The healing revival, 1947-58, and after

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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Life

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

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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Life

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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Life

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

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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Life

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

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

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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Life

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.