Agnes Sanford (1897—1982)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
Traditions
- Episcopalian
Ministries
- healing minister
Agnes Sanford originally grew up as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in China, teaching English there in her post-college years. In XX, she moved back to the United States and married XX. They moved to New Jersey in XX, where they parented three children and lived in the rectory of the century-old Trinity Episcopal Church. She was welcomed and comfortable, but wrote frankly about struggling with depression:
The kind of person that I used to be was dead. And the new person, whom I was now forced to be, had much trouble in living...
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…. For many months I could not go near an upstairs window without wondering when I would throw myself out of it…. I seldom peeled vegetables without wondering whether the kitchen knife was sharp enough….
My doctor said [later] that he had not thought I would last another year.
At one point, her youngest child, eighteen-month-old Jack, developed an ear infection that wouldn’t go away. He ran a fever for six weeks. A nearby Episcopal priest, Hollis Colwell, stopped by to visit the Sanfords, and upon hearing of the child’s condition, offered to go up to the nursery and pray for him. Agnes said it would be rather pointless, since her little son was too young to understand, but Colwell replied that that did not matter because God would understand.
Proceeding up the stairs, he laid his hands on the whimpering child’s head and prayed a quiet prayer. To the mother’s amazement, Jack calmed down and drifted off into a nap. When he awakened an hour or two later, the fever was gone and he was happy again. Agnes Sanford could not believe it.
On a Sunday morning not long afterward, as her depression continued, she went to the altar rail to receive Communion and heard a distinct voice: "Go to Hollis Colwell and ask him to pray for you." Twenty-four hours later, she was in the priest’s office, where he asked a few questions and then proceeded to lay hands on her and pray. He had hardly finished when, she said, “Great waves of joy flooded my mind.” The dark cloud vanished. The following days and months confirmed that a genuine miracle had taken place.
Agnes Sanford immediately began to tell anyone who would listen what had set her free after six years of gloom. If any woman of the parish confided to her an emotional or physical struggle, she sent her to Hollis Colwell. In time, the quantity of referrals became so great that Colwell said Sanford needed to start praying for the sick herself. Healing was not restricted to the ordained clergy, he said; anyone with faith in an omnipotent God could ask and receive his intervention.
This initiated a half-century of ministry for Agnes Sanford. She did not speak to large audiences or become a public personality. She ministered most often to people one at a time, either because they came to her, or because she went where the need was obvious—especially hospitals, and veterans’ hospitals during World War II.
Colwell had also advised her to make time for her call to write. He prescribed that she dedicate two hours each morning, after her children went to school, to go to the parish house and begin writing. Her first book, The Healing Light, appeared in 1947 and became a perennial best-seller, going through thirty-five printings in hardcover before paperback. It inspired readers to see God as one who truly cared about their infirmities and would lovingly act. One testimony is representative:
I went to see a little girl who had been in a cast for five months following infantile paralysis [polio]. One day I placed my hands above the rigid knee in that instinctive laying-on of hands that every mother knows…. And I asked that the light of God might shine through me into the small, stiff knee and make it well.
“Oh, take your hands away!” cried the little girl. “It’s hot.”
“That’s God’s power working in your knee, Sally,” I replied. “It’s like electricity working in your lamp. I guess it has to be hot, so as to make the knee come back to life. So you just stand it now for a few minutes, while I tell you about Peter Rabbit.”
By the time the erring Peter had returned home without his shoes and his new red jacket and had been put to bed with castor oil, the pulsation of energy in my hands had died away.
“Now crawl out to the edge of the bed, Sally, and see if that leg will bend,” I directed the child.
She pulled herself to the edge of the bed and sat up. And the leg that had been rigid [now] bent at an angle of forty-five degrees. Within two weeks she was walking.
“How do you turn on God’s electricity in your hands?” she asked me at my next visit.
“I don’t turn it on,” I replied. “I just forget everything else and think about God and about Jesus, who is God’s Son and our friend. And I believe that God can turn on that light in me because Jesus said He could. He turns it on, and when He is through with it, He turns it off.”
Sally and I both understood quite simply that God’s life was a kind of light.
Remarkably, these healing testimonies were published even prior to Sanford receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit. In the early 1950s, some friends wrote to Agnes about her receiving Spirit baptism, and she agreed to let them pray for her. As a result, she was filled with the Spirit and spoke in tongues. She hesitated for a long time to tell her husband what had happened, knowing their denomination would not be receptive at this time. Eventually, however, the truth came out, and no harm ensued.
She became what some today call the mother of the inner-healing movement, which treated painful memories with prayer, forgiveness, repentance, and the rejection of long-held lies so that divine truth an take its place. She and her husband set up the School of Pastoral Care to minister to hurting pastors and teach them how to care for others in the same way. This effort eventually spread beyond the United States to nations around the world.
Her writings continued with more than twenty books published by major firms including such titles as The Healing Gifts of the Spirit, The Healing Power of the Bible, and her autobiography, Sealed Orders. She held steadfast in her confidence about God loving his children enough to relieve and restore them, if humans would be his willing channels. She emphasized the need to expect miracles, describing Jesus as standing in church services all over Christendom with his hands tied behind his back because no one expected him to do anything. She also notably addressed Paul's "thorn in the flesh" (2 Cor. 12:7), in a way that became iconic of, and resonant with, the healing revivals surrounding her time:
St. Paul’s thorn in the flesh has become a veritable thorn in the spirit to thousands of Christians, who take St. Paul as an example for cherishing illness. In this they are not consistent. If St. Paul were really their example, they could raise the dead. For in seeing him as an example of the invalid saint, they do the utmost violence to the Biblical pattern of a man strong enough to endure shipwreck and exposure, stoning and imprisonment and still accomplish more than ten ordinary men could….
[Granted,] he did not receive an instantaneous healing. Instead of that, he received everyday enough of the Grace of God for that day’s needs. So do I. And if God’s perfect strength accomplished as much through me as it did through St. Paul, I would be well content.
[XX ENDING: death, circumstances, legacy...]