dissolved it in The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, a satirical document in which the presbytery "willed" that it "die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large", and that the people take the Bible as their only rule. They called themselves simply "Christians".

Losses and growth

The movement suffered early defections: in 1805 two of its founders, Richard McNemar and John Dunlavy, joined the Shakers, and in 1811 two others returned to the Presbyterians. Stone continued, and the Christian churches spread through Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. He adopted believer's baptism by immersion around 1807, though he did not make it a condition of fellowship. He married Elizabeth Campbell in 1801; after her death in 1810 he married Celia Wilson Bowen. From 1826 he edited The Christian Messenger.

Union with the Campbells

In the 1820s Stone came into contact with Alexander Campbell, whose "Reformers" shared his rejection of creeds and his call for unity on the Bible alone. They disagreed on several points - Campbell emphasised reason and baptism for the remission of sins, Stone the Spirit's work and Christian unity - but on 1 January 1832, at a meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, their followers agreed to unite. Stone moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834.

Key dates

• 24 December 1772 - Born near Port Tobacco, Maryland
• 1790 - Enters David Caldwell's academy; converted
• 1796 - Licensed by the Orange Presbytery
• 1798 - Ordained at Cane Ridge, Kentucky
• 6-12 August 1801 - The Cane Ridge revival
• 1803 - Withdraws from the Synod of Kentucky
• 28 June 1804 - The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery
• 1805 - McNemar and Dunlavy join the Shakers
• 1814 - Address to the Christian Churches on the Trinity and atonement
• 1826 - Founds The Christian Messenger
• 1 January 1832 - Union with the Campbells' Reformers
• 1834 - Moves to Jacksonville, Illinois
• 9 November 1844 - Dies at Hannibal, Missouri

Teachings and claims

No creed but the Bible

Stone taught that creeds and confessions divide Christians and should not be tests of fellowship; the Bible alone is sufficient, and Christians should unite on it as simply "Christians".

Christian unity

Unity was his lifelong passion. "Let the unity of Christians be our polar star," he wrote.

The Trinity

He rejected the term "Trinity" as unscriptural and held that the Son was begotten of the Father before creation, deriving His being from Him, and was not co-eternal or co-equal in the sense of the Nicene Creed; the Holy Spirit he described as the power and energy of God rather than a distinct person.^†

The atonement

He rejected the doctrine that Christ's death satisfied divine justice or bore the penalty of sin, teaching instead that it demonstrated God's love and reconciled sinners to God by moving them to repentance.

Election and free will

He rejected Calvinist predestination and taught that God's love is offered to all, and that the sinner can respond to the gospel.

Documented controversies

The exercises

Critics, Presbyterian and otherwise, regarded the bodily exercises of Cane Ridge as fanaticism and disorder.

Doctrinal views

His views on the Trinity and the atonement were attacked by Presbyterians and later by some of Campbell's followers, who regarded them as Arian. Campbell himself avoided Trinitarian terminology but defended Christ's full deity more clearly.

The Shakers

The defection of two of his co-founders to the Shakers was used by critics as evidence of where his principles led.

Death

He died on 9 November 1844 at the home of his daughter in Hannibal, Missouri, aged 71, while returning from a preaching journey. He was later reburied at Cane Ridge.

Legacy

Stone is honoured, with Thomas and Alexander Campbell, as a founder of the Stone-Campbell or Restoration Movement, from which descend the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and the Churches of Christ (a cappella). Cane Ridge meeting house is preserved as a shrine of the movement. His slogan of unity on the Bible alone, and his rejection of creeds, became a defining principle of large parts of American Protestantism and of the non-denominational churches that later followed.

Measured against the creeds

Stone's longing for Christian unity is the longing of the Lord's own prayer (John 17:21), and his charity towards Christians of other denominations was genuine.

But his solution - unity on the Bible without creeds - shows in his own life why the Church wrote creeds. The Nicene Creed was written precisely because Arius and his followers also claimed to take the Bible alone; the Church found that a confession of what Scripture means was necessary to preserve what it says. Stone's own teaching on the Son, which denied that He is co-eternal and "of one substance with the Father", is the very position the Council of Nicaea rejected. His teaching on the Spirit departs from the Constantinopolitan confession of "the Lord and Giver of life, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified".

His rejection of satisfaction in the atonement also departs from the teaching common to the four traditions that Christ "bore our sins in his own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24) and gave Himself as a sacrifice for sin. The movement he founded, intended to end division, itself divided several times within a century, illustrating that unity without a common confession is difficult to keep.

Major writings

• The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804, with others)
• An Address to the Christian Churches in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio (1814; rev. 1821)
• Editor, The Christian Messenger (1826-44)
• The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself (1847)

Affiliation

Farmer of Low Hampton, New York; Baptist lay preacher; leader of the Millerite or Second Advent movement

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Restorationists and date-setters

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Farmer, deist, soldier

William Miller was born on 15 February 1782 at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the eldest of sixteen children, and grew up at Low Hampton in Washington County, New York, near the Vermont border. His mother was a devout Baptist. Largely self-taught, he read widely from the local library. After marrying Lucy Smith in 1803 he moved to Poultney, Vermont, where he became a deputy sheriff and justice of the peace, and, under the influence of friends there, a deist who doubted the Bible.

He served as a captain in the War of 1812 and saw action at the Battle of Plattsburgh (1814), where a much smaller American force defeated the British. The outcome struck him as providential and the deaths of comrades confronted him with mortality.

Conversion and the Bible study

Back at Low Hampton he farmed and attended the Baptist church. In 1816, reading a sermon aloud in church, he was overcome and converted. Challenged by a deist friend to prove the Bible's consistency, he set out to study it verse by verse with only a concordance, from 1816 to 1818. He became convinced that Scripture interprets itself, that prophecy is meant to be understood, and that its time periods can be calculated.

He concluded from Daniel 8:14 - "unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed" - that, taking a day for a year and starting from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 457 BC, the "cleansing of the sanctuary", which he took to mean the purification of the earth by fire at Christ's return, would happen "about the year 1843". He spent more than a decade checking his reasoning before he spoke of it publicly.

Preaching the Advent

In August 1831 he accepted an invitation to preach at Dresden, New York, and from then on preached in churches of many denominations across New York and New England. The Baptists licensed him in 1833. His lectures were published in 1836 as Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843.

In 1839 he met Joshua V. Himes, a Boston minister and gifted organiser, who turned the message into a movement. Himes founded the newspaper Signs of the Times (1840) and later the Midnight Cry in New York, organised general conferences, printed millions of tracts, and in 1842 bought a great tent seating some 4,000 for camp meetings. Charles Fitch's prophetic chart (1842) was used everywhere. Estimates of Millerite believers range from 50,000 to several hundred thousand, with perhaps a million more who took an interest.

The dates

Pressed for a specific date, Miller said in 1843 that Christ would come between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844, by the Jewish calendar as he understood it. The year passed. Then in the summer of 1844 Samuel S. Snow, a Millerite preacher, argued from the Day of Atonement typology that the true date was the tenth day of the seventh month - 22 October 1844. The "seventh-month movement" spread rapidly; farmers left crops unharvested and shopkeepers closed. Miller accepted the date only in early October.

The Great Disappointment

Christ did not return on 22 October 1844. Hiram Edson, a believer in western New York, wrote: "Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before... We wept, and wept, till the day dawn." Many abandoned faith altogether; others were mocked and expelled from their churches.

Miller acknowledged his error in dates but held that the Advent was still near. At the Albany conference of April 1845 the mainstream Adventists, with his support, rejected the "shut door" theory and the new interpretations being proposed.

Key dates

• 1782 - Born at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 15 February
• 1803 - Marries Lucy Smith; moves to Poultney, Vermont
• 1814 - Battle of Plattsburgh
• 1816 - Conversion; begins two years of Bible study
• 1818 - Concludes that Christ will return about 1843
• 1831 - Begins preaching
• 1836 - Evidences from Scripture and History
• 1839 - Meets Joshua V. Himes
• March 1843-March 1844 - The "Jewish year 1843"
• 22 October 1844 - The Great Disappointment
• 1845 - Albany conference; publishes his Apology and Defence
• 20 December 1849 - Dies at Low Hampton

Teachings and claims

Prophecy can be calculated

Miller held that the prophetic time periods of Daniel and Revelation are given to be understood, using a "day for a year" principle (Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 4:6). He found several independent periods which, he believed, converged on 1843. His fourteen "Rules of Interpretation" insisted that every word of Scripture has its place and that prophecy must be compared with history.

Premillennial Advent

Against the optimistic postmillennialism of his day, he taught that Christ would return personally and visibly before the millennium, raise the righteous dead, burn up the earth, and reign with the saints on a renewed earth. There would be no thousand years of gradual improvement before His coming.

No secret rapture

Unlike Darby's contemporaneous teaching, Miller expected a single, visible, public return of Christ, not a secret coming for the Church.

Documented controversies

• Setting a date. Miller always insisted he did not know the "day or the hour" but only the year; nonetheless he gave a range and, at the end, accepted a specific day. Critics, including most Protestant clergy, said this contradicted Matthew 24:36 and Acts 1:7.
• Excess and harm. Opponents blamed the movement for mental breakdowns, neglected farms and families, and suicide; some of these claims were exaggerated by hostile newspapers. The tale of believers waiting on hilltops in white "ascension robes" is a later legend that historians have found no good evidence for.
• Expulsions. Many Millerites were expelled from their churches in 1843-44 after the movement began to call the denominations "Babylon" (a theme pressed by Charles Fitch, against Miller's original intent).

Death

Miller's health failed after 1845; he went blind in his last years. He died at Low Hampton on 20 December 1849, aged 67, still expecting Christ's soon return. His gravestone bears the words of Daniel 12:13: "But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."

Legacy

Out of the wreck of Millerism came several new movements. A small group around Hiram Edson, Joseph Bates, James White and Ellen G. White reinterpreted 1844 as the date when Christ entered the heavenly sanctuary to begin an "investigative judgment"; they became the Seventh-day Adventist Church (organised 1863), now with over twenty million members. The Advent Christian Church also descends from the movement. Through Adventist offshoots and the Bible Students who influenced Charles Taze Russell, the calculation of prophetic dates passed into the Jehovah's Witnesses and many later date-setters.

Miller himself was by all accounts honest, sincere and humble; he admitted his error and never profited from the movement.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead" - and say nothing of when. Christ Himself said, "of that day and hour knoweth no man" (Matthew 24:36), and "it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power" (Acts 1:7). The Church Fathers, notably St Augustine, warned against calculating the end; Augustine wrote that the Lord "puts all calculators to rest".

Miller's method - treating prophecy as a code that a private reader with a concordance can unlock - set aside the Church's reading of Scripture as a whole, in which the prophecies of Daniel are fulfilled in Christ, His Passion and the coming of His kingdom. His failure, and the many failures that followed, show the danger the Fathers foresaw.

Major writings

• Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843 (1836; expanded 1842)
• "Rules of Interpretation", in Joshua V. Himes, ed., Views of the Prophecies and Prophetic Chronology (1842)
• Apology and Defence (1845)

Affiliation

Ulster-born Seceder Presbyterian; briefly a Baptist; leader of the Disciples of Christ; founder of Bethany College

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Restorationists and date-setters

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Ulster and Glasgow

Alexander Campbell was born on 12 September 1788 near Ballymena, County Antrim, in the north of Ireland, the eldest son of Thomas Campbell, a minister of the Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian Church - one of several small Scottish churches that had split from the Church of Scotland and then from one another. Thomas grieved over these divisions and tried without success to reunite the Ulster Seceders.

In 1807 Thomas emigrated to western Pennsylvania for his health. The family followed in 1808, but their ship was wrecked off Scotland, and Alexander spent a year at the University of Glasgow (1808-09). There he met followers of the Haldane brothers and of John Glas and Robert Sandeman, independents who practised weekly communion and congregational government and rejected creeds as tests of fellowship. Before leaving Scotland he quietly declined to take communion in the Seceder church.

The Declaration and Address

In America, Thomas had been censured by his presbytery for giving communion to Presbyterians of other synods. He withdrew, formed the "Christian Association of Washington" (Pennsylvania), and in 1809 wrote the Declaration and Address, which proposed that Christian unity could be restored by setting aside human creeds and returning to "a simple evangelical Christianity", with nothing required "but what is expressly taught and enjoined... in the word of God". The family motto became: "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent."

Alexander arrived in October 1809, read his father's proof sheets, and embraced the programme. The association became the Brush Run Church in 1811. When his first child was born in 1812, Alexander studied baptism, concluded that only the immersion of believers was scriptural, and was immersed with his parents on 12 June 1812 by a Baptist minister.

With the Baptists, and apart

From 1813 the Brush Run Church joined a Baptist association, and Campbell became a famous debater. He settled at Bethany in western Virginia, where he married Margaret Brown (1811; she died in 1827) and later Selina Bakewell (1828), farmed, and established a printing press. His journal The Christian Baptist (1823-30), and then the Millennial Harbinger (1830-66), attacked clergy, creeds, missionary societies and "the kingdom of the clergy". The Baptists increasingly rejected his teaching that baptism is for the remission of sins, and from 1827 to 1830 his followers - called "Reformers" or "Campbellites" - were expelled from Baptist associations.

Union with Stone's Christians

In 1832, at Lexington, Kentucky, many of Campbell's "Disciples" and the "Christians" led by Barton W. Stone agreed to unite, sealed by a handshake between Stone and "Raccoon" John Smith, who spoke for Campbell's Reformers. Campbell's own role in the union was cautious, but it created the Stone-Campbell or Restoration Movement.

Educator and debater

He founded Bethany College in 1840 and was its president until his death. He held public debates with the socialist Robert Owen (1829) on the evidences of Christianity, with the Catholic Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati (1837), and with the Presbyterian N.L. Rice (1843). He was elected to the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829-30. In 1849 he became president of the American Christian Missionary Society - a move his early writings had opposed.

Key dates

• 1788 - Born near Ballymena, County Antrim, 12 September
• 1808-09 - Studies at Glasgow; meets Haldanean and Sandemanian independents
• 1809 - Arrives in America; Thomas Campbell's Declaration and Address
• 1811 - Brush Run Church formed
• 1812 - Immersed as a believer
• 1823 - Begins The Christian Baptist
• 1827-30 - Separation from the Baptists
• 1829 - Debate with Robert Owen
• 1830 - Begins the Millennial Harbinger
• 1832 - Union with Barton Stone's Christians
• 1837 - Debate with Bishop Purcell
• 1840 - Founds Bethany College
• 1849 - President of the American Christian Missionary Society
• 4 March 1866 - Dies at Bethany

Teachings and claims

Restoring the ancient order

Campbell taught that the denominations had overlaid the New Testament with human creeds, clergy and traditions, and that unity would come by restoring "the ancient order of things" exactly as the apostles left it. Creeds were not wrong in what they said but were wrong as tests of fellowship. In practice he and his followers looked for a New Testament warrant for every element of church life.

Baptism for the remission of sins

From Acts 2:38 he taught that baptism by immersion of a penitent believer is the moment God assures forgiveness - not a work that earns it but the appointed act of obedience in which faith receives pardon. He rejected infant baptism and the Calvinist view that one must wait for an inner experience of regeneration.

Weekly communion and lay order

The Lord's Supper should be celebrated every Lord's Day, as in Acts 20:7. Each congregation should be governed by its own elders and deacons, with no distinction between clergy and laity in principle.

Reason and the Word

Influenced by John Locke and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, he held that the Spirit works through the words of Scripture rather than by direct inner impulses, and that faith is the rational acceptance of credible testimony.

Postmillennial hope

His journal's title expressed his conviction that restoring the primitive gospel would unite Christians, convert the world and usher in the millennium.

Documented controversies

• Baptismal regeneration. Baptists accused him of teaching salvation by an outward act; he denied it but held that immersion is for remission of sins. The debate split Baptist associations across Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia.
• The Lunenburg Letter (1837). Asked whether there were Christians among the unimmersed, he answered that he could not "make any one duty the standard of Christian state or character" - that there were true Christians in the denominations. Stricter followers objected.
• Missionary societies. His acceptance of the society in 1849 contradicted his own earlier arguments, and opposition to societies became one cause of later splits.
• Slavery. He opposed slavery in principle but held that the New Testament did not condemn it as sinful in itself, and opposed abolitionism, hoping to keep the movement united.

Death

Campbell's mind and health declined in his last years. He died at his home in Bethany on 4 March 1866, aged 77, and was buried in the family cemetery there.

Legacy

The movement he led divided after his death. The instrumental-music and missionary-society disputes produced the Churches of Christ (recognised separately in the 1906 census), which use no instruments; the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the more liberal body, separated from the independent Christian Churches / Churches of Christ in the twentieth century. Together they number several million in the United States and many more abroad. His slogan "no creed but Christ" became a watchword far beyond his own churches, and his weekly communion and lay eldership are still characteristic of them.

The irony that a unity movement produced several new denominations is often noted, including by its own historians.

Measured against the creeds

Campbell's desire for Christian unity, his high view of baptism and his insistence on the Lord's Supper every Sunday are closer to the ancient Church than most of the revivalism around him, and he affirmed the Trinity and the deity of Christ.

The difficulty lies in his method. The Nicene Creed was itself the Church's answer to people who claimed to teach nothing but Scripture - the Arians quoted the Bible too. Rejecting creeds as tests of fellowship removes the Church's chief means of saying what Scripture means when it is disputed. The four traditions hold that the Church received both Scripture and the rule of faith from the apostles, and that the creeds and councils express that faith rather than add to it. Campbell's restoration also passed over eighteen centuries of the Church's life, as if the Holy Spirit had not been leading it into truth (John 16:13).

His rejection of infant baptism and of an ordained ministry with apostolic succession also departs from the universal practice of the early Church.

Major writings

• Editor, The Christian Baptist (1823-30) and Millennial Harbinger (1830-66)
• The Living Oracles (1826), a revised New Testament translation
• Debate on the Evidences of Christianity with Robert Owen (1829)
• A Debate on the Roman Catholic Religion with John B. Purcell (1837)
• The Christian System (1835, revised 1839)
• Christian Baptism: With Its Antecedents and Consequents (1851)

Affiliation

Lawyer; licensed Presbyterian evangelist (1824); later Congregationalist; professor and president of Oberlin College

Appears in

Revivalism and the "second blessing"

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Lawyer at Adams

Charles Grandison Finney was born on 29 August 1792 at Warren, Connecticut, and grew up on the New York frontier in Oneida and Jefferson counties, where his family had moved. He had little formal religion as a boy. He taught school, briefly considered Yale, and in 1818 began training in law at Adams, New York, in the office of Benjamin Wright. Reading Moses's law in his law books led him to buy a Bible.

He attended the Presbyterian church of George Washington Gale and argued with the pastor's Calvinism. On 10 October 1821, after days of anxiety, he went into the woods to pray and later that evening, alone in the law office, experienced what he described as "a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost... like a wave of electricity going through and through me... like the very breath of God." The next morning he told a client: "I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours."

Evangelist of the Burned-over District

He studied theology privately with Gale, refusing to go to Princeton, and was licensed to preach by the St Lawrence Presbytery in 1823 and ordained in 1824. When asked if he accepted the Westminster Confession, he said yes, though he later wrote that he had not read it. Working first as a missionary in the villages of upstate New York, he moved to the towns of the Mohawk valley - Western, Rome, Utica, Auburn, Troy - in 1825-27.

The region was later called the "Burned-over District" for the waves of revival and new religious movements that swept it. Finney's meetings were intense. He prayed for sinners by name, spoke in a direct, conversational, lawyerly style, allowed women to pray aloud in mixed meetings, held "protracted meetings" lasting days or weeks, and introduced the "anxious seat" - a front bench where those under conviction sat to be prayed for and urged to submit to God at once.

Rochester and New York

Despite opposition from eastern ministers, he went on to Philadelphia, Boston and New York. His revival at Rochester in 1830-31 was the most celebrated: the town's churches added well over a thousand members and its businessmen were transformed. In 1832 he became pastor of the Second Free Presbyterian Church in New York, meeting in the Chatham Street Theatre, and in 1836 of the Broadway Tabernacle, built for him. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), given there, became a manual for evangelists.

Oberlin

In 1835 he accepted a professorship of theology at the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio, on condition that it admit Black students. He taught there for forty years, serving as president from 1851 to 1866 and as pastor of the First Congregational Church. He made evangelistic tours, including to Britain in 1849-51 and 1858-60. He married three times; his first wife, Lydia, died in 1847, and his second, Elizabeth, in 1863.

Key dates

• 1792 - Born at Warren, Connecticut, 29 August
• 1818 - Begins legal training at Adams, New York
• 10 October 1821 - Conversion and "baptism of the Holy Ghost"
• 1824 - Ordained by the St Lawrence Presbytery
• 1825-27 - Revivals in Oneida County
• 1827 - New Lebanon Convention with Beecher and Nettleton
• 1830-31 - Rochester revival
• 1835 - Lectures on Revivals of Religion; joins Oberlin
• 1846-47 - Lectures on Systematic Theology
• 1851-66 - President of Oberlin College
• 16 August 1875 - Dies at Oberlin

Teachings and claims

Revival by means

Finney's best-known claim opens his Lectures on Revivals: "A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means." Just as a farmer who sows and tends gets a harvest, the church that uses the right measures will see conversions. He defended "new measures" - the anxious seat, protracted meetings, plain preaching, public prayer for named individuals - as tools that God expects His people to adopt and adapt.

Human ability

Finney rejected the Calvinism in which he had been licensed. He taught that sinners have full natural ability to obey God and that sin is entirely voluntary: "sin and holiness... are voluntary acts of mind." In his Systematic Theology he denied that human beings inherit a sinful nature from Adam - "moral depravity... cannot consist in any attribute of nature" - and held that regeneration is a change of the will brought about by the persuasion of the truth, which the sinner can make immediately.

The atonement

He taught a "governmental" view of the atonement: Christ's death did not pay the penalty for sin but showed God's justice and upheld His moral government, so that God could forgive the repentant without weakening the law.

Oberlin perfectionism

With Asa Mahan he taught at Oberlin that entire sanctification - full consecration to God - was attainable in this life, often described as the "baptism of the Holy Ghost". This "Oberlin theology" fed into the Holiness movement.

Reform

He held that converts must turn their lives to the good of others, and preached against slavery, alcohol and other social evils. He refused communion to slaveholders at his New York church.

Documented controversies

• The Westminster Confession. He admitted in his Memoirs that he had not read the Confession when he affirmed it at his licensing; he later rejected its teaching on original sin and the atonement.
• The New Lebanon Convention (1827). The Connecticut evangelist Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher objected to his methods - women praying in public, harsh language, the naming of sinners, emotional excess. Beecher reportedly told him he would fight him all the way to Boston; they later reconciled.
• Theological critics. The Princeton theologians, led by Charles Hodge, attacked his theology as Pelagian. John Williamson Nevin of the German Reformed Church wrote The Anxious Bench (1843), arguing that the new measures replaced the steady formation of faith through catechism and sacraments with manufactured crises.
• Spiritual exhaustion. Finney himself acknowledged that some of the areas he had evangelised were left "burnt over", with many converts falling away and later waves of excitement following.

Death

Finney died at Oberlin, Ohio, on Sunday 16 August 1875, of heart failure, two weeks before his eighty-third birthday. He had spent the evening walking in the garden and listening to the hymns of the church.

Legacy

Finney is the father of modern revivalism. The anxious seat became the altar call, the "invitation" at the end of a sermon, and the evangelistic crusade; Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and later evangelists all used methods he pioneered. His belief that the right technique produces predictable spiritual results shaped the Church Growth and megachurch movements as well.

He was also a determined abolitionist. Oberlin admitted Black students from 1835 and women to its degree course from 1837, and was a station on the Underground Railroad.

Measured against the creeds

Finney's preaching led many people to Christ, and his opposition to slavery was admirable. But his theology departed from the historic faith at its centre. By denying that we inherit a fallen nature and holding that sinners can turn to God by their own natural ability, he revived the position condemned in Pelagius at the Councils of Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431) and in the Second Council of Orange (529), which taught that even the beginning of faith is a gift of grace. Lutherans confess in the Augsburg Confession (Article II) that since the fall all are born "without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence", and Catholics and Orthodox, though they describe original sin differently, also teach that human nature is wounded and needs grace from the first.

His claim that revival is "a purely philosophical result" of methods reverses the order of grace: the Spirit "blows where it wills" (John 3:8), and the Church has held that it works through the Word and sacraments, not through techniques that guarantee a result. The governmental view of the atonement also sets aside the Church's confession that Christ died "for us and for our salvation" as a true sacrifice for sin.

Major writings

• Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835)
• Lectures to Professing Christians (1837)
• Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846-47; revised 1851)
• Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (1876, posthumous)

Affiliation

Minister of the Church of Scotland (deposed 1833); minister of the National Scotch Church, Regent Square, London; "angel" of the Newman Street congregation of the Catholic Apostolic Church

Appears in

Edward Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church, The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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Annan and Edinburgh

Edward Irving was born on 4 August 1792 at Annan in Dumfriesshire, in the south of Scotland, the son of a tanner. A brilliant student, he entered the University of Edinburgh at thirteen and graduated MA in 1809. He became a schoolmaster at Haddington and then Kirkcaldy, where he befriended a younger teacher, Thomas Carlyle; the friendship lasted all his life. He was licensed to preach by the Church of Scotland in 1815 but could find no parish, and for several years his ornate, Miltonic style failed to win a congregation.

Glasgow and London

In 1819 Thomas Chalmers, the great evangelical preacher, took him as his assistant at St John's, Glasgow, one of the poorest parishes in the city. In 1822 he was called to the small Caledonian Chapel in Hatton Garden, London, a congregation of Scottish exiles. Within months he was the most fashionable preacher in London. Statesmen such as George Canning, writers such as Coleridge and Hazlitt, and crowds of society figures came to hear him; tickets were needed. In 1823 he married Isabella Martin of Kirkcaldy. A grand new church was built for him in Regent Square and opened in 1827.

Prophecy and Albury

Irving became absorbed in the study of prophecy. He translated the Chilean Jesuit Manuel Lacunza's The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty (1827) and took part in the conferences on prophecy held by the banker Henry Drummond at Albury Park in Surrey from 1826 to 1830. These gatherings concluded that the present dispensation was ending in judgement, that the Jews would be restored, and that Christ would return before the millennium. Irving preached and wrote on these themes and on the decline of the Church.

The gifts

In 1830 reports reached London of tongues, prophecy and healing in the west of Scotland, among the Campbell and Macdonald families at Fernicarry and Port Glasgow. Irving, who already held that the gifts of the Spirit had ceased only through unbelief, sent observers and welcomed the reports. Prayer meetings for the gifts began in his church. On 30 April 1831 Emily Cardale, wife of a member, spoke in tongues at a private meeting in London^†, and from October 1831 tongues and prophecies were heard during public worship at Regent Square, sometimes interrupting the service.

Trials and deposition

The trustees of Regent Square brought charges before the London Presbytery, which in May 1832 removed him for allowing people who were neither ordained nor licensed - including women - to speak in public worship. About 800 members followed him, and they met first in a hall and then in Benjamin West's former picture gallery in Newman Street.

Meanwhile his teaching that Christ took human nature in its fallen condition had been attacked since 1827. In March 1833 the Presbytery of Annan, which had ordained him, deposed him from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for heresy on this point.

Under the apostles

In the Newman Street congregation the prophetic utterances began to designate "apostles". John Bate Cardale was called as the first apostle in 1832, and Henry Drummond and others followed. Irving, who had been deposed, was not one of them. On the word of the prophets, he was re-ordained by Cardale in April 1833 as "angel" (bishop) of his own congregation, and found himself subordinate to the men his preaching had brought together. He accepted it humbly.

Key dates

• 1792 - Born at Annan, 4 August
• 1815 - Licensed by the Church of Scotland
• 1819 - Assistant to Thomas Chalmers in Glasgow
• 1822 - Called to the Caledonian Chapel, London
• 1826-30 - Albury conferences on prophecy
• 1827 - Translates Lacunza; Regent Square church opens
• 1830 - Tongues and healings reported in the west of Scotland
• October 1831 - Tongues and prophecy in public worship at Regent Square
• May 1832 - Removed from Regent Square by the London Presbytery
• March 1833 - Deposed by the Presbytery of Annan
• April 1833 - Ordained "angel" of the Newman Street church by Cardale
• 7 December 1834 - Dies in Glasgow

Teachings and claims

The humanity of Christ

Irving's best-known doctrine was that the Son of God took human nature "in its fallen state" - flesh subject to the same tendencies as ours - and was kept from sin throughout His life by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that He sanctified our nature from within. "The Son of God took our fallen nature... and wrought in it a perfect holiness." He insisted that Christ never sinned, but believed that unless Christ took fallen flesh, He could not redeem it.

Restoration of the gifts

He taught that the gifts of the Spirit - tongues, prophecy, healing - belonged to the whole age of the Church and had disappeared only through unbelief. He called tongues the "standing sign" of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, an idea later Pentecostals developed independently.

Imminent return

He believed that the Church was in apostasy, that judgement was near, and that the restoration of the gifts and of apostles was God's preparation for Christ's return.

Documented controversies

• Disorder in worship. The London Presbytery's case rested on the Westminster Directory: utterances by unordained men and women during worship were contrary to the order of the Church of Scotland.
• His Christology. Critics, including Marcus Dods (the elder) and Henry Cole, charged him with making Christ a sinner. The Church of Scotland deposed him for it.
• Robert Baxter's renunciation. Robert Baxter, a lawyer and one of the most prominent prophets, uttered predictions - including that the Lord would come within 1,260 days - and later concluded that his utterances had come from a deceiving spirit. His Narrative of Facts (1833) is the most important contemporary account by an insider.
• Failed prophecies. Several utterances in Irving's circle about events and timing did not come to pass.

Death

Exhausted and consumptive, Irving obeyed a prophetic direction to go to Scotland in the autumn of 1834, riding through Wales and travelling by sea. He reached Glasgow, grew worse, and died there on 7 December 1834, aged forty-two. His last words were reported as "If I die, I die unto the Lord. Amen." He was buried in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral. He and Isabella had lost several of their children in infancy.

Legacy

The Catholic Apostolic Church, which the apostles formed after his death, developed an elaborate liturgy drawn from Eastern and Western rites. It declined when its last apostle died in 1901; a German offshoot, the New Apostolic Church, has some millions of members today.

Irving is remembered as a forerunner of Pentecostalism and of modern prophetic and apostolic movements, and his circle helped shape the prophetic expectation from which dispensationalism grew. As a theologian, his view of Christ's humanity was later defended by Karl Barth and T.F. Torrance. Carlyle wrote of him: "the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with."

Measured against the creeds

Irving was orthodox on the Trinity and the deity of Christ, and he sincerely sought holiness and the renewal of a cold Church. But three of his positions are open to serious question. First, on Christ's humanity: the Church has confessed, with the Council of Chalcedon, that Christ is "like us in all things except sin" (Hebrews 4:15). The Fathers taught that He took our nature with its weakness and mortality, but whether He took "fallen" nature in Irving's sense is contested; the Church of Scotland judged that his language compromised Christ's sinlessness. Second, by treating spontaneous utterances in worship as the voice of the Spirit and allowing them to direct the Church - even to appoint apostles - he placed prophecy above the Church's order and the apostolic ministry. Third, the restoration of "apostles" after eighteen centuries implies that the Church had lost its apostolic foundation, which the creeds deny.

Major writings

• For the Oracles of God, Four Orations (1823)
• Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed of God (1826)
• Translation of Lacunza, The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty (1827)
• Sermons, Lectures and Occasional Discourses (1828)
• The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord's Human Nature (1830)
• Articles in The Morning Watch (1829-33)

Affiliation

Dentist of Exeter; early member of the Dublin Brethren; self-supporting missionary to Baghdad (1829-33) and India (1833-52)

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism, The modern movements in India

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Dentist of Exeter

Anthony Norris Groves was born on 1 February 1795 at Newton Valence in Hampshire, the son of a businessman. He trained in chemistry and dentistry in London, set up practice in Plymouth and then in Exeter, where he became prosperous. In 1816 he married his cousin, Mary Bethia Thompson. He was converted in his teens and longed to be a missionary, but his wife at first opposed it.

Christian Devotedness

In 1825 he published a short book, Christian Devotedness, arguing from the Sermon on the Mount that Christians should not lay up treasure on earth, but give away all beyond their daily needs and trust God for the future. He and his wife did so, and their example made a deep impression on several young men, among them George Müller, later Groves's brother-in-law, and Henry Craik.

Dublin

Intending to be ordained in the Church of England and sent out by the Church Missionary Society, he studied at Trinity College Dublin from 1826. In Dublin he met a circle of earnest evangelicals, including John Gifford Bellett and Edward Cronin, and in 1827 he suggested to them that believers, as disciples of Christ, were free to break bread together each Lord's Day without waiting for an ordained minister, since Scripture did not require one. This conversation is often regarded as one of the beginnings of the Brethren movement. He came to the conclusion that ordination was unnecessary for preaching or for the Supper, and gave up his plan to be ordained.

Baghdad

In June 1829, with his wife, two sons and a small party including the deaf scholar John Kitto, he set out for Baghdad without the support of any mission society, travelling by way of St Petersburg and the Caucasus. In Baghdad he opened a school and studied Arabic. In 1831 the city was struck by plague, flood and siege; his wife died in May and his infant daughter soon after. A small party of Brethren, including Francis Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), arrived to join him. The mission produced few converts.

India

In 1833 he went to India. He travelled widely, encouraging Indian evangelists and urging missionaries of every society to cooperate. On a visit to England in 1834-35 he married Harriet Baynes and recruited William Bowden and George Beer, who founded the Godavari Delta mission in Andhra in 1836. To make the mission self-supporting, he tried a series of business ventures in the Chittoor district, including sugar production; they mostly failed and left him in debt. Among the Indians he trained was John Christian Aroolappen of Tirunelveli, who later led an indigenous revival.

The letter to Darby

On 10 March 1836 he wrote to J.N. Darby warning that the Brethren were becoming defined by what they rejected, and that Darby was building a system as exclusive as those he had left: "you will find the position you are now taking... will make you more known by what you witness against than what you witness for." When the movement divided in 1848 he remained with the Open Brethren of Bethesda, Bristol.

Key dates

• 1 February 1795 - Born at Newton Valence, Hampshire
• 1816 - Marries Mary Bethia Thompson
• 1825 - Christian Devotedness
• 1826-27 - Studies at Trinity College Dublin
• 1827 - Proposes the breaking of bread without ordained ministers
• June 1829 - Leaves for Baghdad
• May 1831 - His wife dies of plague in Baghdad
• 1833 - Arrives in India
• 1835 - Marries Harriet Baynes
• 10 March 1836 - Letter to J.N. Darby
• 1836 - Godavari Delta mission begun by his recruits
• 1852 - Returns to England, ill
• 20 May 1853 - Dies in Bristol

Teachings and claims

Living by faith

Groves taught that Christians, and missionaries above all, should not accumulate wealth or depend on guaranteed salaries, but trust God to supply their daily needs, giving away everything beyond that.

Free ministry

He held that the New Testament requires no ordination for preaching or for the breaking of bread, and that every believer may serve as gifted by the Spirit.

Catholicity of spirit

Unlike many of the Brethren, he held that the bond of fellowship is life in Christ, not agreement on church order, and that believers should be received whatever their denomination. He continued to share in worship with Anglicans and others.

Indigenous mission

He insisted that Indian Christians should lead their own churches, that Indian evangelists should not be dependent on foreign salaries, and that missionaries should adopt a simple way of life.

Documented controversies

Baghdad

His decision to take his family to Baghdad without support, and the deaths that followed, were criticised by contemporaries as imprudent. Groves saw them as a trial of faith.

Missions in India

His insistence on self-support and his criticism of salaried missionaries brought him into conflict with established missions, and his business ventures failed.

Brethren divisions

His appeal to Darby went unheeded, and he lived to see the division of 1848, which he had foreseen.

Death

He returned to England in poor health in 1852 and died on 20 May 1853 at Bristol, in the home of George Müller, aged 58. He is buried at Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol.

Legacy

Groves has been called the "father of faith missions". His example and writings inspired George Müller, Hudson Taylor and the many missions that followed the faith principle. His emphasis on indigenous leadership anticipated principles that later became standard in mission theory. In India, the Brethren churches of the Godavari delta and the indigenous movements of Tirunelveli connected with Aroolappen trace their beginnings to him. Within the Brethren, he is remembered as the voice of an open, catholic spirit against Darby's exclusivism.

Measured against the creeds

Groves confessed the creeds' doctrine of God and Christ, and his self-denial, his willingness to suffer, and his charity towards Christians of other churches were admirable. His warning to Darby is one of the wisest documents of the Brethren movement.

His teaching on ministry, however, departs from the historic order. The four traditions hold that Christ instituted the ministry of word and sacrament, and that the apostles appointed elders and gave instructions for their ordination (Acts 14:23; 1 Timothy 4:14; Titus 1:5). The Augsburg Confession (Article 14) teaches that no one should publicly preach or administer the sacraments unless rightly called. To make the Lord's Supper possible without an ordained ministry was the first step in a movement that, as Groves himself feared, came to have no means of settling its disputes except by division.

Major writings

• Christian Devotedness (1825)
• Journal of Mr. Anthony N. Groves, Missionary, during a Journey from London to Bagdad (1831)
• On the Liberty of Ministry in the Church of Christ (1835)
• Memoir of the Late Anthony Norris Groves, compiled by his widow (1856)

Affiliation

Barrister; priest of the Church of Ireland (deacon 1825, priest 1826); leader of the Plymouth, then Exclusive, Brethren

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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A privileged beginning

John Nelson Darby was born in Westminster, London, on 18 November 1800, the youngest son of John Darby, a wealthy Anglo-Irish merchant with an estate at Leap Castle in County Offaly; his godfather was Admiral Lord Nelson. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1819 with the classical gold medal. He trained for the bar and was called in 1822, but within a year gave up the law, to his father's displeasure, out of conviction that it was incompatible with following Christ.

Curate in Wicklow

He was ordained deacon in the Church of Ireland in 1825 and priest in 1826, and served as curate of Calary, a poor mountain parish in County Wicklow. He lived ascetically among the Catholic peasantry, fasting and visiting at night, and many converted. In October 1827 he injured his leg in a riding accident; during a long convalescence in Dublin he came, through reading Scripture, to a new assurance of salvation and a conviction that the believer is "seated in heavenly places" with Christ, distinct from the world.

Breaking with the Establishment

In 1827 Archbishop William Magee of Dublin required converts from Catholicism to take an oath of allegiance to the king. Darby protested that this made conversion a political act and tied the Church to the State. His disillusion grew. From about 1827 he joined small groups in Dublin - among them Anthony Norris Groves, Edward Cronin and J.G. Bellett - who broke bread together on Sundays without a clergyman, as believers only.

He attended the Powerscourt conferences on prophecy organised by Lady Theodosia Powerscourt in County Wicklow (1831-33), where his views on the Church and the end times took shape and were debated. He resigned his curacy and, by the early 1830s, had left the Church of Ireland.

Plymouth and the Brethren

In 1831-32 he visited Oxford and then Plymouth, where with Benjamin Wills Newton and others he helped form a large assembly; its members became known as the "Plymouth Brethren". For fifteen years he travelled tirelessly - Switzerland (1838-45), where he gained many followers in Vaud and Geneva, France, Germany, and later North America, the West Indies and New Zealand - preaching, founding assemblies and writing.

The great division

In 1845 he returned to Plymouth and attacked Newton for his prophetic views and for controlling the assembly; in 1847 Darby charged Newton with heresy about Christ's sufferings. Newton withdrew, but some of his supporters were received at Bethesda Chapel in Bristol, led by George Müller and Henry Craik. In August 1848 Darby issued the "Bethesda Circular", declaring that any assembly receiving anyone from Bethesda would itself be cut off. The movement split into the "Exclusive" Brethren, who followed Darby, and the "Open" Brethren, who did not.

Later years

Darby continued to travel, write and translate into old age, making seven journeys to North America between 1862 and 1877. In 1879-81 a dispute at Ramsgate led his party to excommunicate a large group associated with his long-time collaborator William Kelly. He never married.

Key dates

• 1800 - Born in Westminster, 18 November
• 1819 - Graduates from Trinity College, Dublin
• 1825-26 - Ordained deacon and priest in the Church of Ireland
• 1827 - Protests the Archbishop's oath for converts; begins breaking bread with Dublin believers
• 1831-33 - Powerscourt prophecy conferences
• 1832 - Plymouth assembly established
• 1838-45 - Ministry in Switzerland
• 1845-47 - Conflict with B.W. Newton at Plymouth
• 1848 - The Bethesda Circular; Open and Exclusive Brethren divide
• 1862-77 - Seven visits to North America
• 1881 - Kelly division
• 29 April 1882 - Dies at Bournemouth

Teachings and claims

The ruin of the Church

Darby taught that the professing Church had fallen into ruin, like Israel before it, and that no one now had authority to restore its offices. Ordained clergy, denominations and national churches were all part of the ruin. Faithful believers should separate from them and gather "to the name of the Lord" alone, breaking bread each Lord's Day, with any brother free to speak as the Spirit led.

Israel and the Church

Darby made a sharp distinction between Israel and the Church. Israel is God's earthly people with earthly promises, which will be fulfilled literally in a future kingdom; the Church is a heavenly people, a "parenthesis" in God's plan unknown to the Old Testament prophets. Prophecies about Israel do not apply to the Church.

Dispensations

History is divided into dispensations - periods in which God tests humanity under a particular arrangement, each ending in failure and judgement. The present age of the Church is one of them and will end in apostasy.

The pre-tribulation rapture

Because the Church is heavenly, Darby taught that Christ will come secretly for the Church - the "rapture" (1 Thessalonians 4:17) - before a seven-year tribulation, when God will resume His dealings with Israel. Christ's visible return to judge and reign comes at the end of the tribulation. This two-stage Second Coming was new.

Translation

He translated the Bible into German (the Elberfeld Bible, with others), French (the Pau Bible) and English (the New Translation), working carefully from the original texts.

Documented controversies

• The origin of the rapture teaching. Some writers claim that Darby took it from Margaret Macdonald's 1830 vision or from Irving's circle; others, including most Brethren historians, say he reached it independently through his ecclesiology around 1827-33. The question is disputed (see the topic page).
• The Newton affair and the Bethesda Circular. Darby's attack on Newton, and his demand that all assemblies cut off Bethesda, are generally regarded even by sympathetic historians as harsh. The division has never healed.
• Autocratic leadership. Friends and opponents alike described his leadership as domineering. The Exclusive Brethren after him divided repeatedly - Kelly (1881), Grant (1884), Raven (1890) and others.
• Contradiction. Critics noted that a movement founded on the principle that no one has authority in the ruined Church came to exercise, through him and later leaders, an authority stricter than any bishop's.

Death

Darby died at Sundon House, Bournemouth, on 29 April 1882, aged 81, after a period of declining health, and was buried in Bournemouth. His gravestone carries the words "As unknown and well known", from 2 Corinthians 6:9.

Legacy

Dispensationalism, carried to America by Darby's visits and taken up by James H. Brookes, the Niagara Bible Conference, Moody, and above all the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), became the dominant end-times teaching of American fundamentalism and much of Pentecostalism. Dallas Theological Seminary (1924) became its academic centre. Popular prophecy culture - from Hal Lindsey's books to the Left Behind novels - and much Christian Zionism grew from it.

The Brethren in their many branches, Open and Exclusive, descend from him and the early Dublin and Plymouth groups. They have produced notable Bible scholars, missionaries and philanthropists, as well as, in some Exclusive branches, extreme forms of separation.

Measured against the creeds

Darby was orthodox on the Trinity and the person of Christ, a fine scholar and a devoted, self-denying man. But his doctrine of the Church cannot be reconciled with the creeds. The Nicene Creed confesses "one holy catholic and apostolic Church"; Darby taught that the Church on earth was in ruins and that its ministry had no authority. The Lord promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church (Matthew 16:18) and that the Spirit would guide it into all truth (John 16:13).

His separation of Israel and the Church also contradicts the apostolic teaching that in Christ the promises to Abraham are fulfilled for Jew and Gentile together, "one new man" (Ephesians 2:14-16; Galatians 3:29). And his secret rapture is unknown to the Fathers and the whole Church before the nineteenth century, which confessed one return of Christ "in glory to judge the living and the dead". Lutherans, in the Augsburg Confession (Article XVII), also reject "Jewish opinions" that before the resurrection the godly will rule an earthly kingdom.

Major writings

• The Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ (1828)
• Synopsis of the Books of the Bible, 5 vols (1857-67)
• The Collected Writings of J.N. Darby, ed. William Kelly, 34 vols
• Letters of J.N.D., 3 vols
• The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation from the Original Languages (English New Testament 1871; Old Testament completed after his death)
• Spiritual Songs (hymns)

Affiliation

German Pietist convert; Open Brethren leader at Bethesda Chapel, Bristol; founder of the Ashley Down orphanages

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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Life

A dissolute youth

Johann Georg Ferdinand Müller was born on 27 September 1805 at Kroppenstedt, near Halberstadt in Prussia, the son of a tax collector. By his own account he was a thief and liar from boyhood: he stole government money from his father, ran up debts, and at sixteen was jailed for several weeks for leaving hotels without paying. His father intended him for the Lutheran ministry, a comfortable living, and in 1825 he entered the University of Halle to study divinity.

Conversion

In November 1825 a fellow student took him to a Bible study and prayer meeting in a private house. Seeing a man kneel to pray moved him deeply; he returned, and within weeks was converted. He gave up drinking and gambling, began to read Scripture seriously, and resolved to be a missionary. Halle, the home of August Hermann Francke's famous orphan house, impressed on him the example of a work of faith; he lived for a time in free lodgings at Francke's institution.

England and Teignmouth

In 1829 he went to London to train with the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. Falling ill, he went to recover at Teignmouth in Devon, where he met Henry Craik, a Scottish tutor who became his lifelong colleague, and came under the influence of Anthony Norris Groves's teaching on simple dependence on God. He left the Society, became minister of Ebenezer Chapel, Teignmouth, in 1830, and the same year married Groves's sister, Mary. Soon afterwards he gave up his fixed salary and pew rents, taking only what was freely given in a box, and resolved never to ask anyone but God for money or to go into debt.

Bristol and the orphanages

In 1832 he and Craik moved to Bristol as joint pastors of Gideon and Bethesda Chapels. In 1834 he founded the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad, which supported schools, Bible distribution and missionaries. In April 1836 he opened his first orphan house, for thirty girls, in a rented house in Wilson Street. More houses followed. In 1849 he opened the first purpose-built house at Ashley Down on the edge of Bristol, and by 1870 there were five large houses accommodating about 2,000 children at a time. The orphanages provided food, clothes, schooling and training, and placed children in apprenticeships and service.

His Narrative recorded each gift and each answer to prayer, including the often retold mornings when the children sat down to empty plates and food arrived before the meal.

Bethesda and the Brethren

Bethesda Chapel was one of the early Brethren assemblies. In 1848, when Darby demanded that Bethesda refuse fellowship to anyone from Newton's former congregation at Plymouth, Müller, Craik and the elders declined to judge individuals without examination, while condemning Newton's errors. Darby's Bethesda Circular cut them off, creating the division between Exclusive and Open Brethren. Müller remained a leader of the Open Brethren.

Preaching journeys

After Mary died in 1870, he married Susannah Grace Sanger in 1871. From 1875, aged seventy, he handed the daily running of the orphanages to his son-in-law James Wright and spent seventeen years travelling - some 200,000 miles in forty-two countries, including the United States, India, Australia, China and Russia - preaching to perhaps three million people.

Key dates

• 1805 - Born at Kroppenstedt, Prussia, 27 September
• 1825 - Studies at Halle; converted in November
• 1829 - Comes to London
• 1830 - Pastor at Teignmouth; marries Mary Groves; gives up a fixed salary
• 1832 - Moves to Bristol with Henry Craik
• 1834 - Founds the Scriptural Knowledge Institution
• 1836 - Opens the first orphan house
• 1848 - Refuses Darby's demand; Bethesda is cut off
• 1849-70 - Builds five orphan houses at Ashley Down
• 1875-92 - World preaching tours
• 10 March 1898 - Dies at Ashley Down

Teachings and claims

The faith principle

Müller taught that a Christian work should depend on God alone. He would not ask anyone for money, take out loans, or reveal current needs while they were pressing, and published accounts only afterwards. He described the orphanages as a public demonstration that "God is still the living God" who hears prayer, aimed at Christians who doubted that faith could be practical.

Scripture and prayer

He read the Bible through some two hundred times and taught that the first business of each day is to get one's soul happy in the Lord through Scripture and prayer. He kept a lifelong record of prayers and their answers.

Brethren principles

He held the Brethren practice of weekly breaking of bread, believer's baptism and an unpaid, unordained ministry, but was more moderate than Darby on separation. He did not accept every element of dispensational teaching; he expected Christ's return but did not hold that it could happen at any moment before certain prophecies were fulfilled.^†

Documented controversies

• The Bethesda question. Darby and the Exclusive Brethren regarded Müller as compromised by the decision of 1848 and refused fellowship with Bethesda; the breach was never healed.
• Publicity as appeal. Some critics have asked whether publishing detailed annual reports of answered prayer functioned as an indirect appeal for funds. Müller replied that the reports always came after the need had been met.
• Institutional care. Later writers on child welfare have noted the strict, regimented life of large Victorian orphanages, of which Ashley Down was one, though it was regarded as humane by the standards of its time.

No personal or financial scandal is recorded. At his death his personal estate was valued at about £160, most of it in household goods and books.

Death

Müller died peacefully in his room at the New Orphan House No. 3, Ashley Down, early on 10 March 1898, aged 92; he had led a prayer meeting the evening before. Tens of thousands lined the streets of Bristol for his funeral, and he was buried in Arnos Vale Cemetery.

Legacy

Over his lifetime the orphanages cared for some ten thousand children, and the Scriptural Knowledge Institution supported hundreds of missionaries, including Hudson Taylor in his early years. His example inspired the faith-mission movement - the China Inland Mission and many others - and countless orphanages and works of charity worldwide. The George Müller Charitable Trust continues in Bristol.

He is one of the most widely admired figures in evangelical history, cited by Christians of every tradition as an example of prayer and trust in God.

Measured against the creeds

Müller's charity, honesty and humility are beyond question, and they reflect the Church's ancient care for orphans, enjoined in Scripture (James 1:27) and practised by the Fathers and religious orders through the centuries. His trust in Providence would be recognised by any of the four traditions, and has close parallels in the mendicant orders and in Francke's Lutheran orphanage that inspired him.

Where he stood with the Brethren, he shared their rejection of an ordained ministry, of infant baptism and of the historic sacramental order, which the four traditions cannot accept. But in 1848 he chose charity and careful judgement over sweeping separation, and in this he stood closer to the mind of the Church than his critics.

Major writings

• A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller (in parts, from 1837)
• Annual Reports of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution
• Preaching Tours and Missionary Labours of George Müller, by Susannah Grace Müller (1883)

Affiliation

Methodist laywoman, New York; leader of the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness

Appears in

Revivalism and the "second blessing"

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A Methodist home in New York

Phoebe Worrall was born in New York City on 18 December 1807, the daughter of Henry Worrall, an English iron-works owner who had been converted under John Wesley's ministry, and Dorothea Wade. She grew up in a devout Methodist household with family prayer twice a day. In 1827 she married Walter Clarke Palmer, a homoeopathic physician and fellow Methodist, who supported her ministry throughout their marriage.

Grief and consecration

Their first two sons died in infancy, in 1828 and 1830, and a daughter, Eliza, died in 1836 when her cradle's netting caught fire. Phoebe came to interpret these losses as God's correction for loving her children more than Him, and resolved to give everything to God. Her sister, Sarah Lankford, had begun a women's prayer meeting in 1835; on 26 July 1837, after a long search for the experience of entire sanctification that Wesley had taught, Phoebe declared that she had received it - not by waiting for a feeling but by laying all on "the altar" and believing God's promise.

The Tuesday Meeting

From 1839 Phoebe led her sister's meeting, the "Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness", in the Palmers' home on Rivington Street. Men were admitted from 1839, and over the following decades bishops, college presidents, ministers of many denominations and ordinary laypeople attended. The meeting became the hub of a network across America.

Writer, editor and evangelist

Her book The Way of Holiness (1843) went through dozens of editions. She and Walter travelled widely as evangelists in the United States and Canada, at camp meetings and in churches, and from 1859 to 1863 spent four years in Britain, where their meetings drew large crowds. In 1864 Walter bought the magazine Guide to Holiness, which Phoebe edited; its circulation reached some 30,000. She also helped found the Five Points Mission (1850) in one of Manhattan's worst slums, and worked with prisons, orphans and the poor.

Key dates

• 1807 - Born in New York, 18 December
• 1827 - Marries Walter C. Palmer
• 1828-36 - Loses three children in infancy
• 26 July 1837 - Claims entire sanctification
• 1839 - Takes over the Tuesday Meeting
• 1843 - The Way of Holiness
• 1850 - Five Points Mission founded
• 1857-58 - Canadian and American revivals; the "Layman's Prayer Revival"
• 1859 - The Promise of the Father
• 1859-63 - Evangelistic tour of Britain
• 1864 - Begins editing the Guide to Holiness
• 2 November 1874 - Dies in New York

Teachings and claims

The "shorter way"

Wesley had taught that entire sanctification is usually preceded by a long period of seeking and that one should wait for the Spirit's witness. Palmer taught a "shorter way" in three steps: entire consecration, faith, and testimony. The believer lays everything on the altar; since Scripture says "the altar sanctifies the gift" (Matthew 23:19) and Christ is the altar, the gift is sanctified at once; and the believer must testify to it, or risk losing it. Feelings are not needed: one believes on the authority of the Word.

Pentecost language

From the 1850s she increasingly described sanctification as "the baptism of the Holy Ghost" and spoke of "Pentecostal power". This language passed into the Holiness movement and prepared the way for Pentecostalism's teaching of a distinct baptism in the Spirit after conversion.

Women's ministry

In The Promise of the Father (1859) she argued from Joel 2 and Acts 2 that the Spirit was poured out on "your sons and your daughters", so women are called to testify and prophesy in public. She herself did not seek ordination and avoided the word "preach", but her book became a foundation for women's ministry in the Holiness and Pentecostal churches.

Documented controversies

• Technique over grace. Methodist critics, including Nathan Bangs, the leading Methodist theologian of the day, argued that her method turned sanctification into a formula and encouraged people to claim an experience they did not have.

^†

• The witness of the Spirit. Opponents said she had dropped Wesley's insistence on the Spirit's witness and put the believer's own act of faith in its place.
• Division in Methodism. Her teaching was debated throughout the Methodist Episcopal Church in the mid-nineteenth century; after her death the Holiness movement increasingly separated from it.

Death

Phoebe Palmer died at her home in New York on 2 November 1874 of a kidney ailment (Bright's disease), after a long illness. Walter married her sister Sarah in 1876 and continued the Guide to Holiness. ^†

Legacy

Palmer is called the mother of the Holiness movement. The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness (1867), and through it the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Methodist and Free Methodist churches, the Salvation Army and the Church of God (Anderson), all drew on her teaching. Through them, her two-stage pattern and "Pentecost" language passed into Pentecostalism. She was also an early and influential advocate of women's ministry and of practical charity in the city.

Measured against the creeds

Palmer's devotion, her care for the poor and her call to wholehearted consecration are to be honoured. Her teaching, however, inherited Wesley's narrowed definition of sin and made sanctification a single, datable act achieved by a method. The historic Church - Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican alike - has held that holiness is the lifelong work of the Spirit through Word, sacrament and the struggle against sin, and that no Christian in this life is beyond the petition "forgive us our trespasses" (1 John 1:8). Her reading of "the altar sanctifies the gift" was a novel use of a text in which the Lord rebuked the Pharisees' casuistry.

Her description of sanctification as the "baptism of the Holy Ghost" also separated the gift of the Spirit from baptism and confirmation (or chrismation), where the historic Church has always located it (Acts 2:38).

Major writings

• The Way of Holiness (1843)
• Entire Devotion to God (1845)
• Faith and Its Effects (1848)
• Incidental Illustrations of the Economy of Salvation (1855)
• The Promise of the Father (1859)
• Four Years in the Old World (1866)
• Editor, Guide to Holiness (1864-74)

Affiliation

Port Glasgow, Scotland; part of the 1830 charismatic revival in the west of Scotland associated with Edward Irving

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism, Edward Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church

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Port Glasgow

Margaret Macdonald was born in 1815 in Port Glasgow, on the Clyde in the west of Scotland, into a pious family of the Church of Scotland. Her twin brothers, James and George, were shipyard workers. Little is known of her early life except what appears in the accounts of the 1830 revival, written by sympathisers.

The west of Scotland revival

In 1828-30 a movement of expectation spread through parishes of the west of Scotland, encouraged by the preaching of John McLeod Campbell at Row (Rhu) and by Edward Irving's teaching that the gifts of the Spirit had been lost through unbelief and could be restored. Groups met to pray for an outpouring of the Spirit. In March 1830 Mary Campbell of Fernicarry, a young invalid, began to speak in tongues and was reported healed.

The vision

Margaret Macdonald was seriously ill in early 1830. During her illness, in the spring of that year, she experienced a series of visions of the coming of Christ and of the Church filled with the Spirit, which she described at length to visitors and wrote down. Soon afterwards, in April 1830, her brother James commanded her in the name of Jesus to rise, and she was reported to have been healed. James and George began to speak in tongues and to interpret, and visitors came from England and Scotland to see the Macdonald household. Among them, in the summer of 1830, was J.N. Darby, who later wrote that he had found the phenomena unconvincing.

Irving and London

Reports of Port Glasgow reached Irving's congregation in London, where tongues and prophecy broke out in 1831. The Macdonalds remained in Port Glasgow; the movement there was closely watched and widely discussed. James and George Macdonald both died in 1835.

Later years

Margaret is said to have married, possibly to a member of the movement, and to have died young. Almost nothing about her later life is documented.^†

Key dates

• 1815 - Born in Port Glasgow
• 1828-30 - Revival in the west of Scotland
• March 1830 - Tongues and healing reported at Fernicarry
• Spring 1830 - Her illness and visions
• April 1830 - Reported healing; her brothers begin to speak in tongues
• Summer 1830 - J.N. Darby visits Port Glasgow
• 1831 - Tongues in Irving's London congregation
• 1835 - Death of James and George Macdonald
• 1840 - Robert Norton publishes her account
• c. 1840 - Dies
• 1861 - Norton's second, altered version of the vision
• 1970s - The vision becomes the centre of the rapture-origins debate

Teachings and claims

The vision of 1830

As published by Robert Norton in 1840, her account describes a vision of the coming of the Lord "in glory", seen not by the natural eye but by those filled with the Spirit; a fiery trial to come upon the Church, in which the wicked one would be revealed; and the need for the Church to be filled with the Spirit to be ready. She wrote that "the trial of the Church is from Antichrist" and that it is "by being filled with the Spirit that we shall be kept".

The restoration of the gifts

She shared the conviction of the revival that God was restoring the gifts of tongues, prophecy and healing in preparation for Christ's return.

Documented controversies

The rapture debate

In the twentieth century some writers, beginning with an American journalist in 1973, argued that her 1830 vision was the source of the pre-tribulation rapture - the doctrine that believers will be removed from the earth before the tribulation - and that Darby took the idea from Port Glasgow. Most historians, including those sympathetic to neither side, have rejected this. Her account speaks of the Church passing through the trial of Antichrist, which is the opposite of a pre-tribulation rapture, and Darby's own teaching developed from his reading of Scripture and his ecclesiology over several years.

The two texts

The debate is complicated by the fact that Norton's 1861 version of the vision omits passages, present in the 1840 text, about the Church's trial under Antichrist. Writers on both sides have used the differences. Scholars have generally concluded that the 1840 text is the more reliable.

The phenomena

Contemporary observers, including Darby and later the Church of Scotland, disputed whether the Port Glasgow tongues and healings were genuine. McLeod Campbell was deposed by the General Assembly in 1831 for his teaching on the atonement, and Irving in 1833.

Death

She died young, around 1840. The date and place of her death are not recorded in the standard sources.^†

Legacy

Her significance is almost entirely posthumous. Within the Catholic Apostolic Church that grew from Irving's movement, the Port Glasgow events were remembered as the first signs of the restoration of the gifts. In the twentieth century she became the centre of a dispute about the origin of dispensational teaching on the rapture - a dispute that says more about modern controversy than about her.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead", a single, public return. Margaret Macdonald's vision, as first published, expects the Church to pass through trial and to be kept by the Spirit - closer to the historic expectation than the dispensational scheme with which she has been linked.

The difficulties lie in the setting of her vision. The historic churches have always tested private revelations by Scripture and the Church's faith, and treated them with great caution; they do not receive them as guidance for the Church's teaching about the last things (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1). The movement of which she was part claimed a restoration of gifts that the Church, through its ordinary means, had never lacked, and its teaching was examined and rejected by the Church of Scotland.

Affiliation

Congregationalist layman; independent evangelist; founder of the Moody Bible Institute (1886) and the Northfield schools

Appears in

Revivalism and the "second blessing", The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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Northfield and Boston

Dwight Lyman Moody was born on 5 February 1837 at Northfield, Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children. His father, a stonemason, died when Dwight was four, leaving the family in debt; his mother, Betsey, kept them together and raised them in the liberal Unitarian church of the village. Moody had about five years of schooling and wrote poorly all his life.

At seventeen he went to Boston to work in his uncle's shoe shop, on condition that he attend the Mount Vernon Congregational Church. On 21 April 1855 his Sunday-school teacher, Edward Kimball, came to the shop and spoke to him about Christ, and Moody was converted. The church at first delayed his membership because he could not explain his faith.

Chicago

In 1856 he moved to Chicago and became a successful shoe salesman, but he spent more and more of his time recruiting children for Sunday school. His North Market Hall mission school grew to some 1,500 pupils; Abraham Lincoln visited it in 1860. That year Moody gave up business to work full time for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and his mission. He married Emma Revell in 1862. During the Civil War he served with the YMCA's Christian Commission among soldiers. His independent church, the Illinois Street Church, was formed in 1864.

In 1871 he said he had been praying for a filling of the Spirit after two women of his congregation told him they were praying that he would receive "the power". In the weeks after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed his church and home in October 1871, while walking in New York, he had an experience of God's presence so strong that he "had to ask Him to stay His hand". He spoke of it as an anointing for service rather than a second blessing of perfection.

Britain, 1873-75

Moody had visited Britain in 1867 and 1872 and met Brethren and other evangelical leaders, including George Müller and Henry Varley. In 1873 he returned with the singer Ira D. Sankey for a campaign that began quietly in York and grew into a national phenomenon: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, and finally London in 1875, where an estimated two and a half million people attended meetings over twenty weeks. Sankey's songs, published as Sacred Songs and Solos, sold in vast numbers.

American campaigns and schools

Moody returned to America a celebrity and held great city campaigns in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Boston (1875-77), supported by businessmen such as John Wanamaker. He founded the Northfield Seminary for girls (1879) and the Mount Hermon School for boys (1881) near his home, the Northfield summer conferences (from 1880), and the Chicago Evangelization Society (1886), later the Moody Bible Institute. At a 1886 student conference at Mount Hermon, the Student Volunteer Movement for foreign missions was born. He returned to Britain in 1881-84 and later held a massive campaign at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Key dates

• 1837 - Born at Northfield, Massachusetts, 5 February
• 1855 - Converted in Boston
• 1856 - Moves to Chicago
• 1860 - Gives up business for mission and YMCA work
• 1871 - Chicago Fire; experience of the Spirit's power
• 1873-75 - British campaign with Ira Sankey
• 1875-77 - Great American city campaigns
• 1879-81 - Founds the Northfield schools
• 1886 - Founds what became Moody Bible Institute; Student Volunteer Movement begins at Mount Hermon
• 1893 - World's Fair campaign in Chicago
• 22 December 1899 - Dies at Northfield

Teachings and claims

The simple gospel

Moody preached what he called the "three Rs": ruin by sin, redemption by Christ and regeneration by the Holy Ghost. His sermons were short, warm and full of stories, emphasising God's love more than His wrath. He asked hearers to decide for Christ and directed them to an "inquiry room" where trained workers prayed with them, replacing Finney's anxious bench with a quieter, more personal setting.

Premillennial expectation

Through Brethren contacts in Britain, Moody came to expect that Christ could return at any moment, before a millennium, and that the world would not be converted beforehand. In a well-known sermon he said: "I look on this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'" His Northfield conferences gave a platform to dispensational teachers, and his Bible institute became one of its main schools.

Power for service

He taught that believers should seek a baptism of the Spirit for service, as distinct from conversion. This "Keswick" emphasis on empowerment, taught by his associate R.A. Torrey, fed into the Holiness and early Pentecostal movements.

Documented controversies

• Lack of training. Moody was never ordained and had no theological education. Critics in Britain and America charged him with oversimplifying the gospel and with bad grammar; he cheerfully admitted the latter.
• Business methods. His campaigns were organised like commercial enterprises, with advertising, committees of businessmen, ticketing and careful preparation. Critics thought this made revival a product; admirers saw efficient stewardship.
• Theological breadth. Conservatives later criticised him for inviting modernists such as Henry Drummond and George Adam Smith to speak at Northfield.
• Race. In the American South he accepted segregated meetings, which drew criticism from Black church leaders including Ida B. Wells.

^†

No significant personal or financial scandals are documented; he refused to take money from his campaigns for himself, and royalties from the hymn books went to his schools.

Death

Moody fell ill during a campaign in Kansas City in November 1899 and returned to Northfield, where he died of heart failure on 22 December 1899, aged 62. His son recorded his last words as "Earth recedes; heaven opens before me... This is my triumph; this is my coronation day!"

Legacy

Moody created the modern city-wide evangelistic campaign later carried on by Billy Sunday and others, and the Bible institute movement that trained generations of lay workers and missionaries. Moody Bible Institute, the Moody Church and the Northfield schools continue. He was also a principal channel by which premillennial, dispensational expectation entered mainstream American evangelicalism and, through it, Pentecostalism. He was generous, humorous and personally humble, and drew support across denominational lines.

Measured against the creeds

Moody's preaching of sin, redemption and new birth stood within the historic faith, and he avoided the perfectionism of many of his contemporaries. His weakness was the absence of the Church and the sacraments from his message: conversion became an individual decision in an inquiry room, detached from baptism, the Lord's Supper and the life of a congregation. The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" and "one baptism for the remission of sins"; in mass evangelism these were often left to others, or forgotten.

His adoption of the "any moment" return and the view that the world is a wreck to escape also helped spread an eschatology foreign to the ancient Church, which confesses simply that Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead", without a secret rapture or a separate destiny for the Church and Israel.

Major writings

Moody wrote little; most of his books are edited sermons.

• Twelve Select Sermons (1880)
• Secret Power, or the Secret of Success in Christian Life and Christian Work (1881)
• The Way to God and How to Find It (1884)
• Heaven (1880)

Affiliation

Canadian Presbyterian minister; founder of the Gospel Tabernacle, New York, and of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1887/1897)

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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A Presbyterian boyhood

Albert Benjamin Simpson was born on 15 December 1843 at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, Canada, to a Scottish Presbyterian family of farmers and shipbuilders, and grew up in Chatham, Ontario. His upbringing was strict and Calvinist; as a teenager he went through a long period of fear about his salvation, resolved by reading Walter Marshall's The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. He studied at Knox College, Toronto, graduating in 1865, and was ordained the same year.

A rising pastor

At twenty-one he became minister of Knox Church, Hamilton, Ontario, one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Canada. He married Margaret Henry in 1865. In 1873 he moved to the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where he led city-wide evangelistic meetings after the Civil War, and in 1879 to the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. Throughout these years he suffered from nervous exhaustion and heart trouble; he wrote later that he was "a nervous wreck" and had been told by a doctor that he would not live long.

Sanctification and healing

In Louisville, reading W.E. Boardman's The Higher Christian Life, he sought and claimed a deeper experience of Christ as his sanctification. In 1881, at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, he attended a meeting of the healing evangelist Charles Cullis and became convinced that healing is part of the gospel. Walking in the woods afterwards, he committed himself to accept Christ as his physician; he wrote that his heart trouble disappeared and that he was able afterwards to climb a 3,000-foot mountain. He lived another thirty-eight years of exceptionally hard work.

The Gospel Tabernacle

The same year he concluded that infant baptism was unscriptural and was immersed. He resigned from the Presbyterian ministry in November 1881 to work among the unchurched poor of New York, and founded an independent congregation that became the Gospel Tabernacle. He opened Berachah Home for the sick (1883), began a missionary training college (1883, later Nyack College), and published The Word, Work and World, later The Alliance Weekly.

The Alliance

In 1887, at Old Orchard Beach, he founded two societies: the Christian Alliance, for believers in many churches who held the Fourfold Gospel, and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance, for overseas missions. They merged in 1897 as the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). Simpson insisted it was a fellowship and missionary society, not a denomination. By his death it had missionaries in some sixteen countries.

Pentecostalism

When the Pentecostal revival reached the Alliance in 1906-07, especially at Nyack and in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Simpson investigated it with sympathy. His private diary shows that he sought the gift of tongues for himself without receiving it. He concluded that tongues might be a genuine gift but must not be made the evidence of the baptism in the Spirit. His policy became known as "seek not, forbid not". Several leaders and congregations left for the new Assemblies of God.

Key dates

• 1843 - Born at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, 15 December
• 1865 - Graduates from Knox College, Toronto; minister of Knox Church, Hamilton
• 1873 - Minister in Louisville, Kentucky
• 1879 - Minister in New York
• 1881 - Healed at Old Orchard Beach; immersed; leaves the Presbyterian ministry
• 1882-83 - Gospel Tabernacle; Berachah Home; missionary training college
• 1887 - Founds the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance
• 1890 - The Four-fold Gospel
• 1897 - The two societies merge as the Christian and Missionary Alliance
• 1906-12 - Pentecostal revival and division in the Alliance
• 1918 - Suffers a stroke
• 29 October 1919 - Dies at Nyack, New York

Teachings and claims

The Fourfold Gospel

Simpson summed up his message as Christ our Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. The emblem of the C&MA - a cross, a laver, a pitcher of oil and a crown - pictures the four.

Sanctification as union with Christ

He taught a crisis experience of sanctification after conversion, but understood it less as the removal of sin (as in the Wesleyan Holiness movement) than as the indwelling of Christ - "not the blessing but the Blesser" - received by surrender and faith, in the Keswick tradition.

Healing in the atonement

From Isaiah 53:4-5 and Matthew 8:17 he taught that Christ bore our sicknesses as well as our sins, so that bodily healing is provided in the atonement and may be claimed by faith. He did not forbid medicine outright, but he discouraged reliance on it and believed that a Christian fully trusting God would not need it. He taught that healing is a foretaste of the resurrection, not immunity from death.

Missions and the return of Christ

He believed that taking the gospel to every nation would hasten Christ's return (Matthew 24:14), and made world mission the centre of the Alliance.

Documented controversies

• Leaving the Presbyterian Church. His adoption of believer's immersion and divine healing, and his departure from his New York church in 1881, were criticised by fellow Presbyterians.
• Healing and medicine. Critics, including the Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield in Counterfeit Miracles (1918), attacked the faith-cure movement, of which Simpson was a leader. Deaths among those who refused medical care in faith-healing circles were widely reported, though Simpson was more moderate than Dowie.
• The Pentecostal division. The Alliance lost many members and workers to the Pentecostal movement after 1907; some Pentecostals accused Simpson of resisting the Spirit, while some Alliance members thought him too open.

He was personally modest, and no significant personal scandal is recorded.

Death

Simpson suffered a stroke in 1918 and died at his home in Nyack, New York, on 29 October 1919, aged 75. He was buried on the Nyack College campus.

Legacy

The Christian and Missionary Alliance became a worldwide missionary denomination, with several million members, the large majority outside North America. Nyack College (now Alliance University) and many other schools descend from his work.

He wrote more than seventy books and some 120 hymns. Through members who left for Pentecostalism - including leaders of the early Assemblies of God - his Fourfold Gospel shaped Pentecostal theology: Aimee Semple McPherson's "Foursquare Gospel" is a close adaptation.

Measured against the creeds

Simpson's devotion to Christ, his care for the poor and his missionary vision are admirable, and his "seek not, forbid not" was more cautious than many in his day. His teaching that healing is provided in the atonement in the same way as forgiveness, however, goes beyond what the Church has taught. The Church prays for the sick and anoints them, and believes God heals; but it has held that bodily healing in this age is a gift, not a guaranteed benefit of the cross like the forgiveness of sins, and that all will suffer and die until the resurrection (Romans 8:23). St Paul's own "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7-9) and Timothy's stomach (1 Timothy 5:23) show this.

His separation of sanctification as a second crisis, and his rejection of infant baptism, also depart from the historic faith, which places the gift of the Spirit and new life in baptism and holds sanctification to be a lifelong growth.

Major writings

• The Gospel of Healing (1885)
• The Four-fold Gospel (1890)
• The Holy Spirit, or Power from on High, 2 vols (1895-96)
• Wholly Sanctified (1890)
• Christ in the Bible (commentary series)
• Hymns including "Himself" and "Yesterday, Today, Forever"

Affiliation

Confederate soldier; Kansas legislator and U.S. attorney; Congregationalist minister (ordained 1883); editor of the Scofield Reference Bible

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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Michigan, Tennessee and the war

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was born on 19 August 1843 in Lenawee County, Michigan. His mother died soon after his birth and his father remarried. As a teenager he went to live with a married sister in Lebanon, Tennessee. When the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Confederate army (7th Tennessee Infantry) in 1861, served in the Virginia campaigns, and was discharged in 1862 as a non-combatant on grounds of his Northern birth and age. His later accounts - that he won the Cross of Honour for bravery at Antietam - are not supported by the records. ^†

St Louis, Kansas and scandal

After the war he lived in St Louis, read law, and married Léontine Le Beau Cerré, a Catholic from a prominent French family, in 1866; they had two daughters. In 1869 the family moved to Atchison, Kansas, where Scofield entered Republican politics. He was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives (1871-72) and in 1873, through the influence of Senator John J. Ingalls, was appointed U.S. District Attorney for Kansas. He resigned after only six months amid newspaper reports of bribery and financial irregularities connected with Ingalls's election campaign.

He returned to St Louis, drank heavily, and left his wife and daughters. Local newspapers and later court papers record charges that he obtained money with promissory notes bearing forged signatures, including those of his mother-in-law; he was briefly jailed in St Louis in 1879 according to some accounts. ^†

Conversion and ministry

In September 1879 a St Louis lawyer and YMCA worker, Thomas McPheeters, led him to faith. He came under the teaching of James H. Brookes, pastor of Walnut Street Presbyterian Church and the leading American disciple of Darby's prophetic teaching, who taught him dispensationalism. Scofield worked for the YMCA and for Moody's St Louis campaign of 1880. In 1882 he became pastor of the small First Congregational Church of Dallas, Texas, and was ordained in 1883. The same year his wife divorced him for desertion, and in 1884 he married Hettie van Wark, a member of his Dallas church.

The Dallas church grew from fourteen members to over five hundred. He wrote Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (1888), began a popular Comprehensive Bible Correspondence Course, founded the Central American Mission (1890), and spoke at the Niagara Bible Conferences. From 1895 to 1902 he was pastor of Moody's Trinitarian Congregational Church at Northfield, Massachusetts, and taught at Moody's schools, then returned to Dallas.

The Reference Bible

At the Sea Cliff Bible Conference in 1901-02 Scofield proposed a reference Bible with notes to help ordinary readers. With financial support from businessmen and a panel of consulting editors - among them A.T. Pierson, W.J. Erdman and James M. Gray

• he worked on it for several years, partly in Switzerland and England. Oxford

University Press published The Scofield Reference Bible in January 1909, with a revised edition in 1917. He founded the New York School of the Bible in 1914.

Key dates

• 1843 - Born in Lenawee County, Michigan, 19 August
• 1861-62 - Confederate service
• 1866 - Marries Léontine Cerré
• 1871-73 - Kansas legislator; U.S. District Attorney for Kansas; resigns
• 1879 - Conversion in St Louis
• 1882-83 - Pastor in Dallas; ordained; divorced by his first wife
• 1888 - Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth
• 1890 - Founds the Central American Mission
• 1895-1902 - Pastor at Northfield, Massachusetts
• 1909 - The Scofield Reference Bible published by Oxford
• 1917 - Revised edition
• 24 July 1921 - Dies at Douglaston, New York

Teachings and claims

Rightly dividing

Taking 2 Timothy 2:15 ("rightly dividing the word of truth") as his key, Scofield taught that the Bible must be divided by dispensations and by the peoples to whom each part is addressed - Jews, Gentiles and the Church. Much of the Old Testament and parts of the Gospels, including the Sermon on the Mount, belong to the "kingdom" message for Israel rather than directly to the Church.

Seven dispensations

His notes define a dispensation as "a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God", and name seven: Innocency, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Grace and the Kingdom.

Israel, the Church and the rapture

Following Darby, he taught that Israel and the Church are distinct, that the Church will be raptured before a seven-year tribulation, that Christ will then return to reign on earth for a thousand years, and that the promises to Israel, including the land, will be fulfilled literally.

The gap theory

His notes on Genesis 1:1-2 taught that a long gap may lie between the original creation and the six days, during which a pre-Adamic world was judged - allowing geological ages without conceding evolution.

Documented controversies

• His early life. His resignation as U.S. attorney, desertion of his family and financial dealings in St Louis are documented in newspapers and court records of the time. Some biographers, notably Joseph Canfield and David Lutzweiler, have argued that he also concealed and misrepresented much of this; sympathetic writers argue that his conversion was real and that he made some restitution. His authorised biography (Trumbull, 1920) omitted his first marriage altogether.
• His titles. He used the title "D.D." though no institution conferring it has been identified.^†
• His military record. His claims to Confederate honours do not match the surviving records.
• The notes as authority. Critics then and since have argued that printing a single school's interpretation beside the text, in a prestigious Oxford edition, gave its readings an authority that readers confused with Scripture itself.

Death

Scofield's health declined after 1917. He died at his home in Douglaston, Long Island, on 24 July 1921, aged 77.

Legacy

The Scofield Reference Bible sold millions of copies and became the standard Bible of American fundamentalism, of Bible institutes, and of most early Pentecostals. Oxford still publishes a revised version. Dallas Theological Seminary (1924), founded by his disciple Lewis Sperry Chafer, made his system academic. Through the Bible, his scheme shaped popular prophecy writing and American evangelical attitudes to the State of Israel throughout the twentieth century.

Measured against the creeds

Scofield's system carried Darby's teaching on the Church, Israel and the rapture to millions, with the same difficulties: the creeds confess one Church and one return of Christ to judge the living and the dead, not a secret rapture or a separate destiny for the Church and Israel. Assigning the Sermon on the Mount and much of the Gospels to another dispensation also sets aside the way the Church has always read them - as the Lord's own teaching to His disciples of every age.

His method raises a further issue. The four traditions read Scripture within the rule of faith handed down in the Church, guarded by creeds and councils; Scofield offered instead a private system of notes, printed beside the sacred text, which for many readers became an unrecognised authority of its own. His personal story - a real conversion after real wrongdoing - is one the Church can honour; the system he popularised is another matter.

Major writings

• Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (1888)
• Comprehensive Bible Correspondence Course (1890s)
• The Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford, 1909; revised 1917)
• Addresses on Prophecy (1910)
• In Many Pulpits (1922, posthumous)

Affiliation

Church of God (Winebrenner) evangelist until 1904; independent Holiness, then Pentecostal evangelist; founder of a tabernacle in Indianapolis (1918)

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Pentecostal celebrity evangelists, 1910s-1940s

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Life

Ohio childhood

Mariah Beulah Underwood was born on 22 July 1844 near New Lisbon, Columbiana County, Ohio, one of eight children of a farming family. Her father, a heavy drinker, died of sunstroke in 1857, leaving the family poor, and she went to work as a girl. At thirteen she was converted and baptised among the Disciples of Christ, the church of Alexander Campbell, and she said she felt even then a call to preach - a call she believed closed to her as a woman, since the Disciples did not permit women in the pulpit.

Marriage and loss

In 1863 she married Philo Harrison Woodworth, a farmer recently discharged from the Union army after a head injury. The marriage was unhappy and the farm failed. Of their six children, five died young, most of them of disease. Maria later wrote that these losses, and her own long illnesses, were God's way of breaking her resistance to her call. She read Scripture for herself and concluded that women were called to preach as surely as men, pointing to Joel 2:28 and to the women prophets of the Old and New Testaments.

The trance evangelist

She began to preach around 1879-80, first among the Friends (Quakers) and then the United Brethren, and from 1884 held a licence from the Churches of God (General Conference), the body founded by John Winebrenner. Her revival meetings in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois drew thousands. What made them famous was the "trance": men and women fell to the ground and lay rigid, sometimes for hours, before rising to describe visions of heaven or hell. She herself sometimes stood motionless on the platform for long periods. Newspapers called her the "trance evangelist" and "the voodoo priestess", and journalists and physicians argued about whether the phenomena were hysteria, hypnotism or something else. In 1885 meetings at Hartford City and Kokomo, Indiana, were among her largest.

From the mid-1880s she prayed for the sick, and healing became a major part of her work. Her meetings in St Louis in 1890 provoked a campaign by local physicians, who tried to have her declared insane.^†

Oakland, 1889-90

In late 1889 she began a long tent campaign in Oakland, California. During it a prophecy circulated among her followers that San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda would be destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave on 14 April 1890. Many people left the area; the date passed without incident. The press ridiculed her, and the campaign ended in disarray. Her biographer Wayne Warner treats the prophecy as hers and as false; some defenders say it came from followers rather than from her. She later linked it to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

She divorced Philo Woodworth in 1891, charging adultery; he died the following year. In 1902 she married Samuel Etter, a farmer from Arkansas, who supported her ministry until his death in 1914. The Churches of God withdrew her licence in 1904.

The elder of Pentecost

When the Pentecostal revival broke out in 1906, she was over sixty. In 1912 F.F. Bosworth invited her to Dallas, where a campaign of about five months drew crowds of thousands and attracted many of the young leaders of the new movement. She now identified herself fully with Pentecostalism, and its people honoured her as a pioneer whose ministry had anticipated theirs. In 1913 she was the principal speaker at the Worldwide Camp Meeting at Arroyo Seco, near Los Angeles, the meeting at which the "Jesus' name" (Oneness) baptism controversy first surfaced; she did not adopt the Oneness teaching. The same year she was arrested at Framingham, Massachusetts, on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences in connection with healing; the case did not end in a conviction.^†

In 1918 she settled in Indianapolis, where she built a tabernacle in the west of the city and preached there until her death.

Key dates

• 22 July 1844 - Born near New Lisbon, Ohio
• c. 1857 - Converted and baptised among the Disciples of Christ
• 1863 - Marries P.H. Woodworth; five of six children later die young
• c. 1880 - Begins to preach
• 1884 - Licensed by the Churches of God (Winebrenner)
• 1885 - Great meetings at Hartford City and Kokomo, Indiana
• 1889-90 - Oakland campaign; the failed earthquake prophecy of 14 April 1890
• 1891 - Divorces Woodworth
• 1902 - Marries Samuel Etter
• 1904 - Licence withdrawn by the Churches of God
• 1912 - Dallas campaign with F.F. Bosworth
• 1913 - Arroyo Seco camp meeting; arrested at Framingham
• 1916 - Publishes Signs and Wonders
• 1918 - Opens her tabernacle in Indianapolis
• 16 September 1924 - Dies in Indianapolis

Teachings and claims

Repentance and the coming Christ

Her preaching was in the revivalist tradition: sin, judgement, repentance and holiness, with an urgent expectation of Christ's return. She taught that the gifts of the Spirit, lost through the Church's unfaithfulness, were being restored before the end.

Healing

She taught that God heals in answer to prayer and faith, and anointed and laid hands on the sick. She did not reject physicians as firmly as John Alexander Dowie did, but she encouraged reliance on God alone.

Trances and visions

She regarded the trances as the power of God falling on people, and the visions reported in them as revelations, often of heaven, hell or the coming judgement. They became the most frequently cited precedent for the later Pentecostal and charismatic practice of being "slain in the Spirit".

Women preaching

Her defence of women's preaching from Joel 2 and Acts 2 was one of the earliest popular statements of the position in American revivalism, and she lived it out for forty-five years.

Documented controversies

The 1890 prophecy

The earthquake prediction is the best-documented failed prophecy of her career. Warner records that she never admitted that it was wrong.

The trances

Contemporary physicians, journalists and some clergy regarded the trances as hysterical or hypnotic. Her defenders pointed to conversions and changed lives. The debate is one of the earliest public disputes over the bodily phenomena of revival.

Arrests and lawsuits

Besides the St Louis insanity petition and the Framingham arrest, she was the subject of several legal complaints in the course of her ministry. None ended in a conviction.

Divorce

Her divorce in 1891, at a time when many churches regarded divorce as disqualifying a minister, was criticised; she defended it on the ground of her husband's adultery.

Death

She died at her home in Indianapolis on 16 September 1924, aged 80. She is buried in Memorial Park Cemetery in Indianapolis.^†

Legacy

Pentecostals regard her as a bridge between the Holiness healing revivals of the nineteenth century and the Pentecostal movement, and as a pioneer of women's ministry. Her tabernacle continues as Lakeview Church in Indianapolis. The bodily phenomena of her meetings became a pattern that Kathryn Kuhlman and later healing evangelists followed, and her name is still invoked whenever "slain in the Spirit" is defended as historic. Her books of sermons and testimonies remain in print in charismatic publishing.

Measured against the creeds

Woodworth-Etter's preaching of repentance, faith and Christ's return stood within the common faith, and she held to the Trinity and to the deity of Christ. Her care for the sick and her courage in a hostile press are not in question.

The difficulties lie elsewhere. The historic churches have never treated bodily phenomena - falling, trances, rigidity - as a sign of the Spirit's work; the Spirit's fruit is "love, joy, peace" (Galatians 5:22), and Paul's rule for public worship is that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Corinthians 14:33). Visions received in trance are not a source of doctrine and must be tested by Scripture and the Church's faith (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1). A prophecy that fails, by the biblical test, was not spoken by the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:22), and the refusal to acknowledge it is a more serious matter than the error itself.

On women's preaching, the four traditions differ among themselves today, and their own practice has changed; but none of them accepts the principle, implicit in her ministry and in much revivalism since, that a personal sense of call is enough to authorise a public ministry without the Church's testing and sending (Romans 10:15; Acts 13:2-3).

Major writings

• Life and Experience of Mrs. M.B. Woodworth (1885)
• Acts of the Holy Ghost (1912)
• Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years (1916)
• Marvels and Miracles God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty-Five Years (1922)

Affiliation

Congregational minister in Australia; founder of the Christian Catholic Church (1896) and Zion City, Illinois

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Edinburgh and Adelaide

John Alexander Dowie was born in Edinburgh on 25 May 1847, the son of a tailor and lay preacher. In 1860 the family emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia, where he worked in his uncle's business. In 1867 he returned to Edinburgh to study at the university, attending classes in arts and theology for about two years without taking a degree, and went back to Australia in 1870.

Congregational minister

He was ordained in the Congregational Union and served churches at Alma, near Adelaide, and from 1873 at Newtown, a suburb of Sydney. In 1876, during an epidemic (probably typhoid) in which he buried some forty of his parishioners, he became convinced from Acts 10:38 that sickness is the oppression of the devil and that Christ heals today. He prayed for a dying young woman in his congregation, who recovered, and from then on he taught healing by faith. He married his cousin Jane Dowie in 1876.

He left the Congregational ministry in 1878, criticising its ties to the world, and became an independent evangelist in Sydney and then Melbourne, where he built a Free Christian Tabernacle. He campaigned fiercely against alcohol and in 1885 was jailed for a month in Melbourne for holding unauthorised processions. ^† He founded the International Divine Healing Association in 1886.

America and the Chicago fair

In 1888 he left Australia for San Francisco and travelled the Pacific coast holding healing meetings. In 1890 he settled near Chicago. During the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 he set up a small wooden tabernacle opposite Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and held healing services that drew growing crowds. His magazine Leaves of Healing (from 1894) published testimonies, and he opened "Divine Healing Homes" where the sick could stay while being prayed for.

The Christian Catholic Church and Zion

In February 1896 he founded the Christian Catholic Church (later the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church), declaring himself its General Overseer. In 1899-1900 he secretly bought 6,500 acres on Lake Michigan, forty miles north of Chicago, and on 1 January 1900 announced the founding of Zion City. Lots went on sale in July 1901 on 1,100-year leases that forbade alcohol, tobacco, pork, oysters, theatres, doctors and drugstores. Dowie owned or controlled the land, the bank, the stores and the lace factory. By 1905 Zion had perhaps 7,500 residents.

Elijah and the First Apostle

On 2 June 1901 he declared that he was "Elijah the Restorer", the prophet foretold in Malachi 4 and Matthew 17:11, and appeared thereafter in elaborate robes. In October 1903 he took a party of some 3,000 followers by special trains to New York for a "visitation" at Madison Square Garden; hostile crowds and ridicule ended in a humiliating retreat, and the cost helped push Zion into insolvency. In September 1904 he consecrated himself "First Apostle" of the restored Church.

Collapse

Zion's industries were unprofitable, and the city went into receivership in 1906. Dowie, who had suffered a stroke in September 1905, was in Mexico when, in April 1906^†, his deputy Wilbur Glenn Voliva and the Zion leadership deposed him, accusing him of extravagance, misuse of funds and teaching polygamy. Dowie challenged the deposition in court, but the court gave the church's property to a receiver and an election confirmed Voliva.

Key dates

• 1847 - Born in Edinburgh, 25 May
• 1860 - Family emigrates to Adelaide
• 1867-69 - Studies at the University of Edinburgh
• 1876 - Embraces divine healing during a Sydney epidemic
• 1878 - Leaves the Congregational ministry
• 1888 - Moves to the United States
• 1893 - Healing services at the Chicago World's Fair
• 1894 - Leaves of Healing begins
• 1895 - Prosecuted in Chicago for practising medicine without a licence
• 1896 - Founds the Christian Catholic Church
• 1900-01 - Founds Zion City
• 2 June 1901 - Declares himself "Elijah the Restorer"
• 1903 - New York "visitation"
• 1904 - Consecrates himself "First Apostle"
• 1906 - Deposed by Voliva and the Zion leadership
• 9 March 1907 - Dies at Zion

Teachings and claims

Healing without doctors

Dowie taught that sickness, like sin, is the work of the devil, and that Christ's atonement provides healing for the body. To use doctors, drugs or surgery was to trust the arm of flesh; he called medicine "devil's work" and doctors "poisoners". A Christian who was not healed lacked faith or harboured sin.

Zion as the kingdom

He saw Zion City as a restoration of God's rule on earth: a holy city where every part of life, from business to food, was ordered by the law of God under the prophet's authority, and from which the gospel would go out to the world.

Restoration of offices

He held that the Church had lost its apostles and prophets through unbelief and that God was restoring them. His own claims - Elijah, then First Apostle - were the summit of this.

Other teachings

He taught triune immersion as the only valid baptism, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, the dietary laws against pork, and the coming restoration of all things. He denounced Freemasonry, the press and much of organised Christianity.

Documented controversies

• Prosecutions. He was arrested and prosecuted in Chicago in 1895 for practising medicine without a licence and for violations relating to his healing homes; he fought the charges and many were dropped.
• Healings questioned. Chicago newspapers alleged that some healings at his meetings were exaggerated or staged, and printed accounts of patients who died in his homes.
• Deaths without medical care. Deaths of followers, including children, who refused medical treatment drew public criticism and inquests.^†
• Financial control. Residents were urged to deposit their savings in Zion's bank and invest in its businesses, which failed; critics alleged that large sums were unaccounted for and that Dowie lived in luxury.^†
• The New York fiasco (1903) and his escalating claims to be Elijah and an apostle.
• The deposition of 1906, in which his own leaders accused him of extravagance and of advocating polygamy.^†

Death

After his stroke in 1905, Dowie lived on in Zion, partly paralysed and with a few remaining followers, in his house Shiloh. He died there on 9 March 1907, aged 59. He had suffered further strokes and was said to have died still believing in his mission.

Legacy

Zion was the seedbed of early Pentecostalism. When Charles Parham preached there in 1906, many residents embraced tongues, and Zion produced a remarkable number of early Pentecostal and healing leaders - John G. Lake, F.F. Bosworth, Gordon Lindsay's parents, Marie Burgess Brown and others. Missionaries sent by Dowie to South Africa helped found the Apostolic Faith Mission there and the "Zionist" churches, which today number millions across southern Africa. Under Voliva, Zion became famous for teaching that the earth is flat.

Through Lindsay, who wrote his biography, Dowie also became a model for the post-war healing revival.

Measured against the creeds

The historic Church has always prayed for the sick, anointed them (James 5:14-15) and honoured miracles of healing. It has never held that using medicine is a sin; the Fathers and the monastic tradition founded hospitals, and Scripture itself commends the physician (Sirach 38:1-15). Dowie's teaching turned prayer for healing into a law, with deadly results for some who obeyed it, and laid guilt on those who were not healed.

His claims to be Elijah and the First Apostle set his own person above the Church and the apostolic ministry handed down from Christ. The Church holds that Elijah's promised coming was fulfilled in John the Baptist (Matthew 11:14; 17:12-13), and that the foundation of the apostles is laid once for all (Ephesians 2:20). His theocratic city, ruled by a prophet who controlled land, money and conscience, is an example of what happens when such claims go unchecked.

Major writings

• Editor, Leaves of Healing (1894-1906)
• Published sermons and addresses in Leaves of Healing

Affiliation

Brahmin Sanskrit scholar and social reformer; Christian from 1883 (baptised in the Church of England); founder of the Mukti Mission, Kedgaon

Appears in

The modern movements in India, The history of tongues

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A pilgrim childhood

Ramabai Dongre was born on 23 April 1858 in the forest of Gangamul in the Western Ghats, in what is now Karnataka, into a Chitpavan Brahmin family. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, a Sanskrit scholar, had taught his young wife Sanskrit against the custom that forbade it to women, and he taught Ramabai in turn. The family lived as wandering pilgrims, reciting the Puranas at temples and holy places across India. In the great famine of 1876-77 her father, mother and sister died of starvation.

Calcutta and marriage

With her brother Srinivas, Ramabai walked thousands of miles and reached Calcutta in 1878, where her learning astonished the pandits. They gave her the titles "Pandita" and "Saraswati", unprecedented for a woman. She lectured on the education of women and on the rights given to women in the ancient texts. Her brother died in 1880, and she married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer of a lower caste - a marriage that defied convention. Their daughter Manorama was born in 1881. Her husband died of cholera in 1882.

Pune and England

Widowed at twenty-three, she moved to Pune, where she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a society for the education of women, and gave evidence in 1882 to the Hunter Commission on education, urging the training of women teachers and doctors. In 1883 she went to England, supported by the Anglican sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, to study medicine. There, after long study, she was baptised in the Church of England in September 1883, with her daughter. She studied at Cheltenham Ladies' College and taught Sanskrit. Her correspondence with the sisters and with the Bishop of Bombay shows a mind that would not accept doctrines it did not understand: she questioned the Athanasian Creed and, for a time, the full deity of Christ, and resisted pressure to submit to Anglican authority in all things.

America and the Sharada Sadan

In 1886 she went to the United States, where she published The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), an indictment of child marriage and the treatment of widows. American supporters formed Ramabai Associations to fund a home for widows. Returning to India, she opened the Sharada Sadan ("Home of Learning") in Bombay in March 1889, moving it to Pune soon after. It was officially non-sectarian, but when some residents became Christians, Hindu reformers who had supported her, including leaders of the Pune nationalist press, accused her of proselytism, and many withdrew their daughters.

A deeper conversion

Around 1891 she experienced what she described as a personal conversion: she had been a Christian by conviction, she wrote, but now found Christ as her Saviour. Her faith became more evangelical, and she drew closer to the holiness and revival movements.

Mukti

During the famines of 1896-97 and 1899-1900 she travelled into the famine districts and brought hundreds of starving girls and widows to a farm she had bought at Kedgaon, near Pune. There she built the Mukti ("Salvation") Mission, which by the early 1900s sheltered around two thousand women and children, with schools, workshops, farms and a printing press, all run on the faith principle. Inspired by news of revival in Australia and Wales, she organised praying bands from 1903. In June 1905 a revival broke out at Mukti, with confession of sin, weeping, visions and, from late 1906, speaking in tongues. Her colleague Minnie Abrams described it in The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire (1906), which was read widely by early Pentecostals.

The Marathi Bible

From 1904 she devoted much of her time to translating the Bible into simple Marathi from the Hebrew and Greek, which she had learned for the purpose. She completed it shortly before her death. Her daughter Manorama, who was to succeed her, died in July 1921.

Key dates

• 23 April 1858 - Born in the Western Ghats
• 1876-77 - Parents and sister die in the famine
• 1878 - Reaches Calcutta; titled "Pandita"
• 1880 - Marries Bipin Behari Medhavi
• 1882 - Widowed; founds the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune
• 1883 - In England; baptised in the Church of England
• 1887 - The High-Caste Hindu Woman
• March 1889 - Opens the Sharada Sadan
• c. 1891 - Personal evangelical conversion
• 1896-1900 - Famine rescues; Mukti founded at Kedgaon
• June 1905 - Revival at Mukti
• 1907 - A Testimony
• 1919 - Awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind medal
• July 1921 - Her daughter Manorama dies
• 5 April 1922 - Dies at Kedgaon

Teachings and claims

Women's dignity

Ramabai taught that women, including widows and girls of every caste, are made in God's image and must be educated and protected. She attacked child marriage, the treatment of widows and the exclusion of women from learning.

Christ above denomination

She held that her loyalty was to Christ and Scripture rather than to any denomination, and she was critical of Western missionary divisions. Mukti was independent of any mission board.

Revival and caution

She welcomed the 1905 revival as God's work but cautioned against seeking tongues, against treating them as the necessary evidence of the Spirit, and against excitement. She taught that the Spirit's chief fruit is love and that the Spirit's presence is shown by humility and holiness.

Documented controversies

Conversions

Hindu reformers and nationalists accused her of breaking her promise of religious neutrality at the Sharada Sadan, and the controversy damaged her standing in Pune.

Independence

Some Anglican and missionary leaders criticised her for her doctrinal independence and her refusal to submit to church authority, and for her later association with revivalism.

The revival

Some missionaries were critical of the emotional phenomena at Mukti and of the tongues. No personal scandal is recorded.

Death

She died at Kedgaon on 5 April 1922, aged 63, a few days after completing the proofs of her Marathi Bible.^†

Legacy

Ramabai is honoured as one of the great figures of modern India - a scholar, social reformer and pioneer of women's education - and the Government of India issued a stamp in her honour in 1989. In the Church she is commemorated in the calendars of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Church of England. The Mukti Mission continues at Kedgaon. The 1905 revival made Mukti a significant site in the early history of Pentecostalism, and her caution about tongues has been cited by those who resist making them a test.

Measured against the creeds

Ramabai's mature faith confessed Christ as Lord and Saviour and the authority of Scripture, and her love for the destitute is one of the clearest examples in modern Christian history of faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). Her early questions about the Athanasian Creed and the deity of Christ were those of a searching convert, and she came to a clear confession of Christ.

Her caution about tongues is close to the historic churches' view that the Spirit's gifts are many and that love is the greatest (1 Corinthians 12-13). Her independence from church order is the point at which she differs most from the historic tradition: she was baptised into the Anglican Church and remained in communion with it, but Mukti was an independent work, and she valued the inner experience of revival more highly than the sacramental life of the Church. Her own life, though, shows how far the gospel can lead someone in the service of the neighbour.

Major writings

• Stri Dharma Niti (Morals for Women, 1882)
• The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887)
• The Peoples of the United States (Marathi, 1889)
• A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible Treasure (1907)
• Marathi translation of the Bible (completed 1922)

Affiliation

Bradford plumber and mission leader; Pentecostal from 1907; for a time credentialed with the Assemblies of God

Appears in

Pentecostal celebrity evangelists, 1910s-1940s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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A Yorkshire childhood of labour

Smith Wigglesworth was born on 8 June 1859 at Menston, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a poor family. His father was a farm labourer. From the age of six he worked in the fields pulling turnips and from seven in a woollen mill, and he never went to school; he could not read until his wife taught him, and said afterwards that the only book he ever read was the Bible. His grandmother, a Wesleyan Methodist, took him to chapel, and he was converted at about eight. He was confirmed in the Church of England, and as a youth was involved with the Methodists and the Salvation Army.

Plumber and mission leader

He learned plumbing and in 1880 set up in business in Bradford. In 1882 he married Mary Jane "Polly" Featherstone, a Salvation Army officer and a gifted preacher, who taught him to read. Together they opened the Bowland Street Mission in Bradford in 1889, where Polly preached and Smith, shy and halting, made the altar calls. For some years his faith cooled while his business prospered, and Polly's prayers and example brought him back.

Healing

In the 1890s he was introduced to divine healing at the Leeds Healing Home, run on the model of the American faith-cure homes. He was healed, he said, of haemorrhoids and later of appendicitis without surgery, and he threw away all medicines. He began praying for the sick at Bowland Street.

Sunderland, 1907

In October 1907 he went to All Saints, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, where the Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy was hosting Pentecostal meetings after a visit from T.B. Barratt. Wigglesworth at first argued with those who were seeking tongues. On 28 October, as Mary Boddy laid hands on him in the vicarage, he had a vision of the empty cross and Christ exalted, and spoke in tongues. He returned to Bradford a changed man and began to preach with new confidence.

Polly's death and world ministry

Polly died on 1 January 1913. By the family's account Smith commanded death to give her back; she opened her eyes, told him her time had come, and he let her go. After her death he travelled widely as an evangelist, often with his daughter Alice and son-in-law James Salter. Between the wars he preached across Britain, in Scandinavia and Switzerland, in the United States and Canada, in South Africa, India, Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand. His campaigns in New Zealand (1922) and Australia were especially well attended and led to new Pentecostal churches. He held credentials for a time with the Assemblies of God in America and was associated with the British Assemblies of God and Elim.

His sermons, taken down in shorthand, were published as Ever Increasing Faith (1924) and Faith That Prevails (1938).

Key dates

• 1859 - Born at Menston, Yorkshire, 8 June
• c. 1867 - Converted; working in the mills
• 1880 - Plumbing business in Bradford
• 1882 - Marries Polly Featherstone
• 1889 - Opens the Bowland Street Mission
• 1890s - Healed at the Leeds Healing Home
• 28 October 1907 - Speaks in tongues at Sunderland
• 1 January 1913 - Polly dies
• 1914-39 - International campaigns
• 1922 - New Zealand campaign
• 1924 - Ever Increasing Faith
• 12 March 1947 - Dies at Wakefield

Teachings and claims

Only believe

His watchword was "Only believe!" He taught that faith is acting on God's Word without regard to feelings or circumstances, and that a believer who truly trusts God will see healing. "I am not moved by what I see. I am moved only by what I believe."

Sickness and the devil

He often treated sickness, especially cancer, as the work of a demon to be rebuked, and taught that the believer has authority to command it to leave.

Medicine

He refused medical treatment for himself and his family, including for painful kidney stones that he passed over several years, and told the sick that doctors and medicines showed a lack of faith, though he did not always forbid them to others.

Raising the dead

He claimed that God had used him to raise a number of people from the dead, including briefly Polly in 1913.

Documented controversies

• Rough handling of the sick. He struck, slapped and punched sick people where they were afflicted, saying "I don't hit them, I hit the devil." One account records him punching a man with stomach cancer hard enough to knock him across the room; the man was said to have been healed. Others were hurt or humiliated.^†
• Unsubstantiated claims of resurrection. Figures for those he is said to have raised vary from three to more than a dozen; none was documented at the time with medical evidence.
• Harshness to the unhealed. He prayed for the sick once and rebuked those who came back as lacking faith.
• Legend and later prophecy. Prophecies attributed to him - especially a "1947 prophecy" of a coming revival - first appear long after his death, and his biographer Desmond Cartwright found no contemporary record of them.

^†

• Legal trouble. He was prosecuted in England for practising medicine without a licence and was acquitted, and in Sweden in 1920 the authorities restricted his public meetings after crowds gathered for healing.

^†

Death

Wigglesworth died on 12 March 1947 at Wakefield, Yorkshire, aged 87. He had gone to the funeral of a friend, Wilfred Richardson, and collapsed in the vestry of the church while asking after the father of a sick girl he had prayed for. He was buried in Bradford.

Legacy

Wigglesworth is a towering figure in Pentecostal and charismatic memory, often called "the Apostle of Faith". His books of sermons remain in print, and later healing and Word of Faith preachers cite him as a model. The legend around him has grown far beyond the documented record; Cartwright's biography (2000), written from within the Pentecostal tradition, is the main attempt to separate the two.

He was also, by every account, a man of deep prayer, generosity and simplicity, who never sought wealth and lived plainly.

Measured against the creeds

Wigglesworth's devotion, his love of Scripture and his compassion for the sick are not in doubt. His teaching nonetheless carried several errors of the faith-cure movement: that healing is always available to those with enough faith, that sickness is commonly demonic, and that using medicine is a failure of faith. The Church has always prayed for and anointed the sick (James 5:14-15) and also honoured the physician (Sirach 38), and has recognised that God may permit suffering for His purposes, as with St Paul (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).

Striking the sick contradicts the gentleness Christ showed to the suffering, who "laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them" (Luke 4:40). And claims of raising the dead, made without witnesses or evidence, ask for a faith in the evangelist rather than in Christ, whose own resurrection the Church has always proclaimed on the testimony of witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

Major writings

• Ever Increasing Faith (1924)
• Faith That Prevails (1938)
• Sermons printed in Confidence (Sunderland), Redemption Tidings and The Pentecostal Evangel

Affiliation

Methodist, then Free Will Baptist preacher; founder and president of Bethel Bible Institute, Spencer, Massachusetts (1898-1923); radio preacher in Seattle

Appears in

Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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Upstate New York

Essek William Kenyon was born on 24 April 1867 at Hadley, Saratoga County, in upstate New York, the fourth of ten children of a logger and a schoolteacher. The family moved to Amsterdam, New York, where he worked in a carpet mill. He was converted in a Methodist church at about seventeen and began to preach at nineteen, but for some years in his twenties he drifted from faith, hoping for a career on the stage.

Boston and Emerson College

In 1892 he enrolled at the Emerson College of Oratory in Boston, a school of speech and drama founded by Charles Wesley Emerson, whose teaching blended Christianity with the idealist and "mind-cure" philosophies then popular in New England. Boston was the centre of the New Thought and Christian Science movements. Kenyon's time at Emerson later became the centre of a dispute over the sources of his ideas.^†

He returned to faith under the preaching of A.J. Gordon, the Baptist pastor of Clarendon Street Church and a leader of the Keswick-style Higher Life and divine healing movements. Kenyon was ordained by the Free Will Baptists, married Evva Spurling in 1893, and pastored Baptist churches in New York and Massachusetts.

Bethel Bible Institute

In 1898 he founded what became the Bethel Bible Institute at Spencer, Massachusetts, a faith school without fees that trained preachers and missionaries; he led it for some twenty-five years and also held evangelistic campaigns in the north-east. His first book, The Father and His Family (1916), set out the core of his teaching. Evva died in 1914, and he married Alice Whitney in 1914.^†

California and Seattle

In 1923, after disputes with the institute's board, he left Spencer and moved to California, where he preached in Los Angeles and Oakland, mixing with Pentecostals but never joining them. In 1931 he moved to Seattle, founded the New Covenant Baptist Church, and began a daily radio broadcast, "Kenyon's Church of the Air". He published a series of books and a magazine, Herald of Life. His daughter Ruth Kenyon Houseworth continued his publishing work after his death.

Key dates

• 1867 - Born at Hadley, New York, 24 April
• c. 1884 - Converted in a Methodist church
• 1892 - Studies at the Emerson College of Oratory, Boston
• 1893 - Marries Evva Spurling; ordained by the Free Will Baptists
• 1898 - Founds Bethel Bible Institute, Spencer, Massachusetts
• 1916 - The Father and His Family
• 1923 - Leaves Bethel; moves to California
• 1931 - Moves to Seattle; founds New Covenant Baptist Church and radio ministry
• 1945 - What Happened from the Cross to the Throne
• 19 March 1948 - Dies in Seattle

Teachings and claims

Sense knowledge and revelation knowledge

Kenyon taught that there are two kinds of knowledge. "Sense knowledge" comes through the five senses and belongs to the natural man; "revelation knowledge" comes from the Word of God received by the human spirit. Faith must act on revelation knowledge even when the senses contradict it. A believer who is sick should not trust his symptoms but the Word that says he is healed.

Positive confession

Faith is expressed by confession. "What I confess, I possess," he wrote; "confession always goes ahead of possession". Believers should never confess weakness, sickness or defeat, because their words have power, and negative confession gives Satan legal ground.

Identification and authority

The believer is identified with Christ in His death, resurrection and enthronement, and therefore shares His authority over Satan, sickness and circumstance. "We are what He says we are."

Healing already provided

Healing was accomplished at the cross and belongs to believers by right; they need only claim it and confess it.

The new creation as divine

He taught that in the new birth the believer receives God's own nature ("zoe", eternal life) and becomes "as much an incarnation as was Jesus of Nazareth".^†

Christ's spiritual death

Kenyon taught that on the cross Christ died not only physically but "spiritually", taking on Satan's nature; that He suffered in hell as the sinner's substitute; and that He was "born again" there before His resurrection. This was the price of redemption, paid to satisfy justice.

Documented controversies

• New Thought origins. D.R. McConnell's A Different Gospel (1988) argued that Kenyon's ideas derived in large part from New Thought metaphysics, partly through his studies at Emerson College, and that the Word of Faith movement had therefore taken over a non-Christian philosophy. Dale Simmons (1997) argued that Kenyon's roots lay chiefly in the Holiness, Higher Life and faith-cure movements of A.J. Gordon, A.B. Simpson and others, while confirming that he borrowed language and ideas from New Thought, which he also criticised by name. Joe McIntyre, a sympathetic biographer, denies any significant New Thought influence.
• Plagiarism by Hagin. His writings were later reproduced extensively, without acknowledgement, in books by Kenneth Hagin.
• The spiritual death of Christ. Theologians of every tradition have rejected this teaching as contrary to Scripture and the creeds.
• Leaving Bethel. His departure from the institute in 1923 followed disagreements with its board; the details are not fully recorded.

Death

Kenyon died in Seattle on 19 March 1948, aged 80, after a short illness.^†

Legacy

Kenyon never joined a Pentecostal church, and in his lifetime his influence was modest. After his death, his books were taken up by the healing evangelists of the 1950s - T.L. Osborn and F.F. Bosworth cited him - and above all by Kenneth Hagin, through whom his teaching became the foundation of the Word of Faith movement. Phrases such as "What I confess, I possess", the believer's authority and revelation knowledge became the common language of the prosperity gospel worldwide. Kenyon is therefore the source of positive confession and the Word of Faith, though he himself did not preach financial prosperity in the later sense.

Measured against the creeds

Kenyon's call to trust God's Word and his emphasis on the believer's union with Christ have deep roots in Scripture. But his central teachings depart from the historic faith in several ways.

• Christ's spiritual death. The Church confesses that the eternal Son, "true God from true God", suffered and died in His human nature, offering Himself "through the eternal Spirit" without spot to God (Hebrews 9:14). That He took on Satan's nature, was tormented in hell and "born again" there is unknown to Scripture and the Fathers and contradicts His own words "It is finished" (John 19:30) and "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). The Apostles' Creed's "He descended into hell" has always meant Christ's triumphant proclamation to the dead (1 Peter 3:18-19), not His defeat.
• The believer as an incarnation. The Church teaches that we become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) by grace, not that we become incarnations of God as Christ was. Christ alone is God and man by nature (Chalcedon, 451).
• Confession as power. To make one's words the means of obtaining health turns prayer into a technique and lays on the sick the guilt of a "negative confession". The Church prays "Thy will be done", following Christ in Gethsemane.

Major writings

• The Father and His Family (1916)
• The Wonderful Name of Jesus (1927)
• Jesus the Healer (1940)
• Two Kinds of Faith (1942)
• What Happened from the Cross to the Throne (1945)
• The Hidden Man (published after his death)
• Editor, Herald of Life

Affiliation

Resident of Zion City (1901-07); Pentecostal missionary to South Africa (1908-13); co-founder of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; founder of healing rooms in Spokane and Portland

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

A full account of Lake's life has two layers: the story he told, which his admirers have repeated, and what independent records show. Both are given here.

Early life

John Graham Lake was born on 18 March 1870 at St Marys, Ontario, Canada, one of sixteen children; the family moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Lake said that several of his siblings died of illness and that he himself was sickly. In the 1890s he married Jennie Stevens and worked in Michigan and Chicago. He later said he had been licensed as a Methodist preacher, had founded newspapers, and had made a fortune in real estate and insurance, holding a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Zion

Lake said that his brother, sisters and wife were healed through the ministry of John Alexander Dowie, and he moved to Zion City in 1901, where he worked as a manager in its building department.^† After Dowie's fall, Parham's preaching in Zion (1906) won many residents to Pentecostalism, and in 1907 Lake received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues, with Thomas Hezmalhalch praying for him,^† and began to preach and pray for the sick in the Midwest.

South Africa

In April 1908 Lake, his wife, their seven children and several co-workers sailed for South Africa, with no mission board or salary. In Johannesburg they took over a meeting place and held revival meetings that drew Black and white South Africans. With Thomas Hezmalhalch and others, Lake helped organise the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) of South Africa, which took in many of the "Zionist" congregations planted earlier by Dowie's missionaries. Jennie Lake died in December 1908, while he was away preaching; he blamed her death on exhaustion and malnutrition. In 1909 he was elected president of the AFM. He returned to America in 1913, having married Florence Switzer in 1913.

Spokane and Portland

In 1914 Lake settled in Spokane, Washington, where he opened "healing rooms" in the Rookery Building and founded the Apostolic Church. He claimed that some 100,000 healings occurred there between 1915 and 1920 and that the U.S. government had declared Spokane "the healthiest city in the world". In 1920 he moved to Portland, Oregon, and then spent years in Texas and California before returning to Spokane in 1931.

What the records show

In 2012 the historian Barry Morton, working through census records, newspapers and South African archives, concluded that much of this story was invented. Census records list Lake as a carpenter or labourer, not a businessman; no evidence was found for his Board of Trade seat, his newspapers or his fortune; the "healthiest city" claim has no government source; and the healing figures were Lake's own. His sympathetic biographer, Kemp Burpeau, had also found no corroboration of the business career. The theologian Marius Nel (2016) has defended Lake's sincerity and ministry against parts of Morton's critique, arguing that Morton read the sources too uncharitably and judged him by standards foreign to early Pentecostalism.

Key dates

• 1870 - Born at St Marys, Ontario, 18 March
• 1890s - Marries Jennie Stevens
• 1901 - Moves to Zion City
• 1907 - Baptism in the Spirit
• 1908 - Sails for South Africa; Jennie Lake dies in December
• 1908-09 - Helps form the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; becomes its president
• 1913 - Returns to America; marries Florence Switzer
• 1914-20 - Healing rooms in Spokane
• 1920 - Moves to Portland, Oregon
• 1931 - Returns to Spokane
• 16 September 1935 - Dies in Spokane

Teachings and claims

Healing as God's will

Lake taught that sickness is from the devil and healing always God's will, provided in the atonement. Like Dowie, he regarded reliance on doctors as a lack of faith, though he later spoke more mildly.

Spirit-man and "God-men"

He taught that the baptism in the Spirit makes the believer a channel of divine power, even a "God-man" in whom Christ's own life is reproduced. In one sermon he said, "The real Christian is a God-man... God's intention is that every man be a God-man."^†

Restoration of apostolic power

He saw the Pentecostal revival as the restoration of the apostolic Church, with miracles as its normal sign.

Scientific claims

He described healing in quasi-scientific language, claiming that the Spirit's power could be seen killing germs under a microscope - a claim widely repeated in later healing ministries.^†

Documented controversies

• His biography. As set out above, Morton (2012) argued that Lake fabricated much of his career and inflated his results; Burpeau (2004) also found no corroboration for his business claims. Nel (2016) defends him in part.
• South African finances. Accusations of misusing AFM funds were made in South Africa; Morton reports that these were eventually disproved.
• Race in South Africa. Lake preached to mixed audiences at first, but the AFM soon segregated its work, and his later statements on race relations have been criticised.^†
• The "God-man" language, which critics have seen as anticipating the little-gods teaching of later Word of Faith preachers.
• His wife's death. Some critics have asked whether Jennie's death reflected the hardships of going to Africa with no support and the refusal of medical care.

Death

Lake suffered a stroke in 1935 and died in Spokane on 16 September 1935, aged 65.

Legacy

The Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, which he helped found, is one of the country's largest churches, with well over a million members. The Zionist churches it influenced are among the largest religious movements in southern Africa.

Lake's sermons and the stories of his healing rooms were revived by Gordon Lindsay, who published them in the 1950s, and by later charismatic ministries, which reopened "healing rooms" in Spokane in 1999 and spread them worldwide. He is often cited as a hero of faith in Word of Faith and healing circles, usually on the basis of his own account.

Measured against the creeds

The Church honours missionaries who went out in poverty and preached Christ, and there is no doubt that the movement Lake helped start in South Africa brought many to faith. His teaching on healing, however, carried Dowie's view that sickness is never God's will and that medicine shows a lack of faith, which the historic Church has never held. His description of believers as "God-men" also confuses two things the Church distinguishes with care: union with God by grace, which the Fathers call deification, and the one Person of Christ, who alone is God and man by nature (Council of Chalcedon, 451).

The serious doubts about his own account of his life are also a warning. Where a ministry's authority rests on the leader's testimony of wealth renounced and wonders done, that testimony must be true; St Paul insisted that "we have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty" (2 Corinthians 4:2).

Major writings

Lake wrote no books in his lifetime; his sermons were collected and published later.

• John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith (Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994)

Affiliation

Holiness preacher; pastor of the Apostolic Faith Mission, 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

Born to freed slaves

William Joseph Seymour was born on 2 May 1870 at Centerville, St Mary Parish, Louisiana, the son of Simon and Phillis Seymour, who had been born into slavery. His father had served in the Union army. The family were poor sharecroppers, and William was baptised as an infant in the Catholic church at Franklin; he grew up attending Baptist churches. He taught himself to read and, by his own account, had visions and dreams as a child.

Searching in the North

In his twenties he left the Jim Crow South, working as a railway porter and a waiter in Memphis, St Louis and Indianapolis, where he joined a Black Methodist Episcopal congregation. In Cincinnati around 1900 he came into contact with Martin Wells Knapp's God's Bible School and with the "Evening Light Saints" (the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana), an interracial Holiness movement that taught entire sanctification, divine healing and the coming unity of all true Christians. There he was sanctified, and during an attack of smallpox that left him blind in his left eye, he accepted a call to preach.

Houston

By 1903 he was in Houston, Texas, attending a Holiness church pastored by Lucy Farrow, a Black woman who had worked as a governess for Charles Parham's family. In late 1905 Parham opened a Bible school in Houston, and Farrow arranged for Seymour to attend. Because of segregation, Seymour sat in the hallway or at an open door. He accepted Parham's teaching that tongues are the evidence of the baptism in the Spirit, though he had not yet spoken in tongues himself.

Los Angeles

In January 1906 Neely Terry, a visitor from Los Angeles, invited Seymour to be pastor of a small Holiness mission led by Julia Hutchins. He arrived in February and preached on tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism. Hutchins locked him out. He continued holding prayer meetings in the house of Richard and Ruth Asberry at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street. On 9 April 1906 Edward Lee and then others there spoke in tongues; Seymour himself did so on 12 April. Crowds gathered in the street, and the meetings moved to a former African Methodist Episcopal church, later used as a stable and warehouse, at 312 Azusa Street.

The Azusa Street Mission

The Apostolic Faith Mission opened there in mid-April 1906. On 18 April, the day of the San Francisco earthquake, the Los Angeles Times reported "a weird babel of tongues". For three years meetings ran almost continuously, three times a day, seven days a week. Black, white, Hispanic and Asian worshippers knelt together. Seymour led with notable humility, often praying with his head inside one of the two wooden crates that served as a pulpit. The mission's paper, The Apostolic Faith (1906-08), edited by Clara Lum and Florence Crawford, reached some 50,000 subscribers worldwide, and visitors carried the movement across America and to Europe, India, Africa and Latin America.

Divisions

In October 1906 Parham came, denounced the meetings and was asked to leave. In 1908 Seymour married Jennie Evans Moore, one of the first at Bonnie Brae to speak in tongues. Shortly afterwards Clara Lum, who reportedly opposed the marriage, left for Portland with Florence Crawford, taking the national and international mailing lists of The Apostolic Faith, which Seymour never recovered. In 1911, while Seymour was away, William Durham preached at the mission and tried to take over its pulpit; Seymour locked him out. The mission's congregation shrank to a small, mostly Black fellowship.

In 1915 he wrote The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission, reserving the office of bishop to "people of color", after repeated experiences of white leaders taking over or leaving.

Key dates

• 1870 - Born at Centerville, Louisiana, 2 May
• c. 1900 - In Cincinnati; joins the Evening Light Saints; loses sight in one eye
• 1905 - Attends Parham's Bible school in Houston
• February 1906 - Arrives in Los Angeles; locked out of Julia Hutchins's mission
• 9 April 1906 - Tongues at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street
• April 1906 - Apostolic Faith Mission opens at 312 Azusa Street
• September 1906 - The Apostolic Faith begins
• October 1906 - Parham denounces the revival
• 1908 - Marries Jennie Evans Moore; Lum and Crawford leave with the mailing lists
• 1911 - Locks out William Durham
• 1915 - Doctrines and Discipline
• 28 September 1922 - Dies in Los Angeles

Teachings and claims

Three works of grace

Seymour held the Holiness pattern of conversion, then entire sanctification as a second work of grace, then the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a third, evidenced by tongues. "The Baptism with the Holy Ghost is a gift of power upon the sanctified life," The Apostolic Faith explained.

Love as the real evidence

Over time - especially after Parham's attack and the divisions that followed - Seymour came to say that divine love, not tongues alone, is the real sign of the Spirit's presence. "If you get angry, or speak evil, or backbite," he wrote, "I care not how many tongues you may have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit."^†

Unity across the colour line

Seymour saw the interracial character of the revival as itself a work of the Spirit. Frank Bartleman, who worshipped there, wrote that "the color line was washed away in the blood".

Healing and the return of Christ

He taught divine healing and the imminent return of Christ, and that the Pentecostal outpouring was the "latter rain" before the end.

Documented controversies

• The break with Parham (1906), who attacked the revival for its emotionalism and racial mixing.
• The loss of the mailing lists in 1908, when Clara Lum left for Portland, reportedly after his marriage, which some in the mission opposed because they expected the Lord's imminent return.
• The Durham episode (1911), in which Seymour locked Durham out after he challenged the Holiness teaching on sanctification.
• Excess at Azusa. Visitors and newspapers described trances, shaking, barking and other manifestations; Seymour and the paper sometimes warned against "wild fire" and counterfeit experiences.
• The 1915 Discipline, which some white Pentecostals read as racial exclusion, and which Seymour presented as a defensive measure.

No personal or financial scandal is recorded.

Death

Seymour died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on 28 September 1922, aged 52. Jennie Evans Seymour led the mission until it lost its building in 1931; she died in 1936. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Los Angeles.

Legacy

For decades white Pentecostal histories gave the leading place to Parham, but historians now generally recognise Seymour as the central figure of early Pentecostalism. Azusa Street was the hub from which the movement spread to the world: the Church of God in Christ, the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World and many others trace their origins wholly or partly to it. He stands out as a rare example of Black leadership of an interracial movement in Jim Crow America, who bore humiliation without bitterness.

Measured against the creeds

Seymour's humility, his love for his opponents and his conviction that the Spirit breaks down the walls between races reflect the gospel's own teaching (Ephesians 2:14; Galatians 3:28), and his later emphasis on love as the true mark of the Spirit echoes 1 Corinthians 13.

His teaching on the Spirit, however, carried the Holiness three-stage pattern and Parham's initial-evidence doctrine. The historic Church holds that the Spirit is given in baptism and confirmation or chrismation, and that no particular gift is the necessary sign of His presence (1 Corinthians 12:29-30). The expectation of an immediate second and third work of grace is unknown to the Fathers, who describe the Christian life as continual growth in grace through Word, prayer and sacraments.

Major writings

• Contributions to The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles, 1906-08)
• The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, Cal. (1915)

Affiliation

Methodist supply pastor (to 1895); independent Holiness preacher; founder of the Apostolic Faith movement and Bethel Bible College, Topeka

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street, The history of tongues

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A sickly boy on the Kansas prairie

Charles Fox Parham was born on 4 June 1873 at Muscatine, Iowa, and moved with his family to Cheney, Kansas, in 1878. As a child he suffered from what he later called "fever" and a heart condition, and a tapeworm that stunted his growth. His mother died when he was twelve. He was converted at about thirteen in a Congregational church and began to lead meetings while still a teenager.

In 1890 he entered Southwest Kansas College, a Methodist school in Winfield, intending to become a minister. He nearly died of rheumatic fever there, and attributed his recovery to prayer; he left the college convinced that God was calling him to preach, not to study medicine.

Methodist supply pastor to independent healer

He served as a supply pastor for the Methodist Episcopal Church at Eudora, Kansas, from 1893, but left in 1895, objecting to denominational control and creeds. He married Sarah Thistlethwaite, a Quaker, in 1896. After the serious illness of their first son and his own renewed sickness, he renounced all medicine and doctors.

He moved to Topeka in 1898 and opened Bethel Healing Home, where the sick came for prayer, and published a magazine, The Apostolic Faith. In 1900 he toured Holiness centres in the east - including Dowie's Zion, A.B. Simpson's Nyack, and Frank Sandford's "Shiloh" community in Durham, Maine - where he heard reports of missionaries receiving foreign languages by the Spirit.

Bethel Bible School and 1 January 1901

In October 1900 he opened Bethel Bible School in a rented mansion in Topeka known as "Stone's Folly", with about forty students. Parham said that before leaving for a few days in December he set them to study what the Bible gives as evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that they concluded independently that it was speaking in tongues. On the night of 1 January 1901, a student, Agnes Ozman, asked Parham to lay hands on her and, by her own account, began to speak in what was taken to be Chinese. Over the next days Parham and others also spoke in tongues. Newspapers reported the event with curiosity and ridicule. The school closed within months.

Revival in Kansas and Texas

After lean years, Parham's healing meetings at Galena, Kansas, in the winter of 1903-04 brought large crowds and claims of many healings. He organised his followers as the Apostolic Faith Movement, with headquarters at Baxter Springs, Kansas, and in 1905 moved his work to Houston, Texas, where he opened another short-term Bible school. There a Black Holiness preacher, William J. Seymour, sat in on his classes - by most accounts in the hallway or doorway, because of Texas segregation laws and customs. Seymour carried the teaching to Los Angeles in 1906.

Zion and Azusa Street

In September 1906 Parham went to Zion City, Illinois, where Dowie's community had collapsed, and won hundreds of residents to Pentecostalism. In October he visited the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where Seymour had invited him as the movement's leader. He was appalled by what he saw - emotional worship, people falling and jerking, and above all Black and white worshippers mixing freely - and denounced it from the pulpit. He was asked to leave and held rival meetings nearby, which failed.

Arrest and decline

In July 1907 Parham was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, with a young man, J.J. Jourdan, on a charge of "the commission of an unnatural offense". The charge was dropped without trial and Parham always denied it, saying he had been framed by enemies, but reports spread quickly - promoted by his rival Wilbur Glenn Voliva of Zion - and his national leadership of the movement ended. He spent the rest of his life as a travelling evangelist from Baxter Springs, with a small loyal following.

Key dates

• 1873 - Born at Muscatine, Iowa, 4 June
• 1890 - Enters Southwest Kansas College
• 1893-95 - Methodist supply pastor at Eudora, Kansas
• 1896 - Marries Sarah Thistlethwaite
• 1898 - Opens Bethel Healing Home in Topeka
• 1900 - Visits Zion, Nyack and Shiloh; opens Bethel Bible School in October
• 1 January 1901 - Agnes Ozman speaks in tongues
• 1903-04 - Galena revival
• 1905 - Bible school in Houston; William Seymour attends
• 1906 - Revival in Zion; visits and denounces Azusa Street
• July 1907 - Arrested in San Antonio; charges dropped
• 1927 - Visits the Holy Land
• 29 January 1929 - Dies at Baxter Springs, Kansas

Teachings and claims

Tongues as the initial evidence

Parham's lasting contribution was the doctrine that speaking in tongues is the necessary initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is a third experience after conversion and sanctification. This "initial evidence" doctrine became the defining teaching of classical Pentecostalism.

Xenolalia

He held that tongues are real foreign languages, given so that missionaries could preach without learning languages. He reported that his students spoke Chinese, Swedish, Bohemian and other languages. Missionaries who went abroad expecting to preach in their tongues found they could not be understood (see A.G. Garr).

The bride and the sealing

He taught that only those baptised in the Spirit would form the "bride of Christ", caught up at His coming, while other Christians would pass through the tribulation.

Other teachings

He taught divine healing without doctors, the imminent premillennial return of Christ, the annihilation (not eternal punishment) of the wicked, and British-Israelism - the belief that the Anglo-Saxons are descended from the lost tribes of Israel. He held that races should remain separate and that intermarriage had caused the Flood.

Documented controversies

• Azusa Street. He denounced the revival in October 1906 as "a darky camp meeting", "spiritual power prostituted", and attacked its interracial worship, writing later of "white people imitating unintelligent, crude negroism".^†
• The 1907 arrest. As above. Historians are divided over what happened; the charge was dropped, and the evidence is not conclusive either way.
• Race. His biographer James Goff records that he praised the Ku Klux Klan for its "high ideals" and spoke at Klan gatherings, still commending it in 1927.
• Durham's death. He claimed the death of his rival William Durham in 1912 as divine vindication of his own teaching on sanctification.^†
• Holy Land expedition. He announced plans to find the Ark of the Covenant, and later raised funds for a trip to the Holy Land in 1927-28.

^†

Death

In January 1929 Parham collapsed while lecturing in Temple, Texas. He was taken home to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where he died of heart disease on 29 January 1929, aged 55. His gravestone is shaped like a pulpit, bearing John 15:13. ^†

Legacy

Parham is the doctrinal founder of classical Pentecostalism: the initial-evidence teaching he formulated is still held by the Assemblies of God and many other Pentecostal churches, which together with the wider Pentecostal-charismatic movement number several hundred million people. His own Apostolic Faith churches remain small.

Pentecostal historians now acknowledge his racism and the questions over his conduct openly, and generally give Seymour and Azusa Street the greater place in the movement's history.

Measured against the creeds

The four traditions confess that the Holy Spirit is given in baptism and in the laying on of hands (confirmation or chrismation), as in Acts 2:38 and 8:14-17. Parham's teaching that there is a later "baptism of the Spirit" that every Christian must seek, and that it is always shown by speaking in tongues, has no basis in the Church's tradition. St Paul asks, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), expecting the answer no. The Fathers - St John Chrysostom and St Augustine among them - regarded the tongues of Pentecost as a sign for the founding of the Church that was not expected to continue in the same form.

His claim that tongues are foreign languages for missionary preaching was tested by events and failed. His teaching that only the Spirit-baptised form the bride of Christ divides the one Church, and his annihilationism and British-Israelism depart from the creeds and from the apostolic teaching that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (Galatians 3:28). His racial teaching is incompatible with the gospel.

Major writings

• Editor, The Apostolic Faith (from 1899)
• A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1902)
• The Everlasting Gospel (1911)
• Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham (1930)

Affiliation

Baptist, then Holiness preacher; pastor of the North Avenue Mission, Chicago

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street

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Kentucky and Chicago

William Howard Durham was born on 10 January 1873 in Kentucky. Few details of his early life are recorded. He joined a Baptist church in 1891 but said he was not truly converted until 1898, while working in Minnesota, through a vision of the crucified Christ. He was drawn into the Holiness movement and, without formal training, became a preacher. In 1901 he became pastor of the North Avenue Mission in Chicago, a small Holiness congregation on the city's north side. He married Bessie Mae, and they had three children.

Azusa Street

News of the Los Angeles revival reached Chicago in 1906. Durham, who had long taught the Holiness doctrine that entire sanctification is a second work of grace, went to Azusa Street in February 1907 to see for himself. On 2 March 1907, after weeks of seeking, he spoke in tongues; William Seymour prophesied that wherever Durham preached the Spirit would fall. Durham returned to Chicago, and the North Avenue Mission became one of the most important Pentecostal centres in North America. Among those who received the Spirit baptism there were E.N. Bell, later first chairman of the Assemblies of God; A.H. Argue, who carried Pentecostalism to Canada; Luigi Francescon, founder of Italian Pentecostal churches in America, Brazil and Argentina; and Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, Swedish immigrants who went on to found the Assemblies of God in Brazil. Aimee Semple McPherson and her first husband Robert Semple also came under his influence.

The Finished Work

His wife died in 1909. In 1910, at a convention in Chicago, Durham publicly announced that the second work of grace was unscriptural: sanctification, he said, is received at conversion through faith in "the finished work of Calvary", and the believer then grows in it. This "Finished Work" teaching provoked fierce controversy, since most early Pentecostals - Parham, Seymour, and the Southern Holiness-Pentecostal churches - held the three-stage pattern.

Los Angeles, 1911

In February 1911 Durham went to Los Angeles. While Seymour was away on a preaching tour, he preached at the Azusa Street Mission, drawing large crowds; when Seymour returned and found that Durham was teaching against sanctification as a second work, he locked the doors against him. Durham set up a rival mission on Seventh Street, where hundreds followed him. Frank Bartleman, the chronicler of Azusa, sided with him.

Key dates

• 1873 - Born in Kentucky, 10 January
• 1898 - Conversion in Minnesota
• 1901 - Pastor of the North Avenue Mission, Chicago
• 2 March 1907 - Speaks in tongues at Azusa Street
• 1907-10 - North Avenue Mission becomes a Pentecostal centre
• 1909 - His wife dies
• May 1910 - Announces the "Finished Work" teaching
• February-May 1911 - Preaches at Azusa Street; locked out by Seymour
• 7 July 1912 - Dies in Los Angeles

Teachings and claims

The finished work of Calvary

Durham taught that the whole of salvation, including sanctification, is accomplished by Christ on the cross and received in a single act of faith at conversion. There is no second work of grace to eradicate the sinful nature. The Christian is identified with Christ in His death and must "reckon" himself dead to sin (Romans 6:11), growing progressively in holiness. "The work is finished," he wrote; it is not done again in two stages.

Tongues as evidence

He kept Parham's doctrine that tongues are the initial evidence of the baptism in the Spirit, which now became the second (rather than third) blessing.

Pentecost as the restoration of the Church

He saw the Pentecostal revival as God's restoration of apostolic Christianity at the end of the age, and denounced denominational organisation.

Documented controversies

• Division of the movement. His teaching split Pentecostalism into the Holiness stream (the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God of Cleveland, the Pentecostal Holiness Church) and the Finished Work stream.
• Azusa Street. His attempt to take over the pulpit while Seymour was away is remembered as a painful episode; Seymour's supporters saw it as disloyalty, Durham's as God's vindication.
• Harsh polemics. Both sides used strong language; Durham accused his opponents of denying the sufficiency of the cross.
• Parham's response. Parham prayed publicly that God would show which of them was wrong by striking the false teacher dead, and claimed Durham's early death as divine judgement.^†

Death

Durham returned to Chicago in 1912 and then came back to Los Angeles exhausted. He contracted pneumonia (some sources say tuberculosis) and died there on 7 July 1912, aged 39.^†

Legacy

Although he died within two years of announcing it, the Finished Work teaching won the majority of white Pentecostals. The Assemblies of God (1914), the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and the Oneness Pentecostals all descend from the Finished Work stream; through Francescon, Berg and Vingren, so do some of the largest Pentecostal churches in Latin America, including the Assemblies of God and the Congregação Cristã in Brazil. The controversy also opened the way to the Oneness "New Issue" of 1913, as some of Durham's followers pressed the logic of simplification further.

Measured against the creeds

On one point Durham's correction brought Pentecostals closer to the historic faith: by rejecting a second instantaneous work of entire sanctification, he returned to the view, shared by the four traditions, that the Christian is made holy in Christ and grows in holiness throughout life. Lutherans in particular will recognise his emphasis on Christ's finished work received by faith.

But he kept the separation of the gift of the Spirit from Christian initiation, and the claim that tongues are its necessary evidence, which the historic Church does not teach; the Spirit is given in baptism and the laying on of hands (Acts 2:38; 8:14-17; 19:5-6). His rejection of church order also left the movement with no way to settle disputes except division - as his own story shows.

Major writings

• Editor, The Pentecostal Testimony (Chicago, from 1909)
• "The Finished Work of Calvary", The Pentecostal Testimony (1911)

Affiliation

Baptist minister in Canada; assistant to William Durham in Los Angeles; founder of Oneness Pentecostalism

Appears in

Oneness Pentecostalism

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From Australia to Canada

Frank J. Ewart was born in 1876 in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, and grew up in a Christian family. He worked in the bush and as a lay preacher before emigrating to Canada in 1903, where he became a Baptist minister and served a church in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.^†

Pentecost and dismissal

In 1908 he received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues, and was dismissed by his Baptist church. He moved to Los Angeles in 1911 and became William Durham's assistant at the Seventh Street mission, which had been formed after Durham was locked out of Azusa Street. When Durham died in July 1912, Ewart succeeded him as pastor.

The "New Issue"

In April 1913 a great World-Wide Camp Meeting was held at Arroyo Seco, near Los Angeles, led by Maria Woodworth-Etter. During a baptismal service the Canadian evangelist R.E. McAlister remarked that the apostles had always baptised in the name of Jesus, never with the Trinitarian formula of Matthew 28:19. A man named John G. Scheppe, after a night of prayer, ran through the camp shouting that he had seen the power of the name of Jesus. Ewart and others began to study the question.

Ewart concluded that "Jesus" is the one name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that the Trinitarian formula was a later invention. He developed a Oneness doctrine of God: there is one God, who is one Person, manifested as Father in creation, Son in the incarnation and Holy Spirit in regeneration.

The rebaptisms

On 15 April 1914, at a tent meeting at Belvedere, east Los Angeles, Ewart rebaptised Glenn A. Cook in the name of Jesus, and Cook then rebaptised him. They preached that all who had been baptised with the Trinitarian formula needed to be rebaptised in Jesus' name. Cook carried the message east; among those rebaptised were G.T. Haywood of Indianapolis, leader of a large interracial congregation, and several leading ministers of the newly formed Assemblies of God, including its first chairman, E.N. Bell, who was rebaptised in 1915 but later returned to the Trinitarian position. Ewart published his teaching in a paper, Meat in Due Season.

The split

At its General Council in St Louis in October 1916 the Assemblies of God adopted a "Statement of Fundamental Truths" with a strong section on the Trinity. About a quarter of its ministers - some 156 - withdrew, and the Oneness movement organised separately, eventually in bodies such as the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (organised 1916-18 and led for years by Haywood) and, after a racial division in 1924, churches that merged in 1945 as the United Pentecostal Church. Ewart continued as a pastor and evangelist in California for the rest of his life.

Key dates

• 1876 - Born in Australia
• 1903 - Emigrates to Canada; Baptist pastor
• 1908 - Baptism in the Spirit; dismissed by his Baptist church
• 1911 - Assistant to William Durham in Los Angeles
• 1912 - Succeeds Durham as pastor
• April 1913 - Arroyo Seco camp meeting; the "New Issue" begins
• 15 April 1914 - Rebaptism at Belvedere with Glenn Cook
• 1915 - E.N. Bell and other Assemblies of God leaders rebaptised
• October 1916 - Assemblies of God affirms the Trinity; Oneness ministers withdraw
• 1945 - United Pentecostal Church formed
• 1947 - The Phenomenon of Pentecost
• 13 August 1947 - Dies

Teachings and claims

One God, one Person

Ewart taught that God is absolutely one, not three Persons. "Father", "Son" and "Holy Spirit" are titles or manifestations of the one God, not distinct Persons. The fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Jesus (Colossians 2:9), who is the Father incarnate.

The Son as the human nature

He distinguished the divine and human in Christ by saying that the Father is the divine nature, or Spirit, in Jesus, and the Son is the human nature. The Son therefore had a beginning at Bethlehem; there is no eternal Son.

Baptism in Jesus' name

Since "Jesus" is the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Matthew 28:19 is fulfilled by baptising "in the name of Jesus Christ" (Acts 2:38). Baptism with the Trinitarian formula is invalid, and those so baptised must be rebaptised.

The new birth

Later Oneness teaching, which Ewart helped shape, held that full salvation requires repentance, baptism in Jesus' name and the baptism of the Spirit evidenced by tongues - a three-part reading of Acts 2:38.

Documented controversies

• The rebaptisms of 1914-16, which divided congregations and families and split the young Assemblies of God.
• The 1916 General Council, where Trinitarian leaders such as J.R. Flower and E.N. Bell insisted on a doctrinal statement; Oneness ministers saw this as a return to man-made creeds.
• Charges of reviving ancient heresy. Critics identified Oneness teaching with the third-century modalism of Sabellius; Ewart and later Oneness writers rejected the label, though they acknowledged the similarity.

Death

Ewart died of cancer on 13 August 1947, aged about 71, shortly after publishing his history of the movement.

Legacy

Ewart is regarded as the founding theologian of Oneness Pentecostalism. The movement today includes the United Pentecostal Church International, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the True Jesus Church in China, and large Oneness churches in Latin America, Africa and Asia; estimates of its size range from twenty to forty million people.^† His The Phenomenon of Pentecost (1947) remains its classic history from the inside.

Measured against the creeds

Oneness teaching is a direct denial of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as confessed in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed: "we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance". The Church rejected modalism - the teaching that Father, Son and Spirit are modes or manifestations of one Person - in the third century, against Noetus, Praxeas and Sabellius, long before Nicaea. The Gospels show the Son praying to the Father, the Father speaking from heaven at the Son's baptism while the Spirit descends, and the Son sending the Spirit from the Father (John 15:26).

Ewart's teaching that the Son began at Bethlehem also denies the Creed's confession of "the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages". His rejection of baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit sets aside the Lord's own command (Matthew 28:19) and the universal practice of the Church from the Didache onward. The four traditions therefore regard Oneness Pentecostalism as outside the historic Christian faith, while recognising the sincerity of many of its members.

Major writings

• Editor, Meat in Due Season (from 1915)
• The Name and the Book (1936)
• The Phenomenon of Pentecost (1947)

Affiliation

Zion City resident; Pentecostal pastor in Dallas; early Assemblies of God minister (resigned 1918); Christian and Missionary Alliance evangelist; later associate of William Branham

Appears in

Topeka and Azusa Street, The healing revival, 1947-58, and after

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Nebraska and Zion City

Fred Francis Bosworth was born on 17 January 1877 in Utica, Nebraska, and grew up on farms in Nebraska and Iowa. He left school early, worked at a variety of jobs, and was a gifted cornet player. As a young man he was converted at a Methodist meeting, and around 1900 he was seriously ill with a lung complaint, from which he said he was healed through prayer.^†

He was drawn to John Alexander Dowie's Christian Catholic Church and moved to Zion City, Illinois, where he led the town's band. In 1906, when Charles Parham came to Zion after Dowie's fall, Bosworth was among the many there who received the Pentecostal experience and spoke in tongues.

Dallas

By 1909-10 he was pastoring a Pentecostal congregation in Dallas, Texas, and in 1912 he invited the veteran evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter to hold a campaign there. The meetings ran for about five months and made Dallas one of the important early centres of Pentecostalism in the South. His church also drew Black worshippers, and in 1911, at Hearne, Texas, he was beaten by a white mob for preaching to a Black congregation. ^†

In 1914 he was among the ministers at the founding of the Assemblies of God in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

The evidence question

Bosworth came to doubt the Pentecostal doctrine that speaking in tongues is the necessary "initial evidence" of the baptism in the Spirit. He observed many people who had spoken in tongues without lasting change, and others who showed every sign of the Spirit's power without tongues. In 1918 he published Do All Speak with Tongues?, answering Paul's question in 1 Corinthians 12:30 in the negative, and resigned from the Assemblies of God before its General Council that year adopted initial evidence as a fundamental doctrine. He joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance, whose founder A.B. Simpson had welcomed tongues as a gift but never made it a test.

Christ the Healer

With his brother B.B. Bosworth he held large healing campaigns in North America through the 1920s, including in Ottawa, Toronto, Pittsburgh and Chicago. He began radio broadcasting in Chicago and was among the early religious broadcasters. In 1924 he published Christ the Healer, a set of sermons arguing that healing is provided in the atonement as surely as forgiveness, and that faith rests on the promises of Scripture rather than on feelings or symptoms.

With Branham

After a quieter period in the 1930s, Bosworth was drawn back into public ministry in 1948 when he met William Branham, and for some years he travelled with him as teacher and campaign associate, including on the South African tour of 1951. He defended Branham publicly, notably in the Houston debate of January 1950 with a Baptist critic, and described him as the most sensitive person to the Holy Spirit he had known. In his last years he held campaigns of his own in Africa and elsewhere.

Key dates

• 17 January 1877 - Born in Utica, Nebraska
• c. 1900 - Moves to Zion City; leads the town band
• 1906 - Receives the Pentecostal experience in Zion
• c. 1910 - Pastor in Dallas
• 1911 - Beaten at Hearne, Texas
• 1912 - Woodworth-Etter campaign in Dallas
• 1914 - Present at the founding of the Assemblies of God
• 1918 - Do All Speak with Tongues?; resigns from the Assemblies of God
• 1924 - Christ the Healer
• 1948 - Joins William Branham's campaigns
• 1951 - South Africa with Branham
• 23 January 1958 - Dies in Miami

Teachings and claims

Healing in the atonement

Bosworth's central argument was that Isaiah 53:4-5 and Matthew 8:16-17 show that Christ bore sickness as well as sin, so that healing is as much part of redemption as forgiveness. It is God's will to heal every believer who asks in faith. Faith comes by hearing the promise (Romans 10:17), so the sick should fix their minds on Scripture, "act" on the promise and thank God for healing before the symptoms disappear.

Faith and confession

He taught that believers should not speak of their symptoms as though the promise were untrue. This "confession" teaching, which drew on A.B. Simpson and E.W. Kenyon, passed through Christ the Healer into the Word of Faith movement.

Tongues and the Spirit

Against the Assemblies of God, he held that tongues are one of the gifts of the Spirit, given to some, and that the baptism in the Spirit is evidenced by power and holiness rather than by a single sign.

Documented controversies

Initial evidence

His challenge to initial evidence made him the centre of the first doctrinal controversy in the Assemblies of God, and his departure in 1918 confirmed that the doctrine would be a mark of classical Pentecostalism.

Endorsement of Branham

His support for Branham continued while Branham's teaching moved towards anti-Trinitarianism and other doctrines that Bosworth's own churches rejected. Historians note that he did not publicly distance himself, though he died before Branham's later teaching was fully developed.^†

Unhealed sick

As with every teacher of healing in the atonement, his theology left those who were not healed with the implication that their faith had failed - a pastoral criticism made of the movement from the beginning.

Death

He died on 23 January 1958, aged 81, at his home in Miami, Florida. Friends reported that he spoke of seeing those who had gone before him and died peacefully.^†

Legacy

Christ the Healer has remained in print for a century and is one of the most widely read books on divine healing; it shaped the healing revival of the 1940s-50s and the teaching of Kenneth Hagin and later Word of Faith preachers. His 1918 dissent remains the classic statement, within Pentecostalism, against initial evidence, and is cited by charismatics in the historic churches who hold that the Spirit's gifts need not include tongues. His courage at Hearne is remembered as an early instance of interracial Pentecostal ministry in the South.

Measured against the creeds

Bosworth's correction on tongues brought him closer to the historic churches, which have never made any single gift the evidence of the Spirit; Paul's rhetorical question, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), expects the answer no.

His doctrine of healing is another matter. The historic churches confess that Christ's death and resurrection are the ground of all God's gifts, including the final healing of the body in the resurrection, and they pray for the sick, anoint them and expect God to act (James 5:14-15). But they do not teach that bodily healing is guaranteed now to every believer who believes rightly. Matthew applies Isaiah 53 to Christ's healings during His ministry; Paul left Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20) and told Timothy to take wine for his stomach (1 Timothy 5:23); and the apostle's own "thorn" was not removed (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Teaching the sick to deny their symptoms, and implying that continued sickness reveals unbelief, places a burden on them that Scripture does not lay.

Major writings

• Do All Speak with Tongues? (1918)
• Christ the Healer (1924; enlarged editions to 1948)

Affiliation

Calvinistic Methodist (Presbyterian Church of Wales); former collier and blacksmith's apprentice

Appears in

The Welsh Revival, 1904-05

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Collier and seeker

Evan John Roberts was born on 8 June 1878 at Island House, Loughor, near Swansea in south Wales, one of fourteen children of a Calvinistic Methodist family. At twelve he went down the pit with his father, who had injured his leg, and worked as a collier for twelve years, later training as a blacksmith. He was intensely devout. He attended Moriah Chapel at Loughor, read his Bible in the mine, and for eleven years, he said, prayed for revival. In 1904 he began training for the ministry at the preparatory school at Newcastle Emlyn.

Blaenannerch

In September 1904 he attended a convention at Blaenannerch in Cardiganshire, influenced by the Keswick movement, where the evangelist Seth Joshua prayed "Bend us, O Lord". Roberts cried out, "Bend me! Bend me!" and later described an overwhelming experience of God's love that left him convinced he was called to bring revival to Wales. He reported visions - including one of a hundred thousand people being added to the Church, which he took as a promise.

Loughor and the spread of the revival

On 31 October 1904 he returned to Loughor and began holding meetings for the young people of Moriah. Within days the meetings ran late into the night with weeping, confession and singing. Newspapers, above all the Western Mail, reported the meetings daily, and crowds came from across Wales. Roberts toured the valleys of Glamorgan and beyond from November 1904, often with a group of young women singers. Meetings had no fixed order: prayers, testimonies and hymns broke out spontaneously, and he sometimes did not preach at all. Chapels reported tens of thousands of new members; taverns and courts reported less business, and pit ponies reportedly no longer understood the colliers, who had stopped swearing.

The revival spread through Wales, to Welsh communities in England and America, and was reported worldwide. Visitors came from Los Angeles, India, Korea and elsewhere, and Frank Bartleman in Los Angeles corresponded with him.

Strain and withdrawal

From early 1905 Roberts showed growing signs of strain. He would stop a meeting to declare that someone present was disobeying the Spirit or hiding sin, sometimes refusing to continue until they yielded. He cancelled engagements on what he said was divine instruction, and in February 1905 kept seven days of silence. In January 1905 the Congregational minister Peter Price of Dowlais criticised the revival in the Western Mail as largely "a sham revival, a mockery... a blasphemous travesty of the real thing", though he accepted that there was a real work of God alongside it; the letter provoked a fierce controversy.

By 1906 Roberts had collapsed from exhaustion. He was taken to Leicester to recover at the home of Jessie Penn-Lewis and her husband, and remained there for some years, largely withdrawn from public life, devoting himself to prayer and intercession.

Later years

With Penn-Lewis he wrote War on the Saints (1912), arguing that many supernatural experiences in revival - including some in Wales and in the new Pentecostal movement - were deceptions of evil spirits on believers who had become passive. He returned to Wales in the late 1920s, preached occasionally (notably at Gorseinon in 1928), and spent his last decades living quietly in Cardiff, writing poetry and letters and praying.

Key dates

• 1878 - Born at Loughor, 8 June
• 1890 - Begins work in the coal mine
• 1904 - Enters the school at Newcastle Emlyn
• September 1904 - "Bend me" experience at Blaenannerch
• 31 October 1904 - First meetings at Moriah Chapel, Loughor
• November 1904-1905 - Revival tours across south Wales
• 31 January 1905 - Peter Price's letter in the Western Mail
• 1905 - Visits Liverpool and north Wales; growing strain
• 1906 - Collapses; goes to Leicester to the Penn-Lewis home
• 1912 - War on the Saints
• 1928 - Brief return to public ministry at Gorseinon
• 29 January 1951 - Dies in Cardiff

Teachings and claims

Four conditions of revival

Roberts set out four conditions for receiving the Spirit:

1. Confess every known sin to God and put right any wrong done to others.
2. Put away anything doubtful from your life.
3. Obey the Holy Spirit promptly.
4. Confess Christ publicly.

The leading of the Spirit

He taught and practised total dependence on the immediate leading of the Spirit in meetings, believing that human planning quenched Him. He claimed visions and direct voices guiding his movements and words.

Warnings against deception

In later life he taught, with Penn-Lewis, that believers who abandon the use of their mind and will in passive surrender become vulnerable to evil spirits, who counterfeit the works of the Spirit, and that the Church must "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1).

Documented controversies

• Naming hidden sinners. At times he announced from the platform that a hidden sinner was blocking the Spirit, or described individuals' spiritual condition; critics thought this was manipulative and damaging to those singled out.
• Disorder. Some ministers criticised the lack of preaching and order and the emotional excess of the meetings.
• The Peter Price letter (31 January 1905) and the controversy it provoked.
• His relationship with Penn-Lewis. Some Welsh contemporaries believed that she had removed him from Wales and kept him isolated; others saw her home as a refuge that saved his health. Historians remain divided.
• Lasting fruit. Chapel membership in Wales fell back within a few years, and some historians argue that much of the revival's growth did not last.

Death

Roberts died in Cardiff on 29 January 1951, aged 72, and was buried in the family grave behind Moriah Chapel, Loughor, where a memorial stands.

Legacy

The Welsh Revival added an estimated 100,000 members to the Welsh chapels and became a model of revival for evangelicals worldwide. It fed the expectations of the Azusa Street revival (1906), the Khasi Hills and Mukti revivals in India, and the Pyongyang revival in Korea (1907). Roberts himself became the face of the revival, though many ministers and lay people led it.

His later withdrawal and his warnings in War on the Saints are less often remembered. They influenced the cautious attitude of many British evangelicals towards Pentecostalism and remain an important early critique of the movement from inside the revival tradition.

Measured against the creeds

The repentance, reconciliation, sobriety and renewed worship the revival brought are fruits the whole Church can recognise, and Roberts's four conditions are in substance the Church's own call to conversion. The difficulties lay in his reliance on immediate inner guidance, which put the revival at the mercy of one young man's impressions and visions, without the steadying framework of Word, sacrament and ordered ministry. St Paul insists that "God is not the author of confusion" and that "the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets" (1 Corinthians 14:32-33).

His own later conclusion - that revival can be counterfeited and that passivity opens the soul to deception - stands close to the long experience of the Church, expressed in the Eastern teaching on spiritual "prelest" (delusion) and in the Western tradition of the discernment of spirits.

Major writings

• With Jessie Penn-Lewis, War on the Saints (1912)
• With Jessie Penn-Lewis, The Overcomer (magazine articles, 1909-14)
• Letters and poems, preserved in the National Library of Wales

Affiliation

Pastor of Christ Temple, Indianapolis; presiding bishop of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World

Appears in

Oneness Pentecostalism

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Greencastle and Indianapolis

Garfield Thomas Haywood was born on 15 July 1880 in Greencastle, Indiana, one of a large Black family, and moved with them to Indianapolis as a small child. He left high school after two years. A talented draughtsman, he worked as a cartoonist for two Black weekly newspapers in Indianapolis, The Freeman and The Recorder. He was active in Baptist and Methodist churches as a young man and taught Sunday school.

Pentecost

In 1908 he attended a small Pentecostal mission in Indianapolis led by Henry Prentiss, a Black preacher who had been at the Azusa Street revival, and received the baptism in the Spirit with tongues. In 1909 Prentiss handed the little congregation to him. Under Haywood it grew steadily, drawing white as well as Black members, and it became one of the largest Pentecostal churches in the Midwest. He also edited a periodical, The Voice in the Wilderness.

The New Issue

In 1913, at the Arroyo Seco camp meeting near Los Angeles, the teaching arose that baptism should be administered "in the name of Jesus" rather than in the triune name, and this grew into the "New Issue" - the doctrine that God is one person who is revealed as Father, Son and Spirit, and that Jesus is the name of the one God. In March 1915 Glenn Cook, one of the teaching's early promoters, came to Indianapolis and rebaptised Haywood, and Haywood in turn rebaptised several hundred members of his congregation. His adoption of the teaching gave it its most influential Black leader.

The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World

When the Assemblies of God, at its General Council of 1916, adopted a strongly Trinitarian statement, Oneness ministers withdrew. Many joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW), a small body organised around 1907, and in 1918 the General Assembly of the Apostolic Assemblies merged with it. Haywood became its general secretary and its most prominent figure. For several years it was one of the few genuinely interracial Pentecostal bodies in America, with Black and white ministers holding office together.

Division

The arrangement came under growing strain. Southern white ministers found it difficult to travel to conventions in the North and to accept Black leadership, and Jim Crow laws made interracial meetings in the South hard to hold. In 1924 most white ministers withdrew to form separate bodies, which later became part of the United Pentecostal Church. The PAW reorganised under an episcopal structure in 1925 with Haywood as its first presiding bishop. In 1924 his congregation dedicated a large new building, Christ Temple.

Key dates

• 15 July 1880 - Born in Greencastle, Indiana
• 1908 - Receives the baptism in the Spirit
• 1909 - Becomes pastor of the Indianapolis mission
• March 1915 - Rebaptised in Jesus' name; rebaptises his congregation
• 1916 - Oneness ministers leave the Assemblies of God
• 1918 - Merger forms the enlarged Pentecostal Assemblies of the World; Haywood general secretary
• 1924 - White ministers withdraw; Christ Temple dedicated
• 1925 - Presiding bishop of the PAW
• 12 April 1931 - Dies in Indianapolis

Teachings and claims

The oneness of God

Haywood taught that God is absolutely one, not three persons; that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are titles or manifestations of the one God; and that Jesus Christ is the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Colossians 2:9). He set out this teaching in The Victim of the Flaming Sword and Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah.

The Acts 2:38 pattern

He taught that salvation in its full New Testament sense consists of repentance, baptism by immersion in the name of Jesus Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit evidenced by tongues, following Acts 2:38. Many in the movement, including Haywood, regarded baptism in the triune formula as invalid, and taught that the new birth of John 3:5 is water and Spirit baptism together.

Holiness and hymns

He kept the Holiness ethic of the early Pentecostals. A prolific hymn-writer, he wrote songs still sung in Oneness and other Pentecostal churches, among them "Jesus, the Son of God" and "I See a Crimson Stream of Blood".

Documented controversies

The New Issue

His rebaptism of his congregation helped carry the Oneness teaching into a large part of early Pentecostalism and deepened the division of the movement in 1916.

Race

The 1924 split of the PAW along racial lines is often cited as one of the saddest episodes of early Pentecostal history. Historians attribute it both to white ministers' unwillingness to accept Black leadership and to the practical pressures of segregation; Haywood is remembered as having borne it with dignity.

Death

He died in Indianapolis on 12 April 1931, aged 50, after a period of illness, and was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery.^†

Legacy

The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World remains one of the largest Oneness Pentecostal bodies, with a predominantly Black membership, and honours Haywood as its founding bishop. Christ Temple continues in Indianapolis. His hymns, his art and his leadership of an interracial church in the age of segregation have made him one of the most respected Black church leaders of early Pentecostalism, even among those who reject his theology.

Measured against the creeds

Haywood's doctrine of God is the modalism that the early Church rejected in the third century in Noetus, Praxeas and Sabellius. The Nicene Creed confesses the Son as "begotten of the Father before all worlds", distinct from the Father as person while one with Him in being; Christ prays to the Father, is sent by Him, and with the Father sends the Spirit (John 14:16; 15:26; 17:5). Baptism in the triune name is Christ's own command (Matthew 28:19) and the universal practice of the Church from the earliest documents; the phrase "in the name of Jesus" in Acts identifies the baptism as Christian, not a liturgical formula replacing the one Christ gave. To rebaptise those already baptised in the triune name denies that their baptism was Christ's.

His defence of Christ's full deity, his preaching of repentance and his refusal to accept the colour line in the Church deserve to be remembered. But on the doctrine of the Trinity, which the creeds confess as the heart of the faith, his teaching departs from it.

Major writings

• The Victim of the Flaming Sword (c. 1913-20)
• Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah (c. 1920s)
• The Finest of the Wheat (collected writings)
• Editor, The Voice in the Wilderness
• Hymns, including "Jesus, the Son of God" and "I See a Crimson Stream of Blood"

Affiliation

Pentecostal evangelist; founder of Angelus Temple (1923) and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (1927)

Appears in

Pentecostal celebrity evangelists, 1910s-1940s

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Salvation Army girl in Ontario

Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy was born on 9 October 1890 on a farm near Salford, Ontario, Canada. Her mother, Minnie, was a devoted Salvation Army worker who had dedicated her daughter to God's service before her birth; her father, James Kennedy, was a Methodist farmer much older than his wife. As a teenager Aimee questioned her faith after reading about evolution at school, and wrote to a Canadian newspaper about it.

Robert Semple and China

In December 1907 she heard the Irish Pentecostal evangelist Robert Semple preach in Ingersoll, was converted, and soon after received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues. She married Semple in August 1908. They worked with William Durham's North Avenue Mission in Chicago, and in 1910 sailed for China as missionaries. Within weeks of arriving in Hong Kong both contracted malaria; Robert died on 19 August 1910. A month later Aimee, aged nineteen, gave birth to their daughter, Roberta, and returned to America.

Harold McPherson and the call

In New York she worked with her mother for the Salvation Army and in 1912 married Harold McPherson, an accountant; their son Rolf was born in 1913. In Providence, Rhode Island, she suffered illness and depression, and became convinced that God was calling her to preach. In 1915 she left with the children for Canada and began preaching at a tent meeting in Mount Forest, Ontario. Harold joined her for a time, but the marriage failed; they divorced in 1921.

The gospel car

From 1916 to 1918 she crossed America in a "Gospel Car" painted with slogans such as "Jesus is coming soon - get ready", holding tent revivals on the East Coast and in Florida with her mother as manager. She edited her own magazine, The Bridal Call (from 1917). In 1918 she drove to Los Angeles, where supporters gave her a house. Over the next years her campaigns in Baltimore, San Diego, Denver, Wichita and elsewhere drew tens of thousands, with healing services for the sick that filled stadiums and auditoriums.

Angelus Temple

On 1 January 1923 she opened Angelus Temple in Echo Park, Los Angeles, a domed church seating about 5,300, built with money raised in her campaigns. It held services every day and three on Sundays. She preached "illustrated sermons" with costumes, sets, and props - once riding a motorcycle onto the stage dressed as a traffic officer to arrest sin. In 1924 she opened radio station KFSQ, one of the first religious stations in the country. She founded L.I.F.E. Bible College (1923), a prayer tower with continuous prayer, and a commissary that fed, clothed and found work for tens of thousands during the Great Depression, regardless of creed or race. In 1927 her churches were incorporated as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

The disappearance

On 18 May 1926 she disappeared while swimming at Venice Beach and was presumed drowned; two people died searching for her body. On 23 June she reappeared at Agua Prieta, Mexico, saying she had been kidnapped and held in a shack in the desert and had escaped. Investigators found no shack and noted that her shoes showed little sign of a long desert walk. Newspaper witnesses claimed she had spent part of the time with Kenneth Ormiston, a married former radio engineer of the temple, at a cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea, which he denied. She, her mother, Ormiston and others were charged with criminal conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice; the charges were dropped in January 1927 when the prosecution's key witness was judged no longer credible. The case was never resolved.

Later years

After 1926 she broke with her mother (1927) and later with her daughter Roberta (1937), in disputes over control of the temple and its money; she faced dozens of lawsuits. In 1931 she married the actor and singer David Hutton, which the Foursquare Church's own teaching on remarriage made controversial; they divorced in 1934. She suffered a breakdown in the early 1930s. In her last years she worked with greater calm, sold war bonds during the Second World War, and handed leadership to her son, Rolf.

Key dates

• 1890 - Born near Salford, Ontario, 9 October
• 1907-08 - Converted under Robert Semple; marries him
• 1910 - Missionary in China; Robert dies; daughter Roberta born
• 1912 - Marries Harold McPherson
• 1915 - Begins preaching in Mount Forest, Ontario
• 1916-18 - Gospel car tours; The Bridal Call
• 1918 - Moves to Los Angeles
• 1921 - Divorces McPherson
• 1 January 1923 - Opens Angelus Temple
• 1924 - Radio station KFSQ
• May-June 1926 - Disappearance and reappearance
• 1927 - International Church of the Foursquare Gospel incorporated
• 1931-34 - Marriage to David Hutton
• 27 September 1944 - Dies in Oakland, California

Teachings and claims

The Foursquare Gospel

Inspired, she said, by a vision of Ezekiel's four-faced creatures during an Oakland campaign in 1922, she summed up her message as the "Foursquare Gospel": Jesus as Saviour, Baptiser with the Holy Spirit, Healer and Coming King. It closely adapted A.B. Simpson's Fourfold Gospel, replacing "Sanctifier" with "Baptiser".

Pentecost without excess

She kept the Pentecostal doctrines of Spirit baptism and divine healing but presented them in a dignified, accessible style, discouraging the wilder manifestations that had given Pentecostalism a bad name. Tongues were encouraged in an upstairs "tarry room" rather than in the main services.

Christian America

She preached a patriotic, conservative message, opposing evolution in schools and the "modernism" of the mainline churches, and saw America as a nation with a Christian destiny.

Women in ministry

She held that the Spirit calls women as well as men to preach, and ordained women in her church.

Documented controversies

• The 1926 disappearance, the conspiracy charges and the doubts that never went away.
• Three marriages, including remarriage while her second husband was living, which troubled many of her own followers.
• Family disputes and lawsuits over money and control, with her mother and her daughter, reported widely in the press.
• Showmanship. Critics, among them H.L. Mencken and many fellow ministers, saw her illustrated sermons and publicity as entertainment rather than worship.
• Healings. Claims of healing at her campaigns were questioned; she herself moved away from large healing meetings after the 1920s.

Death

On 26 September 1944 she preached at a rally in Oakland, California. The next morning she was found unconscious in her hotel room and died that day, aged 53. The coroner found an overdose of secobarbital (Seconal), a prescribed sleeping medication, and ruled the death accidental, complicated by kidney failure. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale.

Legacy

The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel has grown to several million members in some 150 countries. Aimee Semple McPherson was the most famous woman evangelist in American history, a pioneer of women's ministry, of religious radio and of large-scale social relief, and an early example of the celebrity evangelist that later televangelism made common. She helped make Pentecostalism respectable in the eyes of many Americans.

Measured against the creeds

Her charity in the Depression and her preaching of Christ's love brought many to faith, and she affirmed the Trinity and the historic doctrines of Christ. Her Foursquare Gospel, however, made a separate Spirit baptism and healing in the atonement part of the core of the gospel, which the historic Church does not teach.

Two further issues stand out against the Church's tradition. Remarriage after divorce while a former spouse is living is not permitted in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (the Orthodox allowing it only by economy, with penitence) and was resisted by most Protestants of her day; it troubled her own church. And her ministry depended heavily on her own personality and stagecraft. The four traditions hold that worship is the offering of the whole Church to God, ordered by the liturgy, not a performance centred on a preacher.

Major writings

• This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings (1919, revised 1923)
• In the Service of the King: The Story of My Life (1927)
• The Story of My Life (1951, posthumous)
• Editor, The Bridal Call (from 1917), later The Foursquare Crusader

Affiliation

Disciples of Christ missionary in India (1923-54); founding dean of Fuller Seminary's School of World Mission (1965)

Appears in

Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch, The modern movements in India

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A missionary family

Donald Anderson McGavran was born on 15 December 1897 in Damoh, in the Central Provinces of British India, the son and grandson of missionaries of the Disciples of Christ. The family returned to America when he was a boy. He served in the US Army in the First World War, studied at Butler College in Indianapolis, and in 1920, at a student missionary convention, committed himself to mission. He studied at Yale Divinity School and the College of Missions in Indianapolis and married Mary Howard in 1922.

India, 1923-54

In 1923 he and his wife went to India under the United Christian Missionary Society. He served as an educator and administrator and, from 1929, as secretary of the mission, responsible for its schools, hospitals and churches in the Central Provinces. In 1936 he received a doctorate in education from Columbia University.

He was troubled that after decades of work, the mission's stations had produced only small, static congregations, while elsewhere in India whole communities were becoming Christian in "mass movements". In 1934-36 he worked with the Methodist bishop J. Waskom Pickett, whose study Christian Mass Movements in India (1933) had documented these group conversions, on surveys of church growth in the central provinces. From 1937 he gave up administration to work as an evangelist among the Satnami people of Chhattisgarh, hoping to see a people movement begin; over seventeen years, about a thousand were baptised, fewer than he had hoped.

The Bridges of God

His reflection on these years produced The Bridges of God (1955), which argued that peoples, not only individuals, come to faith, and that missions should seek "people movements" in which groups become Christian together along the bridges of family and kinship, rather than extracting converts one by one from their communities into mission compounds. The book was widely read and widely contested.

The Institute of Church Growth

After further studies of churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia, he founded the Institute of Church Growth at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon, in 1961. In 1965 Fuller Theological Seminary invited him to become founding dean of its School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth in Pasadena. He recruited a faculty that included C. Peter Wagner and Ralph Winter, and for a decade the school was the centre of evangelical missiology. Understanding Church Growth (1970) became the standard text of the movement. He continued to write, teach and edit the Church Growth Bulletin until his eighties.

Lausanne and after

His ideas were prominent at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne in 1974, and controversial there. The Lausanne Committee's 1977 Pasadena consultation was devoted to the homogeneous unit principle. In his last years he defended the priority of evangelism against what he saw as the dilution of mission into social action.

Key dates

• 15 December 1897 - Born in Damoh, India
• 1922 - Marries Mary Howard
• 1923 - Missionary in India with the Disciples of Christ
• 1929-37 - Secretary of the India mission
• 1936 - PhD, Columbia University
• 1937-54 - Evangelist among the Satnami of Chhattisgarh
• 1955 - The Bridges of God
• 1961 - Institute of Church Growth, Eugene, Oregon
• 1965 - Founding dean, School of World Mission, Fuller
• 1970 - Understanding Church Growth
• 1974 - Lausanne Congress
• 1977 - Pasadena consultation on the homogeneous unit principle
• 10 July 1990 - Dies in Altadena, California

Teachings and claims

Church growth as faithfulness

McGavran taught that God wills the growth of His Church, and that faithfulness in mission should be measured by whether people are actually being discipled and churches multiplied. He criticised what he called "search theology", which valued the proclaiming of the gospel regardless of response, and urged "harvest theology": find the responsive peoples and reap.

People movements

He held that people decide together, especially in group-oriented societies, and that missions should welcome "multi-individual, mutually interdependent conversion".

The homogeneous unit principle

His most famous and most disputed thesis was that "people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers". Churches grow fastest when they consist mainly of one people group, and missions should plant churches within each group rather than require converts to join a church of another culture or caste.

Discipling and perfecting

He distinguished "discipling" - bringing a people to Christ and baptism - from "perfecting" - their growth in holiness afterwards, and argued that missions had too often delayed the first in the name of the second.

Documented controversies

Segregation and caste

The homogeneous unit principle was criticised from the start as legitimising divided churches - racially segregated churches in America and caste-based churches in India. At Lausanne and at the 1977 consultation, critics argued that the gospel creates one new humanity in which the divisions of race and class are overcome (Ephesians 2:14-16; Galatians 3:28). McGavran replied that he was describing how people come to faith, not how they should remain, but the distinction was not always observed by his followers.

Pragmatism

Theologians criticised the movement's reliance on statistics and the social sciences, arguing that it treated the Church as an enterprise to be optimised and growth as the measure of truth.

Social action

His insistence on the priority of evangelism over social and political engagement placed him at the centre of the evangelical debate on mission in the 1970s.

Death

He died at his home in Altadena, California, on 10 July 1990, aged 92, a few months after his wife.^†

Legacy

McGavran is regarded as the father of the Church Growth Movement. Through Fuller, his ideas shaped evangelical mission strategy for a generation, including the focus on "unreached people groups". In North America, Wagner and others applied them to the local church, giving rise to the church-planting, seeker-sensitive and megachurch movements, and, through Wagner, eventually to the New Apostolic Reformation. In India, people-movement thinking remains influential in mission strategy.

Measured against the creeds

McGavran's concern that the Church actually make disciples of the nations is the concern of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), and his insistence that converts not be torn from their families and communities echoes the household baptisms of Acts (16:15, 33) and the Church's long practice of baptising whole peoples. His work drew attention to forms of mission that had, in practice, made Western culture a condition of the gospel.

But the historic churches confess the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Its catholicity means that it gathers every people into one body at one table, so that in the Eucharist "we, being many, are one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17). A principle that builds churches around the boundaries of race or caste, however useful for growth, sits uneasily with that confession; the Church in India, in particular, has long struggled against caste divisions within its own congregations. And the Church's faithfulness is not measured by its numerical growth: the seed is sown by the word, and the growth is God's (1 Corinthians 3:6-7; Mark 4:26-29).

Major writings

• The Bridges of God (1955)
• How Churches Grow (1959)
• Understanding Church Growth (1970; rev. 1980, 1990)
• With Win Arn, How to Grow a Church (1973)
• Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from India (1979)

Affiliation

New York linen merchant; leader of the Raven-Taylor Exclusive Brethren from 1959

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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A Brethren family

James Taylor Jr. was born in 1899, the son of James Taylor Sr. (1870-1953), an Irish-born businessman in New York who became the leading figure of the largest party of the Exclusive Brethren.^† The Exclusive Brethren had divided several times since J.N. Darby's day; Taylor Sr. led the party descended from F.E. Raven, who had been followed in 1890 by those who accepted his teaching that the eternal Son became Son only at the Incarnation. Under Taylor Sr. that teaching was confirmed in the 1920s, and the party came to be known as the "Raven-Taylor" Brethren. The movement increasingly looked to one man, the "Elect Vessel" or "Man of God", for its ministry.

The younger Taylor worked in the linen trade in New York and was active in Brethren meetings from early adulthood.

Leadership

After his father's death in 1953 there was a period without a single acknowledged leader. From about 1959 Taylor Jr., then around sixty, emerged as the dominant voice in the fellowship's ministry, and his addresses, printed and distributed through the Brethren's own publishers, came to be treated as authoritative throughout the world.

The separation doctrine

From 1959 Taylor taught a series of increasingly strict applications of the principle of "separation from evil", drawn from 2 Timothy 2:19-22 and 2 Corinthians 6:14-17. In 1960 he ruled that members must not eat with anyone outside the fellowship, including their own family members who had left or never joined, applying 1 Corinthians 5:11. Members were forbidden to belong to professional associations or trade unions, to live in buildings with shared walls or drains with non-members, to go to university, to own radios or later televisions, or to keep pets. The breaking of bread was moved to early Sunday morning.

Division and the press

The new rules divided families: husbands and wives, parents and children were separated when one side remained in fellowship and the other did not. Large numbers left in the early 1960s, and newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand reported cases of families broken apart, leading to questions in the British Parliament.^†

Aberdeen, 1970

In July 1970 Taylor visited Brethren meetings in Aberdeen, Scotland. Local Brethren reported that he was drunk at meetings, used obscene and abusive language, and was discovered in bed with the wife of a member of the fellowship at the house where he was staying. Taylor and his supporters said that nothing improper had occurred and that the episode was a test of the saints' loyalty. Many assemblies in Scotland and elsewhere withdrew from him, forming separate fellowships; those who remained, the majority worldwide, accepted his account.

Key dates

• 1899 - Born
• 1953 - Death of James Taylor Sr.
• c. 1959 - Emerges as leader of the Raven-Taylor Exclusive Brethren
• 1960 - Rule against eating with non-members
• 1960s - Wave of departures and press coverage
• July 1970 - The Aberdeen meetings
• 1970 - Divisions follow; dies in New York

Teachings and claims

Separation from evil

Taylor taught that the true Church is preserved by separating from all association with evil, and that the world - including other Christians and family members outside the fellowship - is a source of defilement. Separation must be practised in every area of daily life.

Authoritative ministry

He taught, in practice if not in theory, that the ministry of the leading brother was the voice of the Spirit to the assembly, and that those who questioned it were rebellious.

The Raven-Taylor doctrines

He maintained his father's and Raven's teaching that the Son's sonship is not eternal but belongs to the Incarnation, and that the Spirit should not be addressed in prayer.

Documented controversies

Broken families

The rules introduced from 1959 led to the separation of spouses, children and parents across the English-speaking world, documented in press investigations and later in academic studies.

Aberdeen

The events of July 1970 were described in contemporary statements by Aberdeen Brethren and reported in the press. Taylor's defenders denied immorality.^†

Authority

Critics, including former members and other Brethren, argued that the movement had come to treat one man as infallible, a contradiction of the early Brethren's rejection of clerical authority.

Death

He died in New York in October 1970, a few months after the Aberdeen meetings, aged about 71.^†

Legacy

His successors, beginning with James Symington (leader 1970-87), kept and extended his separatist rules. The fellowship, now known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, has tens of thousands of members worldwide and has been the subject of government inquiries, charity-law cases and press investigations in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, particularly over its treatment of those who leave. The assemblies that broke away in 1970 and later form several smaller Exclusive fellowships. The history of the Taylor era is the most frequently cited example of the danger inherent in Exclusive Brethren ecclesiology.

Measured against the creeds

The Nicene Creed confesses "the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds"; the Raven-Taylor teaching that the Son's sonship began at the Incarnation is a departure from that confession, which the creed's language was framed to secure.

The doctrine of separation as Taylor practised it also contradicts the historic understanding of the Church. The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church", which is holy because it is Christ's, not because its members have separated from defilement; the Lord ate with sinners (Luke 15:2), and Paul's instruction not to eat with a professing brother living in open sin (1 Corinthians 5:11) applies to discipline within the Church, not to separation from family members outside it. Paul explicitly says that believers are not to withdraw from unbelievers in the world, "for then must ye needs go out of the world" (1 Corinthians 5:10), and he forbids a believer to leave an unbelieving spouse (1 Corinthians 7:12-14).

The concentration of authority in a single "man of God", without creed, council or accountable ministry, is the opposite of the ordered ministry the historic churches maintain, and the events of 1970 show how such a system can turn moral failure into a test of loyalty.

Affiliation

Sikh convert (1929, Canada); founder of the Hebron assemblies, Hyderabad

Appears in

The modern movements in India, The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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A Sikh childhood

Bakht Singh Chabra was born on 6 June 1903 at Joia, in the Punjab (now in Pakistan), into a prosperous Sikh family. He was educated at a Christian school, but he despised Christianity and once tore up a copy of the New Testament. He studied at Punjab University and in 1926 went to England to study agricultural engineering at King's College, London. He adopted a Western way of life, cut his hair and gave up his Sikh observances.

Conversion in Canada

In 1928 he moved to Canada to continue his studies and work in Winnipeg, Manitoba. There, through a Christian family who befriended him and through reading the New Testament, he was converted in 1929. He was baptised in Canada in 1932.^† He resolved to return to India as an evangelist.

Return to India

He arrived in Bombay in 1933. His family, who had expected him to return as an engineer, were bitterly hurt by his conversion and disowned him. He began preaching in the streets and in churches of every denomination, and was soon in demand as an evangelist. In the late 1930s campaigns he led in Karachi, the Punjab and Madras saw many conversions and a revival among Christians, marked by public confession of sin and restitution.

Indigenous assemblies

Bakht Singh became convinced that the denominational churches of India, dependent on foreign missions and divided by Western traditions, did not follow the New Testament pattern. From 1941 he began to establish independent congregations, the first of them Jehovah Shammah in Madras (Chennai). In 1950 he made Hyderabad his base, where the Hebron assembly became the centre of a network of hundreds of local churches across India and in Pakistan and beyond, known informally as the Hebron or "Brother Bakht Singh" assemblies. They had no formal denomination, no foreign funding and no paid clergy in the usual sense.

Holy Convocations

From 1941 he held annual "Holy Convocations", gatherings of believers lasting several days, at which thousands camped together for prayer, preaching, the breaking of bread and baptism. They became the signature of the movement.

Later years

He travelled widely in India and abroad, including Britain, North America and Australia, and was regarded by many evangelical leaders as one of the most significant Indian Christians of his age. In his last years he was frail, and leadership passed to elders of the assemblies.

Key dates

• 6 June 1903 - Born at Joia, Punjab
• 1926 - Goes to England to study engineering
• 1928 - Moves to Canada
• 1929 - Converted in Winnipeg
• 1932 - Baptised
• 1933 - Returns to India
• late 1930s - Revival campaigns in Karachi, the Punjab and Madras
• 1941 - Jehovah Shammah assembly, Madras; first Holy Convocation
• 1950 - Hebron, Hyderabad, becomes his base
• 17 September 2000 - Dies in Hyderabad

Teachings and claims

The New Testament pattern

Bakht Singh taught that the local church should follow the pattern of the New Testament as he understood it: believers' baptism by immersion, the breaking of bread every Lord's Day, leadership by a plurality of elders, prayer and fasting, and dependence on God alone for finances.

Indigenous Christianity

He insisted that Indian churches should be led and supported by Indians, worshipping in Indian languages and with Indian forms - sitting on the floor, singing Indian lyrics, men and women seated separately, women with covered heads.

Holiness and prayer

He preached repentance, holiness, separation from worldly practices, and the power of persistent prayer. Many of his hymns in Hindi, Urdu and Telugu are still sung.

Against denominations

He taught that denominational divisions were unscriptural and that believers should gather simply in the name of the Lord.

Documented controversies

Rejection of the historic churches

His assemblies, like the Brethren whom they resembled, regarded the historic churches' ministry and sacraments as unnecessary or worse, and rebaptised members who had been baptised as infants. Churches of the Church of South India and other bodies lost members to the assemblies and criticised his teaching as divisive.

Succession

After his death, and in his last years, the assemblies experienced divisions over leadership and property.^†

No personal scandal is recorded.

Death

He died in Hyderabad on 17 September 2000, aged 97.

Legacy

Bakht Singh is widely regarded as one of the most important leaders of indigenous Indian Christianity in the twentieth century. The Hebron assemblies continue in India and the diaspora, and his example of an Indian-led, self-supporting church movement influenced many other independent churches. His hymns remain part of Indian Christian worship.

Measured against the creeds

Bakht Singh confessed the Trinity, the deity of Christ and salvation by grace through faith, and his evangelistic zeal, his personal holiness and his insistence that the Church in India should not depend on foreign money command respect.

His ecclesiology, however, departs from the historic churches at the same points as the Brethren. The creeds confess "one baptism", which the Church has given to infants since the earliest centuries; to rebaptise those already baptised in the triune name denies that their baptism was Christ's. The Church is "catholic and apostolic", not a fresh gathering recovering a pattern lost for centuries; the Lord promised to be with His Church always (Matthew 28:20). The weekly breaking of bread was a recovery of ancient practice, but the historic churches hold that the Supper is the Lord's body and blood given by Him through His ordained ministry, not only a memorial of the gathered assembly.

The movement's dependence on one leader's gifts, and the divisions that followed his death, also illustrate the difficulty of churches without a wider order.

Affiliation

Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; Assemblies of God (credentials revoked 1962, restored 1980); Pentecostal World Conference

Appears in

The Charismatic Renewal, 1960 onward

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Huguenot roots and Pentecostal youth

David Johannes du Plessis was born on 7 February 1905 at Twenty-Four Rivers, near Cape Town, South Africa, into an Afrikaner family of French Huguenot descent. When he was eleven his parents joined the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), the Pentecostal church founded through the work of John G. Lake and others, and in 1918 he received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues. He studied at Grey University College in Bloemfontein but did not complete a degree. He married Anna Cornelia Jacobs in 1927; they had seven children.

Leader of the Apostolic Faith Mission

He was ordained in 1928 and became one of the AFM's leading figures: editor of its magazine, secretary-general from 1936 to 1947, and a skilful administrator who helped the church secure legal recognition from the South African government.^†

The Wigglesworth prophecy

In 1936 Smith Wigglesworth visited South Africa. According to du Plessis, Wigglesworth burst into his office one morning, pushed him against the wall and prophesied that God would bring a revival through the old-line denominations "that will eclipse anything we have known throughout the history of Christianity", and that du Plessis would have a great part in it. He kept this word privately for years.

Pentecostal World Conference

In 1947 he resigned his AFM office to help organise the first Pentecostal World Conference in Zürich, and served as its secretary. He moved to the United States in 1948. After a serious car accident in 1949, he said, God told him to go to the leaders of the World Council of Churches, newly formed in 1948, and tell them about the Pentecostal experience.

"Mr Pentecost"

In 1951 he visited the WCC's offices in New York and found a warm welcome. From 1952 - when he spoke at the International Missionary Council at Willingen, Germany - he attended WCC assemblies, including Evanston (1954), New Delhi (1961) and Uppsala (1968), as well as countless church gatherings, telling mainline and Catholic leaders of the baptism in the Spirit. He insisted that he came to share an experience, not to make Pentecostals. Leaders such as John Mackay of Princeton Seminary and Henry P. Van Dusen of Union Seminary took up his message; Time magazine called him "Mr Pentecost".

Expelled and restored

His ecumenical contacts scandalised many Pentecostals, who regarded the WCC as liberal and the Roman Catholic Church as the harlot of Revelation. In 1962 the Assemblies of God, with which he had ministered in America, revoked his credentials. He continued as a member of a local Assemblies of God congregation and ministered independently. The credentials were restored in 1980.

Vatican II and the dialogue

He attended the third session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964 as a guest, at the invitation of Cardinal Augustin Bea, and later met Pope John XXIII's successors Paul VI and John Paul II. When the Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in 1967, he was one of its early friends. From 1972 he co-chaired the International Roman Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue with Fr Kilian McDonnell, OSB, a dialogue that continues. In 1983 Pope John Paul II awarded him the Benemerenti medal, the first time it was given to a non-Catholic.^†

Key dates

• 1905 - Born near Cape Town, 7 February
• 1918 - Baptism in the Spirit in the Apostolic Faith Mission
• 1927 - Marries Anna Jacobs
• 1928 - Ordained in the AFM
• 1936 - Wigglesworth's prophecy, by his account
• 1947 - Organises the first Pentecostal World Conference, Zürich
• 1948 - Moves to the United States
• 1951-52 - Begins contacts with the World Council of Churches
• 1954 - WCC Assembly at Evanston
• 1962 - Assemblies of God revoke his credentials
• 1964 - Guest at the third session of Vatican II
• 1972 - Co-chairs the Roman Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue
• 1977 - A Man Called Mr Pentecost
• 1980 - Credentials restored
• 2 February 1987 - Dies in Pasadena, California

Teachings and claims

Experience before doctrine

Du Plessis taught that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is an experience God gives to Christians of every church, Catholic and Protestant, and that it unites them across doctrinal divisions. "The Holy Spirit is not a Pentecostal," he liked to say. He did not ask those who received the experience to leave their churches.

Classical Pentecostal theology

He held the classical Pentecostal teaching that the baptism in the Spirit is distinct from conversion and normally accompanied by tongues, and he never abandoned it. But he softened the insistence that tongues must be the evidence.

Unity through the Spirit

He believed that the Spirit was bringing the churches together in a way that ecumenical negotiations could not, and that Pentecostals had a duty to share with others rather than condemn them. He urged love and humility rather than argument.

Forgiveness

A favourite theme was forgiveness, which he taught as the key to unity: "Forgive them, and you'll be free of them."

Documented controversies

• Ecumenism. His contacts with the WCC and with Rome scandalised many Pentecostals, and the Assemblies of God revoked his credentials in 1962.
• The Wigglesworth prophecy rests on his own later account.
• Doctrine and experience. Critics in the historic churches thought he treated doctrine too lightly, as if a shared experience could overcome real disagreements about the Church, the sacraments and authority; some evangelicals thought he compromised the gospel.
• His own accounts. Some details in his autobiography, written decades later, cannot be confirmed.^†

No personal or financial scandal is recorded.

Death

Du Plessis died in Pasadena, California, on 2 February 1987, five days before his eighty-second birthday. His papers are held in the David du Plessis Center for Christian Spirituality at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Legacy

Du Plessis did more than anyone to bring Pentecostal experience to the attention of the historic churches, and to bring Pentecostals into conversation with them. The Roman Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue he co-founded is one of the longest-running ecumenical conversations. The Charismatic Renewal in the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and Orthodox churches found in him a friend and advocate. His insistence on humility, forgiveness and love across church lines is remembered with respect even by those who disagree with his Pentecostal theology.

Measured against the creeds

Du Plessis's charity towards other Christians and his refusal to proselytise are commendable, and the dialogue he helped begin has clarified much on both sides. The Catholic participants, for example, have explained the Church's teaching that the Spirit is given in baptism and confirmation, while the Pentecostal side has explained its experience.

The difficulty lies in his assumption that a shared experience can stand in for shared faith. The four traditions hold that the unity Christ prayed for (John 17:21) is unity in the apostolic faith, the sacraments and the Church's order, and that experience must be tested by these, not the other way round. A Spirit baptism understood as separate from water baptism and confirmation, with tongues as its normal sign, remains outside what the Church has taught. And the claim that the Spirit is renewing the churches is something the churches themselves - not one prophecy recalled years later - must discern.

Major writings

• The Spirit Bade Me Go (1961)
• A Man Called Mr Pentecost (with Bob Slosser, 1977)
• Simple and Profound (1986)

Affiliation

Independent evangelist; Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation, Pittsburgh

Appears in

The healing revival, 1947-58, and after, The Charismatic Renewal, 1960 onward

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Concordia, Missouri

Kathryn Johanna Kuhlman was born on 9 May 1907 on a farm near Concordia, Missouri, and grew up in the town, where her father, Joseph, was a respected businessman and later mayor. Her father was a nominal Baptist and her mother a Methodist; Kathryn was converted at fourteen in the Methodist church, weeping in her pew during a revival service. Her father, whom she adored, was killed in a car accident in 1934, a loss she said taught her to depend on God alone.

The itinerant years

At sixteen she left home to travel with her older sister Myrtle and Myrtle's husband, Everett Parrott, an evangelist, working as their helper in tent meetings in the north-west. She briefly attended Simpson Bible Institute in Seattle. By 1928 she was preaching on her own with a pianist, Helen Gulliford, in Idaho and Colorado, sleeping in turkey houses and farm sheds, and was ordained by the Evangelical Church Alliance.^† In 1933 she settled in Denver, where her Denver Revival Tabernacle (1935) drew large congregations and she broadcast on the radio.

The marriage

In 1935 the Texas evangelist Burroughs A. Waltrip preached at her tabernacle. He soon divorced his wife, who had two sons, and in October 1938 he and Kuhlman married. Her Denver congregation largely abandoned her, and her ministry collapsed. They lived together for about six years; she left him in 1944, and they divorced in 1948. She later called the breaking of his first family the greatest regret of her life, and seldom spoke of the marriage. She said that she walked away on a dead-end street in Los Angeles, saying "I give it all to You".

Franklin and Pittsburgh

After years of small meetings she came in 1946 to Franklin, Pennsylvania, where her radio ministry flourished. In April 1947, she said, a woman stood up in a service to testify that she had been healed of a tumour the previous night while Kuhlman was preaching on the Holy Spirit, without anyone praying for her. This, Kuhlman said, was the beginning of her healing ministry.

In 1948 she began meetings in Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Hall in Allegheny and then in the First Presbyterian Church, and Pittsburgh became her base. She formed the Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation in 1954. Her "miracle services" in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Ohio, and from 1965 in the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles drew capacity crowds for nearly thirty years.

Television and the Charismatic Renewal

From 1966 to 1976 she hosted the CBS television programme I Believe in Miracles, recording more than 500 half-hour episodes. Her services drew large numbers of Catholics, Episcopalians and other mainline Christians just as the Charismatic Renewal was spreading in their churches. In 1972 she was received by Pope Paul VI in a private audience, and Oral Roberts University gave her an honorary doctorate.^†

Key dates

• 1907 - Born near Concordia, Missouri, 9 May
• 1921 - Converted in the Methodist church
• 1923 - Begins travelling with her sister and brother-in-law
• 1928 - Begins her own preaching ministry
• 1935 - Denver Revival Tabernacle
• 1938 - Marries Burroughs Waltrip
• 1944 - Leaves Waltrip; divorced 1948
• 1946 - Radio ministry in Franklin, Pennsylvania
• April 1947 - First reported healing in her services
• 1948 - Begins meetings in Pittsburgh
• 1954 - Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation
• 1962 - I Believe in Miracles
• 1966-76 - CBS television programme
• 20 February 1976 - Dies in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Teachings and claims

The Holy Spirit, not Kathryn Kuhlman

Kuhlman insisted that she had no power to heal and no "gift of healing". "I have nothing to do with it," she said. The Holy Spirit heals, she taught, often without anyone laying hands on the sick. She would sense where in the auditorium a healing was taking place and announce it - "Someone in the balcony is being healed of a back condition" - and invite people to come forward to testify.

Healing and medicine

She did not forbid medicine, and asked those who claimed healing to have it confirmed by their doctors. She said she did not know why some were healed and others not, and that it was one of the questions she would ask God.

"Slain in the Spirit"

When she prayed for people, many fell backwards, an experience her followers called being "slain in the Spirit" or "resting in the Spirit". She did not invent it, but her services made it widely known, and it spread through the Charismatic Renewal.

Salvation first

She placed conversion above healing and often said that the greatest miracle was the new birth. She did not teach that tongues are the necessary evidence of the Spirit and rarely spoke in tongues in public.

Documented controversies

• The marriage to Waltrip (1938), as above.
• Medical investigation. The surgeon William Nolen followed up twenty-three people who testified to healing at one of her services and found no cures of organic disease (Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle, 1974). Some with cancer had died; one woman who had thrown away her brace after declaring her spine healed suffered a collapse of her vertebra. Supporters replied with their own documented cases.
• Wealth and lifestyle. She dressed in expensive gowns, lived comfortably and collected art and jewellery. In 1975 her former administrator, Paul Bartholomew, sued her, alleging that she kept large amounts of jewellery and art for herself; the suit was settled.
• Her age. She gave her birth year as 1910 or later for most of her life.
• Her will. She changed her will shortly before her death, leaving most of her estate to her last business manager and his family rather than to the foundation, which provoked bitterness.

^†

Death

Kuhlman had suffered from an enlarged heart since the 1950s. In 1975 she collapsed and was taken to Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she had open-heart surgery. She died there on 20 February 1976, aged 68, and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

Legacy

Her style of quiet, dignified healing services - music, preaching on the Holy Spirit, words of knowledge, testimonies and people falling - shaped the Charismatic Renewal and later healing ministries more than any other woman's. Several later evangelists have presented themselves as her successors. Her emphasis on the person of the Holy Spirit, and her openness to Catholics and mainline Christians, helped bridge Pentecostalism and the historic churches.

Measured against the creeds

Kuhlman's refusal to claim healing power for herself, her preaching of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and her willingness to submit healings to medical confirmation stand out among the healing evangelists. She affirmed the Trinity and the historic creeds.

The difficulties lie elsewhere. The "word of knowledge" announcing anonymous healings in a crowd cannot be tested, and Nolen's investigation suggests that many such announcements were mistaken. Falling in the Spirit, which became the expected sign of God's power, has no clear precedent in the Church's tradition of prayer for the sick, which is quiet, sacramental and pastoral (James 5:14-15). And a ministry built around one charismatic woman's stage presence, outside any church's oversight, depended heavily on her personality; her marriage and the disputes at the end of her life show the cost of that independence. The Church holds that healing and the gifts of the Spirit belong to the Body of Christ, not to a single celebrated figure (1 Corinthians 12:4-27).

Major writings

• I Believe in Miracles (1962)
• God Can Do It Again (1969)
• Nothing Is Impossible with God (1974)
• Captain LeVrier Believes in Miracles (1973)

Affiliation

Independent Baptist, then independent Pentecostal-style healing evangelist; founder of the "Message" movement

Appears in

The healing revival, 1947-58, and after, Oneness Pentecostalism, The New Order of the Latter Rain, 1948, The modern movements in India

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A Kentucky cabin

William Marrion Branham was born on 6 April 1909 in a log cabin near Burkesville, Cumberland County, Kentucky, the eldest of ten children of a poor family; his father drank heavily. The family moved to Jeffersonville, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, around 1912. Branham later said that a light had appeared over his crib at birth, and that at the age of seven a voice in a whirlwind told him never to drink, smoke or defile his body because there would be a work for him to do. He had little schooling.

Conversion and the Jeffersonville tabernacle

After working at various jobs, including a spell in Arizona, he was converted in about 1931 and ordained as an independent Baptist minister. In 1933 he held a tent revival in Jeffersonville and, by his later account, while baptising converts in the Ohio River on 11 June 1933, a bright star descended over him and a voice declared that as John the Baptist was sent to forerun Christ's first coming, so his message would forerun the second. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the baptism do not mention the light. ^† His followers built the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville.

In 1934 he married Amelia Hope Brumbach. In 1937 the great Ohio River flood struck Jeffersonville, and Hope and their infant daughter Sharon Rose died of illness soon afterwards. Branham later interpreted their deaths as God's punishment for his having refused, on the advice of his Baptist friends, to minister among the "Oneness" Pentecostals who had invited him. He married Meda Broy in 1941.

The angel and the healing campaigns

On 7 May 1946, by his account, an angel appeared to him in a secret place and told him that he was sent to take a gift of divine healing to the peoples of the world, with two signs: a vibration in his left hand when he touched the sick, which would reveal the disease, and later the ability to discern the secrets of people's hearts. His first great campaign was in St Louis in June 1946, and within a year he was drawing crowds of thousands across the United States.

From 1947 his campaigns were organised by Gordon Lindsay, who founded The Voice of Healing magazine (1948) to promote them, with the healer F.F. Bosworth and others as associates. Branham's meetings - with "words of knowledge" about strangers' names, addresses and illnesses, followed by declarations of healing - set the pattern for the whole post-war healing revival. In January 1950, in Houston, a photograph taken during a debate between Bosworth and a Baptist critic showed a light above Branham's head, which his followers regard as a supernatural halo. He held campaigns in Scandinavia (1950), South Africa (1951), India (1954) and elsewhere, claiming crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

Decline and the "Message"

From about 1955 his campaigns declined as other evangelists - Oral Roberts, A.A. Allen and many more - drew the crowds, and his ministry ran into debt and tax trouble. He turned increasingly to teaching at the Branham Tabernacle, and his doctrine moved away from mainstream Pentecostalism. In 1960 he preached a series on the seven church ages of Revelation, identifying himself, by implication and then openly, as the angel-messenger to the seventh, Laodicean, age. In 1963 he moved to Tucson, Arizona, and preached a series on the seven seals, claiming that seven angels had appeared to him on a mountain near Sunset Peak in February 1963 to reveal them; his followers connect this with a ring-shaped cloud photographed over Arizona that day.

Key dates

• 1909 - Born near Burkesville, Kentucky, 6 April
• c. 1912 - Family moves to Jeffersonville, Indiana
• c. 1931 - Conversion; ordained an independent Baptist
• 11 June 1933 - Ohio River baptismal service
• 1937 - Ohio River flood; his wife and daughter die
• 7 May 1946 - Claimed angelic commission
• 1946-55 - Height of the healing campaigns
• 1948 - The Voice of Healing begins
• January 1950 - Houston "halo" photograph
• 1956 - Tax settlement; campaigns decline; meetings with Jim Jones
• 1960 - Sermons on the seven church ages
• 1963 - Moves to Tucson; sermons on the seven seals
• 18 December 1965 - Car crash near Friona, Texas
• 24 December 1965 - Dies in Amarillo, Texas

Teachings and claims

The healing gift and discernment

Branham claimed that his gift came directly from an angel and that God confirmed it with two signs, the hand vibration and the discernment of hearts. He spoke of "the Spirit of God" or "the angel" standing beside him during his meetings.

The serpent seed

He taught that the original sin in Eden was sexual: Eve had intercourse with the serpent, who was then a man-like creature, and Cain was their offspring. Humanity is therefore divided into two seeds - the seed of the serpent, descending from Cain, and the seed of God through Seth. He drew from this a harsh view of women, whom he blamed for the fall, and strict teaching on marriage and divorce.

God and baptism

He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, calling it a doctrine "of the devil" that came from the Council of Nicaea, and held that the Father, Son and Spirit are three manifestations, or "offices", of one God, Jesus. He baptised in "the name of the Lord Jesus Christ" and taught that those baptised with the Trinitarian formula should be rebaptised.

The end-time messenger

He taught that each of the seven church ages of Revelation 2-3 had its messenger - Paul, Irenaeus, Martin, Columba, Luther, Wesley - and that he was the messenger of the last, the Elijah of Malachi 4:5-6, sent to restore the faith of the apostles before Christ's return. His sermons, his followers believe, are the "spoken Word" by which the bride of Christ is prepared for the rapture.

Denominations as the mark of the beast

He taught that organised denominations were a system of the "harlot" church of Revelation 17 and bore the mark of the beast, and urged his followers to come out of them.

Prophecy and the end

In 1933, he later said, he received seven visions of the future, culminating in the destruction of the world, and he predicted that these would be fulfilled by 1977.

Women and dress

He taught that women may not preach, cut their hair, wear trousers or make-up.

Documented controversies

• Failed healings. Investigations by journalists, doctors and church leaders in South Africa, Canada and elsewhere found that many people declared healed at his meetings were not; one "cripple" was found to have been pretending.

^†

• Tax. The Internal Revenue Service pursued his ministry for unreported income; in 1956 he agreed a settlement, paying a $40,000 penalty.^†
• Race. In a 1963 sermon he spoke warmly of the Ku Klux Klan and opposed racial integration, and he taught that the races should not intermarry.
• Jim Jones. He shared a platform with Jim Jones at Jones's Indianapolis convention in June 1956; Jones later used his methods of "discernment".
• Failed prophecies. His prediction that the world system would end by 1977 failed. His 1965 prediction that Los Angeles would sink into the ocean has not been fulfilled.
• Embellished stories. Historians have found that many stories of his childhood and early ministry grew in the telling and are not supported by contemporary sources.

Death

On 18 December 1965 Branham's car was struck head-on by a car driven by a drunk driver near Friona, Texas, while he and his family were travelling to Jeffersonville for Christmas. He was taken to hospital in Amarillo and died on 24 December 1965, aged 56. His burial was delayed until April 1966, after Easter, and some followers expected him to rise from the dead. A pyramid-shaped monument with an eagle stands over his grave in Jeffersonville.

Legacy

The "Message" churches - independent congregations that treat his recorded sermons as inspired revelation - are found worldwide, with especially large numbers in Africa, Latin America and India; estimates of followers range up to two million or more. ^†

His wider influence was greater still. He set the pattern of the post-war healing revival, and leading figures of that revival, the Latter Rain movement of 1948, and later prophetic movements drew on him; Paul Cain travelled with him, Oral Roberts and others imitated his methods, and Paulaseer Lawrie in India claimed to fulfil his prophecies. His teaching on the "manifested sons of God" and a final end-time company of overcomers fed into the Latter Rain and, through it, into later apostolic and prophetic movements.

Measured against the creeds

Branham's denial of the Trinity, his rejection of baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and his serpent-seed teaching each place him outside the historic Christian faith. The Nicene Creed confesses one God in three Persons, and the Church condemned modalism before Nicaea. The serpent-seed teaching contradicts Genesis 4:1 ("Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain") and, by making some human beings the offspring of Satan, denies that all are made in God's image and that Christ died for all (1 Timothy 2:4-6).

His claim to be the end-time Elijah, whose sermons are the "spoken Word", sets one man's revelations above Scripture and the apostolic faith, which was "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). The four traditions hold, with Christ, that Elijah came in John the Baptist (Matthew 17:12-13). The test of a prophet is whether what he foretells comes to pass (Deuteronomy 18:22); Branham's predictions did not.

Major writings

Branham wrote little; his teaching survives in more than 1,100 recorded sermons, transcribed and published by his followers.

• An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages (1965, edited from sermons)
• The Revelation of the Seven Seals (1963 sermons, published 1967)
• Sermons published by Voice of God Recordings, Jeffersonville

Affiliation

Assemblies of God minister (ordained 1936; resigned 1955); founder of Miracle Revival Fellowship and Miracle Valley, Arizona

Appears in

The healing revival, 1947-58, and after, Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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A drinker's son in the Ozarks

Asa Alonso Allen was born on 27 March 1911 in Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, into a poor family; his father and mother both drank heavily, and Allen later said that he began drinking as a child and was an alcoholic by his teens. He left home young, worked at odd jobs, and spent time in jail for stealing corn.^† In 1934 he was converted at a Methodist church revival in Missouri, and soon afterwards received the Pentecostal baptism in the Spirit.

Assemblies of God pastor

He married Lexie Scrivner in 1936 and was licensed by the Assemblies of God the same year, ordained later. For more than a decade he served small churches and held revivals in Colorado, Missouri and Texas. He later wrote that he fasted and prayed for the power of God, and on one occasion listed thirteen things God required of him before he could receive it.

Healing evangelist

In 1949 he attended an Oral Roberts campaign in Dallas and resolved to start his own healing ministry. He bought a tent in 1951, began a radio programme, and in 1954 launched Miracle Magazine, which by the time of his death had a circulation of around 450,000. His meetings were the most sensational of the healing revival: long, loud, with frenzied music, deliverance from demons, and testimony after testimony of healings. He displayed jars said to contain cancers and tumours expelled in his meetings, and invited anyone to come forward.

Knoxville, 1955

In October 1955, during a revival in Knoxville, Tennessee, Allen was arrested on a charge of drunk driving. He said he had been kidnapped and drugged, but he forfeited bond rather than contest the charge. The Assemblies of God asked him to withdraw from ministry pending an inquiry; instead he resigned from the denomination and continued as an independent.

Miracle Valley

In 1956 he founded the Miracle Revival Fellowship to license ministers associated with him. In 1958 he was given land in the San Pedro valley near Bisbee, Arizona, where he built Miracle Valley: a headquarters, Bible college, recording studio, church and housing for his staff and followers. His campaigns continued across America, and he was one of the few white evangelists of the time to hold integrated meetings in the South.

Prosperity and the last years

In the 1960s Allen turned increasingly to promises of financial blessing, teaching that God would give "power to get wealth" to those who gave to his ministry. He claimed miracles such as oil flowing from the hands and heads of worshippers. In 1967 his wife left him, and they divorced. His health and drinking worsened.

Key dates

• 1911 - Born at Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, 27 March
• 1934 - Converted; baptism in the Spirit
• 1936 - Marries Lexie Scrivner; licensed by the Assemblies of God
• 1949 - Attends an Oral Roberts campaign
• 1951 - Begins tent ministry
• 1954 - Miracle Magazine
• October 1955 - Arrested in Knoxville; leaves the Assemblies of God
• 1956 - Miracle Revival Fellowship
• 1958 - Miracle Valley, Arizona
• 1963 - Wins a tax case against the IRS
• 1967 - Divorce
• 11 June 1970 - Found dead in San Francisco

Teachings and claims

Healing and deliverance

Allen taught that sickness, deformity, poverty and addiction are often the work of demons and can be cast out by faith. His meetings featured extended deliverance sessions.

Signs and wonders

He promoted claims of "miracle oil" flowing from the hands and of the dead being raised, and of crosses of blood appearing on people's foreheads.^†

Prosperity

In his later years he preached that God would give financial blessings in return for gifts to his ministry, and offered "prosperity" prayer cloths and other items, anticipating the prosperity gospel of later televangelists.

End-time revival

He saw his ministry as part of a last-days outpouring of miracles before Christ's return.

Documented controversies

• The 1955 arrest. As above. An associate later said that he was sometimes drunk afterwards and that his staff covered for him.
• Healing claims. Journalists and doctors questioned his displays of "tumours" and claimed healings; few were independently confirmed.
• Finances. His ministry was investigated by the IRS; it won its tax case in 1963. Critics pointed to the amounts raised through Miracle Magazine and his appeals.
• Sensationalism. Other healing evangelists, including Gordon Lindsay's Voice of Healing, distanced themselves from him after 1955.

Death

On 11 June 1970 Allen was found dead in a room at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, aged 59. His ministry first said he had died of a heart attack. The coroner found acute alcoholism and fatty infiltration of the liver, with a blood alcohol level of 0.36. He was buried at Miracle Valley.

Legacy

Allen's protégés included R.W. Schambach, Leroy Jenkins and others who carried his style into later decades, and his combination of healing, deliverance and prosperity preaching anticipated later televangelism. Miracle Valley passed through several hands after his death. His integrated meetings in the South are remembered as one of the more admirable features of his ministry.

Measured against the creeds

The Church prays for the sick, casts out demons in Christ's name, and calls the addicted to repentance and freedom. But Allen's ministry turned these into spectacle, built on claims that were rarely examined and a promise of financial reward for giving. His life also shows the danger of a ministry without accountability: he left the discipline of his own church at the first test, and the private struggle that ended his life was hidden from the people who trusted him.

The New Testament asks that those who lead be "sober" and "not given to wine" (1 Timothy 3:2-3), not for the leader's reputation but for his own sake and the flock's. And it warns against those who, "through covetousness, with feigned words, make merchandise of you" (2 Peter 2:3). The Church's answer to such failures is not contempt but the ordinary discipline of a pastor under authority, confession and the sacraments, which Allen's independent ministry had abandoned.

Major writings

• The Price of God's Miracle-Working Power (1950)
• Editor, Miracle Magazine (1954-70)
• With Walter Wagner, Born to Lose, Bound to Win (autobiography, 1970)

Affiliation

Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; Pentecostal Bible teacher; one of the "Fort Lauderdale Five"

Appears in

The shepherding and discipleship movement

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Life

Bangalore, Eton and Cambridge

Peter Derek Vaughan Prince was born on 14 August 1915 in Bangalore, India, into a British army family. He was sent to England at five, won a scholarship to Eton, where he studied Greek and Latin, and went on to King's College, Cambridge, where he read classics and philosophy. In 1940 he was elected a fellow of King's for a dissertation on Plato's method of definition, and he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was nominally Anglican but, by his own account, had no faith, and had dabbled in yoga and Eastern philosophy.

Conversion in the army

On the outbreak of war he registered as a non-combatant and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In July 1941, while stationed in Yorkshire, he attended a Pentecostal meeting and, a few nights later in his barracks, had a dramatic experience of conversion and, soon after, spoke in tongues. He served with the medical corps in North Africa and then Palestine, reading the Bible intensively.

Jerusalem and Kenya

In Palestine he met Lydia Christensen, a Danish schoolteacher who ran a children's home in Ramallah, and they married in 1946. He took on her eight adopted daughters, and the family lived in Jerusalem through the fighting of 1947-48 that accompanied the founding of the State of Israel. They moved to London in 1949, where Prince pastored a small Pentecostal congregation, and in 1957 to Kenya, where he served as principal of a teacher-training college. In 1963 they moved to the United States.

Bible teacher

In America Prince became a sought-after teacher among Pentecostals and charismatics. His series Foundation Series (later collected in The Spirit-Filled Believer's Handbook) set out the elementary doctrines of Hebrews 6:1-2 in systematic form. He became known especially for teaching on deliverance from demons, and on fasting and prayer.

Fort Lauderdale

In 1970 Prince joined three other teachers - Don Basham and two others - at Christian Growth Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and in 1974 Ern Baxter joined them; they became known as the "Fort Lauderdale Five". They responded to a scandal involving a Florida evangelist by agreeing to submit their lives to one another, and then taught that every believer needs a personal "shepherd" to whom he submits in matters of life and conduct. The teaching spread through their magazine New Wine and a growing network of churches. It became known as the shepherding or discipleship movement and provoked fierce controversy with other charismatic leaders from 1975.

Withdrawal

In 1983 Prince withdrew from the group. He later said that the movement had fallen into the "Galatian error" - trying to achieve by human control and organisation what only the Holy Spirit can do - and that its leaders had built a structure they could not control. His first wife died in 1975, and in 1978 he married Ruth Baker, an American living in Jerusalem. From the 1980s the couple lived mostly in Jerusalem, and Derek Prince Ministries broadcast his teaching worldwide in many languages. Ruth died in 1998.

Key dates

• 14 August 1915 - Born in Bangalore
• 1940 - Fellow of King's College, Cambridge
• July 1941 - Conversion while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps
• 1946 - Marries Lydia Christensen in Jerusalem
• 1949-57 - Pastor in London
• 1957-61 - Principal of a teacher-training college in Kenya
• 1963 - Moves to the United States
• 1970 - Joins Christian Growth Ministries, Fort Lauderdale
• 1975 - Shepherding controversy erupts; Lydia Prince dies
• 1978 - Marries Ruth Baker
• 1983 - Withdraws from the shepherding movement
• 24 September 2003 - Dies in Jerusalem

Teachings and claims

Deliverance

Prince taught that Christians can be oppressed or "demonised" (he avoided "possessed") and need deliverance by casting out demons in Jesus' name. His books They Shall Expel Demons (1998) and earlier pamphlets set out the signs of demonic influence and methods of deliverance.

Curses

In Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose (1990) he taught that curses - from ancestors, from involvement in the occult, from spoken words or from sins - can operate in a person's life and family until they are recognised and broken.

Fasting and prayer

He taught regular fasting as a means of spiritual power and of shaping national events, in Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting (1973).

Israel

He taught that God's covenant with Israel remains in force, that the return of the Jews to the land is a fulfilment of prophecy, and that Christians have a duty to pray for and support Israel.

Covenant submission

In the shepherding years he taught that believers should be under the personal authority of a shepherd in a chain of covenant relationships. He later repudiated the abuses this produced, though not the principle of accountability.

Documented controversies

Shepherding

He shared responsibility for a movement that critics, and later its own leaders, acknowledged had produced authoritarian control over members' marriages, finances and careers. His public withdrawal and repentance were among the earliest by its leaders. One of the remaining leaders made a formal public apology in 1990.

Deliverance

Critics, including other charismatic leaders, argued that his teaching on the demonisation of Christians and on generational curses encouraged a fearful preoccupation with demons and blurred the distinction between sin, illness and demonic influence.

Death

He died in his sleep at his home in Jerusalem on 24 September 2003, aged 88, after a period of declining health, and was buried in the Alliance Church International Cemetery in Jerusalem.^†

Legacy

His Bible teaching, in more than a hundred languages through Derek Prince Ministries, remains widely used across the charismatic world, especially in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. His teaching on deliverance and curses shaped much of the charismatic deliverance ministry that followed. His public withdrawal from shepherding is remembered as a rare example of a movement leader confessing error.

Measured against the creeds

Prince was a careful student of Scripture and confessed the Trinity and the creeds' teaching on Christ. His insistence on the foundational doctrines of Hebrews 6:1-2 - repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection, judgement - is close to the catechetical order of the historic Church.

On deliverance, the historic churches have always practised exorcism, and the rites of baptism in the ancient churches include the renunciation of Satan. But they hold that in baptism the believer is delivered from the dominion of darkness and transferred into Christ's kingdom (Colossians 1:13), and they have treated demonic possession of the baptised as rare and to be discerned by the Church with great caution, not as a common condition calling for routine deliverance. The teaching on generational curses fits poorly with Ezekiel 18 and with the confession that Christ "became a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13).

The shepherding movement in which he took part replaced the Church's ordered ministry, accountable to bishops, synods and confessions, with personal chains of submission accountable to no one but each other. His own judgement that this was a "Galatian error" is a sound one.

Major writings

• Foundation Series (1965-66), later The Spirit-Filled Believer's Handbook (1993)
• Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting (1973)
• Appointment in Jerusalem (1975) - the life of Lydia Prince
• Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose (1990)
• They Shall Expel Demons (1998)

Affiliation

Episcopal priest; rector of St Mark's, Van Nuys (1953-60) and St Luke's, Seattle (1960-81)

Appears in

The Charismatic Renewal, 1960 onward

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London and California

Dennis Joseph Bennett was born on 28 October 1917 in London, England, the son of a Congregational minister, and emigrated with his family to California in 1927. He studied at San Jose State College and worked for a time in radio and as a salesman, then trained for the ministry at the Chicago Theological Seminary (BD, 1949) and was ordained in the Congregational Church. Drawn to liturgy, the sacraments and the historic episcopate, he became an Episcopalian and was ordained deacon and priest in the Episcopal Church in 1951-52.

St Mark's, Van Nuys

In 1953 he became rector of St Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, a parish of the Diocese of Los Angeles, which he built up to some 2,600 members. In 1959 a young couple in a neighbouring parish, John and Joan Baker, told him that they had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. Bennett was sceptical but impressed by their changed lives. In November 1959, at a prayer meeting in their home, he prayed for the Spirit and began to speak in a new language. Over the following months some seventy members of St Mark's, quietly, had the same experience.

Passion Sunday, 1960

On Passion Sunday, 3 April 1960, Bennett told his congregation at all three services what had happened to him. At the second, an assistant priest took off his vestments and walked out; a member stood on a chair shouting "Throw out the damn tongue-speakers!" Bennett resigned at the end of the day to avoid splitting the parish. Bishop Francis Eric Bloy of Los Angeles banned speaking in tongues in his diocese's parish services. Newsweek (4 July 1960) and Time (15 August 1960) reported the story nationally, and it is usually counted as the public beginning of the Charismatic Renewal in the historic churches.

St Luke's, Seattle

Bishop William Fisher Lewis of Olympia invited Bennett to take charge of St Luke's, Ballard, a small, debt-ridden mission in Seattle that the diocese had considered closing. He arrived in July

1. St Luke's became the centre of the charismatic movement in the Pacific North-West, with

regular Friday "information meetings" that drew Christians of every denomination. It grew to be one of the largest Episcopal congregations in the diocese. Bennett remained rector until 1981.

Second marriage and the wider ministry

His first wife, Elberta, died in 1963. In 1966 he married again. His second wife, a Southern Baptist who had received the baptism in the Spirit, worked alongside him; together they wrote and spoke widely. His autobiography, Nine O'Clock in the Morning (1970), sold widely and introduced many in the historic churches to the renewal. With his wife he wrote The Holy Spirit and You (1971), a practical guide. He helped found the Episcopal Charismatic Fellowship (later Episcopal Renewal Ministries). After leaving St Luke's in 1981 he and his wife ran the Christian Renewal Association from Edmonds, Washington, travelling and teaching internationally.

Key dates

• 1917 - Born in London, 28 October
• 1927 - Family emigrates to California
• 1949 - Graduates from Chicago Theological Seminary; Congregational minister
• 1951-52 - Ordained in the Episcopal Church
• 1953 - Rector of St Mark's, Van Nuys
• November 1959 - Baptism in the Spirit
• 3 April 1960 - Announces his experience to St Mark's; resigns
• July 1960 - Vicar, then rector, of St Luke's, Seattle
• 1966 - Marries for the second time
• 1970 - Nine O'Clock in the Morning
• 1971 - The Holy Spirit and You
• 1981 - Leaves St Luke's
• 1 November 1991 - Dies

Teachings and claims

The baptism in the Spirit for every church

Bennett taught that the baptism in the Holy Spirit, normally accompanied by speaking in tongues, is available to Christians in every church, and that it releases the Spirit already received in baptism and confirmation. He presented it within an Anglican framework, as a renewal of grace already given, rather than as a Pentecostal "second blessing".

Stay in your church

Unlike earlier Pentecostals, he urged charismatics to remain in their denominations, loyal to their bishops and liturgy, and to bring renewal from within. He kept the Prayer Book, the Eucharist and vestments at St Luke's.

The gifts for today

He held that all nine gifts of 1 Corinthians 12 are for today. The Holy Spirit and You included practical teaching on how to receive and exercise them, including how to begin speaking in tongues.

Healing and the inner life

With his wife he taught prayer for healing, including "inner healing" of emotional wounds, in the setting of the Church's sacramental life.

Documented controversies

• Van Nuys. His announcement divided his parish; he resigned, and Bishop Bloy banned tongues in parish services.
• Episcopal criticism. Critics in the Episcopal Church regarded the movement he led as divisive, emotional and theologically naive; several dioceses issued cautionary statements in the 1960s.
• Method. Critics within and outside the renewal objected to coaching people to speak in tongues, as The Holy Spirit and You did, arguing that it risked producing a learned behaviour rather than a gift of the Spirit.
• Inner healing. Some of the inner-healing techniques associated with the later renewal drew criticism from evangelical and Catholic writers as borrowing from psychology.

No personal or financial scandal is recorded.

Death

Bennett died suddenly of a heart attack on 1 November 1991, at the age of 74, at his home in Edmonds, Washington.^†

Legacy

Bennett is generally regarded as the father of the Charismatic Renewal in the historic churches. After 1960 the renewal spread to Lutherans (through Larry Christenson and others), Presbyterians, Methodists and, from 1967, Roman Catholics. Its spirit of renewal within the churches, rather than separation from them, owes much to him. In the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion, charismatic parishes and movements such as Anglican Renewal Ministries trace their origins to his example.

Measured against the creeds

Bennett stood within the Anglican tradition: he affirmed the creeds, used the Prayer Book, honoured the sacraments and submitted to his bishops. His teaching that the baptism in the Spirit releases grace already given in baptism and confirmation is closer to the historic faith than the Pentecostal two-stage pattern, and is similar to the "release of the Spirit" language later used in the Catholic renewal.

The questions the four traditions raise concern emphasis and method. Treating tongues as the normal sign of the Spirit's fullness sets aside St Paul's question, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), and his ranking of love above every gift (1 Corinthians 13). Teaching people how to begin speaking in tongues risks confusing a technique with a gift. And a renewal centred on a particular experience can divide parishes into those who have had it and those who have not, as Van Nuys showed; the Church's unity rests on the one baptism and the one Eucharist that all share.

Major writings

• Nine O'Clock in the Morning (1970)
• With his wife, The Holy Spirit and You (1971)
• The Trinity of Man (1979), with his wife
• How to Pray for the Release of the Holy Spirit (1985)
• Moving Right Along in the Spirit (1982)

Affiliation

Assemblies of God pastor (1937-49); independent teacher; founder of Rhema Bible Training Center (1974)

Appears in

Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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A sick boy in McKinney

Kenneth Erwin Hagin was born on 20 August 1917 in McKinney, Texas, prematurely, weighing under two pounds; he was not expected to live. He had a congenital heart condition, and his father left the family when he was six. At fifteen, in April 1933, he became bedridden with what doctors told him was an incurable heart disease and a blood disorder. On 22 April 1933, he later wrote, he died three times that night, descending each time towards hell, and was brought back. He was born again in the experience.

Healed by Mark 11:24

For more than a year he remained bedridden, reading his grandmother's Bible. In August 1934, he said, he came to understand Mark 11:24 - "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them" - as meaning that he must believe he was healed before he felt any change. He declared himself healed, got up, and recovered. The verse became the foundation of his teaching.

Baptist and Pentecostal pastor

He began preaching in 1934 as a Southern Baptist "boy preacher" in a small community church at Roland, Texas. In 1937 he received the baptism in the Spirit with tongues and joined the Assemblies of God, which licensed and later ordained him. He married Oretha Rooker in 1938, and pastored several small Assemblies of God churches in east and north Texas between 1937 and 1949.

Visions and the field ministry

In 1949 he left pastoring to become an itinerant Bible teacher and evangelist, associating with the healing revival and The Voice of Healing. He said that between 1950 and 1963 Jesus appeared to him in eight visions, the first in a revival meeting in Rockwall, Texas, in 1950, giving him a special anointing to minister healing and teaching him about faith, demons and prosperity. In 1952 he said Jesus told him how to discern evil spirits.

Tulsa and Rhema

In 1963 he founded the Kenneth E. Hagin Evangelistic Association and in 1966 moved his headquarters to Tulsa, Oklahoma. He began a radio programme, Faith Seminar of the Air (1966), and the magazine The Word of Faith (1968), which gave the movement its name. In 1974 he opened Rhema Bible Training Center in Broken Arrow, near Tulsa, which by his death had trained some 20,000 graduates, many of whom founded churches worldwide. From 1979 he held annual Campmeetings in Tulsa. His books, mostly short booklets, sold tens of millions of copies.

Final years

In the 1980s Hagin became the target of strong criticism from evangelical and Pentecostal scholars. In 2000, shortly before his death, he published The Midas Touch, which criticised excesses of prosperity teaching. His son succeeded him.

Key dates

• 1917 - Born in McKinney, Texas, 20 August
• April 1933 - Bedridden; near-death experience and conversion
• August 1934 - Healed, he said, through faith in Mark 11:24
• 1934 - Begins preaching as a Baptist
• 1937 - Baptism in the Spirit; joins the Assemblies of God
• 1938 - Marries Oretha Rooker
• 1949 - Begins itinerant ministry
• 1950-63 - Reported visions of Jesus
• 1966 - Moves to Tulsa; radio ministry
• 1968 - The Word of Faith magazine
• 1974 - Rhema Bible Training Center
• 2000 - The Midas Touch
• 19 September 2003 - Dies in Tulsa

Teachings and claims

Faith as confession

Hagin's core message, taken from Kenyon and his own experience, was that faith believes it has received before it sees, and expresses this by confession. "Say it, do it, receive it, tell it," he summarised in How to Write Your Own Ticket with God (1979). "You can have what you say."

Healing guaranteed

He taught that healing was provided in the atonement and that it is never God's will for a believer to be sick. Sickness is from the devil and is to be resisted and refused by faith and confession. Believers should "not confess" symptoms.

Prosperity

Drawing on Deuteronomy 28 and Galatians 3:13-14, he taught that Christ redeemed believers from the curse of the law, which includes poverty, so that financial prosperity is part of salvation.

The authority of the believer

Believers share Christ's authority over Satan and demons, and must exercise it; God has given the Church dominion on earth and will not act without its words and prayers.

Christ's spiritual death and the believer's divine status

Following Kenyon, he taught that Jesus died spiritually on the cross, taking on Satan's nature, and was born again in hell. He wrote that man was created "on terms of equality with God" and that "the believer is as much an incarnation as was Jesus of Nazareth".^†

Revelation by vision

He presented his teaching as received by revelation, especially in the visions of 1950-63.

Documented controversies

• Plagiarism. D.R. McConnell showed in A Different Gospel (1988) that substantial passages of Hagin's books reproduce E.W. Kenyon's writings nearly word for word without acknowledgement, although Hagin presented his teaching as received directly by revelation. Hagin's ministry later said he had read Kenyon and absorbed his words unconsciously.
• Theological criticism. Critics across the churches - evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic and Orthodox - condemned his teaching on Christ's spiritual death, on believers as "little gods", and on healing and prosperity. Pentecostal scholars such as Gordon Fee (The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels, 1985) were among the sharpest critics.
• Deaths and suffering. Critics recorded cases of people who abandoned medical treatment or refused to acknowledge illness after hearing Word of Faith teaching.

^†

• The visions, which he cited as authority but which cannot be tested.

Death

Hagin collapsed at his home in Tulsa on 14 September 2003 and died in hospital on 19 September 2003, aged 86, of heart failure.^†

Legacy

Hagin is called "the father of the Word of Faith movement". Through Rhema, his books and his many students - including several of the best-known televangelists of the following decades - he made Kenyon's teaching a worldwide movement, especially strong in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The prosperity gospel built on it has become one of the most influential forms of Christianity in the Global South. He was personally regarded by followers as humble, folksy and kind; his late Midas Touch tried, too late for many, to rein in the excesses his teaching had helped to unleash.

Measured against the creeds

Hagin's teaching inherits all of Kenyon's departures from the historic faith and adds others. Christ's "spiritual death" and rebirth in hell contradict the Church's confession that the eternal Son offered Himself as a spotless sacrifice and that His death destroyed the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). To call believers "an incarnation" as Christ was confuses deification by grace with the unique union of God and man in the one Person of Christ (Chalcedon, 451).

The promise of guaranteed healing and wealth sets aside the Lord's call to take up the cross (Mark 8:34) and the apostolic teaching that "we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22). St Paul, who learned to be content "both to abound and to suffer need" (Philippians 4:11-13), and the long witness of the martyrs and saints, are a sufficient answer. And the claim to new revelation by vision, presented as above testing, sets one man's experience above the faith "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3).

Major writings

Hagin wrote more than 125 books and booklets, among them:

• Redeemed from Poverty, Sickness and Death (1966)
• The Believer's Authority (1967)
• I Believe in Visions (1972)
• How to Write Your Own Ticket with God (1979)
• Zoe: The God-Kind of Life (1981)
• The Name of Jesus (1979)
• The Midas Touch: A Balanced Approach to Biblical Prosperity (2000)

Affiliation

Pentecostal Holiness minister; healing evangelist from 1947; United Methodist from 1968; founder of Oral Roberts University

Appears in

The healing revival, 1947-58, and after, Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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A stammering boy in Oklahoma

Granville Oral Roberts was born on 24 January 1918 near Ada, Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, the youngest of five children of Ellis Roberts, a Pentecostal Holiness preacher, and Claudius Priscilla Irwin, who was part Cherokee. The family was very poor. Oral stammered badly as a child. At sixteen he left home for Atoka to finish high school and become a lawyer, but in 1935 he collapsed with tuberculosis and was bedridden for five months.

Healing and call

In July 1935 his brother Elmer took him to a tent meeting in Ada led by the evangelist George Moncey. On the way, Roberts said, he heard God tell him: "Son, I am going to heal you, and you are going to take the message of My healing power to your generation." He reported that he was healed of both tuberculosis and stammering when Moncey prayed for him. He was licensed to preach by the Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1936, and for twelve years served as an evangelist and pastor in Oklahoma, Georgia and North Carolina, while studying at Oklahoma Baptist University and Phillips University. He married Evelyn Lutman in 1938; they had four children.

"If you will only believe"

In 1947, while pastoring in Enid, Oklahoma, he read 3 John 2 - "I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth" - which he came to see as the key to his ministry: God wants people to be well in body, mind and finances. He bought a new Buick the same day, by his account, and resigned his church to begin an independent healing ministry. His first campaign in Enid in May 1947 was followed by others across the country, and he moved his headquarters to Tulsa.

The tent and the screen

By the early 1950s Roberts had the largest tent in the world, seating more than 12,000, and was the most successful evangelist of the healing revival. He prayed for hundreds of people in long "healing lines", laying hands on them one by one, and taught that the point of contact - his touch, a handkerchief, a radio - released faith. His magazine Healing Waters (later Abundant Life) reached hundreds of thousands. In 1955 he began televising his tent services, bringing healing evangelism into American living rooms for the first time.

In 1956, at a crusade in Melbourne, Australia, hostile crowds and press criticism forced him to end the campaign early.^†

University and Methodism

In 1963 he founded Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, which opened in 1965, with its distinctive Prayer Tower and modernist campus. In 1968 he surprised Pentecostals by joining the United Methodist Church, Boston Avenue, Tulsa, and being ordained a Methodist elder, though he continued to preach healing. From 1969 his prime-time television specials, featuring entertainers, made him one of the best-known religious figures in America.

The City of Faith

In 1977 he announced a plan to build a medical complex that would join prayer and medicine. In May 1980 he said that a 900-foot Jesus had appeared to him in a vision and promised that the project would succeed. The City of Faith Medical and Research Center, with a sixty-storey tower, opened in 1981 but never filled its beds. It closed in 1989 with heavy losses.

"God will call me home"

In January 1987 he told his supporters that God would "call me home" unless $8 million was raised for medical-mission scholarships by the end of March. The money was raised, partly through a $1.3 million gift from a Florida dog-track owner, Jerry Collins. The episode was ridiculed across America and damaged his reputation.

Later years

He suffered personal tragedies: his daughter Rebecca and her husband died in a plane crash in 1977, and his son Ronald took his own life in 1982. He handed leadership of ORU to his son Richard in 1993 and retired to California. Evelyn died in 2005.

Key dates

• 1918 - Born near Ada, Oklahoma, 24 January
• 1935 - Healed of tuberculosis at a tent meeting
• 1936 - Licensed by the Pentecostal Holiness Church
• 1938 - Marries Evelyn Lutman
• 1947 - Begins independent healing ministry in Enid and Tulsa
• 1954 - The "Blessing Pact"
• 1955 - First televised healing services
• 1963-65 - Founds Oral Roberts University
• 1968 - Joins the United Methodist Church
• 1970 - Miracle of Seed-Faith
• 1980 - Vision of a 900-foot Jesus
• 1981-89 - City of Faith Medical Center
• 1987 - $8 million appeal
• 15 December 2009 - Dies at Newport Beach, California

Teachings and claims

Health and wholeness

From 3 John 2 he taught that God wills health and prosperity for every believer, alongside the salvation of the soul: "God is a good God." He spoke of healing for "the whole man" - body, mind and spirit.

The point of contact

Faith, he taught, needs a "point of contact" to release it - an act such as touching a television screen or a prayer cloth at the moment of prayer.

Seed faith

His best-known teaching was "seed faith". From 1954, in his "Blessing Pact", he promised donors that if their gift to his ministry was not returned to them from an unexpected source within a year, he would refund it. In Miracle of Seed-Faith (1970) he set out three principles: God is your source, give first so it can be given back to you, and expect a miracle. Giving is a seed which God multiplies back to the giver "in kind".

Healing and medicine together

Unlike Dowie or Wigglesworth, he came to teach that prayer and medicine both come from God and should be combined - the idea behind the City of Faith.

Documented controversies

• Seed faith. Critics within and outside Pentecostalism condemned seed faith as turning giving into investment and exploiting poor donors; it became a cornerstone of later prosperity preaching.
• The 900-foot Jesus (1980), widely mocked, and the failure of the City of Faith, which Roberts said God had commanded.
• The 1987 appeal, in which he said God would take his life if the money was not raised.
• Wealth. Critics pointed to his homes in Tulsa and Palm Springs, country club memberships and expensive cars; he defended them as God's blessing.
• Healing claims. Investigations in the 1950s found that many reported healings could not be confirmed; Roberts himself acknowledged that not all were healed.

Death

Roberts died of complications of pneumonia at Newport Beach, California, on 15 December 2009, aged 91. He was buried in Tulsa.

Legacy

Oral Roberts University, with several thousand students, remains a leading charismatic university. Roberts brought Pentecostal healing into mainstream American religion and onto television, and by joining the Methodists helped prepare the way for the Charismatic Renewal in the historic churches. Through seed faith he drew a direct line to the prosperity gospel, which later Word of Faith teachers built on.

Measured against the creeds

Roberts's compassion for the sick and his later insistence that medicine and prayer belong together are closer to the Church's tradition than much of the faith-cure movement. But his reading of 3 John 2 - a conventional greeting in a letter - as a promise of health and wealth for every believer is not the Church's reading, and it set the pattern for the prosperity gospel.

Seed faith inverts the Christian teaching on almsgiving. The Lord commands giving "hoping for nothing again" (Luke 6:35), and the Church has always taught that we give because God has given to us, not to secure a return. St Paul warns against those who suppose "that gain is godliness" (1 Timothy 6:5-10). And a minister who tells his people that God will take his life unless they give treats the faithful as a source of money rather than as souls in his care.

Major writings

• If You Need Healing - Do These Things! (1947)
• The Call: An Autobiography (1972)
• Miracle of Seed-Faith (1970)
• A Daily Guide to Miracles (1975)
• Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry (1995)

Affiliation

Civil engineer; president of Family Radio

Appears in

Restorationists and date-setters

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Life

Engineer and elder

Harold Egbert Camping was born on 19 July 1921 in Boulder, Colorado, into a Dutch Reformed family, and grew up in California. He graduated in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942 and built a successful construction business in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was a member and elder of the Alameda Christian Reformed Church and taught Bible classes there.

Family Radio

In 1958, with others, he bought a radio station and founded Family Radio, a non-profit Christian broadcaster. He sold his business to devote himself to it. The network grew to dozens of stations in the United States and broadcasts worldwide by shortwave and satellite, carrying hymns, Bible readings and teaching programmes. From 1961 Camping hosted Open Forum, a live call-in programme in which he answered listeners' questions about the Bible. His calm, authoritative manner won a large and loyal following.

Numbers and dates

Over the years Camping developed a system of biblical chronology and numerology, by which he believed the dates of creation (11,013 BC), the flood (4990 BC) and other events could be worked out precisely from Scripture. In his book 1994? (1992) he suggested that the end of the world would probably come in September 1994. When it did not, he said he had miscalculated.

Leaving the churches

In 1988 he left the Christian Reformed Church after disputes over his teaching. From about 2001 he taught that the "church age" had ended on 21 May 1988, that the Holy Spirit had departed from all churches, that Satan now ruled in them, and that true believers must leave their congregations and worship at home, listening to Family Radio.

2011

In the late 2000s he announced that the rapture of the elect would take place on 21 May 2011, exactly 7,000 years after the flood by his reckoning, accompanied by a worldwide earthquake, and that the world would be destroyed on 21 October 2011. Family Radio and his followers spent millions of dollars on billboards, vans and publicity across the world. Some followers quit their jobs, gave away their savings or travelled to spread the message. When 21 May passed, Camping said that a spiritual judgement had taken place invisibly and that the destruction would still come on 21 October. He suffered a stroke in June 2011. When 21 October passed, he made no further prediction.

Recantation

In March 2012 Family Radio published a letter in which Camping acknowledged that his prediction had been wrong, said that he had been rightly rebuked by critics, and wrote that attempting to know the date was sinful. He retired from broadcasting.

Key dates

• 19 July 1921 - Born in Boulder, Colorado
• 1942 - Graduates in civil engineering from Berkeley
• 1958 - Co-founds Family Radio
• 1961 - Open Forum begins
• 1988 - Leaves the Christian Reformed Church
• 1992 - 1994? predicts the end in 1994
• September 1994 - Predicted end passes
• c. 2001-02 - Teaches that the church age has ended; calls believers out of churches
• 21 May 2011 - Predicted rapture
• June 2011 - Suffers a stroke
• 21 October 2011 - Predicted end of the world
• March 2012 - Acknowledges his error
• 15 December 2013 - Dies in Alameda, California

Teachings and claims

Calendar of history

Camping taught that the Bible contains a complete and exact chronology of history from creation, and that its numbers carry hidden meanings - for example, that 5 signifies atonement, 10 completeness and 17 heaven - from which the date of the end can be calculated.

The end of the church age

He taught that the "great tribulation" of Matthew 24 began in 1988, that churches had become apostate and spiritually dead, and that the Spirit now worked only outside them. He told his listeners not to take the Lord's Supper or be baptised in any church.

Other doctrines

He taught that the dead are annihilated rather than consciously punished, and that God saves the elect without any act or decision on their part, in a hyper-Calvinist form that denied the means of grace.

Documented controversies

Failed predictions

His predictions of 1994 and 2011 both failed. The 2011 campaign was the most widely publicised date-setting in modern times and was reported around the world.

Harm to followers

Newspapers documented followers who had given up jobs, savings and family relationships to spread the 2011 message, and the distress that followed its failure.^†

Separation

His instruction to leave all churches cut many listeners off from the life of a congregation, and the Christian Reformed Church and other bodies condemned it.

Finances

Family Radio, whose assets had been reported at over $100 million, sold several of its largest stations in the years after 2011.^†

Death

He fell at his home in Alameda, California, in late November 2013 and died on 15 December 2013, aged 92.

Legacy

Family Radio continues on a smaller scale under new leadership, and no longer teaches date-setting. Camping's 2011 campaign is cited across the churches as a cautionary example of what happens when Scripture is treated as a puzzle and when a teacher has no church to answer to.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead", and the Lord Himself said that "of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven" (Matthew 24:36; Acts 1:7). Every attempt to set the date - from the Montanists to the Millerites - has failed, and Camping's own final judgement on his attempt, that it was sinful, agrees with the Church's.

His teaching that the Spirit had left the churches and that believers should forsake baptism and the Supper is a more serious error. The Lord promised to be with His Church "alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matthew 28:20), and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). The historic churches hold that Christ is present where the word is preached and the sacraments administered according to His institution, and that believers are commanded not to forsake assembling together (Hebrews 10:25).

His annihilationism also departs from the Church's teaching on the last judgement, and his hyper-Calvinism from the Reformed confessions he once professed, which teach that God uses the preaching of the word and the sacraments as means of grace.

Major writings

• Adam When? (1974)
• 1994? (1992)
• Are You Ready? (1993)
• Time Has an End (2005)
• We Are Almost There! (2008)

Affiliation

Healing evangelist and follower of William Branham; founder of the Manujothi Ashram near Tirunelveli

Appears in

The modern movements in India, The healing revival, 1947-58, and after

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Life

Tirunelveli

R. Paulaseer Lawrie was born on 24 February 1921 in the Tirunelveli region of Tamil Nadu, into a Protestant Christian family.^† Little is recorded of his early life. He trained and worked as a stenographer, and spent some years in Bombay.

Visions and Branham

In 1953, after a series of visions which he believed called him to ministry, he left his work. In 1954 William Branham held a healing campaign in Bombay, and Lawrie attended and attached himself to it, coming to regard Branham as the prophet of the age. He became a promoter of Branham's teaching in South India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), holding healing meetings and distributing Branham's sermons, and travelled to Britain and the United States, where he met Branham and his followers. For a time he worked closely with a Ceylonese associate, Alwin R. de Alwis, from whom he later split over leadership.

The claim of 1969

After Branham's death in 1965, Lawrie came to believe that Branham's prophecies pointed to him. On 21 July 1969 he announced that he was the second coming of Christ - the Son of Man foretold by Branham's sermons on the seven seals - and that the end of the age would come by 1977, as Branham had predicted. He founded the Manujothi Ashram near Tirunelveli as the centre of his followers.

The Kalki avatar

When 1977 passed, Lawrie's teaching moved away from Christianity. In the 1980s he reinterpreted his mission through Hindu scripture: he taught an "Aadhi Bali" ("Supreme Sacrifice") drawn from the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, the hymn of the cosmic man whose sacrifice brings forth creation, and identified the sacrifice with Christ. He took the name Gurudev Shri Lahari Krishna and presented himself as the Kalki avatar, the final incarnation of Vishnu whose coming Hindu tradition expects at the end of the present age, uniting in himself the expectations of Christianity and Hinduism.

Key dates

• 24 February 1921 - Born in the Tirunelveli region
• 1953 - Leaves his work after visions
• 1954 - Joins William Branham's campaign in Bombay
• 1950s-60s - Promotes Branham's teaching in South India, Ceylon, Britain and America
• 1965 - Death of Branham
• 21 July 1969 - Claims to be the second coming of Christ
• 1977 - Predicted end passes
• 1980s - Teaches the "Aadhi Bali"; presents himself as the Kalki avatar
• 24 February 1989 - Dies on his 68th birthday

Teachings and claims

Branham's message

In his early ministry he taught Branham's doctrines: healing, the rejection of the Trinity, baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the serpent seed, the seven church ages and Branham as the Elijah of Malachi 4.

The Son of Man

From 1969 he taught that he was the Son of Man whose coming Branham had foretold, the returned Christ, and that the "Message" of Branham had prepared the way for him.

The Aadhi Bali and Kalki

In his final teaching he presented the Vedic sacrifice of the Purusha as a revelation of Christ's sacrifice and himself as the Kalki avatar, the culmination of all religions.

Documented controversies

Claim to be Christ

His 1969 claim, and the failure of the 1977 prediction, place him outside Christianity, and Branham's own followers repudiated him.^†

Religious syncretism

His turn to the identity of a Hindu avatar marked a complete departure from the Christian faith with which he began.

Division

He split with his earlier associate de Alwis over authority, and his movement remained small.

Death

He died on 24 February 1989, his 68th birthday, and was buried at the Manujothi Ashram near Tirunelveli. His followers had expected that he would not die. [[verify - Bergunder 2003]]

Legacy

His movement continues on a small scale at the Manujothi Ashram, which presents itself as a universal spiritual centre. His career is studied by historians as an example of the interaction between American Pentecostal-style healing movements and Indian religion, and as the clearest illustration of where Branham's claims to prophetic authority could lead in a follower who took them to their conclusion.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead". The Lord warned that "if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not", for His coming will be as the lightning that shines from east to west (Matthew 24:23-27). Lawrie's claim to be the returned Christ is precisely what the Lord warned against.

His earlier teaching repeated Branham's departures from the creeds - the denial of the Trinity and the claim to new prophetic authority - and his later identification of himself as a Hindu avatar abandoned the confession that Christ is the one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5), incarnate once for all.

His story shows the danger, discussed in this section's pages on Branham and the healing revival, of accepting a prophet's claims on the strength of signs. Once a man's words are treated as revelation above Scripture and the Church's faith, there is nothing to stop the next man claiming that the prophecies are fulfilled in him.

Affiliation

Minister of the Reformed Church in America; founder of Garden Grove Community Church, the Crystal Cathedral and the Hour of Power

Appears in

Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch

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Life

Iowa

Robert Harold Schuller was born on 16 September 1926 on a farm near Alton, Iowa, the youngest of five children of a Dutch Reformed family. He said that at the age of four an uncle who was a missionary told him he would be a preacher, and he never wanted to be anything else. He studied at Hope College in Holland, Michigan (1947), and at Western Theological Seminary (1950), and was ordained in the Reformed Church in America. He married Arvella DeHaan in 1950.

Chicago and California

After five years as pastor of Ivanhoe Reformed Church in Riverdale, near Chicago, he was sent in 1955 to start a new congregation in Garden Grove, Orange County, California. With no building available, he rented the Orange Drive-In Theatre and preached from the roof of the snack bar to families sitting in their cars. The first service was held in March 1955. He went door to door asking people why they did not attend church, and designed his message to answer their objections.

The walk-in, drive-in church

In 1961 the congregation opened a building designed by Richard Neutra in which people could worship either in the pews or in their cars outside, through a sliding glass wall. The Tower of Hope followed in 1968. In 1970 he began the Hour of Power, a weekly televised service which at its peak was watched by millions in many countries. In 1980 the church moved into the Crystal Cathedral, a vast glass building designed by Philip Johnson, built at a cost of about $18 million.

Possibility thinking

Schuller was influenced above all by Norman Vincent Peale, the Reformed Church minister and author of The Power of Positive Thinking, and developed his own "possibility thinking", set out in books such as Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking (1967) and Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do! (1983). From 1969 his Institute for Successful Church Leadership taught thousands of pastors his methods for reaching the unchurched, and several of the founders of the seeker-sensitive megachurch movement attended it.

Self-esteem

In Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (1982), sent free to many thousands of ministers, he argued that the Church's message had been "theocentric" when it should be "human-need-centred", and that the deepest human need is self-esteem.

Decline

After his retirement as senior pastor in 2006, disputes within his family over the succession and the direction of the ministry became public. Donations fell, and in October 2010 Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy with debts of over $40 million. The cathedral was sold to the Catholic Diocese of Orange, which took possession in 2013 and, after renovation, consecrated it as Christ Cathedral in 2019. Schuller was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2013.

Key dates

• 16 September 1926 - Born near Alton, Iowa
• 1950 - Ordained in the Reformed Church in America
• 1950-55 - Pastor of Ivanhoe Reformed Church, Riverdale, Illinois
• March 1955 - First service at the Orange Drive-In Theatre
• 1961 - Walk-in, drive-in church opens
• 1969 - Institute for Successful Church Leadership
• 1970 - Hour of Power begins
• 1980 - Crystal Cathedral dedicated
• 1982 - Self-Esteem: The New Reformation
• 2006 - Retires as senior pastor
• October 2010 - Crystal Cathedral Ministries files for bankruptcy
• 2012 - Cathedral sold to the Catholic Diocese of Orange
• 2 April 2015 - Dies in Artesia, California

Teachings and claims

Possibility thinking

Schuller taught that faith is the power to believe that God can make the impossible possible, and that a positive mental attitude is the key to success in life and in the Church. "If you can dream it, you can do it," and "Inch by inch, anything's a cinch," were among his sayings.

Self-esteem as the deepest need

In Self-Esteem he argued that sin is best understood as the loss of self-esteem: "Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem."^† He described hell as the loss of pride that follows separation from God, and held that the Church should not preach in a way that makes people feel worthless. Christ's death, he taught, shows the value God places on every person.

The unchurched

He taught that the Church must meet people where they are, removing barriers - traditional architecture, religious language, demands for commitment at the first encounter - that keep the unchurched away. "Find a need and fill it; find a hurt and heal it" was his principle of ministry.

Documented controversies

The gospel

Theologians across the churches, Reformed and evangelical above all, criticised his message as self-help with a Christian veneer, and his redefinition of sin as a loss of self-esteem as a denial of the Reformed doctrine he had promised to uphold. Some critics compared his reluctance to speak of sin and repentance with the liberal Protestantism he claimed to oppose.

The cathedral

Critics questioned the expense of the Crystal Cathedral and its associated buildings, and the dependence of the ministry on broadcasting revenue.

Bankruptcy

The bankruptcy of 2010 and the family disputes that preceded it were widely reported, and the sale of the cathedral to the Catholic diocese became a symbol of the end of an era.

Death

He died at a care facility in Artesia, California, on 2 April 2015, aged 88, of oesophageal cancer. His wife had died the previous year.

Legacy

Schuller was one of the pioneers of the church designed for the unchurched, of the televised worship service and of the megachurch, and leaders of the seeker-sensitive movement acknowledged their debt to his institute. His positive-thinking theology helped prepare the ground for later "prosperity lite" preaching. The Crystal Cathedral itself now serves as the cathedral of a Catholic diocese.

Measured against the creeds

Schuller remained a minister of a Reformed church whose confessions - the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort - begin with the knowledge of human sin and misery before the knowledge of redemption. His redefinition of sin as a want of self-esteem inverts that order. The historic churches with one voice confess that sin is rebellion against God and the corruption of human nature, that Christ died "for our sins" (1 Corinthians 15:3), and that the gospel brings repentance and forgiveness, not self-esteem. The Lord said that whoever exalts himself will be humbled (Luke 14:11).

His concern for those outside the Church, and his conviction that God values every person, are true and important. But the historic churches hold that the Church serves the unchurched by offering them Christ in word and sacrament, not by reshaping its message to their felt needs. The danger he illustrates is that a gospel adapted to self-esteem ceases to be the gospel of the cross.

Major writings

• Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking (1967)
• Your Church Has Real Possibilities (1974)
• Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (1982)
• Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do! (1983)
• My Journey: From an Iowa Farm to a Cathedral of Dreams (2001) - autobiography

Affiliation

Healing evangelist in the 1950s revival, associated with William Branham and the Latter Rain; one of the Kansas City Prophets

Appears in

The Third Wave, the Vineyard and the Kansas City Prophets, The healing revival, 1947-58, and after

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A child of promise

Paul Cain was born in 1929 in Garland, Texas. According to his own account, his mother was dying of cancer and other illnesses while pregnant with him, and was healed when an angel promised that the child would be a prophet. He said that at the age of eight an angel appeared to him and that from then on he received visions and knowledge about strangers. These stories come from Cain himself and his supporters; there is no contemporary record of them. One claim, that he foresaw the exact time of his mother's death, is contradicted by her death certificate.^†

The healing revival

He began preaching in his teens and by the late 1940s was a healing evangelist in his own right, with a tent and a radio programme. He joined the circle of evangelists around Gordon Lindsay's Voice of Healing and was closely associated with William Branham, whom he regarded as the greatest prophet of the age and in whose campaigns he took part. Cain was engaged to be married in the 1950s but broke off the engagement, saying God had forbidden him to marry; he remained single.

Withdrawal

Around 1958, disillusioned with the commercialism and showmanship of the healing revival, he withdrew from public ministry. For about twenty-five years he lived quietly, pastoring small congregations and travelling occasionally.

The Kansas City Prophets

In the late 1980s he came into contact with a fellowship in Kansas City whose leaders were promoting a new prophetic movement, and he became the most celebrated of the "Kansas City Prophets". In 1989 John Wimber, leader of the Vineyard, embraced him, convinced by a series of what he took to be accurate prophetic words, including a prediction of an earthquake in southern California on the day Cain met him. Cain spoke at Vineyard conferences in America and Britain and taught that God was raising up a "new breed" of believers - an end-time army, drawing on Joel 2 - who would demonstrate greater power than the apostles.

He prophesied that a great revival would begin in London in October 1990, at conferences Wimber held there. The revival did not occur. Wimber later acknowledged that the prophecy had been mistaken and distanced the Vineyard from the prophets. Cain continued to travel and minister independently through the 1990s.

Exposure and confession

In October 2004 three leaders who had worked with him made public that they had confronted him over a homosexual relationship and alcoholism, which he had admitted but, they said, had not addressed. In February 2005 Cain posted a letter in which he confessed to homosexual behaviour and alcoholism over many years. He later said he had been restored; the leaders who had confronted him disputed this. One of them later stated that Cain had admitted to him that some of his celebrated revelations had been obtained by natural means.^†

Key dates

• 1929 - Born in Garland, Texas
• 1940s - Healing evangelist; associated with The Voice of Healing
• 1950s - Works with William Branham
• c. 1958 - Withdraws from public ministry
• 1987-89 - Joins the Kansas City Prophets; embraced by John Wimber
• October 1990 - Prophesied London revival fails
• October 2004 - Three leaders make public their confrontation with him
• February 2005 - Publishes a confession
• 12 February 2019 - Dies, aged 89

Teachings and claims

The prophetic gift

Cain claimed to receive detailed revelation - names, addresses, illnesses and secrets - about strangers, as Branham had done. He taught that such gifts were being restored to the Church on a scale not seen since the apostles.

Branham as prophet

He regarded Branham as a true prophet whose ministry had been marred by his doctrinal errors and by the people around him, and he presented his own ministry as a continuation of what had begun in the healing revival.

The new breed

Drawing on Latter Rain teaching, he spoke of an end-time generation of believers - "the new breed", "Joel's army" - who would be filled with the Spirit and display supernatural power in the last days.

Documented controversies

Failed prophecy

The London prophecy of 1990 failed publicly, and Wimber acknowledged it.

Retrospective fulfilments

Critics, including Hank Hanegraaff and some former associates, documented that several prophecies reported as fulfilled were described only after the events, and that some biographical claims did not match the records.

Hidden sin

His confession of 2005 revealed that, during the very years he was celebrated as a prophet, he had been living in practices he publicly condemned. His claim to have been restored was contested by those who confronted him.

Death

He died on 12 February 2019, aged 89.^†

Legacy

Cain is a direct link between Branham's healing revival of the 1950s and the prophetic movement of the 1980s and after, and he carried Latter Rain ideas into the Vineyard and the wider charismatic world. His story is also among the most frequently cited cautionary cases in that world: a prophet admired for apparent accuracy whose private life and failed predictions undermined his claims.

Measured against the creeds

The historic churches confess that the revelation of God is complete in Christ and handed down in Scripture and the apostolic tradition (Hebrews 1:1-2; Jude 3). They have always tested those who claim to prophesy by their doctrine, by their life and by whether their words come to pass (Matthew 7:15-20; Deuteronomy 18:22; 1 John 4:1). By each of these tests Cain's ministry fails: he honoured Branham as a true prophet despite Branham's denial of the Trinity; his best-known prophecy failed; and his life contradicted his message for decades.

The "new breed" teaching, like the Latter Rain movement from which it came, also suggests an elite of end-time believers surpassing the apostles - an idea foreign to the creeds, which confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ as the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20).

His confession of sin was right and necessary; the Church's teaching on repentance and forgiveness applies to him as to everyone. But restoration to forgiveness is not automatically restoration to ministry, and the historic churches have always made the second a matter for the Church's judgement rather than the minister's own.

Affiliation

Missionary in Bolivia (1956-71); professor of church growth, Fuller Theological Seminary (1971-2001); presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles (1999-2009)

Appears in

The New Apostolic Reformation and the "five-fold ministry", The Third Wave, the Vineyard and the Kansas City Prophets, The Seven Mountains Mandate and dominionism, Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch

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New York and conversion

Charles Peter Wagner was born on 15 August 1930 in New York City and grew up in the city and in upstate New York, in a family with no active faith. He studied agriculture at Rutgers University, intending to become a dairy farmer. In 1950 he was converted, largely through the influence of the young woman he married that year, who made his commitment to Christ a condition of marriage; together they resolved to become missionaries.

Bolivia

After studying at Fuller Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary, he and his wife went to Bolivia in 1956 with the South America Mission and the Andes Evangelical Mission, where he taught at a Bible institute and seminary in Cochabamba and worked in mission administration. He was, by his own account, a convinced cessationist and a critic of Pentecostalism in these years. He observed, however, that the Pentecostal churches of Latin America were growing much faster than those of his own missions, and in Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming (1973) he sought to explain why.

Fuller and church growth

In 1971 he joined the faculty of the School of World Mission at Fuller, under Donald McGavran, and for thirty years was its best-known professor of church growth. He wrote prolifically on the subject: Your Church Can Grow (1976), Our Kind of People (1979, a defence of the homogeneous unit principle, based on his doctoral work at the University of Southern California), and Leading Your Church to Growth (1984). He founded the Fuller Evangelistic Association's church growth department in 1975 and recruited John Wimber to lead it.

Signs and wonders

Through Wimber he came to accept healing and the gifts of the Spirit. He co-taught the course MC510, "Signs, Wonders and Church Growth", with Wimber at Fuller from 1982, and in 1983 coined the term "Third Wave" for evangelicals who embraced the gifts without becoming Pentecostals. He said that he had himself been healed of high blood pressure through prayer.

Spiritual warfare

From the late 1980s he became the leading promoter of "strategic-level spiritual warfare". He coordinated the United Prayer Track of the AD2000 and Beyond Movement and founded Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs in 1991. He taught that demonic "territorial spirits" rule cities and nations, that they can be identified through "spiritual mapping" and research, and that they must be bound through targeted prayer before evangelism can succeed. He organised prayer journeys to sites believed to be strongholds of such spirits.

The New Apostolic Reformation

In the mid-1990s he began to describe the growth of independent charismatic networks under "apostolic" leaders as the "New Apostolic Reformation", the most significant change in the way of doing church since the Reformation. He founded the Wagner Leadership Institute in 1998 to train leaders in the new paradigm and in 1999-2000 became the "presiding apostle" of the International Coalition of Apostles. He declared that the "Second Apostolic Age" had begun in 2001. He retired from Fuller in 2001.

Dominion

In his later writings, especially Dominion! (2008), he taught that the Church is called to take dominion over the "seven mountains" of society - religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. He identified himself with what he called "dominion theology", while distinguishing it from Christian Reconstructionism.

Key dates

• 15 August 1930 - Born in New York City
• 1950 - Converted; marries
• 1956-71 - Missionary in Bolivia
• 1971 - Joins the School of World Mission at Fuller
• 1975 - Recruits John Wimber
• 1982-85 - Co-teaches MC510 with Wimber
• 1983 - Coins the "Third Wave"
• 1991 - Founds Global Harvest Ministries
• 1994-96 - Begins to speak of the "New Apostolic Reformation"
• 1998 - Founds the Wagner Leadership Institute; Confronting the Queen of Heaven
• 1999-2000 - Presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles
• 2001 - Retires from Fuller; declares the "Second Apostolic Age"
• 2008 - Dominion!
• 21 October 2016 - Dies, aged 86

Teachings and claims

Church growth

Wagner held that the growth of the Church is a measurable fruit of faithfulness and that churches should study the factors that produce growth. He taught McGavran's homogeneous unit principle and its pastoral application to North American churches.

Modern apostles and prophets

He taught that God is restoring to the Church the offices of apostle and prophet (Ephesians 4:11), which he held had been neglected since the early centuries. Apostles are leaders with extraordinary authority over networks of churches or spheres of society; prophets bring direct revelation for the Church's strategy.

Territorial spirits

He taught that Daniel 10 and other texts show that demonic princes rule territories, and that strategic intercession must identify and bind them by name. He developed the practices of spiritual mapping and "identificational repentance" - repenting on behalf of a city or nation for historic sins.

Dominion

He taught that the Great Commission includes the transformation of society by believers taking leadership in its spheres, and that the kingdom advances as the Church gains influence.

Documented controversies

The Queen of Heaven

In Confronting the Queen of Heaven (1998) he identified a demonic principality, the "Queen of Heaven", behind Marian devotion, the cult of Diana of Ephesus and other religions, and described prayer journeys to bind it. Catholic and many Protestant readers regarded the book as offensive and without biblical basis.

Spiritual mapping

Evangelical missiologists and theologians, including participants in a Lausanne consultation on spiritual warfare in 2000, criticised the theology of territorial spirits as speculative, and spiritual mapping as resembling animistic rather than biblical thought.^†

Apostolic authority

Critics across evangelical and charismatic circles argued that the NAR's apostles claim authority without accountability or confession, and that Wagner's description of the movement placed new revelation above the historic faith. Wagner himself denied that apostles add to Scripture.

Failed declarations

Some of the prayer campaigns he promoted were accompanied by announcements of the defeat of particular spirits or of coming breakthroughs that critics noted did not occur.^†

Death

He died on 21 October 2016, aged 86, after a period of illness.

Legacy

Wagner was the intellectual architect of three movements: church growth in its North American form, the "Third Wave", and the New Apostolic Reformation. His books, more than seventy in number, gave each a vocabulary and a rationale. The apostolic networks he described are now among the largest and fastest-growing forms of Christianity in the world, and the dominion teaching he promoted has entered political as well as religious life.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". In the historic understanding, the Church is apostolic because it continues in the apostles' teaching and is built on their foundation, which is laid once (Ephesians 2:20; Acts 2:42); the apostles' authority is handed on through the Scriptures they wrote and the ordered ministry of the Church, not through new apostles with fresh revelation. Wagner's "Second Apostolic Age" is a claim the creeds do not allow for.

The doctrine of territorial spirits rests on a few texts (Daniel 10; Ephesians 6:12) that do not prescribe the methods he taught; the historic churches confess that Christ has "disarmed the principalities and powers" (Colossians 2:15) and that the Church resists the devil by faith, the word and prayer, not by research into the names of spirits. His treatment of Marian devotion as demonic was a grave misrepresentation of the faith of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Finally, the identification of the kingdom's advance with the Church's gaining dominion over society is foreign to the theology of the cross. The Lord taught that His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) and that it comes as a mustard seed and leaven, hidden and small (Matthew 13:31-33).

Major writings

• Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming (1973)
• Your Church Can Grow (1976)
• Our Kind of People (1979)
• The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit (1988)
• Warfare Prayer (1992)
• Confronting the Queen of Heaven (1998)
• The New Apostolic Churches (1998)
• Apostles Today (2006)
• Dominion! (2008)
• Wrestling with Alligators, Prophets, and Theologians (2010) - memoir

Affiliation

Professional musician; Quaker pastor; church growth consultant at Fuller; leader of the Association of Vineyard Churches (1982-97)

Appears in

The Third Wave, the Vineyard and the Kansas City Prophets

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Life

Musician

John Richard Wimber was born on 25 February 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, and grew up in Peoria, Illinois. His father left the family when he was a baby. He had no religious upbringing. A gifted musician, he played and arranged professionally from his teens; in the early 1960s he was a member of the Paramours, a group from which the Righteous Brothers emerged, and he later described himself as having been successful in the music business while his personal life was in chaos. He married Carol Kenney in 1955; the marriage almost ended in the early 1960s.

Conversion and the Friends

In 1963, attending a Bible study led by a Quaker layman in Yorba Linda, California, in an attempt to save their marriage, John and Carol Wimber were converted. He threw himself into evangelism and by his own account led hundreds of people to faith over the next years. He studied at Azusa Pacific College and in 1970 became co-pastor of the Yorba Linda Friends Church. He later said that he had been taught that the miraculous gifts had ceased with the apostles, and that he had once asked, after reading the Gospels, "When do we get to do the stuff?"

Church growth consultant

In 1975 C. Peter Wagner invited him to become the founding director of the Department of Church Growth at the Fuller Evangelistic Association. For three years he travelled the country as a consultant, observing thousands of churches. He became convinced that churches growing fastest in the developing world were those that expected healing, deliverance and prophecy.

The Vineyard

In 1977 a prayer group in his wife's home grew into a congregation, first affiliated with Calvary Chapel. Wimber began to preach through Luke and to pray for the sick, for months without visible result, and then, he said, with healings. On Mother's Day 1980 the young evangelist Lonnie Frisbee invited the Holy Spirit to come on the congregation, and many fell, shook and spoke in tongues. The phenomena caused tension with Calvary Chapel, and in 1982 Wimber's congregation joined a small network of churches called the Vineyard. Wimber soon became its leader, and the Anaheim Vineyard grew to several thousand members. The Association of Vineyard Churches grew rapidly in America and abroad.

Signs and wonders at Fuller

From 1982 to 1985 Wimber taught a course at Fuller Theological Seminary, MC510 "Signs, Wonders and Church Growth", with C. Peter Wagner, which included practical sessions in which students prayed for the sick. It became the most popular course in the seminary's history and also its most controversial; in 1985 the faculty suspended it, and a faculty study published in 1987 set out the seminary's reservations.^†

Britain

From 1981 Wimber travelled to Britain, at first through the Anglican evangelist David Watson, and his conferences at Westminster Central Hall and elsewhere from 1984 drew thousands of Anglicans, Baptists and others. His influence on the charismatic wing of the Church of England was considerable.

The prophets and Toronto

In 1988-89 Wimber embraced the Kansas City Prophets, including Paul Cain, and their predictions of a coming revival. When Cain's prophecy of a revival in London in October 1990 failed, Wimber publicly acknowledged the error and in time placed the prophets under Vineyard oversight before distancing himself from them. In 1994 the "Toronto Blessing", marked by uncontrolled laughter, animal noises and falling, began at the Toronto Airport Vineyard; after a year of growing concern, Wimber and the Vineyard board withdrew recognition from the congregation in December 1995.

Illness

Wimber was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 1993 and suffered a stroke in 1995. He continued to lead the Vineyard until shortly before his death.

Key dates

• 25 February 1934 - Born in Kirksville, Missouri
• 1955 - Marries Carol Kenney
• 1963 - Converted in a Quaker Bible study
• 1970 - Co-pastor of Yorba Linda Friends Church
• 1975-78 - Church growth consultant with C. Peter Wagner
• 1977 - Home group becomes a congregation
• May 1980 - Mother's Day meeting
• 1982 - Joins the Vineyard; MC510 begins at Fuller
• 1984 - First large British conferences
• 1985 - Fuller suspends MC510
• 1986 - Power Evangelism
• 1988-90 - Association with the Kansas City Prophets
• October 1990 - Failed London prophecy
• December 1995 - Toronto Airport Vineyard removed from the Vineyard
• 17 November 1997 - Dies in Santa Ana, California

Teachings and claims

The kingdom now and not yet

Following George Eldon Ladd, Wimber taught that the kingdom of God has broken into history in Christ but awaits completion at His return. Healing, deliverance and prophecy are signs of the present kingdom; continued sickness and death show that it is not yet complete. This framework allowed him to pray for healing without promising it.

Power evangelism

He taught that the gospel is most effectively received when proclamation is joined with demonstration - "power encounters" in which people experience God's power through healing or deliverance. He contrasted this with "programmatic evangelism" that relies on persuasion alone.

Doing the stuff

He taught that every believer, not only a gifted few, can pray for the sick and minister in the gifts of the Spirit, and developed a simple five-step model of healing prayer. He was known for a relaxed, unhysterical style: "Come, Holy Spirit," followed by quiet waiting.

The "Third Wave"

With Wagner, he described his ministry as a "third wave" of the Spirit after the Pentecostal and charismatic waves: evangelicals who embraced the gifts without the Pentecostal doctrine of a second baptism evidenced by tongues.

Worship

He gave great weight to intimate, extended sung worship, and Vineyard songs and style spread worldwide.

Documented controversies

Signs and wonders

Critics, among them Reformed and dispensational evangelicals and some fellow charismatics, argued that his methods produced psychological rather than spiritual effects, that reported healings were unverified, and that "power evangelism" made experience rather than the word the ground of faith. A study of a Wimber conference in Harrogate in 1986 by a sympathetic medical researcher found mixed results.^†

The prophets

His endorsement of the Kansas City Prophets is widely regarded, including by Vineyard historians, as his most serious error of judgement. He acknowledged the failure of Cain's prophecy.

Toronto

His removal of the Toronto congregation was criticised by its supporters as quenching the Spirit and by critics as coming too late.

Death

After years of cancer and a stroke, he fell at his home in Santa Ana, California, and died of a brain haemorrhage on 17 November 1997, aged 63.

Legacy

The Vineyard movement now includes many hundreds of churches worldwide, and its music has shaped contemporary worship across denominations. More broadly, Wimber made the practice of the gifts of the Spirit normal among evangelicals who did not identify as Pentecostal, and his influence among charismatic Anglicans in Britain was lasting. His collaboration with Wagner also helped give birth to the prophetic and apostolic movements that followed, some of which he himself came to distrust.

Measured against the creeds

Wimber's framework of the kingdom "now and not yet" is closer to the historic faith than the Word of Faith teaching that healing is guaranteed: the creeds confess the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come as the completion of redemption, and the Church has always prayed for the sick without promising that every prayer will be answered as asked. His humility in acknowledging the failure of the London prophecy, and in removing a congregation from his own movement, is to his credit.

The difficulties lie in his doctrine of the Church and of experience. He taught that the Spirit's power is chiefly encountered in signs and in phenomena under the invitation "Come, Holy Spirit", rather than in the means the Lord appointed - the word preached and the sacraments administered (Romans 10:17; Acts 2:38-42). "Power evangelism" risks making the sign the ground of faith, which Christ refused (Matthew 12:39; John 20:29). And the movement he led, without an ordered ministry or a confession of faith, had no settled way to test the prophets he embraced; the historic churches hold that prophecy is subject to the Church and its faith (1 Corinthians 14:29-32).

Major writings

• With Kevin Springer, Power Evangelism (1986)
• With Kevin Springer, Power Healing (1987)
• The Dynamics of Spiritual Growth (1990)
• Worship songs, including "Spirit Song" (1979)

Affiliation

Bank clerk; independent charismatic evangelist; founder of Jesus Calls Ministries and Karunya University

Appears in

The modern movements in India

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Surandai

Duraisamy Geoffrey Samuel Dhinakaran was born on 1 July 1935 at Surandai, in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, into a Christian family of modest means in the Protestant tradition of the region.^† He was educated in local schools and at college, and went to work as a clerk in a bank in Chennai (then Madras).

Despair and conversion

He later described a period in his early twenties of deep despair, which he said ended in 1955 when a relative spoke to him of Christ and he gave his life to Jesus. In his own account, in 1962 Jesus appeared to him in a vision, filled him with the Holy Spirit and gave him a ministry of healing and prophecy. He began to preach in the evenings and at weekends, and in time left the bank to preach full-time.

Jesus Calls

From the late 1960s his meetings grew rapidly. In 1970 he founded Jesus Calls, which began with a prayer ministry and a magazine and, from 1972, radio broadcasts. His mass meetings in Tamil Nadu and across India, sometimes attended by hundreds of thousands, followed a pattern of worship, preaching, prayer for the sick and personal prophecy, in which he announced healings and spoke "words" to named individuals in the crowd. He travelled widely abroad among the Indian diaspora and in the West.

Prayer towers

From 1986 he built "prayer towers" - centres staffed around the clock by volunteers who receive prayer requests by telephone and letter - first in Chennai and then in other cities of India and abroad. The model became one of the distinctive features of his ministry.

The Young Partners Plan

Jesus Calls says that on 25 July 1985 Dhinakaran received a revelation of a plan for "the young who want to join as partners" in the ministry. The Young Partners Plan, known in Tamil as the Ilam Pangalar Thittam (இளம் பங்காளர் திட்டம்), invited parents to enrol a child, from birth upwards, with an offering, or young people to enrol themselves.^† In return the ministry undertook to pray for each partner daily until adulthood (today, until the age of 21 or 25 or marriage, depending on the branch), to send a certificate bearing a Bible promise, to pray for the partner on each birthday, and to have the Dhinakaran family pray for the partner personally once in a lifetime. The plan was built on the prayer of Jabez (1 Chronicles 4:10), and it promised three blessings: protection from the evils of the world, wisdom for studies, and prosperity in life. The ministry's American branch today suggests an offering of $300; the amounts asked in India in the 1980s are not given in the sources consulted.^†

The plan was launched in the year before Karunya opened, and it is widely remembered in Tamil Nadu as the means by which the college was paid for, with families across the state enrolling their children. The published sources consulted, however, do not document how far Young Partners offerings, rather than other gifts, fees and loans, financed Karunya's land and buildings, and the ministry's own pages describe the offerings as supporting its prayer work generally.^† The two were later linked in practice: Jesus Calls states that it subsidises the fees of young partners who study at Karunya.

Karunya

On 4 October 1986, some months after his daughter Angel was killed in a road accident, Dhinakaran opened the Karunya Institute of Technology, a residential engineering college, on a site in the foothills of the Western Ghats near Coimbatore. He said he had been given a vision of "a Technological Institution founded on faith, which will produce teachers, engineers and managers" who would serve the nation.^† The college was a self-financing institution, receiving no government grant; in 1999 it became the first self-financing institution in India to be granted autonomy, and it was later recognised as a deemed university (Karunya University, now the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences), with Dhinakaran as its first chancellor. The campus grew to some 700 acres.

Television

From the 1990s Jesus Calls produced television programmes in Tamil, English and other Indian languages, which made him one of the best-known religious figures in South India. His son was associated with him in the ministry from the 1980s and later succeeded him.

Key dates

• 1 July 1935 - Born at Surandai, Tirunelveli district
• 1955 - Conversion
• 1962 - Reports a vision of Jesus and a call to healing ministry
• 1970 - Founds Jesus Calls
• 1972 - Radio broadcasts begin
• 25 July 1985 - Announces the Young Partners Plan (Ilam Pangalar Thittam)
• 1986 - Death of his daughter Angel; first prayer tower
• 4 October 1986 - Opens the Karunya Institute of Technology near Coimbatore
• 1999 - Karunya becomes the first self-financing institution in India granted autonomy
• 1990s - Television ministry
• 20 February 2008 - Dies in Chennai

Teachings and claims

Healing and prophecy

Dhinakaran taught that Jesus heals today and that the gifts of the Spirit, including healing, prophecy and the "word of knowledge", are given to the Church. In his meetings he claimed to see, by revelation, specific healings taking place and to receive messages from God for individuals.

Visions

He described many visions of Jesus, heaven and the angels, and wrote and spoke about them at length.

Blessing

He taught that God wills to bless His children in family, education, employment and finance, and that faithful prayer and giving bring that blessing. His "blessing plans" - the Young Partners Plan for children, and family and business plans for adults - invited supporters to give in return for prayer for their families, studies and work. The Young Partners Plan promised children protection, wisdom in their studies and prosperity in life, on the pattern of the prayer of Jabez.

Prayer

His prayer towers expressed his conviction that intercessory prayer should be offered continually and that anyone in need should be able to reach someone to pray with them at any hour.

Documented controversies

Prophetic claims

Critics within the Indian churches, including CSI and evangelical leaders, questioned the verifiability of his healings and personal prophecies, and the absence of independent follow-up of those declared healed.^†

Blessing and giving

His blessing plans, and the linkage between giving and the expectation of blessing, were criticised as a form of prosperity teaching suited to the aspirations of India's growing middle class. The Young Partners Plan drew particular criticism because it was addressed to parents' hopes for their children - protection, examination success and a good future - and because the enrolment offering was presented as the occasion of those blessings. ^†

Style

Some Indian church leaders were uneasy with the American-style methods of mass meetings and broadcasting, and with the drawing of members away from their congregations.

No criminal charge against him personally is recorded.^†

Death

He died in Chennai on 20 February 2008, aged 72, after a long period of heart and kidney illness.

Legacy

Jesus Calls continues under his family's leadership and remains one of the largest Christian ministries in India, with prayer towers, broadcasting and the Karunya university. Dhinakaran was the most widely known Tamil Christian of his lifetime and the model for many later healing and prophetic ministries in South India. In Tirunelveli and the rest of Tamil Nadu his ministry reshaped popular Christianity, encouraging the expectation of healing and personal prophecy among Christians of the historic churches as well as the independent ones.

Measured against the creeds

Dhinakaran confessed the Trinity and the deity of Christ, preached repentance and faith, and his prayer ministry and his care for the sick reached many in need. The founding of an institution of higher education is a lasting contribution.

The difficulties lie where they lie for the healing and blessing movements generally. The historic churches pray for the sick, anoint them and expect God to act (James 5:14-15), but they do not announce healings from a platform without verification, nor promise that health and prosperity follow faithful giving. The creeds promise the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, not material blessing in this life. Personal prophecies addressed to individuals in a crowd are not, in the historic churches' understanding, how God ordinarily guides His people, and every claimed revelation must be tested by Scripture and the Church's faith (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1).

The historic churches also hold that the Spirit's gifts are given through the ordinary means of word and sacrament in the congregation, rather than chiefly through a gifted individual at the head of a ministry independent of the Church.

Affiliation

Assemblies of God evangelist (defrocked 1988); Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, Baton Rouge

Appears in

Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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Ferriday, Louisiana

Jimmy Lee Swaggart was born on 15 March 1935 in Ferriday, Louisiana, into a poor family during the Depression. He was a cousin of the rock-and-roll pianist Jerry Lee Lewis and the country singer Mickey Gilley; the three boys learned piano together. His parents and grandmother joined a small Assemblies of God congregation, and Swaggart said he received the baptism in the Spirit at the age of eight. He left school in the ninth grade and married at seventeen.

Evangelist and singer

Through the 1950s he preached as an itinerant evangelist in the rural South, often in great poverty, living with his wife and son in a trailer. He was ordained by the Assemblies of God in 1961. His gospel albums, recorded from the early 1960s, sold millions of copies and made his name. In 1969 he began a radio programme, The Camp Meeting Hour, and in 1973 a weekly television programme. He built a ministry centre in Baton Rouge, the Family Worship Center, and in 1984 opened Jimmy Swaggart Bible College.

The peak

By the mid-1980s his telecast was carried in more than a hundred countries and, by some measures, was the most-watched religious programme in America; the ministry's annual income was reported at over $140 million.^† His preaching was fiery, emotional and deeply Pentecostal, and he was an outspoken critic of Catholicism, rock music, psychology, humanism and, later, the Word of Faith movement.

The fall

In 1986 he exposed the adultery of a fellow Assemblies of God preacher in New Orleans, who was defrocked. In 1987 he joined in the condemnation of another prominent televangelist after that man's scandal broke. In February 1988 photographs were produced showing Swaggart with a prostitute at a motel in New Orleans. On 21 February 1988, in a televised service, he confessed tearfully, "I have sinned against you, my Lord," without naming the sin. The Assemblies of God ordered a two-year suspension from preaching; after three months he returned to the pulpit, and the denomination defrocked him.

In October 1991 he was stopped by police in Indio, California, with a prostitute in his car. He told his congregation afterwards that the Lord had told him it was "flat none of your business". His ministry's income and audience fell sharply, though it survived.

Later years

He continued to preach in Baton Rouge for more than thirty years, rebuilt a smaller broadcasting operation, and in 2010 launched the SonLife Broadcasting Network. In the late 1990s he began to preach what he called "the Message of the Cross", a cross-centred doctrine of sanctification which he regarded as the answer to the failures of his earlier life and of Pentecostal teaching generally.

Key dates

• 15 March 1935 - Born in Ferriday, Louisiana
• 1950s - Itinerant evangelist in the South
• 1961 - Ordained by the Assemblies of God
• 1969 - The Camp Meeting Hour radio programme
• 1973 - Begins weekly television
• 1984 - Opens Jimmy Swaggart Bible College
• 1986 - Exposes a fellow minister's adultery
• 21 February 1988 - "I have sinned" confession
• April 1988 - Defrocked by the Assemblies of God
• October 1991 - Stopped by police in Indio, California
• 2010 - Launches SonLife Broadcasting Network
• 1 July 2025 - Dies, aged 90

Teachings and claims

Classical Pentecostalism

He preached repentance, holiness, the baptism in the Spirit with tongues and divine healing in the form of the Assemblies of God tradition in which he was raised.

Against Catholicism

He attacked the Catholic Church in sermons and in booklets such as A Letter to My Catholic Friends, describing it as a false church and Marian devotion as idolatry.

Against the Word of Faith

He was among the first Pentecostal preachers to attack the Word of Faith movement publicly, condemning its teaching on positive confession, on believers as "little gods" and on Christ's "spiritual death", and calling it a different gospel.

The Message of the Cross

From the late 1990s he taught that the believer's victory over sin comes only by placing faith in the cross, not in any religious work or discipline, and that this truth had been obscured in Pentecostal preaching. He produced an "Expositor's Study Bible" with notes on this theme.

Documented controversies

The 1988 scandal

His confession and the photographs of February 1988, coming months after another televangelist's fall, made the televangelist scandals of 1987-88 a national story and badly damaged public trust in religious broadcasting.

Rejecting discipline

His refusal to accept the Assemblies of God's suspension is the reason he was defrocked; the denomination stated that restoration required submission to the discipline.

1991

The second incident, and his response to it, led many former supporters to abandon him.

Defamation

The New Orleans minister he had exposed sued him for defamation and won a large jury verdict in 1991, later settled for a smaller sum.^†

Death

He suffered cardiac arrest at his home in June 2025 and died on 1 July 2025, aged 90.

Legacy

He is remembered both as one of the most gifted Pentecostal preachers and gospel singers of his generation and as the emblem of the televangelist scandals. His fall, together with others in the same years, prompted the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability and others to press for higher standards among broadcast ministries. His ministry continues in Baton Rouge.

Measured against the creeds

Much of Swaggart's preaching was within the evangelical consensus: he confessed the Trinity and the deity of Christ, preached salvation by grace through faith, and his later insistence that the believer's hope rests on the cross rather than on spiritual techniques is close to the Reformation's theology of the cross. His criticism of the Word of Faith movement anticipated what most theologians across the churches would say.

His attacks on the Catholic Church, however, were of the kind the historic churches regard as uncharitable and frequently inaccurate. And his history illustrates the danger, described in this section's topic pages, of a ministry with no accountability beyond the preacher himself. The historic churches hold that ministers are under the discipline of the Church (1 Timothy 5:19-20), and that the office, not the personality, carries the ministry; when a minister rejects discipline and continues to preach, he separates himself from the very order that could restore him.

Major writings

• To Cross a River (autobiography, 1977)
• The Expositor's Study Bible (2005)
• The Message of the Cross (sermons and booklets, from the late 1990s)

Affiliation

Assemblies of God pastor; founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul (1958)

Appears in

Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch, Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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Ulju and illness

Cho Yong-gi was born on 14 February 1936 in Ulju County, near Ulsan, in Japanese-ruled Korea, the eldest son of a Buddhist family. His father's business failed during the Korean War, and Cho left school for a time to work. As a teenager in Busan he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis and was told he had little time to live. A young Christian girl visited him and gave him a Bible, and he was converted; he said he was healed of the tuberculosis through prayer and that Jesus appeared to him and called him to preach.^† He worked as an interpreter for American missionaries, including the evangelist Lester Sumrall.

The tent church

In 1956 he entered the Full Gospel Bible College in Seoul, run by the Assemblies of God. There he met Choi Ja-shil, a widow and fellow student, and in May 1958 the two began a tent church in Daejo-dong, a poor district on the outskirts of Seoul, with five members. They prayed for the sick and visited the poor; the church grew. In 1961 it moved to Seodaemun in central Seoul, and in 1965 Cho married Choi's daughter.

Collapse and the cell groups

In 1964, exhausted by preaching, visiting and baptising, Cho collapsed during a service. Unable to carry the work alone, he divided the congregation into home cell groups led by lay people, mostly women - a decision that met with resistance but became the foundation of the church's growth.

Yoido

In 1973 the church moved to a new auditorium on Yoido Island in the Han River, beside the National Assembly. It was renamed Yoido Full Gospel Church. With Choi he founded a prayer mountain at Osanri, where thousands came to fast and pray. By the early 1980s the church was widely described as the largest single congregation in the world, and by 2007 it reported some 830,000 members, with many satellite churches.^† Cho founded the Kukmin Ilbo daily newspaper in 1988 and an array of educational, welfare and broadcasting organisations. He used the name Paul Yonggi Cho in the West until 1992, when he took the name David.

International influence

From the 1970s Cho spoke at church growth conferences around the world; Church Growth International, which he founded in 1976, taught his cell-group model to pastors of every denomination. He was chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship from 1992 to

1. He retired as senior pastor in 2008 but remained influential.

Key dates

• 14 February 1936 - Born in Ulju County, Korea
• c. 1953-54 - Tuberculosis; conversion
• 1956 - Enters Full Gospel Bible College, Seoul
• May 1958 - Founds a tent church with Choi Ja-shil
• 1961 - Church moves to Seodaemun
• 1964 - Collapses; begins cell groups
• 1973 - Church moves to Yoido
• 1976 - Founds Church Growth International
• 1979 - The Fourth Dimension
• 1988 - Founds the Kukmin Ilbo
• 1992-2000 - Chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship
• 2008 - Retires as senior pastor
• 2014 - Convicted of breach of trust and tax evasion
• 14 September 2021 - Dies in Seoul

Teachings and claims

The threefold blessing

Cho's central teaching, drawn from 3 John 2 ("that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth"), was the "threefold blessing": salvation of the soul, prosperity in all things, and bodily health. He set it alongside a "fivefold gospel" of regeneration, the fullness of the Spirit, healing, blessing and the second coming.

The fourth dimension

In The Fourth Dimension (1979) he taught that the spiritual world is a higher dimension that governs the three dimensions of the material world, and that believers, by clearly visualising what they pray for and speaking it in faith, "incubate" the answer and bring it into being. He gave examples of praying for specific items, down to the make of a bicycle. He also wrote that non-Christian religions and occultists use the fourth dimension, which critics seized on.

Prayer and the Spirit

He taught persistent prayer, fasting and the baptism in the Spirit with tongues in the classical Pentecostal manner, and laid great weight on personal communion with the Holy Spirit.

Cell groups

He held that the Church grows through small groups meeting in homes under lay leaders, each expected to multiply, and that this recovers the house churches of the New Testament.

Documented controversies

Visualisation

Evangelical and Pentecostal critics alike argued that the "fourth dimension" owed more to positive thinking and New Thought than to Scripture, and that it treated prayer as a technique for obtaining what one wants.

Blessing theology

His threefold blessing was criticised in Korea and abroad as a prosperity gospel suited to the Korean economic boom, and for teaching that health and wealth are signs of spiritual health.

Financial conviction

In February 2014 the Seoul Central District Court convicted him of breach of trust for causing the church losses of about 13 billion won by directing it to buy shares in a company owned by his eldest son at inflated prices, and of tax evasion on the transaction. He was given a suspended prison sentence and a large fine; his son was also convicted. The convictions were upheld on appeal.^†

Succession and governance

Disputes over the control of church-related organisations by members of his family drew public protests from church elders in the 2010s.

Death

He suffered a brain haemorrhage in July 2020 and was cared for in hospital for more than a year. He died in Seoul on 14 September 2021, aged 85.

Legacy

Yoido Full Gospel Church is the most famous example of the megachurch built on cell groups, and the model has been copied in thousands of churches worldwide. Cho was the best-known Pentecostal leader in Asia, and his blessing theology shaped Pentecostal and charismatic preaching across the continent. His care for the poor in the early years, and the welfare institutions he founded, are part of his legacy alongside the financial scandal of his last years.

Measured against the creeds

Cho confessed the Trinity and the Apostles' Creed and preached Christ's death and resurrection. His recovery of the ministry of lay people in small groups echoes the care of souls in the historic parish and the household prayer of the early Church.

His teaching departs from the historic faith at two points. The first is the threefold blessing: the creeds promise the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and eternal life, not prosperity and health in this life; 3 John 2 is a conventional greeting, not a covenant promise, and the apostles taught contentment in want and plenty alike (Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Timothy 6:6-10). The second is the fourth dimension: prayer in the historic churches is the petition of children to their Father, "Thy will be done", not a technique by which visualised desires are brought into being. The confidence that faith creates its own reality is closer to the New Thought movement than to the Lord's Prayer.

His conviction for breach of trust also illustrates the dangers, described in this section's pages, of a church built around one man and his family without independent oversight.

Major writings

• The Fourth Dimension (1979; vol. 2, 1983)
• Successful Home Cell Groups (1981)
• Prayer: Key to Revival (1984)
• Salvation, Health and Prosperity: Our Threefold Blessings in Christ (1987)