The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Kathryn Kuhlman
1907–1976AmericanPentecostal
Lost her ministry to a marriage she knew was wrong, walked away from it, and spent thirty years insisting she had no healing power of her own.
Summary
- Lived 1907–1976, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Revivalists.
- Tradition: Pentecostal / independent.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Kathryn Kuhlman at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Lost everything to a marriage she called her deepest disobedience, started over from nothing, and refused for thirty years to be called a healer.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.