 Kuhlman, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and T. L. and Daisy Osborn.
William Branham (1909-1965) began his full time healing evangelism ministry in St Louis, Missouri in June, 1946. “Branham’s sensational healing services, which began in 1946, are well documented and he was the pacesetter for those who followed.” Historians mark his full time ministry as inaugurating the healing evangelism revival of the mid-twentieth century. Branham reported that on Tuesday, May 7, 1946, an angel spoke to him saying, “Fear not, I am sent from the presence of Almighty God to tell you that your peculiar life and your misunderstood ways have been to indicate that God has sent you to take a gift of divine healing to the people of the world. If you will be sincere, and can get the people to believe you, nothing shall stand before your prayer, not even cancer.” He became renowned for accurate words of knowledge and amazing healings.
On Sunday, April 27, 1947, when Kathryn Kuhlman (1907-1976) began a teaching series on the Holy Spirit in Franklin, Pennsylvania a woman in the audience was healed of a tumour, and testified about it the following night. That marked the beginning of Kathryn Kuhlman’s thirty years of incredible healing evangelism. Based at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1948 she held regular services in Carnegie Hall and the First Presbyterian Church, developed a daily radio ministry, and produced over 500 telecasts for the CBS network. For ten years she regularly filled the 7,000 seating Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles at her monthly miracle services there.
On Wednesday, May 14, 1947, following seven months of intensive prayer including fasting, Oral Roberts (1918-2009) received direction from God about beginning his now famous healing evangelistic ministry. He had himself been healed through prayer at 17 after being bed ridden with tuberculosis for five months. From 1948 he used a tent seating 2,000 people and from 1953 he had a tent seating 12,500. By 1956 his monthly magazine Abundant Life had a circulation of over a million. In 1965 he opened a college which later became Oral Roberts University now with 4,500 students. By the eighties 15 million copies of his books had been sold, and thousands of people continue the healing and evangelistic ministry he began.
On Tuesday, June 24, 1947, Henrietta Mears, Christian Education Director at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, spoke at a teachers and leaders conference at Forest Home in the nearby mountains. A group of young leaders including the newly converted Bill Bright (later founder of Campus Crusade for Christ) met late that night for prayer with Henrietta Mears, confessing sin with much weeping and crying out to God. “Then, the fire fell. However it can be explained, God answered their prayer with a vision. They saw before them the college campuses of the world teeming with unsaved students, who held in their hands the power to change the world. The college campuses – they were the key to world leadership, to world revival” . Annual College Briefing Conferences were then held at Forest Home. Billy Graham (1918-) and Edwin Orr (1912-1987) spoke at the 1949 conference there, where Billy Graham also experienced a deep infilling of the Holy Spirit as the presence of God engulfed him while he prayed alone on a mountain. His Los Angeles crusade later that year attracted wide press coverage and launched him into an international ministry.
In July, 1947, Tommy (1923-2013) and Daisy Osborn (1924-1995), Pentecostal pastors in Oregon, were deeply moved at a camp meeting by a message on seeing Jesus. They had returned to America after an unsuccessful time as missionaries in India in 1945-46 where sickness plagued them. Following the Oregon meeting T. L. Osborn wrote:
“The next morning at six o’clock, I was awakened by a vision of Jesus Christ as he came into our room. I looked upon him. I saw Him like I see anyone. No tongue can tell of His splendour and beauty. No language can express the magnificence and power of His person.
“I lay there as one that was dead, unable to move a finger o