God’s Battle Axe Series – Kathryn Kuhlman

Kathryn was one of the vessels God used to minister health and deliverance to many people in the late 20^th Century. Before we present her background and ministry, a quote in Robert Liardon’s God’s General serves as an appetizer into the life of this beautiful daughter of Zion – “Hundreds were healed just sitting quietly in the audience without any demonstration whatsoever. There have been times when not even a song has been sung. No loud demonstration, no loud calling on God as though He were deaf. No screaming, no shouting, within the very quietness of His presence. There were hundreds of times when the presence of the Holy Spirit was so real that one could almost hear the rhythm as thousands of hearts beat as one”.

Kathryn was born on May 9, 1907, in Concordia, Missouri. Her parents were of German ancestry and she was one of four children. When she was two years old, her father sold their 160 acre farm and built a big house in town. This was the house she always called “home”.

As a young girl, Kathryn was noted for her independence, self-reliance and a desire to do things her way. Her mother was a disciplinarian but she and her father were extremely close and he dotted on her. She managed to twist her ‘papa’ around her little finger, getting almost anything she wanted from him. According to Kathryn, her mother never praised her or gave her any affection. Yet, she never felt unloved because her papa gave her all the love and affection she needed.

       Kathryn was fourteen years old when she surrendered her life to Christ. She told the story many times during her life of how she answered what seemed to be a sovereign wooing directly from God Himself. She came from a ‘religious’ background rather than a spiritual one, so the churches she attended never gave their congregation altar calls to receive salvation. Of this experience Kathryn would later write:

      I was standing beside Mama, and the hands of the church clock were pointed to five before twelve o’clock. I can’t remember the minister’s name or even one word of his sermon, but something happened to me. It’s real to me right now as it was then – the most real thing that ever happened to me. As I stood there, I began shaking to the extent that I could no longer hold the hymnal, so I laid it on the pew.. and sobbed.

I was feeling the weight (of conviction) and I realized that I was a sinner. I felt like the meanest, lowest person in the whole world. Yet, I was only a fourteen-year-old girl. I did the only thing I knew to do: I slipped out from where I was standing and walked to the front pew and sat down in the corner of the pew and wept. Oh, how I wept!…… I had become the happiest person in the whole world. The heavy weight had been lifted. I had been born again, and the Holy Spirit had done the very thing that Jesus said He would do (John 16:8)”.

Throughout Kathryn’s teenage years, her mother taught the Epworth League for young people in the Methodist church. A neighbour said Mrs Kuhlman was an “excellent Bible teacher and Kathryn and her sisters and brother must have received some very fine teaching and training at home”. The neighbour also talked of hearing someone in the Kuhlman family singing in the evening and someone else playing the piano. Even though her mother was called an excellent teacher in the Epworth League, she was not born again until 1935 during one of Kathryn’s meetings in Denver.

Kathryn was introduced to ministry when she followed her sister Myrtle and her preacher husband, Everett Parrot to Denver. She spent five years with them, laying the foundation for her own ministry. In 1928, the Parrots arrived in Boise, Idaho. By this time they had acquired a tent and a pianist named Helen Gulliford. Due to some misunderstanding between Myrtle and her husband, he left the three of them in Boise and moved to South Dakota.

After Myrtle left to be with her husband, Kathryn and Helen decided to stay back in Boise when a local pastor offered them chance to preach in a small pool that had been converted into a mission – and that was the beginning of the Kathryn Kuhlman Ministry. From Boise, they moved to Idaho and later Colorado. Following a six-month revival in Pueblo, they arrived in Denver

          Kathryn and Helen met with success in Denver, and established the Denver Revival Tabernacle in the 1930s. Her time in Denver was cut shut by the death of her father in an automobile accident in late December 1934. She had left home ten years earlier, visiting only a few times in between. After her father was laid to rest, she returned to Denver with a new understanding and compassion.

On May 30 of that year, the Denver Revival Tabernacle opened with a huge neon sign over it – “Prayer Changes Things”. The auditorium held two thousand seats and thousands of people attended Kathryn’s meetings over the next four years.

In 1935, she made the acquaintance of Burroughs Waltrip, an evangelist who came to Denver on a preaching tour. Their relationship blossomed into romance, though Waltrip was a divorcee. The fact that he was separated from his wife was not acceptable to many of Kathryn’s followers. In spite of the growing opposition to the union, Kathryn and Waltrip married in October 1938. The congregation promptly rejected them and the couple lived in obscurity for six years.

        In April 1946, Kathryn set in motion divorce proceedings. She moved to Pittsburgh, where she began the transformation into the Miracle Lady. In the climate of that era, a divorced female evangelist was not much better than a female evangelist married to a divorced man. In a masterful reinterpretation of her life, Kathryn chose instead to present her decisions to leave Waltrip as a difficult moment of submission, the yielding of a strong-willed woman to the relentless call of God on her life. She indicated throughout her career that that she had realized that her decision to marry Waltrip separated her from God and from her call to ministry.

         In 1946, Kathryn was asked to speak in Franklin, Pennsylvania. She was well received and decided to stay in the area. She began preaching on radio broadcasts in Oil City, Pennsylvania. These became so popular they were picked up in Pittsburgh. She preached mostly about the healing power of God. In 1947, she started teaching on the Holy Spirit. It is noteworthy that this period of her ministry coincided with the healing revival (sometimes referred to as Latter Rain Revival) that lasted for ten years.

What was happening in Kathryn’s ministry was breaking out across the United States. It was during this time that the Voice of Healing Ministry was established, and men like William Braham, Oral Roberts and A. A. Allen were propelled onto the public stage. Though Kathryn was not associated with these groups, she stepped into the flow of what God’s Spirit was doing across the nation and the world.

         Kathryn held series of meetings at Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh in 1948. She eventually moved to Pittsburgh in 1950 and continued to hold meetings at the Hall until 1971. She was used by God to bring the charismatic message to many denominations, including the Catholic Church. She received a lot of criticisms over this and was accused of being a closet Catholic.

These were her best years. She would hold her famous miracle services and the auditorium was filled to capacity every time. She was on radio and television shows. Kathryn was ordained in 1968 by the Evangelical Church Alliance. Hundreds of people were healed in her meetings, and even while listening to her on radio or television. Kathryn never claimed that she was a healer. She pointed people to Jesus as their healer.

She was diagnosed with a heart problem in 1955. Nonetheless, she kept a busy schedule and overworked herself, especially in the 1970’s. She travelled back and forth from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles frequently, as well as taking trips around the world. Her heart was enlarged and Kathryn died on February 20. 1976 in Tulsa, following an open-heart surgery.

          In Kathryn’s early years of ministry, she developed two characteristics – dedication, and loyalty to God and His people. What can we learn from the life and times of this daughter of Zion? One of the things that stand out in the life of Kathryn is that our past or mistakes do no define us. God can and would help us to redeem even our mistakes if we put our trust in Him. Kathryn could have thrown in the towel when religious people rejected her ministry after the sad encounter with Waltrip. Romans 11:29 tells us that the “gifts and calling of God are without repentance”.

It is clear that God had His eyes on Kathryn before she was born, just as He knew Jeremiah before he was conceived (Jeremiah 1:5). What we need to do is identify our place in Christ and make every effort to fulfil our ministries. It must not be within the five-fold ministry of Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Teacher or Pastor. The right person to reveal our gifts and calling to us is the Holy Spirit. Seek His guidance and do not allow a mere man to call you into ministry.

Materials sourced from God’s Generals by Robert Liardon, Evangel Publishers Limited, Kaduna, Nigeria; https://eerdword.com; https://www.times-advocate.com; https://www.healingrevival.com.