AGNES SANFORD’s HEALING
LIGHT
By Rev . Dr. Ed
& Janice Hird
An article for
the Light Magazine ‘Healing Pioneers’ series
The 20th century healing revival was encouraged
greatly by Agnes Sanford. She mentored and raised up more successors than other
healing pioneers. Her spiritual children included Leanne Payne, Francis
MacNutt, Tommy Tyson, John & Paula Sandford, Anne White, Ruth Carter
Stapleton, and Dennis & Rita Bennett.
Newsweek Magazine described her as one of six people who shaped
religious thought in the 20th century. Agnes is remembered as the most original
healing theologian of that time. The famous author Frederick Buechner commented:
I was deeply influenced by an
Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a
faith healer, which is a term I've always distrusted, because it conjures up
charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had
remarkable healings.
Much of her creativity can be traced back to her early years
as an MK (missionary kid) in China. Agnes
Mary White (later Sanford) was born, on November 4, 1897, in China to
Presbyterian missionary parents. Her father, Rev. Hugh W. White was resisted by
other missionaries who did not want to give leadership to the local Chinese
pastors. He wrote a remarkable book
based on his experiences with brand new Chinese believers: Demonism,
Verified and Analyzed.
Like many MKs, Agnes never really felt fully at home in any
culture. She could speak Mandarin, but
not read or write it. She saw North America with Chinese eyes and China with
North American eyes: “I fell in love with China before I fell in love with a
man.” Agnes first attended the Shanghai
American School as a teenager before leaving for the United States to attend
Peace College, a Presbyterian women's college in Raleigh, North Carolina. However, she could not escape the pull to
return to China, serving as a missionary teacher before meeting her future
husband Rev. Edgar (Ted) Sanford, an Anglican/Episcopalian missionary in China.
Much like Eugene Peterson, Agnes was very poetic, musical, imaginative,
and sensitive to other people’s emotional well-being. She was deeply moved by the ignored plight of
a missionary wife struggling with deep depression who later killed herself.
Agnes's initial view of God was that of a distant and
demanding taskmaster: “…the window of my own soul was closed, and I could not
see Him. Christianity to me had become
to me words –just words – only words.” After
she moved with her husband back to North America, Agnes suffered from severe,
recurrent depressions for many, many years: “My family was adept at them
(nervous breakdowns). We are of strong
physical heritage, but we excel in having nervous breakdowns.”
She felt like a square peg in a round hole, in terms of her
role as a North American pastor’s wife:
I had determined to make
myself exactly like Ted’s mother, whom I adored. I would then be, I felt, the
kind of wife that he liked. Therefore, I completely denied my original nature
and devoted every moment to fruitless endeavor. And so, I reached the depths
because I was doing violence to my own soul.
No matter how hard she tried, Agnes felt that she would
never be the ‘perfect minister’s wife.’ Her
postpartum depression was so deep that her doctor thought that she might kill
herself within a year: “…my mind was clogged with resentment and darkness and
unhappiness, as a pipeline can be clogged with roots and dirt.” Agnes’
curiosity was stirred when an Anglican priest Hollis Colwell prayed for her young
son who was immediately healed. She
finally broke out of her depression after Colwell laid his hands on her head
and prayed for her. For the next year, she wrote, she went about her work
repeating to herself, hourly and daily, the same prayer: "Lord have mercy
on me, and fill me with Your Holy Spirit."
Agnes realized that the real part of her was simply not
living, the creative one who longed for children of the mind to be brought
forth. She realized that she could no longer see beauty: “when one can no
longer see beauty, one can no longer see God.”
In her autobiography Sealed Orders, Agnes spoke of
discovering her call by God to be a writer.
Hollis Colwell deeply encouraged her to put her thoughts onto paper: “Write
two hours every day. Those are my orders.” The very act of writing brought healing to
both Agnes and with those whom she ministered.
She eventually dedicated six months a year to writing rather than constantly
leading healing missions. Colwell also encouraged her to begin praying for
others on her own, rather than just keep sending people to him.
The basic trouble was that I
had forgotten whence I came, and I did not know the sealed orders with which I
had been sent to this earth. I sensed my thwarted creativity. I wanted to be a
writer, and I could not, for all of my time and thought and attention was upon
being a wife and mother.
During World War II, Agnes volunteered through the Red Cross
in the local veteran's hospitals, giving her a chance to quietly pray for the
sick. Before being kicked out of the hospital for praying, she saw several
miraculous healings there. Agnes said Jesus stood in church services all over
Christendom with his hands tied behind his back because neither ministers nor
people expected him to do anything. She said people who prayed had to expect
miracles.
Agnes’ first book Healing Light was rejected by many
publishers before several chapters were serialized by Rev. Dr. John Gaynor
Banks in the Order of St. Luke the Physician’s Sharing magazine. This
led to Glenn Clark, founder of the CFO Camps, to publish it through Macalester
Park Publishing Company. Since its 1947 publication, it has sold over half a
million copies. She later wrote many
other nonfiction and fiction books on healing.
In 1958, Agnes and her husband Ted began the School of
Pastoral Care. It helped train pastors to both receive healing and then pray
for other’s healing. Agnes, like Jesus,
healed people out of compassion for lost, hurting sheep: “If you are not moved
by compassion, lay it off. It just won’t work.”
Agnes rooted the healing ministry in the sacraments: “My own
most effective way of receiving Christ is at the communion service, for I have
learned to receive Him through the sacraments of the church as well as through
my own meditation.” One of her strategies for spiritual renewal was having
twenty-five women come ten minutes early to the church to pray the prayer of forgiveness
for anyone whose face irritated them. This, she discovered, released the
healing power of Christ.
With the rise of the Jesus movement, Agnes welcomed the
youth awakening: “I thank God for the Jesus People rolling up and down Sunset
Strip. They have totally changed that place. Some of the bars have closed because the Jesus
People would get in there and give out tracts before they were kicked out. They closed one dirty show completely, by all
standing around and giving a college yell for Jesus (Give me a J!).”
As a pioneer in the healing of memories, she resisted
techniques, preferring instead to rely on the leading of the Holy Spirit. Inner healing for her was about a deeper
understanding of forgiveness of sins, what she called the most difficult
venture in the world. Resentment and bitterness poisoned our bodies. Restoring
our creative imagination brought our souls back to life. Agnes found deep healing through gardening and
drama:
There was also gardening,
which is still my joy and delight, for one feels the life of the earth through
the hands, and the benediction of God’s love through the sunshine, and the pure
joy of the Kingdom through the color and fragrance of the flowers.
Soul healing for Agnes was deeply connected with
experiencing the beauty of the world.
She also encouraged people not to just do spiritual activities but also
to receive healing through building bookshelves, taking part in plays, or going
fishing. We need to both pray and play
to bring healing to our body, mind and spirit.
May the pioneering of Agnes Sanford continue to help release
many into a deeper understanding of forgiveness of sins in every area of our
lives.