Charles S. Price and Vancouver’s Greatest Healing Revival

It’s remarkable how few Canadians have heard about one of Vancouver’s greatest healing revivals with Charles Sydney Price. Born in Sheffield, England in 1887, he lost his mom at age 4 when she gave birth to his sister Jessie.  After attending Wesley College, he served in the British Navy for a couple of months before being discharged for a bad knee. At age 20, he emigrated to Canada where he found work on a railroad crew.  Moving to Spokane Washington, he was converted at a Free Methodist Mission:

One night in early autumn I was standing with my back to a lamp post listening to the singing of a little band of mission workers. When the street meeting was over a little old lady detained me. “Do you know God wants you?” she said. Suddenly I felt uncomfortable. I am afraid that I was rather rude in the way I excused myself and hurried away… I began to feel as if God had spoken to the old lady and a feeling of dread and awe came upon me. Slowly I retraced my steps and I arrived eventually at the mission. What a battle went on in my heart that night!…I was getting to the place that I did not care what happened, and while I was not in the gutter, yet I was slipping down, down, down, and I knew it was disaster and sorrow in the end. When Mr. Stayt gave the altar call, I sprang to my feet, squared my shoulders and marched down to the front. That night I gave myself to God. I was desperately in earnest. I was absolutely sincere.

That same year, Price was ordained a Methodist minister, and married Bessie Rae Osborn with whom he had five children. Coming under the influence of liberal theology, he became a Congregationalist pastor for twelve years. This made him very sceptical about the Bible and its healing miracles.

Later, Price would describe himself as having been ‘spiritually blind, leading his people into a ditch’. He pastored this way for twelve years, with no altar calls or conversions. Then Price moved to California where he was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Lodi. As a cigar smoker, he built smoking rooms to attract newcomers.  In 1921, a healing revival in San Jose broke out with Aimie Semple McPherson. Some of Price’s own congregation were strongly impacted:

His eyes were fairly dancing and on his face was the joy of heaven itself. Clasping my hand, he said, “Brother Price – Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!” I gazed at him in amazement. Expressions like that were not usual in my church. Throwing back my head, I commenced to laugh. Still clasping my hand, he said, “Hallelujah, I have been to San Jose and I have been saved, saved through the Blood. I am so happy I could just float away.”

Price responded to his congregant, saying “I can explain it all. It is metaphysical, psychological, nothing tangible.”  “Slowly a bitter antagonism,” said Price, “commenced to creep into my heart.” He published an ad in the newspaper, promising to preach against Aimie Semple McPherson as a fraud.

Inserting an advertisement in the paper that I would preach the following Sunday on “DIVINE HEALING BUBBLE EXPLODES,” I made my way down to San Jose, armed with pen and paper to take notes. I intended to return the following Sunday and blow the whole thing to pieces.

While listening to McPherson in person, he came under a great conviction about his own emptiness. On the third night, he publicly responded to the altar call, being filled with joy:

Down those steps I walked. I was in the act of kneeling at the altar when the glory of God broke over my soul. I did not pray for I did not have to pray. Something burst within my breast. An ocean of love divine rolled across my heart. This was out of the range of psychology and actions and reactions. This was real!! Throwing up both hands I shouted, “Hallelujah!” So overcome was I with joy that I commenced to run across the altar. Dr. Towner followed me and wept for joy! Then in an ecstasy of divine glory, I ran down the aisle to the back of the tent and back to the front again, shouting, “I am saved, Hallelujah! I am saved!”

During ‘tarrying’ meetings that week at the local Baptist Church, Price experienced a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit:  

Suddenly like a knife, there appeared in that awful dark, a light and it flashed like a lighting flash across the blackness above my head. The heavens were split and they commenced to fold up until I could see the glory of a light through that opening in the sky. Then as I gazed at that beautiful light, a ball of fire came down towards me; lower and lower it came until it got to the level of the darkness on either side. It began to shoot out darts of fire. Then the ball came down a little lower. It shone so brightly it banished the darkness. I just watched, fascinated and entranced, those tongues of fire. It then touched me on the forehead and I felt a quiver go through my body and then my chest began to heave and I started praising God. The Comforter had come!

Price returned to his own church where he once again began giving altar calls. One thousand members began to hold seekers meetings crying out to God for His presence. They started holding two-mile long Gospel parades in their automobiles where Jesus was preached.  

In 1922, Aimie Semple McPherson invited Price to join her evangelistic team. When Ashland, Oregon churches invited “Sister Aimee” to lead revival meetings there, she asked Price go in her place. Hearing of the Oregon salvations and healings, the Victoria Ministerial Association unanimously invited Price to conduct a three-week Crusade in April 1923. After thousands were turned away, the meetings were moved to the new Willow Hockey Arena, where over 9,000 attended, still leaving 4,000 unable to get inside. Victoria at that time only had a population of 55,000.  Up to 1,000 per night were powerfully converted. The blind gained their sight, and the lame were walking. Rev. W.J. Knott was healed from a 10-year-old neck goiter that had grown so big that it was starting to choke him.  One month later, Rev. Knott reported that he could eat any kind of food, slept like a baby, and could read fine print without glasses.  Rev. J.F. Dimmick’s daughter Ruby experienced the healing of her curved spine and deformed foot, allowing her to run and walk freely without any paralysis.  Newspapers all over Canada and the United States printed the story. The Literary Digest printed an account of the case. Over 9,000 Chinese people attended the meetings, with at least 600 going forward to receive Christ. Sadly, when he returned a year later, Price was arrested by the Victoria police and kicked out of town for ‘practising medicine without a license.’

The Vancouver Province newspaper on May 2, 1923, reported: “Nothing that has happened in years has so stirred religious circles like the coming of Rev. C.S. Price, an evangelist, who for the next three weeks, commencing next Sunday, will address afternoon and evening mass meetings in the Arena rink.” Price preached at the new Denman Ice Arena to over 250,000 people in a three-week period where many were healed. At that time, the Vancouver region only had a population of 175,000. Frank Patrick, owner of the Denman Arena, commented: “[T]he evangelistic party addressed over a quarter of a million people in the space of three weeks. On more than one occasion, I could feel the very building tremble with the singing of the multitude who were unable to wait for the opening hymn.” Every meeting was filled with stretchers, crutches, and wheelchairs. Price liked to anoint the sick with oil, praying, “May the mercy of God and the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the power of His Holy Spirit – which are here now – enter your soul, your mind, and your body for healing. Amen.”  He regularly reminded people that “it was Jesus who was the healer.” In all his services, Price encouraged people: “to forget, as much as possible, the instrument who anointed them with oil. He told them to look away to Christ, in whom alone they could find deliverance out of all their sufferings.” 

Price also held parallel meetings in Chinatown, with an interpreter, at the Imperial Theatre.  The over-all response was one of the largest-per-capita responses that has ever occurred in BC. Over seven congregations were planted as a result of these meetings. For four months after the crusade, the baptismal tank at Ruth Morton Baptist was filled and used every Sunday. Sadly, some clergy opposed the healing miracles, publicly speaking out against them. 

Price also held meetings in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, & Toronto, and then in America in Minneapolis, Duluth, St Louis & Belleville, Illinois. In 1926, Price started publishing the “Golden Grain” periodical, which included many testimonies of healings and miracles. In 1928, he decided to purchase a tent to hold meetings, so that he no longer had to pay large auditorium expenses. He called it the Canvas Cathedral. During the last 10 days of the Belleville meetings, there were 1,000 conversions a day. He counted 35,000 conversions in 1928 alone. The constant traveling however put a strain on his marriage which ended in divorce in the 1930s.

In the later 1930s, he ministered in Norway, England, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Italy, as well as continuing to speak throughout the USA. In 1939, Price estimated that he had traveled over a million miles on evangelistic campaigns since he began in 1922. He was a prolific writer, including The Real Faith in which he taught that healing is not about striving but rather surrender and abiding in His healing presence.

Daily surrender of the will was Price’s passion:

In the last analysis, the goal of every mature Christian should not be Divine Healing but DIVINE HEALTH! The flow of His life through ours; the surrender of our will to His; the impartation of His nature, until our natures are impregnated with the glory and the presence of the Divine! Not in an instant! Not in some emotional moment at an altar! But by that daily acknowledgment of His lovely presence in ALL OUR WAYS, and the surrender of EACH MOMENT to His care and to His keeping.”

Price, who died on March 8, 1947, acknowledged that it was not always easy to assess the long-term impact of any one evangelistic service. Memorably he commented: “We cannot always visualize or comprehend the result of our labours at the time we minister. We presume that the old cobbler who preached the sermon on that wintry day in London might have thought he had only one spiritual child. That child, however, was none other than Charles Hadden Spurgeon. The old shoemaker might have had only one spiritual son, but he certainly had a lot of grandchildren.”

We pray for many spiritual grandchildren as Canadians rediscover the healing well dug by Charles S. Price.