Agnes Sanford’s healing light

The 20^th century healing revival was encouraged greatly by Agnes Sanford. She mentored and raised up more successors than other healing pioneers. Her spiritual children included Leanne Payne, Francis MacNutt, Tommy Tyson, John & Paula Sandford, Anne White, Ruth Carter Stapleton, and Dennis & Rita Bennett. Newsweek Magazine described her as one of six people who shaped religious thought in the 20^th century.  Sanford is remembered as the most original healing theologian of that time. The famous author Frederick Buechner commented: “I was deeply influenced by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford, who in her day was quite famous as a faith healer, which is a term I’ve always distrusted, because it conjures up charlatanry. She was not a charlatan. She was the real thing, and she had had remarkable healings.”

Much of her creativity can be traced back to her early years as an MK (missionary kid) in China. Agnes Mary White (later Sanford) was born, on November 4, 1897, in China to Presbyterian missionary parents. Her father, Rev. Hugh W. White was resisted by other missionaries who did not want to give leadership to the local Chinese pastors. He wrote a remarkable book based on his experiences with brand new Chinese believers: Demonism, Verified and Analyzed. 

Like many MKs, Agnes never really felt fully at home in any culture. She could speak Mandarin, but not read or write it. She saw North America with Chinese eyes and China with North American eyes: “I fell in love with China before I fell in love with a man.” She first attended the Shanghai American School as a teenager before leaving for the United States to attend Peace College, a Presbyterian women’s college in Raleigh, North Carolina. However, she could not escape the pull to return to China, serving as a missionary teacher before meeting her future husband Rev. Edgar (Ted) Sanford, an Anglican/Episcopalian missionary in China. Much like Eugene Peterson, Sanford was very poetic, musical, imaginative, and sensitive to other people’s emotional well-being. She was deeply moved by the ignored plight of a missionary wife struggling with deep depression who later killed herself.

Sanford’s initial view of God was that of a distant and demanding taskmaster: “…the window of my own soul was closed, and I could not see Him. Christianity to me had become to me words – just words – only words.” After she moved with her husband back to North America, Sanford suffered from severe, recurrent depressions for many, many years: “My family was adept at them (nervous breakdowns). We are of strong physical heritage, but we excel in having nervous breakdowns.”

She felt like a square peg in a round hole, in terms of her role as a North American pastor’s wife: “I had determined to make myself exactly like Ted’s mother, whom I adored. I would then be, I felt, the kind of wife that he liked. Therefore, I completely denied my original nature and devoted every moment to fruitless endeavour. And so, I reached the depths because I was doing violence to my own soul.”

No matter how hard she tried, Agnes felt that she would never be the ‘perfect minister’s wife.’  Her postpartum depression was so deep that her doctor thought that she might kill herself within a year: “…my mind was clogged with resentment and darkness and unhappiness, as a pipeline can be clogged with roots and dirt.” Agnes’ curiosity was stirred when an Anglican priest Hollis Colwell prayed for her young son who was immediately healed. She finally broke out of her depression after Colwell laid his hands on her head and prayed for her. For the next year, she wrote, she went about her work repeating to herself, hourly and daily, the same prayer: “Lord have mercy on me, and fill me with Your Holy Spirit.”

Agnes realized that the real part of her was simply not living, the creative one who longed for children of the mind to be brought forth. She realized that she could no longer see beauty: “when one can no longer see beauty, one can no longer see God.” 

In her autobiography Sealed Orders, Agnes spoke of discovering her call by God to be a writer.  Hollis Colwell deeply encouraged her to put her thoughts onto paper: “Write two hours every day. Those are my orders.” The very act of writing brought healing to both Agnes and with those whom she ministered.  She eventually dedicated six months a year to writing rather than constantly leading healing missions. Colwell also encouraged her to begin praying for others on her own, rather than just keep sending people to him.  “The basic trouble was that I had forgotten whence I came, and I did not know the sealed orders with which I had been sent to this earth. I sensed my thwarted creativity. I wanted to be a writer, and I could not, for all of my time and thought and attention was upon being a wife and mother.”

During World War II, Sanford volunteered through the Red Cross in the local veteran’s hospitals, giving her a chance to quietly pray for the sick. Before being kicked out of the hospital for praying, she saw several miraculous healings there. Sanford said Jesus stood in church services all over Christendom with his hands tied behind his back because neither ministers nor people expected him to do anything. She said people who prayed had to expect miracles.

Agnes’ first book Healing Light was rejected by many publishers before several chapters were serialized by Rev. Dr. John Gaynor Banks in the Order of St. Luke the Physician’s Sharing magazine. This led to Glenn Clark, founder of the CFO Camps, to publish it through Macalester Park Publishing Company. Since its 1947 publication, it has sold over half a million copies.  She later wrote many other nonfiction and fiction books on healing.

In 1958, Sanford and her husband Ted began the School of Pastoral Care. It helped train pastors to both receive healing and then pray for other’s healing. Sanford, like Jesus, healed people out of compassion for lost, hurting sheep: “If you are not moved by compassion, lay it off. It just won’t work.”

Sanford rooted the healing ministry in the sacraments: “My own most effective way of receiving Christ is at the communion service, for I have learned to receive Him through the sacraments of the church as well as through my own meditation.” One of her strategies for spiritual renewal was having twenty-five women come ten minutes early to the church to pray the prayer of forgiveness for anyone whose face irritated them. This, she discovered, released the healing power of Christ.

With the rise of the Jesus movement, Sanford welcomed the youth awakening: “I thank God for the Jesus People rolling up and down Sunset Strip. They have totally changed that place.  Some of the bars have closed because the Jesus People would get in there and give out tracts before they were kicked out. They closed one dirty show completely, by all standing around and giving a college yell for Jesus (Give me a J!).”

As a pioneer in the healing of memories, she resisted techniques, preferring instead to rely on the leading of the Holy Spirit. Inner healing for her was about a deeper understanding of forgiveness of sins, what she called the most difficult venture in the world. Resentment and bitterness poisoned our bodies. Restoring our creative imagination brought our souls back to life.  She found deep healing through gardening and drama: “There was also gardening, which is still my joy and delight, for one feels the life of the earth through the hands, and the benediction of God’s love through the sunshine, and the pure joy of the Kingdom through the color and fragrance of the flowers.”

Soul healing for Sanford was deeply connected with experiencing the beauty of the world. She also encouraged people not to just do spiritual activities but also to receive healing through building bookshelves, taking part in plays, or going fishing.  We need to both pray and play to bring healing to our body, mind and spirit.

May the pioneering of Agnes Sanford continue to help release many into a deeper understanding of forgiveness of sins in every area of our lives.