-an article for the
Light Magazine ‘Healing Pioneers’ series
By Rev. Dr.
Ed & Janice Hird
We will never forget seeing Kathryn Kuhlman in 1975 at the
packed-out Vancouver Coliseum. Ed
intentionally had us sit in the upper-balcony section, as far away as possible
from Kathryn. One of her trademarks was encouraging healed people to push their
own wheelchairs around the stage.
Many North Shore residents fondly remember the Sign of the Fish
bookstore founded by two charismatic Catholics, after one of them was healed
from cancer at a Kathryn Kuhlman event. Time Magazine in September 14th
1970 called Kathryn ‘a veritable one-woman shrine of Lourdes.’
What is remarkable about Kathryn is the level of scientific,
medical analysis of the healings at her events.
A significant number of the healings were documented in a manner
consistent with the Lambertini Criteria, the gold standard for examination of
such claims of healing.
Kathryn is a testimony to the God of the second chance. Early in her ministry, she unwisely married a
religious con artist Burroughs Waltrip. After
his third divorce, he died at age 46 while he was in jail for mail fraud. She
later called her marriage the biggest mistake of her life. When Kathryn finally
left him, she said that was the night that Kathryn Kuhlman ‘died’:
It’s much easier to die than to live, death to the flesh and the
opinions of this world, that very day at the end of that dead-end street is
when I died at four pm, on a Saturday afternoon.
Her ministry had been so damaged by her marrying Waltrip that no
one would have imagined that she would one day be welcomed in packed-out
stadiums around the world.
Roberts Liardon, author of the best-selling God’s
Generals series, called Kathryn his favorite healing
evangelist. As a young boy, he attended
Kathryn Kuhlman’s meetings three times, meeting her once in person:
And all of a sudden, woom! And people started getting healed all
over the room, and no one touched them. There was no emotional hype... She had
a great word of knowledge, and woom! She could nail it. Someone up there on the
third, from the top on the fourth, boom! She could hit it like that. Her word
of knowledge was phenomenal with accuracy.
Kathryn Kuhlman, along with Oral Roberts, was one of two healing
evangelists who most successfully transitioned from tent rallies to radio and
then TV. She became the world’s best
known female preacher. In 1976, she was
greeted at the airport by the Las Vegas mayor, who declared the date Kathryn
Kuhlman Day.
Millions of viewers watched her television program I Believe in
Miracles where testimonies were shared by now healthy individuals who had
been healed at the Kuhlman meetings. Kathryn’s
healing ministry was distinctly interdenominational. She did TV interviews with
key renewal leaders like Corrie Ten Boom, Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett, and Lutheran
minister Harald Bredesen. Kathryn wanted
everything that she offered, whether radio, TV or a book to be absolutely first
class. By focusing on orderliness and excellence, she made healing acceptable
to the post-World-War II generation:
I hated traditional tent healing services,” she explained. “Those
long healing lines, the filling out of cards…It was an insult to your
intelligence. Once, after visiting such a service, I cried all night. I
determined that with the Holy Spirit’s help, my ministry would not be that way.
Rather than blaming the sick for a lack of faith, Kathryn invited
inquirers into an experience of the loving healing presence of the Holy Spirit:
I saw the harm that was being done in attributing everything to
‘lack of faith’ on the part of the individual who had not received a
healing…The looks of despair and disappointment on the faces I had seen, when
told that only their lack of faith was keeping them from God, was to haunt me
for weeks.
When healing breakthroughs happened, she always redirected the
attention away from herself onto God.
She often reminded people that she was not a healer and had nothing to
do with these healings. She particularly disliked being called a faith healer. Often the healings occurred very quietly in
her services during long times of silence. It deeply saddened and burdened her
when people left her meetings without receiving a healing. She saw spiritual healing as far greater than
physical healing. The greatest miracle
for Catherine was the miracle of the new birth in the Lord Jesus.
Converted at age 14 in her mother’s Methodist Church and baptized
at her father’s Baptist Church in Concordia, Missouri, Kathryn initially
focused only on personal conversion in her events. Kathryn attended the
C&MA AB Simpson Bible College for three years in Seattle, Washington.
For many years in Idaho during the Great Depression, she would ask
permission to preach in closed-up country church buildings. When given the go-ahead
by local elders, she would preach a series of evangelism meetings. Some days she would have to sleep in a turkey
coop.
Being raised in poverty, she felt that she had nothing to give,
but she would offer her ‘nothing’ to the Lord:
“ …it’s all I have. If you can use it, I give it to you” And He
has taken my nothing and used it for his glory. It isn’t golden vessels He asks
for. It isn’t silver vessels. It’s yielded vessels. The secret is
yieldedness to the Lord.
Like Moses and Winston Churchill, Kathryn suffered from
stuttering, which caused some of her words to become multi-syllabic, like
Hooooly Spii-rit, glooory, and JEEEZuss. Kathryn told a People’s Magazine
reporter: “A lot of people think my speech is affected, but it’s just my way of
overcoming my (stuttering) problem.’ One Jewish Hollywood movie
producer was very supportive of Kathyrn.
He commented that she had all the makings of a star because she was the
only woman in the world who could turn the word ‘God’ into four syllables.
In
1947, a spontaneous healing occurred in her service that changed the future of
her ministry. Kathryn described her role
as a surprised onlooker. Historians record a great upsurge in large healing
services starting in the late 1940s. A Pennsylvania
newspaper in 1950 wrote about Carey Reams who had not walked since 1945. Kathryn
Kuhlman told him to throw away his crutches. He did so, walking all around the
stage and aisles. Carey was a biochemist who had previously been severely
disabled due to an WWII landmine explosion. He had been in a partial coma for
six weeks. He now suffered from a crushed pelvis, a fractured jaw, visual
impairment, a snapped spine, and a broken neck. After forty-one surgeries, Carey
was in no better condition. He had lost sixty pounds, due to hemorrhaging and a
limited ability to eat orally. The next day after his healing, he helped load a
truck full of heavy furniture. In
follow-up interviews eleven years later, his ailments remained gone.
Kathryn
had a special appreciation for medical doctors, encouraging them to either be
on stage or in the front rows of her healing services. Dr. Martin Biery, a
spinal chord surgeon, was a frequent visitor on the platform at the LA Shrine
Auditorium. He was on the staff at the Veteran’s Hospital in Long Beach,
California. Dr. Biery commented,
With my own eyes, I have seen the
medically impossible happen time and time again. I have seen arthritics whose spines were
frozen get instantaneous freedom and move and bend in all directions without
pain. A leg which was shortened by polio visibly lengthened before my eyes as
Miss Kuhlman prayed. A boy with
osteochondritis of the knee – a chronic inflammation caused by a football
injury – had not been able to bend his leg for several years. When I examined
him on the spot, he had perfect flexion of his knee. As a medical man, I call these healing
miracles.
At
the end of her life, Oral Roberts was about to pray for her healing in the
hospital, but Kathryn motioned that she wanted to got to heaven. So, he complied with her wishes. as Kathryn Kuhlman died, there was a
mysterious smell of roses.
May
the courageous risk-taking of Kathryn Kuhlman inspire others to be innovative
in bringing the healing power of Jesus Christ to a needy world.
Rev.
Dr. Ed & Janice Hird, co-authors, God’s Firestarters
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