Charles S. Price

Charles Sydney Price was born in 1887 in England, and he went to the United States as a young man. He was educated and ambitious, and he trained for the ministry in the Congregational church. He worked as a pastor in several American churches and became known as a gifted speaker. By the early 1920s he was serving a church in Lodi, California. He was sharp-tongued and skeptical about the claims of the Pentecostal movement, which he considered to be a form of fanaticism.

In 1921 he heard that a woman evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, was holding meetings in San Jose, not far from where he lived. He went with the intention of exposing what he thought was a fraud. He sat in the audience and watched. He was moved by what he saw, and he went home troubled. Not long after, he was in his own church and, as he later told it, he experienced a deep conviction and came under the power of the Holy Spirit. He was transformed. He gave up his old views and began to preach about the baptism of the Spirit and about divine healing.

In 1922 and 1923 he held a series of campaigns in the Pacific Northwest, in Vancouver, Portland, Seattle and other cities, and the meetings were marked by large crowds and many reports of healings. People came by the thousands and filled the halls. He preached the gospel with a plain and persuasive force, and many came to faith. He prayed for the sick, and he said that the healings were a sign to draw people to Christ. Reports of the meetings were published in a magazine he began, called the Golden Grain.

He continued with campaigns across the United States and Canada in the 1920s, and he reached large audiences. He was a trained speaker and used his education to good effect. He also wrote books, such as The Real Faith and The Great Physician. His message was that the Christian life includes the power of the Spirit and that Christ still heals today.

His career was not free of difficulty. As his fame grew, so did the criticism, and some of his meetings drew skeptics who doubted the reports of healing. He was also a man who had made a sharp turn in his life, and some in his old church could not follow him. He felt the pain of that break. In later years he moved around, and he spent time in Southern California and in the South. He kept up his work as a preacher and writer.

He died in 1947. The record of his life is thin in some places, and the details here need to be checked against fuller sources. What can be said is that he was among the leading healing evangelists of the early twentieth century and that he stands as a link between the first Pentecostal pioneers and the great healing revivals of the 1940s and 1950s. His story shows how an honest search for the truth can lead a skeptic to faith.