The next few years were very hard for the couple. They embarked on the road as traveling evangelists, primarily staying in the Midwest. They were not accepted in many places due to their marriage history. Initial advertisements listed Waltrip as the primary evangelist. Then occasionally Mrs. Waltrip was also mentioned.
By the early 1940s Kathryn Kuhlman Waltrip was given equal billing. Finally by the mid-1940s Kathryn was using only Kathryn Kuhlman in meetings where she was the primary speaker. In 1944 Kuhlman went on an evangelistic tour on the east coast without Waltrip. It may have been a conscious decision to leave him, or she may also have taken the opportunity to reassess her life.
It appears to have been more gradual as Waltrip wrote about them as a couple as late as 1946. Kuhlman never returned to Waltrip and they eventually divorced in 1947. She left her marriage behind and from then on acted as if it never existed in the first place.
In 1946 Kuhlman was asked to speak in Franklin, Pennsylvania. She was well received and decided to stay in the area. Kuhlman began preaching on radio broadcasts in Oil City, Pennsylvania. These became so popular they were picked up in Pittsburgh, and she was preaching throughout the area. She began to preach about the healing power of God.
Kathryn Kuhlman’s Powerful Healing Ministry
Although many were praying for the sick in the charismatic renewal, perhaps the most prominent advocate for healing was Kathryn Kuhlman (1907-1976). During this era, she became “one of the best-known woman revivalists in America.”
When Kuhlman initially launched her ministry in the Pacific Northwest, she did not accentuate healing. Although occasionally ministering to the sick, Kuhlman was “chary about the propriety of healing services,” write Robert Krapohl and Charles Lippy. She “determined that she would not indulge in the sensationalism that was obvious in most healing revivals.”
Her reticence about healing changed in 1946, after some notable encounters. Kuhlman writes, according to Allen Spraggett:
“I was preaching in Franklin, Pennsylvania. One night my sermon was on the Holy Spirit. I hadn’t mentioned healing. But the next night, before I began to preach, a woman stood up and said, ‘Pardon me Miss Kuhlman, but I have a testimony to give. While you were preaching last night I had a strange sensation in my body, and I knew I had been healed. I knew it. Today I went to my doctor, and he confirmed that I was.’ As I recollect, the woman had had a tumor. And that was the beginning, the first of miracles.”
As people “began to claim deliverance from infirmities,” it shifted the trajectory of Kuhlman’s ministry. It wasn’t long before “attendance at her services mushroomed, and lines began to form at the close of her services as people sought prayers for healing,” write Robert Krapohl and Charles Lippy.
Kuhlman’s Methodology
As she traveled the United States, Kuhlman embraced a considerably different approach. Instead of following the calculating strategies of her peers, “Kathryn realized that simply by honoring the Holy Spirit and by being in God’s presence, healing could be released,” says Bill Johnson.
Researcher Candy Gunther Brown writes:
“Kuhlman intentionally distanced herself from the techniques of contemporary Voice of Healing evangelists, whom she faulted for showmanship and for blaming the sick when they were not cured. Kuhlman avoided the practices of distributing prayer cards or forming healing lines, although she encouraged people to combine their praying with fasting and to express their faith by action. She rarely prayed for individuals at all, instead creating an atmosphere of worship and faith in which people claimed to receive healings through the power of Holy Spirit.”
Kuhlman believed the greatest miracles transpired in worship as the Holy Spirit sovereignly moved through the auditorium. The “circus sideshow” and tent theatrics were unnecessary. She writes in I Believe in Miracles:
“I understood that night why there was no need for a healing line; no healing virtue in a card or a personality; no necessity for wild exhortations ‘to have faith.’ That was the beginning of this healing ministry which God has given me; strange to some because of the fact that hundreds have been healed just sitting quietly in the audience, without any demonstration whatsoever, and even without admonition. This is because the presence of the Holy Spirit has been in such abundance that by His presence alone, sick bodies are healed, even as people wait on the outside of the building for the doors to open.”
As she received fresh insight, she adjusted her meetings to better accommodate the Holy Spirit’s movement. Kuhlman notes, according to Allen Spraggett:
“When the power of the Spirit is there, miracles happen. Gradually, I began to understand The power, how it operates. I discovered that certain things brought the presence of the Holy Spirit. Praise, for instance. Just praising God— not asking for a single thing but just praising Him— always brings the power. It’s pleasing to the Lord. … You do not manipulate the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person. He is not an ‘it.’ He is God. He is to be reverenced, to be worshiped. He is not to be presumed upon by anyone.”
Conventional methods for conducting crusades were cast aside as Kuhlman unhesitantly advanced in the subtle leadings of the Lord.
TO BE CONTINUED…