Francis & Judith MacNutt: God’s healing team

 

by Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

-previously published in the Light Magazine

Francis and Judith MacNutt were one of the most remarkable healing teams of God that the world has ever known. Born in 1925, Francis MacNutt’s career dream was to become a medical doctor. In 1944, at age 19, he was accepted by Washington University Medical School after only two years of college premed.  Ten days before entering medical school, he was drafted, serving the next two years in the Medical Department of the Army as a surgical technician, mostly in the operating room of the hospital at Camp Crowder, Missouri. 

After World War II, he returned to Harvard where he completed an honours degree in English, followed by a Masters’ Degree in Speech and Drama at Catholic University of America in Washington DC. In 1956, he was ordained as a Dominican priest, before completing his Ph.D. in Theology from Aquinas Institute of Theology. Serving there as a Professor of Preaching, he was elected President of the National Catholic Homiletics Society. After founding the journal Preaching in 1965, he held preaching seminars throughout North America. 

When first praying for healing with others, Francis initially suffered from what he called ‘spiritual inferiority’, “I was afraid of looking ridiculous or being labeled as overly pious.” In 1960, Francis met Rev. Alfred Price, the Warden of the Order of St. Luke the Physician. In 1967, Francis experienced a life-changing outpouring of the Holy Spirit at a Camp Farthest Out conference. There he encountered Agnes Sanford, who became his mentor in the healing ministry, and Rev. Tommy Tyson, a Methodist pastor who later traveled worldwide with Francis on healing missions. A year later, Francis became the first Catholic priest to ever attend Agnes Sanford’s School for Pastoral Care. Francis became like a spiritual talent scout who could discern and call forth other people’s gifts of healing and deliverance. He was so excited to see the healing ministry restored to God’s people: “One of the greatest losses the Church has suffered has been her full heritage of healing power.”

Francis and Tommy lovingly broke down denominational barriers, being welcome in both Catholic and Protestant contexts. In 1974, Francis wrote the book Healing, which has sold over a million copies, becoming a classic text on the healing ministry. He commented: “We’re trying to get an understanding of healing back into the churches. People say ‘we don’t need that anymore, we’ve got doctors.” Francis welcomed the role of doctors working in conjunction with the healing ministry. Agnes Sanford called this book “the most scholarly and comprehensive book on Christian healing that I have ever read.” Francis went on to write seven more books on the history, theology and scriptural basis of healing.

In 1975, while ministering at the World Conference on the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem, Francis met Judith Sewell, a psychotherapist who was leading a local house of prayer. Judith learned much about the healing ministry while praying for hurting Arabs and Jews. Through Francis’ prayer, Judith was healed from uterine cancer symptoms, and did not have to undergo a hysterectomy. Over the next five years, their strong friendship led them to seek the Lord about becoming married. 

Because of Francis’ high-profile ministry, many people sent Judith letters telling her what a terrible and evil person she was as she was considering marrying Francis. After leaving the Dominican order, he was excommunicated because of his marriage. His application for laicization was denied until 1993 when he received a dispensation to revert to be a lay person. 

Being married to Judith was such a blessing to Francis: “We pray every morning. We pray every evening. It is the first and last things that we do. We have discovered that most Christians that are married don’t pray with each other.” Only three percent of Christians have ever received prayer from their own fathers. The MacNutt’s intentionally mentored their children to feel comfortable with both set and spontaneous prayers as a way of deepening their Intimacy with the heavenly Father. 

In February 1980, Francis and Judith settled in Clearwater, Florida, where they established Christian Healing Ministries. Their complimentary gifts and passion for the healing ministry made them a remarkably effective team.  In 1987, they relocated to Jacksonville, Florida. In the mid-2000s, about 500 Catholic charismatic priests and lay leaders from the worldwide Catholic Charismatic Renewal travelled to Jacksonville to learn from Francis and Judith in the Schools of Healing Prayer. Thousands of people have been trained at the MacNutt’s Christian Healing Ministries. Francis and Judith also helped found the Association of Christian Therapists. In 2008, Francis named his wife, Judith, to succeed him as President of CHM, while he took on the position of President Emeritus. MacNutt and his wife have two grown children, Rachel and David, both of whom are involved in the healing ministry and editing of healing books. After Francis died on January 12, 2020, aged 94, Judith has faithfully carried on with her expansive healing ministry.

Francis and Judith were allergic to techniques in the healing ministry. Instead, they focused on the healing presence of Jesus: “We don’t want to set up a rule or technique in his place, that if you do this, this and this, that it will always work.”  Francis held that ‘something always happens when you pray.’ In conjunction with Tommy Tyson, they popularized the concept of ‘soaking prayer’, spending extended time in healing prayer. Francis commented: “If even Jesus had to pray twice, there is good warrant that I might have to pray three times.” Soaking prayer was in contrast to the popular view that you should only pray once before claiming your healing. To Francis, ‘soaking prayer’ conveys the idea of time to let something seep through to the core of something dry that needs to be revived.

Francis was an ‘apostle’ of the Father’s love. Judith described Francis as “a gentle, strong loving ambassador for the Lord Jesus Christ.” She also commented: “We need to hear that we are loved, we need to hear that we have authority in the name of Jesus, we need to take that love to everyone else in this world.” Francis was used in healing Judith’s Cherokee dad from cancer who then gave his life to Jesus Christ. Judith commented that Francis had ‘a supernatural gift of love.’

Both Francis and Judith were powerfully used in restoring the true image of God for broken people.  Healing for the MacNutt’s was about first opening our spiritual sight to see how much we are loved by the Father. Judith MacNutt commented: “Jesus died so that we can call God our heavenly Father…Jesus was always shattering people’s images of God.” Judith observed that forgiveness opens the door and love brings the healing. Dealing with resentments through forgiveness has been foundational to the MacNutt’s healing ministry. Francis commented, “the greatest block to God’s love being poured out among us are the resentments that we have in our hearts. Again, most of us have these resentments, but we can’t get rid of them except through gift…Almost every time Jesus talked about prayer, he talks about forgiveness.  …The greatest block to healing, as I see it, is our lack of forgiveness for the people who have hurt us in the past.”

Francis and Judith were very thorough in their prayer for total health through breaking inner vows, judgements, soul ties, generational ties, curses and strongholds. Francis saw deliverance as a ministry of love to wounded human beings. Both Francis and Judith wanted people to walk in freedom. Our prayer is that the MacNutt’s pioneering examples will inspire many other Christians to walk in greater love, healing and forgiveness.

About Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

Books by Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird include God's Firestarters; Blue Sky, a novel; and For Better, For Worse: Discovering the keys to a Lasting Relationship. Dr Ed’s newest award-winning book The Elisha Code is co-authored with Rev. David Kitz. Earlier books by Dr. Ed include the award-winning Battle for the Soul of Canada, and Restoring Health: Body, Mind, & Spirit.

 

AGNES SANFORD’s HEALING LIGHT

By Rev . Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

An article for the Light Magazine ‘Healing Pioneers’ series

The 20^th 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 20^th 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.

 

Alexander & Mary Boddy, British Healing Pioneers

 

-an article in the Light Magazine ‘Healing Pioneers’ series

From the noisy industrial town of Sunderland in Northern England came unlikely healing pioneers, Rev. AA (Alexander) and Mary Boddy.  Sunderland at the time was the largest shipbuilding port in the world, full of noxious factory fumes and clanging steam hammers. As a spiritual well of revival, Sunderland was visited thirty times by John Wesley. 

Alexander was born on Nov 15^th 1853, the third son of Rev. James Boddy in Cheetham, Manchester.  Mary was a descendant of John Wesley.  As a baby, Alexander was not expected to survive: “But the Lord raised me up again when death seemed certain.” 

After seven years as a legal solicitor, Alexander attended the 1876 Keswick Holiness Convention where he decided to become an ordained Anglican pastor. Like many at Keswick, he believed in personal holiness, pleading the Blood of Jesus for sin and for victory over disease:

As TO DIVINE HEALTH, disease was also dealt with at the Cross. When He crucified the flesh, the old man, we read He bare our sicknesses (Isaiah 53) He separated us from the things of the old Creation, old things passed away (2 Cor. v. 17). But we must believe It and appropriate the separating power of the Blood; for Calvary did it, the Victory was gained for us there.

In 1884, Bishop JB Lightfoot sent Alexander at age 32 to All Saints Church, Sunderland.   The previous pastor had taken to drink and emptied the church. Alexander developed a major ministry to people struggling with alcoholism.

Alexander met his wife Mary in 1890 at one of the parish mission conferences that he often organized. They married in 1891. Mary was supernaturally healed from asthma in 1899:

After many months of prayer, God spoke to me from John 5:39…and as I believed the Word and received Jesus to come into me as my physical life, he did so, and I was made whole.

Afterwards, she regularly prayed with and laid hands on the sick. With her musical gifting, teaching, and gifts of healing, Mary was deeply appreciated as a partner in ministry by her husband. Alexander used a service of Anointing the Sick and taught on the subject of healing.

As a world traveler recognized by the Royal Geographic Society, he wrote five travel books and a devotional Days in Galilee book (1900) on Israel:

Oh, for an outpouring of the Holy Ghost until hearts overflow to one another in love!  There is no other solution of these difficulties but the yielding to the full possession of the Spirit’s power.   

When the 1904 Welsh revival broke out, Alexander visited Evan Roberts in Tonypandy, Wales, to see for himself.  Being most impressed, he started a revival prayer meeting at All Saints Sunderland.  People were said to be aglow for two years afterwards.  Boddy held an interdenominational United Revival Service for 15,000 people at the Sunderland football ground.

In 1907, Alexander invited a British-born Norwegian Methodist pastor, TB Barrett, to lead a parish mission at Sunderland. On 13 September, Barratt wrote "the eyes of the religious millions of Great Britain are now fixed on Sunderland."  The stone in the wall of the Parish Hall still carries the inscription “WHEN THE FIRE OF THE LORD FELL, IT BURNED UP THE DEBT” (there had been a debt on the building). Many people were amazed that the Holy Spirit fell first in England on unlikely Anglicans.

From 1908 to 1914, Alexander hosted an annual Whitsuntide Sunderland Convention, which had people attending from many denominations and nations.  Whitsuntide (or White Sunday) is the British term for the week of Pentecost. He noted in the June 1908 Confidence Magazine:

There was a unity that nothing but the Holy Spirit could give. We were Anglicans, Methodists, Friends, Salvationists, Congregationalists, but ‘denomination’ was forgotten.  All one in Christ Jesus was true. Then we were English folk, Scottish Folk, Welsh folk, Irish folk, Norwegian folk, Danish and Dutch, yet all one in Christ Jesus.

 One of his most famous visitors was Smith Wigglesworth who was seeking a deeper experience of God.  After Mary Boddy laid hands on him, he received a vision of the empty cross and Jesus glorified, and began praying in the Spirit. Such an outpouring of the Holy Spirit launched him around the world in a remarkable healing ministry: “After this, a burning love for everybody filled my soul.”

With the help of the Boddy’s friend Cecil Polhill, many missionaries were sent from Sunderland to the ends of the earth. Boddy’s motto, “unity is not uniformity” characterizes how welcome he made others feel, regardless of whether or not they were Anglican (Church of England). Boddy had a Kingdom mindset rather than a narrowly denominational mindset.

In the first 1908 edition of the Boddy’s magazine Confidence, the ministry of healing was emphasized. C. Peruldsen from Edinburgh wrote that in her visit to Sunderland,

Not only did the dear Lord fill me with the Holy Ghost, but He healed my body at the same time.  The doctor had been attending me almost daily for six months up to the very day I visited Sunderland.  I could take no solid food of any kind, but now I am able to eat anything.  I have seen my doctor many times since and he is amazed. Glory to God for His great love and kindness to me.

This magazine, which had 141 issues until 1926, was read globally by thousands. In the second edition, Mary Boddy wrote about ‘Health and Healing.’  Alexander taught in the Confidence Magazine about the importance of James 5:14 laying on of hands and anointing with oil for divine healing:  

It is the prayer of faith –not the oil – that saves…The Lord is restoring the gifts of the Church, and many in this land have, in measure a gift of Healing.

Boddy the veteran world traveler ministered extensively in Europe, Canada, and USA. The founder of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, A.B. Simpson, became Boddy’s good friend, inviting him to preach on Divine Healing in July 1914.

Bishop Dr. N. T. Wright said, “Those who pray for a fresh work of the Spirit on our own day will do well to learn from such earlier events (as the outpouring at All Saints Sunderland).”

Like Alexander and Mary Boddy, may we in 2025 also seek for a fresh outpouring of the healing ministry in Canada.

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird, co-authors of God’s Firestarters

Dr Jordan Peterson’s Wrestling with God

 

By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

-a article for the Light Magazine

Why have Dr. Jordan Peterson’s videos been watched by almost a billion people since 2017? Other Canadians rarely have this kind of social media coverage.  His regular 8.56 million subscribers have been closely following his spiritual/psychological journey regarding the meaning of the Bible.  God seems to be using him to soften millions of young people to the gospel and even to do the ‘unthinkable’ -- attending church.  In this book, he throws down the gauntlet to Dr. Richard Dawkins and the new atheism. 

In Peterson’s new book, he has become absolutely fascinated with the Bible and its shaping of western culture:

…the biblical corpus, the compilation of drama that sits at the base of our culture and through which we look at the world… is the story on which Western civilization is predicated.

The biblical stories are maps of meaning.  These maps function at the psychological, scientific, and spiritual levels. True meaning is found in narrative, particularly the biblical accounts.  Being made in God’s image is Peterson’s core theological and psychological starting point.  The Bible reveals a true moral order that can be ignored and subverted at our own peril.  The voice of conscience is very close to the voice of God, the still small voice: “…the possibility of establishing a relationship with God by attending to conscience.”  This will result in people being “in some sense reborn, and become new people.”

The word Israel given to Jacob means wrestling with God.  Peterson sees this wrestling with God as our true destiny that we are wise to embrace.  To refuse this call is to hide our light under a bushel and embrace hellish chaos.

Will Jordan help bring about a revival of biblical marriage instead of living together? This book helps young people realize that marriage is not just a piece of paper but rather is a deep-rooted covenant involving the very core of our social identity. As he says, “why would anyone with any sense not want their sexual relationship consecrated?” To embrace the responsibility of marriage and family is to choose a life-giving adventure.

God appears to approve of sex, if only in the context of consecrated, covenantal relationships—but, of course, why would it be otherwise?

Jordan Peterson speaks of Jesus revealing his divine identity during the Transfiguration. He moves back and forth seamlessly in discussing the Old and New Testament.  The Kingdom of God is a major theme in his book. “Elijah is delivered into the Kingdom of God.”  Christ as King of Kings is “by definition, the spirit or essence of sovereignty, its very embodiment.”

In his book, he uses the metaphor of ‘upward’ for spiritual connection with God and societal transformation. As Jordan mentions, “life is well portrayed as a series of uphill journeys.” Upwards for Peterson is about aim and purpose versus nihilism and despair: “We aim at the upward target we deem central…” Upward represents the Promised Land. Carrying our cross and embracing suffering is the Upward path of adult maturity:

To “pick up the cross”—that means to voluntarily face the reality of mortality and malevolence and to struggle uphill nonetheless.

Aim and character development are deeply connected: “character is nothing more than the habitual embodiment of aim.” Where we aim is all about voluntary sacrifice: “the sacrifice that makes such aim possible…” Without such sacrifice, society becomes ruled by sexual hedonism and tyranny.  Covenantal Kingdom faith is all about upward sacrifice:

This is an act of faith as well as one of sacrifice: faith, because the good could be elsewhere; sacrifice, because in the pursuit of any particular good we determine to forgo all others.

Because Peterson is Jungian, he both embraces the gospel and perhaps redefines it subjectively:

God himself does the same with his son, a sacrifice played out as the Passion of Christ—an offering and transformation that brings about the end of the dominion of death, harrows hell, and reconciles the sinful progeny of Adam to their heavenly Father.

At face value, it looks as if Peterson is affirming Jesus as God’s Son, who sacrificed his life for us on the cross, breaking the power of death and sin.  Does Peterson’s new love for the Bible and Jesus trump his allegiance to Jungian psychology?  Does he believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?  Has he encountered Jesus in a life-transforming way?  We hope so. If so, he may become the next C.S. Lewis for our very lost generation.

 

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird, co-authors of God’s Firestarters

 

A.B. Simpson’s Gospel of Healing

 

Healing Pioneers: AB Simpson’s Gospel of Healing 

by Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

-published in the January 2025 Light Magazine

A.B. Simpson was a remarkable Canadian pioneer of the healing ministry. Born on Prince Edward Island on December 15, 1843, Simpson was such a workaholic that he destroyed his health: “I carried a bottle of ammonia (smelling salts) in my pocket for years and would have taken a nervous spasm if I had ventured without it. Again and again, while climbing a slight elevation or going up a stair did the awful and suffocating agony come over me, and the thought of that bottle as a last resort quieted me.”

After moving to New York City, Simpson’s medical doctor gave him three months to live.  But after being prayed for by an Anglican physician, Dr. Charles Cullis, at Old Orchard Camp in Maine, he experienced a remarkable healing of his heart.  Simpson made the following pledge: “As I shall meet Thee in that day, I take the Lord Jesus as my physical life, for all the needs of my body until all my life-work is done; and God helping me, I shall never doubt that He does so become my life and strength from this moment, and will keep me under all circumstances until His blessed coming, and until all His will for me is perfectly fulfilled.”

The next day, Simpson was able to climb a 3,000-foot mountain, and successfully pray for his daughter Margaret’s healing from acute diphtheria – the very disease which had earlier killed his son Melville.

Word spread fast in 1881 of these healings. He was besieged by many with pleas for help. By others, he was vilified and ridiculed as another quack miracle worker. Despite such criticism, Simpson received strong support from medical doctors like Dr. Jenny Trout, the first female doctor & surgeon in Canada, Dr. Robert Glover from Toronto, and Dr. Lilian Yeomans, a Canadian-born surgeon living in Michigan. Simpson commented: “Not a few beloved physicians of the highest standing have taken Jesus as their Healer and when their patients are prepared for it, love to lead them to His care.” While he was not opposed to medical doctors, he wanted people first to pray for healing.  

In May 1882, Simpson started Friday-afternoon healing & holiness meetings, which quickly became New York’s largest attended spiritual weekday meeting, with 500 – 1,000 in attendance. These services involved the laying on of hands or anointing with oil, as described in James 5:14-15. On a wall at his Gospel Tabernacle was all the medical paraphernalia that had been discarded by those who had been healed. Because he did not want people to see him as a healer, he would not pray individually with others at the Friday healing service. Instead after preaching a healing sermon, he would go to another room to take part in intercessory prayer. Thousands, said Simpson, were healed: “One of the most remarkable in the early days was a woman who had not bent her joints for eight years, and used to stand in our meetings on her crutches, unable to sit down during the whole service. She had not sat for eight years. She was healed in a moment, as if by the touch of a feather, and all in the house were filled with wonder. Another was cured of spinal curvature. A great many have been delivered from fibroid tumors; and a few cases from malignant and incurable cancers. We have had two cases of broken bones restored without surgical aid. Many cases of the worst forms of heart disease, several of consumption, and some desperate cases of hernia, when it would have been death to walk forth as they did if Christ had not sustained. 

He even turned his own home into a Healing Home where people could come for prayer ministry. Many of the early pastors and missionaries in the Christian & Missionary Alliance had been dramatically healed from many diseases.  The early Alliance history books often recorded dozens of such healings at the back of the books. 

His four-fold gospel emphasized “Christ our Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King.” Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance logo uses a pitcher of oil to symbolize divine life and physical healing.  He refused to make healing his only focus: “I have four wheels on my chariot. I cannot agree to neglect the other three while I devote all my time to the one.”  Simpson developed a profound theology of healing that has impacted many denominations even to this day.  He saw that the healing ministry was vital in the fulfillment of the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations.  Simpson published over 70 books, edited a weekly magazine for nearly 40 years and wrote many gospel songs and poems.

In his 1890 book The Healing Gospel, Simpson documents 27 case studies of healings in the Bible. These include Job, Naaman, Hezekiah, Peter’s mother-in-law, the Gadarene demoniacs, and blind Bartimeus.  He taught that the healing ministry remained for hundreds of years: “In the second, third, and fourth centuries, fathers as famous as Irenaeus and Tertullian, bear testimony to the prevalence of many undoubted miracles of healing, and even the raising of the dead in the name of Jesus.

Simpson held that the healing ministry only gradually disappeared because of growing worldliness, formalism and unbelief: “the dear Master never contemplated or proposed any post-apostolic gulf of impotence and failure. Man’s unbelief and sin have made it. The Church’s own corruption has caused it. But He never desired it or provided for it.”

The revival of the healing ministry was linked for Simpson to spiritual renewal, a growing openness to the Holy Spirit, and the nearer approach of Jesus’ second coming. Even apart from the physical benefits, healing was seen as valuable because of its aid in spiritual awakening, as it: exalts the name of Jesus, glorifies God, inspires the soul with faith and power, summons to a life of self-denial and holy service, and awakens a slumbering Church and an unbelieving world with the solemn signals of a living God and a returning Master.”

Healing and holiness were closely linked for Simpson: “the spiritual results far outweigh the temporal; and it is one of the most powerful checks and impulses in the lives of those that have truly received it.”

He held that the healing ministry was vital to world-wide evangelism: “The next great missionary movement will and must incorporate this mighty truth.”

Jesus Christ and his healing ministry, for Simpson, was the same, yesterday, today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8). He rejected the popular doctrine of Cessationism, that the gifts of healing had ceased, being only for an earlier dispensation. Signs and wonders of Bible times continue today: “We are in the age of miracles, the age of Christ, the age which lies between two Advents.” At the heart of the healing ministry was “a presence never withdrawn, a love, a nearness, a power to heal and save as constant and as free as ever, even unto the end of the world.” For Simpson, all the charismatic gifts were still available today, especially overseas where they were most needed. Praying for healing was not always instantaneous, but sometimes more gradual. Simpson knew that healing was a mystery, not a formula. He would not say that a person necessarily lacked faith because he was not healed, died in sickness or died young: “Sometimes the Master is taking home His child and will He not, in such cases, lift the veil and show the trusting heart that its service is done? How often He does! (…)”

A key verse for Simpson was 3rd John 2, which prayed that we may prosper and be in health, even as our soul prospers.  

Simpson cautioned against ‘if it be thy will’ prayers for healing:  “Be fully assured of the WILL OF GOD TO HEAL YOU. Most persons are ready enough to admit the power of Christ to heal. The devil himself admits this. True faith implies equal confidence in the willingness of God to answer this prayer of faith.”

Many Christians disqualify themselves from receiving healing because of their supposed unworthiness.  Simpson encouraged people not to give up: “We never can deserve any of God’s mercies. The only plea is the name, merits, and righteousness of Christ.”

Simpson wanted people to not merely ask for healing but by deliberate faith to receive the gift of healing: “You must take Christ as your Healer-not as an experiment, not as a future, perhaps, but as a present reality.” He expected trials of faith as people chose to trust Christ in this area.  

Simpson rooted his understanding of the healing ministry in the miracles of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. He drew particularly on Isaiah 53:4-5 and Matthew 8:16-17.  Both the finished work of the cross and the resurrection were vital for Simpson’s approach to healing: “It is the resurrection life of Christ in us.”  Healing was seen as the receiving of the very Life of Jesus. Healing for Simpson often went from the inner to the outer and physical: “He works from within outwards, beginning with our spiritual nature and then diffusing his life and power through our physical being. Many persons come to God for healing whose spiritual life is wholly defective and wrong. God does not refuse the healing, but He begins in the depths of the soul, and when it is prepared to receive His life, he can begin to heal the body.”

Many other healing pioneers like Smith Wigglesworth, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Oral Roberts drew inspiration from Simpson’s writings and ministry. Also, the official publication of the Assemblies of God, The Pentecostal Evangel, published more than 100 of Simpson’s articles on healing and holiness.  Virtually every denomination is indebted to Simpson’s pioneering healing ministry, far more than they might suspect.  

How might we more intentionally incorporate Simpson’s four-fold gospel insights in our lives and local churches?  

Editor’s note: See also A.B. Simpson, Canadian founder of a global missionary alliance and A.B. Simpson, a Canadian maverick

About Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

Books by Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird include God's Firestarters; Blue Sky, a novel; and For Better, For Worse: Discovering the keys to a Lasting Relationship. Dr Ed’s newest award-winning book The Elisha Code is co-authored with Rev. David Kitz. Earlier books by Dr. Ed include the award-winning Battle for the Soul of Canada, and Restoring Health: Body, Mind, & Spirit.

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