Kathryn Kuhlman

Kathryn Kuhlman left a Missouri farm at sixteen to preach with her sister and brother-in-law, and by her late twenties had built a thriving tabernacle in Denver. Then she married an evangelist who had left his wife and children for her; her congregation emptied and her work collapsed. She walked out of the marriage in 1944, called it the deepest disobedience of her life, and started again from nothing in a small Pennsylvania town.

From Pittsburgh she built the ministry she is remembered for - services where she would stop and say that someone in the balcony had just been healed, filmed for television and filling the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. She refused to be called a faith healer and said flatly that she had no power. A physician who followed up her cases in 1974 published a book saying he could not verify the cures, which her critics still cite and her audiences never accepted. She died in 1976 after open-heart surgery.