Biography
Gordon Lindsay was born on June 18, 1906, in Zion, Illinois, a town founded by the healing evangelist John Alexander Dowie. He grew up in a family that was part of the Zion community and was shaped by the stress on healing and the Christian life. His parents later moved to the West Coast. He came to faith in Christ in his youth and was drawn to the Pentecostal movement. He attended a Bible school in California and was ordained in the Assemblies of God in the 1930s. He began his ministry as an evangelist and pastor in Oregon and California.
He developed a gift for organization and writing. In the 1940s, he became a close associate of William Branham, a healing evangelist from Kentucky, whose meetings drew great crowds. Lindsay served as Branham's manager and organized his campaigns. In 1947, he saw that there was a need to bring together the evangelists who were praying for the sick and to publicize their work. In 1948, he began a magazine called The Voice of Healing, which reported on the healing revival that was spreading across the nation. The magazine became the voice of the movement.
Through the pages of The Voice of Healing, he promoted the ministries of many evangelists, among them Oral Roberts, T. L. Osborn, Jack Coe, A. A. Allen and others. He coordinated their meetings, helped them to find funding and set up an organization to support them. He held conventions of the evangelists, and he stressed the need for integrity in handling money and for sound teaching. He was concerned about the excesses and abuses that crept into the movement, and he sought to hold a standard.
In 1958 he began to turn his attention to missions. He saw the need for the training of workers to take the gospel to the nations and he developed a program for supplying aid and literature to missionaries around the world. In 1970 he founded Christ for the Nations Institute, a Bible school in Dallas, Texas, which has trained thousands of students for ministry. Christ for the Nations also became a large missions agency that sent funds, literature and equipment to missionaries across the world. Among those who studied there was Benson Idahosa, the Nigerian evangelist.
He was also a prolific author who wrote more than two hundred books, many of them about the end times, divine healing and missions. His work on prophecy was widely read. He had a great interest in the Jewish people and in the significance of Israel. He wrote with a plain and urgent style, and his books were circulated in many countries.
His career was not free of difficulties. The healing revival of the 1950s suffered from scandals, and some of the evangelists he had promoted were found to be dishonest or immoral. He was grieved by this. He tried to hold the movement together but found that many went their own way. He also dealt with financial strain in his organizations and with the criticism that came from those outside the movement who doubted the claims of healing.
He died on April 1, 1973, in Dallas, at the age of sixty-six. His wife, Freda, carried on the work of Christ for the Nations after his death. His life shows the value of the organizer and the publicist in a movement of the Spirit, and the way that a man who works behind the scenes can have a large influence on the work of others.