The Miracle Lady

Kathryn Kuhlman and the Transformation of Charismatic Christianity

Amy Collier Artman

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467452489
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Biographies religieuses

A smart, powerful, charismatic preacher brought back to life

On October 15, 1974, Johnny Carson welcomed his next guest on The Tonight Show with these words: "I imagine there are very few people who are not aware of Kathryn Kuhlman. She probably, along with Billy Graham, is one of the best-known ministers or preachers in the country." But while many people today recognize Billy Graham, not many remember Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–1976), who preached faith and miracles to countless people over the fifty-five years of her ministry and became one of the most important figures in the rise of charismatic Christianity.

In The Miracle Lady Amy Collier Artman tells the story of Kuhlman's life and, in the process, relates the larger story of charismatic Christianity, particularly how it moved from the fringes of American society to the mainstream. Tracing her remarkable career as a media-savvy preacher and fleshing out her unconventional character, Artman also shows how Kuhlman skillfully navigated the oppressive structures, rules, and landmines that surrounded female religious leaders in her conservative circles.

CHAPTER 1

The Making of a Miracle Lady

On July 20, 1973, the magazine Christianity Today published a pamphlet containing what it called “a wide-ranging, exclusive interview” with Kathryn Kuhlman “to dispel some of the misunderstanding that has grown up around her, or at least to present a digest, in her own words, of how she answers questions put to her by both believers and unbelievers.” In the interview, Kuhlman stated, “I tell you the truth: I answer every question that is asked of me. I do not believe there is anyone in the religious field today who is more honest in answering questions than I am. That is the reason I am talking to you now. I bare my soul to you.”¹ It was true that Kuhlman was always willing to answer the questions set before her by the media, but with a caveat: outside of a collection of select narratives concerning her childhood and early ministry, Kuhlman maintained a fierce silence about the majority of the first forty years of her life and ministry.

Any attempt to re-create Kuhlman’s life based only upon her public pronouncements falters due to her persistent avoidance of speaking at length about the years between 1907 and 1947. She spoke of the early years only as she reminisced about her father or mother or looked back with nostalgia to her days as a girl evangelist. She chose to downplay, dismiss, or even deny most of her early education and training. Her motivation for doing this was simple: she needed to protect her preferred narrative of being a simple, untrained handmaiden of the Lord, who was “just naïve enough” to say yes to God’s call.² With persistent repetition of carefully constructed anecdotes and a determined resistance to speaking about topics she considered closed, Kuhlman worked to control the story of her life. There were details she wanted known and others she wanted forgotten. In this she was consistent with most public figures who desire to craft a positive and edifying “birth narrative” for their life and career. But to understand Kuhlman and the charismatic Christianity she helped lead, it is necessary to look closely at these formative years.

Kuhlman was shaped by her religious background, her education, and her early career as a traveling evangelist. She developed her style and technique by observing and training under personalities such as her sister, her brother-in-law, and the healing evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, among others. She developed an appreciation for charismatic Christianity despite the negative image “holy rollers” held in the popular culture and mainstream Christianity of the day. At first, she was not completely at ease with charismatic Christianity, as shown by her disdain for the independent healing evangelists who traveled the same circuit as she did, charismatics who represented the excess and emotionalism she rejected. The life and career of this young female religious leader were defined in many ways by the death of her beloved father and the end of her marriage. She spoke of her father’s death but never reflected upon the trauma of the experience that likely propelled her into a courthsip only nine months later that ended in a disastrous marriage. Regarding her marriage, she was taciturn. But an examination of Kuhlman’s “silent years”³ reveals the foundation for the popular public ministry that followed, and is vital to a full understanding of Kuhlman. In addition, her life and career between 1907 and 1947 provide a helpful narrative for an exploration of the development of charismatic Christianity during the same period. Kathryn Kuhlman and charismatic Christianity grew up together.

Kuhlman did not have the typical childhood of a future healing evangelist. She did not claim her healing ministry had its roots in a youth of sickness or trauma. Stories of her happy, energetic, and healthy girlhood in Concordia, Missouri, were common in her preaching and teaching. Kuhlman stated, “I was always healthy as a kid. I had the three-day measles that only lasted one day. I ran so fast nothing could catch up to me.”⁴ Although Kuhlman was a young child during World War I, she never referred to family losses due to the war or the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918. She was the third of four children, and did not mention any medical trouble in the lives of older siblings Myrtle or Earl, or younger sister Geneva. Sickness in her own life was not what led Kuhlman to a career healing sickness in the lives of others.⁵

Kuhlman was raised by father Joe, a nominal Baptist, and a Methodist mother, Emma, neither of whom had any background in divine healing. She was not raised to believe in faith healing, but other aspects of her upbringing likely contributed to her later openness to the concept. Kuhlman inherited from her parents a strong emphasis on the human ability to resist and overcome illness and suffering through plain hard work. Suffering, while a reality in human life, was never meant to define or defeat. She said throughout her career, in a variety of settings, that if you are a part of the human race, you will have troubles. But it’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s what you do with what happens to you that matters. Kuhlman’s father taught her that human beings had the ability to prevail over suffering. Strongly influenced by her father’s approach to life, Kuhlman was indoctrinated in a Midwestern approach to illness and healing. Kuhlman told the story this way: “I can always remember Papa saying something. It wasn’t scientific. You won’t find it in the doctors’ manual. It’s just good common sense. He used to say, ‘Oh, just go out and work it off.’ The best medicine in the world is hard work. They’ve got pills for everything today. We’re almost pilled to death. But no one has come up with a capsule which makes people want to work.”⁶

For Joe Kuhlman and his daughter Kathryn, the appropriate response to sickness was not saintly resignation, but determined action; in other words, good, hard work. This way of thinking about suffering and illness became more prevalent during the late nineteenth century, and came to full flower in the early twentieth century. Historian Heather Curtis’s work notes the shift in thinking about sickness and health at the end of the nineteenth century, as advocates of what would soon be called faith healing “endeavored to articulate and embody an alternative devotional ethic that uncoupled the longstanding link between corporeal suffering and spiritual holiness.”⁷ During Kuhlman’s childhood in Missouri, this renewed emphasis on the belief in God’s desire to heal persons who were determined and bold in prayer was gathering strength in American Christianity.⁸ Kuhlman was ingrained in the approach to adversity and illness taught by her father, which was similar to the ideology producing a widespread renewal of interest in divine cures.

Although Kuhlman’s parents laid some of the foundation for her later interest in divine healing, it was Kuhlman’s sister Myrtle, fifteen years her senior, who led Kathryn to charismatic Christianity.⁹ In the summer of 1913, Myrtle attended a revival at her Methodist church in Concordia led by Mr. Everett Parrott, a young circuit evangelist from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Parrott was traveling in the Midwest, preaching in any church where he could find an audience. Concordia turned out in force to see the handsome preacher, and Myrtle was in the crowd. She and her friend Ora Dickey sat at the back of the church as the pews filled for the revival because “we didn’t want to be seen, to associate with those types.” Attendance at revivals was not common for Myrtle. She noted, “We came from high-class people on both sides. Papa’s side were aristocrats.”¹⁰ Her kind of people did not go to revivals, Myrtle implied. Despite her disdain for the services, she was attracted to Parrott, and the affection was mutual. The two married October 6, 1913, and immediately returned to Chicago to finish Everett’s education. Myrtle also attended classes at Moody. Everett graduated in 1914, and the couple began to travel as itinerant evangelists. For the next ten years they preached across the midwestern and western United States, visiting Concordia occasionally to see the Kuhlman family. Younger sister Kathryn was growing up quickly, and at age fourteen her life took its own dramatic turn.

Kathryn attended her mother’s Methodist church during her youth, but in later years always referred to herself as a Baptist, like her father. As an evangelical, she was able to pinpoint the day when she was “born again.” Kuhlman was in worship one day with her mother at their small church, and as they began to sing the closing hymn the girl began to tremble. “I began to shake so hard that I could no longer hold the hymnal in my hand. . . . This was my first contact with the Third Person of the Trinity, and in that moment I knew I needed Jesus to forgive my sins.” Kuhlman’s first experience with the Holy Spirit brought conviction and conversion, typical marks of evangelicalism. Her testimony did not mention being baptized as an infant or confirmed, the typical practices of the Methodism of her mother. The story of her conversion at the age of fourteen was one of the few stories about her youth she told repeatedly throughout her life. This experience highlighted one aspect of her early years she particularly wanted known and understood: Kathryn Kuhlman was a born-again Christian.

Kuhlman’s story of her conversion at her mother’s church contained not-so-subtle criticism of her childhood church home. In a somewhat damning statement about her congregation, Kuhlman added, “Since I had never seen anyone receive Christ as their savior, I did not know what to do.” She recalled that new members were to go forward to be received into the church, and so she decided to do the same. She sat in the front pew, crying. “It was real, very real, and I have never doubted it from that moment to this hour. I knew I had been forgiven!” Kuhlman continued to cry. “The preacher did not know what to do with me. No altar call had been given. In fact, I doubt that an altar call had been given for years in that little church.” An older woman of the church finally came and sat next to Kuhlman and offered her comfort. “She said in a whisper, ‘Oh Kathryn, don’t cry. You’ve always been such a good girl.’ But even as she spoke those words, we both knew that what she said was not quite the truth for I was the most mischievous kid in town.” It was a significant moment for Kuhlman. “Walking home that Sunday, I thought the whole world had changed,” she remembered. “Nothing in Concordia had changed—except me. I was the one who had changed.”¹¹

Kuhlman soon experienced even more dramatic changes in her life. In the spring of 1924 Myrtle returned to Concordia to petition Joe and Emma for permission to take Kathryn along for a summer of touring and preaching. Kathryn’s parents consented to let her go, and at age seventeen she left Concordia for her first experiences “in the field.” Myrtle, who once had hidden herself at the back of the church to avoid the scandal of being seen at a revival, now associated freely with Pentecostals and supported her husband as he spoke of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the reality of divine healing. As she lived and worked with her sister, Kathryn discovered she was not the only one who had changed.

Myrtle introduced her teenage sister to a strange new religious world. In the 1920s, adherence to belief in tongues-speech and divine healing was considered by much of American culture to be abnormal. Charismatic Christianity, primarily identified at that time with Pentecostalism, was suspect and esoteric for most mainstream Christians. The Chicago Daily Tribune of August 11, 1924, carried a story describing the typical image of Pentecostals. Bold letters headlined the article, “Worshipers Too Noisy, Haled to Night Court:”

Judge Max Witkower was called from his bed to hold a midnight court in Evanston last night when the entire congregation of the Pentecostal Assembly of God at 1615 Lake Street—nine colored and three white—were arrested on complaint of William Dunfriennd who lives across the street from the church. . . . Dunfriennd and his wife complained the members of the congregation clapped their hands, sang and jumped up and down all night so they could not sleep. After being released on bond the prisoners closed their eyes, raised their right hands and began singing. The judge ordered the lights turned out.¹²

Pentecostals came under attack not just for their practices but also for their beliefs. Their emphasis on the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the present reality of the gifts of the Spirit as found in Scripture (such as healing, speaking in tongues, and prophecy) kept them on the outside of mainstream Christian belief in the early twentieth century.

Fundamentalist Baptists especially derided Pentecostals, on the basis of a dispensational understanding of biblical history that taught the cessation of spiritual gifts with the end of the apostolic age, or the age of the New Testament church. The Chicago Daily Tribune carried another account of an altercation over Pentecostal doctrine, this one occurring in New York City in October 1927. The headline stated, “30 Quit Straton Church; Oppose Healing Service.” The pastor, respected Baptist minister Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton, held what the paper termed a “Holy Ghost healing service,” one of a number of such services, at the influential Calvary Baptist Church in New York City. The services were highly controversial, causing the threatened resignation of as many as thirty members. The author of the article recorded that Dr. Straton had “laid on oiled hands” in a service held in the anteroom of the church. Stephen A. Bradford, former Calvary deacon and current member, “was outspoken against the ‘divine healing’ meetings.” Bradford compared the healing services to those held at Calvary the previous summer, which he described as “holy roller and Pentecostal in their character.” The article concluded, “Dr. Straton was likened by Mr. Bradford to a ‘cuckoo,’ in that he lays the eggs of strange doctrines in what is ‘supposedly a baptist organization.’ ” The Baptist leader Bradford saw Pentecostals as dangerous, parasitic, and invasive, just like the cuckoo who lays her eggs in another bird’s nest.¹³ It was remarkable that Myrtle Kuhlman Parrott, a woman who once claimed to be from an aristocratic Baptist family, chose to associate with Pentecostalism in the 1920s. Myrtle’s espousal of charismatic Christianity was the primary reason Kathryn Kuhlman, a born-again Baptist, was exposed to teaching about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly divine or faith healing.

Early Influences

Between 1924 and 1928, as Kuhlman traveled with her sister and brother-in-law throughout the western states, she was moving in the orbit of the preeminent leaders in divine healing. The 1920s were the era of what Jonathan Baer calls the “facilitating healer,” defined as one who “tried to facilitate, through teaching, encouragement, and prayer, healing faith in the Christian patient.”¹⁴ The centerpiece of this approach was the faith of the patient, not the power or heroics of the healer. The facilitating healer was to guide and direct the patient to appropriate the faith already present in him or her in order to gain victory over sickness and suffering.¹⁵ Facilitating healing emerged out of a renewal of interest in healing in the more mainstream evangelical Christianity of the time. It represented a movement away from the more volatile and dramatic ministries of “heroic healers of incipient Pentecostalism” such as Maria Woodworth-Etter and John Alexander Dowie. Facilitating healers of this era differentiated themselves carefully from what they saw as the excesses of the new Pentecostal Christianity....

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Kate Bowler
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Making of a Miracle Lady
• 2. The Beginning of Miracles
• 3. Televising Testimony
• 4. Leading Lady
• 5. Producing Change
• 6. Filming a Miracle
• Epilogue: Death of a Healer
• Notes
• Index