In the Steps of Smith Wigglesworth

In the Steps of Smith Wigglesworth, by Philip B. Taylor. England: The Author, 2007.

This a beautifully produced book. It contains over 150 photographs, many in colour of places connected with the ministry of Smith Wigglesworth. Here are the house and churches of the young Smith. From the humble beginning from his christening in 1859 to his conversion in Menston Chapel aged eight, all of these buildings are shown within the narrative of the story. Other places from Bowland Street in Bradford to All Saints’ in Sunderland and Glad Tidings in Wakefield where he died are all shown in full colour. Anyone interested in the life and ministry of Wigglesworth will want to add this sumptuous volume to their collection. For anyone wishing to follow the Wigglesworth trail or simply view the places when reading about him it makes an ideal companion. The compiler is congratulated on his production that is a valuable addition to the history of Pentecostalism in Britain.

Reviewed by Desmond Cartwright, Elim Pentecostal Church

Paperback, 128 pages, illustrated. £10.99 plus postage. Order from: www.smithwigglesworth.com

Teen Challenge history

Teen Challenge: 50 Years of Miracles, by David Batty and Ethan Campbell. Springfield, MO: Teen Challenge USA, 2008.

Since it first appeared forty-five years ago, The Cross and the Switchblade widely circulated as a book, movie, and comic in Pentecostal and evangelical circles and helped to spur the charismatic movement in mainline Protestant and Catholic churches. At a time when Americans were more concerned than ever about the rise of juvenile delinquency and crime, its author, David Wilkerson, testified to the power of the Christ over addiction, crime, and gang violence.

A handsome coffee table book, Teen Challenge: 50 Years of Miracles provides the rest of the story. David Batty and Ethan Campbell recount how Wilkerson, who had been praying for God’s direction, found himself drawn to the harrowing tale of the brutal murder of Michael Farmer, a handicapped teenager, by several members of the Egyptian Dragons. When it appeared in 1957, the news story shocked the nation and generated tremendous press coverage. To the searching Wilkerson, the plight of gang members appeared a call to action. He moved to New York, where he successfully developed connections with gang members. Batty and Campbell trace how Teen Challenge, the organization he founded, grew to an international organization of over 1000 Christian drug and alcohol treatment centers.

There are a few things the book does not do. It does not place Teen Challenge in the context of the history of the Assemblies of God, youth ministry, or the American conversation on juvenile delinquency. In content and tone, it is a celebration and not an analysis. This is not primarily a scholarly book.

However, what it does do, it does well. It is divided equally into three parts. The first chapter traces the growth of Teen Challenge as a local ministry to youth in Brooklyn during the 1960s. The chapter is broken into easily-read sections profiling important events and Teen Challenge participants. A rich collection of photographs and reproductions of documents tell the story even more powerfully than the text. Those interested in the religious literature of this decade will appreciate the many photographs of books and Teen Challenge promotional materials. The next two chapters trace the growth of Teen Challenge across the United States and globe. These sections follow the same format and focus almost entirely on contemporary personal testimony. Overall, this volume presents a well-organized visual feast and a spiritual chronicle that anyone concerned about the victims of addiction will appreciate.

Reviewed by Danielle DuBois Gottwig, Ph.D. candidate, University of Notre Dame

Hardcover, 199 pages, illustrated. $25.00 plus shipping. Order from Teen Challenge USA by phone (417-862-6969 ext. 212) or online (www.TeenChallengeUSA.com).

Maine Pentecostal history

Prevailing Westerlies (The Pentecostal Heritage of Maine): The Story of How the Pentecostal Fire Spread from Topeka, Kansas to Houston — to Los Angeles — to Bangor, Maine, written by James E. Peters, researched by Patricia Pickard. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 1988.

Prevailing Westerlies documents the early history of the Pentecostal movement in Maine. This 604-page book features hundreds of photographs, as well as accounts of Holy Ghost meetings and supernatural movings of God in tents, downtown missions, Bible schools, and street meetings in New England.

Read about firebrands preaching until the rafters rang. During one tent meeting, rain came down in buckets and water poured into the tent. One sister hollered, “Look out for my piano!” Pa Sweeney kept right on preaching and said, “It ain’t pianos we want to save—it is souls!” It will light a fire in your bones for the renewed move of God in your own life.

Prevailing Westerlies, importantly, recounts the breadth of the early Pentecostal revivals, which crossed the various divides. Stories about early believers — Trinitarian and Oneness, Assemblies of God and independent, male and female — are all included. Years of research yielded previously unpublished information about significant early Pentecostal leaders such as Mattie Crawford, Aimee Semple McPherson, the Crabtree family, and a host of others. This volume includes 34 interviews with people who recounted the early Pentecostal fire which entered Maine in 1907 and spread throughout the area. Includes comprehensive index.

The author, James Peters, served as pastor of Glad Tidings Church (Bangor, Maine), which was founded by Rev. Clifford A. Crabtree and the Davis Sisters. Patricia Pickard, who did the research for this volume, is former archivist for Zion Bible College (Haverhill, Massachusetts) and has authored numerous historical books and articles about New England and the Pentecostal movement.

Softcover, 604 pages, illustrated. $15 postpaid to U.S. addresses. Order from: Patricia Pickard, 144 Poplar Street, Bangor, ME 04401 (email: primrose301@msn.com)

Sister Aimee biography

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, by Matthew Avery Sutton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

One cannot help but wish to have been there, centrally seated in the first row of Angelus Temple’s lower balcony, to view the spectacle up close. Imagine the intensity of the moment, the palpable pangs of spiritual bliss, anguish, and surrender all around as Sister Aimee draws your seatmates into her fanciful world of biblical prophets and priests, heroes and villains. And what must it have been like to stand with thirty thousand others gathered at Los Angeles’ train station on that June day in 1926, cheering rapturously at the first sight of Sister Aimee after her return from a mysterious disappearance; or to sit nervously in the court room later that same year as she attempted to answer the mystery and defend herself against charges of conspiracy?

That such sentiments stir frequently when reading Matthew Sutton’s biography of Aimee Semple McPherson is tribute to his rare story-telling abilities. By pricking the emotions as much as intellectual curiosity, Sutton provides us with an opportunity to appreciate McPherson sympathetically as someone trying her best to negotiate the cultural opportunities, pitfalls, and blessings of her day. At the same time, he offers room to feel what it would have been like to be part of McPherson’s multitude of followers or cadre of critics. McPherson was, to say the least, a polarizing figure. All who encountered her during her lifetime thus seemed compelled to declare publicly their feelings of loyalty or loathing for the female evangelist.

Sutton asks us to suspend such judgment and instead carefully measure the intensity of these responses against the realities of the day–against the constantly expanding range of possibilities that seemed only to encourage Sister Aimee’s exploits, well meaning and successful, poorly conceived, or otherwise.

Quad Cities Pentecostal history

Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage: A Memorial to the Church in the Quad Cities, compiled by Kenneth Richard Kline-Walczak. Revised version. Hillsdale, IL: The Author, 2008.

Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage is the second in a projected four-volume series of books about the history of the Pentecostal movement in the Quad Cities (Moline and Rock Island, Illinois and Bettendorf and Davenport, Iowa). The first volume cataloged the influence of healing evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter in these towns along the Iowa-Illinois border. Now, in this second volume, Kenneth Richard Kline-Walczak has assembled an impressive collection of articles concerning the region’s Pentecostal heritage and its roots in earlier Christian traditions.

Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage is divided into five chapters. The first chapter (p. 1-43), “The Mass Mound and the Blessing of Davenport,” documents the ministry of Father Charles Felix Van Quickenborne, a Jesuit priest-missionary who is believed to have conducted the first Christian service in the area in 1835. Kline-Walczak describes the priest’s work as “miraculous” and “apostolic.” The second chapter (p. 45-78) traces the influence on the Quad Cities of the 1857-1858 revival which originated from the Fulton Street prayer meetings in New York City. The third chapter (p. 79-168) provides detailed information about a local congregation affiliated with noted healing evangelist John Alexander Dowie, the founder of the Christian Catholic Church (headquartered in Zion, Illinois).

The fourth chapter (p. 169-346) presents information about campaigns in the Quad Cities held by various healing evangelists from 1900 to 1960. The chapter, organized chronologically, includes both the mundane (such as the times and locations of services) as well as controversies covered by the local press (including the 1929 departure of the “blonde evangelist” Mattie Crawford due to disagreement over finances). Some of the evangelists in this chapter include: 1900s – Martha Wing Robinson, Maria Woodworth-Etter; 1910s – Wilbur Glenn Voliva, James L. Delk; 1920s – A. W. Kortkamp (founder of Moline Gospel Temple), Mattie Crawford, Louise Nankivell, Lilian B. Yeomans; 1930s – Watson Argue, Mrs. A. A. Carpenter, Joseph Mattson-Boze, Everett B. Parrott, Kathryn Kuhlman; 1940s – R. F. DeWeese, Charles S. Price, Lorne F. Fox, Raymond T. Richey, Leonard E. Page, Oral Roberts, Charles L. Hollis; 1950s – O. L. Jaggers, Frank R. Lummer, William Freeman, James W. Drush, William Branham, David J. DuPlessis, Lloyd Huffey, A. A. Allen, Billy Adams, Velmer Gardner, Maurice Hart, Gordon Lindsey, Morris Cerullo.

The fifth chapter (p. 347-368) is dedicated to Dr. Charles L. Hollis and his wife, Ruth Vingren-Hollis, who served as pastors of Moline Gospel Temple from 1949 to 1999. This chapter includes transcriptions of an oral history interview of the Hollises by the author and of an interview of the Hollises by Kathryn Kuhlman, which was broadcast on her television program in 1976.

The bulk of Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage consists of hundreds of articles from regional newspapers, assembled for the purpose of introducing the region’s readers to its Pentecostal past. Kline-Walczak also includes helpful interpretive and bibliographic essays about the subjects at hand. By reproducing such a vast assortment of historical materials, the compiler allows readers to get a sense of the mood of early Pentecostals (and, at times, that of their detractors). Kline-Walczak, through his back-breaking research efforts, has given Pentecostals in the Quad Cities a valuable documentary account of their origins and development.

Reviewed by Darrin Rodgers

Paperback, vi, 368 pages, illustrated. $20, plus $4.00 shipping. Order from: Ken Kline, P.O. Box 162, Hillsdale, IL 61257 (email: woodworth65@yahoo.com ; phone: 563-210-3282).

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Rex Humbard Biography

The Soul-Winning Century, 1906-2006 : The Humbard Family Legacy … One Hundred Years of Ministry, by Rex Humbard. Dallas, TX: Clarion Call Marketing, 2006.

Since almost the beginning of the twentieth century Pentecostal movement, members of the Humbard family have been engaging in earnest, energetic ministry to reach the lost for Christ. Rex Humbard, whose preaching has graced the airwaves for over 65 years, has now told his family’s story in his memoirs, The Soul-Winning Century.

While Rex Humbard became a household name through his groundbreaking television ministry, his father, Alpha E. Humbard also was an important pioneer preacher in his own right. Alpha Humbard, born in 1890 sixty miles north of Little Rock, Arkansas, had a rough childhood. Poverty, fights, liquor, and hard work dominated the world in which young Alpha was reared. However, he sensed God’s calling at a young age and overcame the odds to answer this call. Alpha was a practical, direct, no-nonsense kind of preacher whose compassion for people, according to this telling, overcame any deficit created by his lack of formal education. Perhaps it was this lack of haute couture – combined with a dependence upon God — that allowed him to touch the masses where they were at.

Alpha once recalled that a seminary-trained minister bitterly complained that, while he was a learned man with good diction and degrees, he could not draw the crowds like Alpha, whom he described as “an old farm boy, a clodhopper who can’t talk good English.” Alpha recalled that he recommended that the minister throw away his cigar, which he was smoking while complaining, and get on his knees and pray (p. 27). Alpha was not alone – his innovative, sometimes rough-and-tumble ways reflected a whole generation of early Pentecostal preachers.

The Sparkling Fountain

The Sparkling Fountain, by Fred T. Corum and Hazel E. Bakewell. Windsor, OH: Corum & Associates, Inc., 1989, c1983.

The Sparkling Fountain is a 278-page book with eyewitness accounts of the beginning of Pentecostalism in the Ozarks. The book was started by Fred T. Corum and his sister Hazel E. Bakewell. Then James and Kenneth Corum, sons of Fred Corum, helped to preserve this slice of history and see it through to production. First marketed in 1983, it is offered again on the 100th anniversary of Central Assembly in Springfield, Missouri.

The Azusa Street Mission story is recapped in beginning chapters, but for our purpose here the story begins in 1905 when Fred and Hazel moved to the Ozarks from Oklahoma with their parents, James and Lillie Harper Corum.

James and Lillie were never credentialed ministers but are considered the pioneers of Pentecost in Springfield — holding together a nucleus for several years until a church was set in order. I have an idea many other lay people throughout our history deserve special recognition for beginning and/or keeping local congregations together (including unfortunate splits) until a pastor assumed the leadership.

The Corums soon became active in a Baptist church where Mr. Corum served as Sunday school superintendent. But in the fall of 1906 they heard about the Pentecostal outpouring and became interested. Then in May 1907 they were introduced to this new experience which would dramatically put their lives on a new course.

Testimonies of Signs and Wonders

Testimonies of Signs and Wonders: Evangelistic Crusades of Maria Beulah Woodworth-Etter in Moline, Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa in the Years 1902-1903-1907, or Redigging the Wells of Holy Spirit Renewal: Our Forgotten Heritage in the Quad Cities, compiled by Kenneth Richard Kline-Walczak. Revised version. Davenport, IA: The Author, 2006.

Maria Woodworth-Etter, among the most prominent of the healing evangelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became one of the best known Holiness preachers to embrace Pentecostalism. Her popularity was due in large part to her practice of faith healing and other charismatic gifts, which began occuring in her meetings in about 1885. Her ministry attracted large crowds, fierce detractors and fervent supporters, as well as widespread coverage in newspapers from coast to coast. Newspaper editors, who often deemed the excitement and large crowds sparked by the woman evangelist to be worthy of critique, helped to spread her fame. The standard biography of Woodworth-Etter, Maria Woodworth-Etter, For Such a Time as This (Bridge-Logos, 2005), was authored by former Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center Director Wayne E. Warner.

Now Kenneth Kline-Walczak has cataloged Woodworth-Etter’s influence in one corner of the world — the Quad Cities on the Iowa-Illinois border. His book consists largely of an impressive collection of articles (1884-1907) about Woodworth-Etter from regional newspapers, assembled in chronological order and reprinted for the purpose of introducing the region’s readers to its Pentecostal past. The compiler also includes a helpful guide to the people and places mentioned in the articles. Kline-Walczak’s detailed research will aid not only historians, but also people in the Quad Cities as they seek to recover the sacred stories of God’s work among them in previous generations.

Reviewed by Darrin Rodgers

Paperback, xxvi, 194 pages, illustrated. $20, plus $4.00 shipping. Order from: Ken Kline, P.O. Box 162, Hillsdale, IL 61257 (email: woodworth65@yahoo.com ; phone: 563-210-3282).

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Uldine Utley: Why I am a Preacher

Uldine Utley: Why I am a Preacher, compiled by T. J. Lavigne. Kissimmee, FL: Cloud of Witnesses Publishing Co., 2006.

Ted Lavigne has developed a passion for discovering and researching child evangelists and their unique role in presenting the gospel. To my knowledge, this topic of child evangelists has never been discussed in a book or dissertation. This makes his research all the more important. It is significant that just as child preachers of yesteryear filled a vital role in communicating the gospel, there are still child evangelists today in the U.S. and abroad. You will be blessed by reading some of their stories.

In this volume, which is the opening text in a child and teen preacher series, he focuses on the life of a well-known girl evangelist, Uldine Utley. She preached in Madison Square Garden in 1926 at the age of 14 and ministered other places across the U.S. She was also featured in American Magazine, the Boston Sunday Post, the New York Times and many other publications.

Lavigne includes a timeline of significant events concerning her ministry, rare photographs, an extensive bibliography, and interesting bits of information about Utley and her family that previously were unpublished. This book includes excerpts from Uldine Utley’s book, Why I am a Preacher: A Plain Answer to an Oft-repeated Question (1931), and from her Petals from the Rose of Sharon newsletters, with related information about some key evangelists connected with her ministry.

The serious reader of church history will be delighted and inspired by the testimony of this girl evangelist and will look forward to additional volumes in this series.

Reviewed by Glenn Gohr

Paperback, 149 pages (8.5×11 in.), illustrated. $29.95, plus $6.00 shipping. Order from: Cloud of Witnesses Products.

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