Kathryn Kuhlman: Believing in Miracles

We will never forget seeing Kathryn Kuhlman in 1975 at the packed-out Vancouver Coliseum.  Ed intentionally had us sit in the upper-balcony section, as far away as possible from Kathryn. One of her trademarks was encouraging healed people to push their own wheelchairs around the stage. 

Many North Shore residents fondly remember the Sign of the Fish bookstore founded by two charismatic Catholics, after one of them was healed from cancer at a Kathryn Kuhlman event. Time Magazine in September 14^th 1970 called Kathryn ‘a veritable one-woman shrine of Lourdes.’ What is remarkable about Kuhlman is the level of scientific, medical analysis of the healings at her events. A significant number of the healings were documented in a manner consistent with the Lambertini Criteria, the gold standard for examination of such claims of healing. 

Kuhlman is a testimony to the God of the second chance.  Early in her ministry, she unwisely married a religious con artist Burroughs Waltrip. After his third divorce, he died at age 46 while he was in jail for mail fraud. She later called her marriage the biggest mistake of her life. When Kuhlman finally left him, she said that was the night that Kathryn Kuhlman ‘died’:

“It’s much easier to die than to live, death to the flesh and the opinions of this world, that very day at the end of that dead-end street is when I died at four pm, on a Saturday afternoon.“

Her ministry had been so damaged by her marrying Waltrip that no one would have imagined that she would one day be welcomed in packed-out stadiums around the world. Roberts Liardon, author of the best-selling God’s Generals series, called Kuhlman his favourite healing evangelist.  As a young boy, he attended Kathryn Kuhlman’s meetings three times, meeting her once in person:

“And all of a sudden, woom! And people started getting healed all over the room, and no one touched them. There was no emotional hype… She had a great word of knowledge, and woom! She could nail it. Someone up there on the third, from the top on the fourth, boom! She could hit it like that. Her word of knowledge was phenomenal with accuracy.“

Kathryn Kuhlman, along with Oral Roberts, was one of two healing evangelists who most successfully transitioned from tent rallies to radio and then TV.  She became the world’s best known female preacher. In 1976, she was greeted at the airport by the Las Vegas mayor, who declared the date Kathryn Kuhlman Day.

Millions of viewers watched her television program I Believe in Miracles where testimonies were shared by now healthy individuals who had been healed at the Kuhlman meetings.  Kuhlman’s healing ministry was distinctly interdenominational. She did TV interviews with key renewal leaders like Corrie Ten Boom, Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett, and Lutheran minister Harald Bredesen. Kathryn wanted everything that she offered, whether radio, TV or a book to be absolutely first class. By focusing on orderliness and excellence, she made healing acceptable to the post-World-War II generation:

“I hated traditional tent healing services,” she explained. “Those long healing lines, the filling out of cards…It was an insult to your intelligence. Once, after visiting such a service, I cried all night. I determined that with the Holy Spirit’s help, my ministry would not be that way.“

Rather than blaming the sick for a lack of faith, Kathryn invited inquirers into an experience of the loving healing presence of the Holy Spirit:

“I saw the harm that was being done in attributing everything to ‘lack of faith’ on the part of the individual who had not received a healing…The looks of despair and disappointment on the faces I had seen, when told that only their lack of faith was keeping them from God, was to haunt me for weeks.“

When healing breakthroughs happened, she always redirected the attention away from herself onto God. She often reminded people that she was not a healer and had nothing to do with these healings. She particularly disliked being called a faith healer. Often the healings occurred very quietly in her services during long times of silence. It deeply saddened and burdened her when people left her meetings without receiving a healing. She saw spiritual healing as far greater than physical healing. The greatest miracle for  Kuhlman was the miracle of the new birth in the Lord Jesus.

Converted at age 14 in her mother’s Methodist Church and baptized at her father’s Baptist Church in Concordia, Missouri, Kuhlman initially focused only on personal conversion in her events. She attended the C&MA AB Simpson Bible College for three years in Seattle, Washington.

For many years in Idaho, during the Great Depression, she would ask permission to preach in closed-up country church buildings. When given the go-ahead by local elders, she would preach a series of evangelism meetings. Some days she would have to sleep in a turkey coop. 

Being raised in poverty, she felt that she had nothing to give, but she would offer her ‘nothing’ to the Lord:

“ ‘…it’s all I have. If you can use it, I give it to you’ And He has taken my nothing and used it for his glory. It isn’t golden vessels He asks for.  It isn’t silver vessels. It’s yielded vessels. The secret is yieldedness to the Lord.“

Like Moses and Winston Churchill, Kuhlman suffered from stuttering, which caused some of her words to become multi-syllabic, like Hooooly Spii-rit, glooory, and JEEEZuss. Kuhlman told a People’s Magazine reporter: “A lot of people think my speech is affected, but it’s just my way of overcoming my (stuttering) problem.’ One Jewish Hollywood movie producer was very supportive of Kuhlman.  He commented that she had all the makings of a star because she was the only woman in the world who could turn the word ‘God’ into four syllables.

In 1947, a spontaneous healing occurred in her service that changed the future of her ministry.  Kuhlman described her role as a surprised onlooker. Historians record a great upsurge in large healing services starting in the late 1940s.  A Pennsylvania newspaper in 1950 wrote about Carey Reams who had not walked since 1945. Kuhlman told him to throw away his crutches. He did so, walking all around the stage and aisles. Carey was a biochemist who had previously been severely disabled due to an WWII landmine explosion. He had been in a partial coma for six weeks. He now suffered from a crushed pelvis, a fractured jaw, visual impairment, a snapped spine, and a broken neck. After 41 surgeries, Carey was in no better condition. He had lost 60 pounds, due to hemorrhaging and a limited ability to eat orally. The next day after his healing, he helped load a truck full of heavy furniture. In follow-up interviews eleven years later, his ailments remained gone.

Kuhlman had a special appreciation for medical doctors, encouraging them to either be on stage or in the front rows of her healing services. Dr. Martin Biery, a spinal chord surgeon, was a frequent visitor on the platform at the LA Shrine Auditorium. He was on the staff at the Veteran’s Hospital in Long Beach, California. Dr. Biery commented,

“With my own eyes, I have seen the medically impossible happen time and time again.  I have seen arthritics whose spines were frozen get instantaneous freedom and move and bend in all directions without pain. A leg which was shortened by polio visibly lengthened before my eyes as Miss Kuhlman prayed.  A boy with osteochondritis of the knee – a chronic inflammation caused by a football injury – had not been able to bend his leg for several years. When I examined him on the spot, he had perfect flexion of his knee.  As a medical man, I call these healing miracles.“

At the end of her life, Oral Roberts was about to pray for her healing in the hospital, but Kuhlman motioned that she wanted to go to heaven.  So, he complied with her wishes.  as she died, there was a mysterious smell of roses.   

May the courageous risk-taking of Kathryn Kuhlman inspire others to be innovative in bringing the healing power of Jesus Christ to a needy world.