Biography
Poverty and Work from Childhood
Smith Wigglesworth was born in Yorkshire in 1859 into a poor working family.
His childhood was marked more by labour than by schooling.
Pentecostal historical sources record that he began working while still a small child, taking jobs on farms and in industrial settings to help the household.
Formal education was limited.
Reading and writing did not come easily to him, and he never became a scholar in the ordinary sense.
That background later became part of the way people interpreted his ministry.
Wigglesworth preached with a directness that reflected a working man’s world.
He did not build sermons around academic argument.
He returned repeatedly to Scripture, often in simple sentences, and expected hearers to respond.
The plainness should not be confused with passivity.
He was physically vigorous, emotionally forceful and capable of startling people.
Long before large Pentecostal meetings knew his name, those traits were being formed in the industrial north of England.
A Young Christian Across Several Traditions
Wigglesworth’s early Christian formation did not come from one denomination.
Assemblies of God historical research records that he responded to the gospel at a Methodist revival while still a child.
He was later confirmed in the Church of England.
He received believer’s baptism among Baptists.
He also learned among Plymouth Brethren Christians.
As a young man he was attracted to the Salvation Army, whose street evangelism, prayer meetings and urgency about conversion suited his temperament.
This mixture matters because the later Pentecostal preacher did not begin life inside a mature Pentecostal denomination.
Pentecostalism itself had not yet emerged in its twentieth-century form.
He entered it carrying Methodist revivalism, Brethren Bible emphasis, Salvation Army evangelism and a strong belief that Christian faith should produce action.
Polly Featherstone
During his Salvation Army years Wigglesworth met Mary Jane Featherstone, known as Polly.
She was articulate, capable and more comfortable in public Christian work than he was.
They married in 1882.
The marriage changed his life in several ways.
Polly helped him improve his reading.
She preached.
She worked in evangelism.
She provided gifts that compensated for his weaknesses.
Early in their marriage it was often Polly who occupied the stronger public role while Smith worked at his trade and served in street ministry.
The later fame of Smith Wigglesworth can obscure this foundation.
His ministry did not appear fully formed from one man.
It grew within a marriage in which Polly’s literacy, preaching and evangelistic experience mattered deeply.
Plumbing, Street Mission and a Quiet Partnership
Wigglesworth became a plumber in Bradford.
The work supported the household.
He and Polly also opened a mission in a needy part of the city and engaged in street evangelism.
For years he was far better known locally as a tradesman and active Christian worker than as a preacher.
He could speak to individuals.
He could urge people toward conversion.
But public preaching intimidated him.
Polly often took the platform.
This long ordinary period is important because Wigglesworth was nearly fifty before the Pentecostal experience that changed the scale of his public ministry.
He had already spent decades working, raising a family, helping the poor, conducting street evangelism and participating in Christian meetings.
The international evangelist grew out of that foundation.
Divine Healing and Personal Testimony
Wigglesworth became strongly convinced that Christians should pray for the sick.
Early Pentecostal accounts connect this conviction partly with his own experiences of illness and healing.
One famous story concerns a severe abdominal condition, described in later sources as appendicitis or a ruptured appendix, from which Wigglesworth believed God had raised him after prayer.
His confidence in divine healing deepened.
He began praying for sick people with an intensity that later became one of the defining features of his ministry.
Historical language has to be careful here.
The fact that Wigglesworth testified to healing and that many people reported healings through his ministry is well documented.
The medical verification of every individual claim is not.
Some accounts survive primarily through Pentecostal testimonies, biographies and meeting reports written by believers who interpreted the events through faith.
A responsible record should preserve the testimonies without turning every report into a medically established fact.
Sunderland and the Pentecostal Turning Point
In 1907 Pentecostal teaching was spreading in Britain.
The Anglican vicar Alexander A. Boddy had become an important leader of the new movement at Sunderland after contact with the Welsh revival and the Pentecostal awakening associated with Thomas Ball Barratt.
Wigglesworth went to Sunderland.
He wanted the experience Pentecostals described as baptism in the Holy Spirit.
Accounts of the event emphasize that he initially resisted the claim that speaking in tongues had a particular relationship to Spirit baptism.
He nevertheless continued seeking.
During prayer connected with the Boddy household, Wigglesworth experienced what he understood as baptism in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues.
He was forty-eight.
The result most visible to people around him was not simply the new spiritual language.
He began preaching with a confidence and fluency that had not characterized his earlier public speaking.
Polly, who knew his previous limitations better than almost anyone, recognized the difference.
The plumber was becoming a preacher.
From Reluctant Speaker to Travelling Evangelist
After 1907 invitations expanded.
Wigglesworth preached in Pentecostal meetings across Britain and then abroad.
His lack of formal theological education remained obvious.
So did his confidence.
He preached as though the promises of the New Testament should be expected in the present.
Salvation, holiness, the Holy Spirit, healing and bold faith were not separate departments for him.
They belonged to one gospel centred on Christ.
He also developed a distinctive platform presence.
He could be humorous.
He could be abrupt.
He could interrupt passivity in a meeting with commands to believe or act.
This made him memorable.
It also meant that his ministry depended heavily on a strong personality.
Admirers saw spiritual authority.
Some observers found his manner rough.
Both perceptions are understandable from the surviving record.
Faith, Scripture and the Holy Spirit
Wigglesworth became known for an unusually simple relation to Scripture.
Later biographies often summarize his practice by saying he read little besides the Bible.
That statement should not be turned into a virtue of ignorance.
Polly had helped him become literate, and Pentecostal periodicals, testimonies and Christian conversation also shaped him.
The deeper point was priority.
He wanted Scripture to govern his imagination.
He preached Mark 11, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians and other passages with direct expectation.
Faith, to him, was not positive thinking.
It was confidence in God rooted in what God had said.
He also emphasized the Holy Spirit.
His Pentecostal experience convinced him that Christian ministry required more than doctrinal agreement.
The Spirit empowered believers for witness and service.
Yet his language could sometimes move quickly from biblical promise to absolute expectation.
That is where the historical and pastoral questions become more difficult.
Reported Healings and Historical Caution
Healing testimonies followed Wigglesworth throughout his international ministry.
People reported recovery from serious illnesses.
Pentecostal newspapers published accounts.
Witnesses described dramatic meetings.
Biographers collected stories of deaf people hearing, tumours disappearing, crippled people walking and people near death recovering.
Some stories are supported by named witnesses and contemporary reports.
Others entered oral tradition and were repeated later with little documentation.
A few of the most extraordinary claims became increasingly dramatic as they moved through retellings.
Spirit Broods should not flatten this material in either direction.
To dismiss all healing testimony simply because it is religious would be poor history.
To present every story as independently established fact would also be poor history.
The sound wording is that Wigglesworth prayed for the sick throughout his ministry and that many participants and observers reported healings they attributed to God.
Where a specific case lacks strong independent documentation, it remains reported testimony.
That distinction honours both faith and truth.
A Forceful Way of Praying
Wigglesworth sometimes prayed for sick people in ways that shocked observers.
He could press hard on an afflicted area.
He could shout.
He could command sickness to leave.
Stories circulated of him striking or pushing a person while praying.
His own explanation was that he was not attacking the person but confronting the disease or demonic oppression he believed was harming the person.
That explanation reflects his theology.
It does not remove the need for caution.
Physical force in ministry can injure vulnerable people and can be imitated irresponsibly by those who lack the context, consent or restraint necessary for safe pastoral care.
Wigglesworth’s unusual methods should therefore be described, not prescribed.
Their existence also prevents sentimental portraits.
The man was not gentle in every outward manner.
His ministry could be physically and emotionally intense.
Polly’s Death
In 1913 Polly Wigglesworth died suddenly.
Pentecostal archival sources confirm the death as a major turning point.
Smith had depended on her through more than three decades of marriage and ministry.
She had been the stronger reader.
She had preached when he hesitated.
She had shared the Bradford mission.
Her death came only six years after the Pentecostal experience that had opened his international ministry.
He continued for another thirty-four years without her.
Later Pentecostal biography sometimes treats his continuation as evidence of extraordinary faith.
The simpler human fact should not be lost.
A man who preached healing could not keep his wife from dying.
The loss did not cause him to abandon his belief in divine healing.
It did prevent any honest account from pretending that his theology meant everyone he loved would be spared death.
International Ministry
Wigglesworth travelled widely through Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and other regions.
He became one of the international figures linking the early British Pentecostal movement with a broader global network.
His meetings contributed to Pentecostal growth in several countries.
He preached to established Pentecostal congregations and to people encountering the movement for the first time.
In the United States he held Assemblies of God credentials for a period during the 1920s.
Pentecostal publishers printed his sermons.
His reputation grew through both meetings and print.
He never founded a denomination bearing his name.
His influence worked more through itinerant ministry, testimonies and the people who heard him.
Ever Increasing Faith and Faith That Prevails
Gospel Publishing House issued collections of Wigglesworth’s sermons under titles including Ever Increasing Faith in 1924 and Faith That Prevails in 1938.
These books helped stabilize an oral ministry in written form.
They also require the same editorial awareness needed with other preachers whose “books” grew from spoken messages.
The printed voice is connected genuinely to Wigglesworth.
It also passed through transcription and editorial processes.
Exact quotations should therefore be traced where possible to identifiable editions or periodical sermons.
The books reveal recurring themes.
Faith is active.
Christ is sufficient.
The Holy Spirit empowers.
Prayer for the sick should be offered boldly.
Unbelief should not govern Christian expectation.
The repetition is part of the man.
He did not spend his later ministry constantly discovering new subjects.
He pressed a comparatively small number of convictions again and again.
Simplicity, Weakness and Strong Claims
Wigglesworth has often been presented as if simplicity itself proved spiritual purity.
The real life was more complex.
Limited education did not make a person immune to error.
Confidence did not make every interpretation correct.
Reported miracles did not remove human weakness.
His forceful healing practices should not become a universal model.
His statements about faith can become damaging if they are used to blame sick people who are not healed.
That misuse is especially important to resist.
The New Testament contains prayer for healing, but it also contains faithful believers who suffered physically and eventually died.
Wigglesworth himself knew bereavement and bodily weakness.
The strongest way to preserve his witness is therefore not to turn him into a man for whom every prayer produced the result desired.
It is to see a working-class Christian who became convinced that God should be trusted boldly and who carried that conviction around the world.
Final Years and Sudden Death
Wigglesworth continued preaching into advanced age.
He remained active close to his eighty-eighth year.
In March 1947 he travelled to a funeral in Wakefield.
Donald Gee, a major British Pentecostal leader, recorded what happened in a contemporary obituary.
Wigglesworth arrived before the funeral party and was speaking with others in the vestry.
He suddenly suffered what Gee described as a stroke.
Within minutes he was dead.
There was no long public farewell.
He died while still moving within the Pentecostal community he had served for decades.
The April 5, 1947 issue of the Pentecostal Evangel carried Gee’s notice and republished a Wigglesworth sermon.
The early movement was burying one of its best-known travelling evangelists.
What Remains in the Record
Smith Wigglesworth’s life sits in a part of Christian history where testimony and documentation must be handled carefully.
He really was born into poverty.
He really did work from childhood.
He really did spend years as a plumber and local Christian worker.
Polly really did play a formative role.
The 1907 Pentecostal experience really did mark a major change in his public ministry.
He really did preach internationally and become a prominent figure in Pentecostalism.
Thousands of people really did hear him pray for the sick.
Many reported healing.
Those facts are substantial.
The record becomes weaker when later admiration turns every remembered story into equally certain history.
Wigglesworth himself preached faith in God.
That faith does not require exaggeration on his behalf.
The human life is already remarkable without it.
Sources and references
- • Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, archival and historical materials on Smith and Polly Wigglesworth. • Darrin J. Rodgers, Assemblies of God historical study, “This Week in AG History - April 5, 1947.” • David W. Dorries, “The Making of Smith Wigglesworth,” Assemblies of God Heritage. • Smith Wigglesworth, Ever Increasing Faith and Faith That Prevails, collections of published sermons. • Donald Gee, contemporary 1947 obituary and Pentecostal Evangel material on Wigglesworth’s death and ministry.
Sources
“Prayer changes things, but prayer also changes you.”
“I see people who are baptized in the Holy Spirit but have never learned to wait on God.”
“Any man who is not hungry for God is not ready to be used by God.”
“There is something about believing God that will cause you to step out and act.”
“Great faith is the product of great fights.”
“I am not moved by what I see. I am moved only by what I believe.”
“Life in the Spirit is life on a new plane altogether.”
“There is nothing God will withhold from a man filled with the Holy Ghost.”
“I would rather have the Spirit of God on me for five minutes than to own the whole world.”
“The man who is filled with the Holy Ghost is no longer an ordinary man.”
“There is a place in God where Satan dare not come.”
“God wants to purify our minds until we think as He thinks.”
“Yield and let the Holy Ghost lead you into all fullness.”
“The power of the Holy Ghost is the very breath of the Church.”
“There is nothing impossible to a man filled with the Holy Ghost.”
“The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus. Prayer without Him is dead.”
“I never pray more than 20 minutes, but I never go 20 minutes without praying.”
“God’s presence is more important than eloquence in prayer.”
“The secret of spiritual success is a hunger that persists. It is an awful condition to be satisfied with one’s spiritual attainments.”
“I often begin in the flesh, but I end in the Spirit.”
“God wants us so filled with His Spirit that we pray in power and live in victory.”
“The devil knows if he can capture your thought life he has won a mighty victory over you.”
“If you pray much, you will grow much.”
“Pray until you become prayer.”
Archives
Only Believe - Smith Wigglesworth
Contents
Poverty and Work from Childhood
Smith Wigglesworth was born in Yorkshire in 1859 into a poor working family.
His childhood was marked more by labour than by schooling.
Pentecostal historical sources record that he began working while still a small child, taking jobs on farms and in industrial settings to help the household.
Formal education was limited.
Reading and writing did not come easily to him, and he never became a scholar in the ordinary sense.
That background later became part of the way people interpreted his ministry.
Wigglesworth preached with a directness that reflected a working man’s world.
He did not build sermons around academic argument.
He returned repeatedly to Scripture, often in simple sentences, and expected hearers to respond.
The plainness should not be confused with passivity.
He was physically vigorous, emotionally forceful and capable of startling people.
Long before large Pentecostal meetings knew his name, those traits were being formed in the industrial north of England.
A Young Christian Across Several Traditions
Wigglesworth’s early Christian formation did not come from one denomination.
Assemblies of God historical research records that he responded to the gospel at a Methodist revival while still a child.
He was later confirmed in the Church of England.
He received believer’s baptism among Baptists.
He also learned among Plymouth Brethren Christians.
As a young man he was attracted to the Salvation Army, whose street evangelism, prayer meetings and urgency about conversion suited his temperament.
This mixture matters because the later Pentecostal preacher did not begin life inside a mature Pentecostal denomination.
Pentecostalism itself had not yet emerged in its twentieth-century form.
He entered it carrying Methodist revivalism, Brethren Bible emphasis, Salvation Army evangelism and a strong belief that Christian faith should produce action.
Polly Featherstone
During his Salvation Army years Wigglesworth met Mary Jane Featherstone, known as Polly.
She was articulate, capable and more comfortable in public Christian work than he was.
They married in 1882.
The marriage changed his life in several ways.
Polly helped him improve his reading.
She preached.
She worked in evangelism.
She provided gifts that compensated for his weaknesses.
Early in their marriage it was often Polly who occupied the stronger public role while Smith worked at his trade and served in street ministry.
The later fame of Smith Wigglesworth can obscure this foundation.
His ministry did not appear fully formed from one man.
It grew within a marriage in which Polly’s literacy, preaching and evangelistic experience mattered deeply.
Plumbing, Street Mission and a Quiet Partnership
Wigglesworth became a plumber in Bradford.
The work supported the household.
He and Polly also opened a mission in a needy part of the city and engaged in street evangelism.
For years he was far better known locally as a tradesman and active Christian worker than as a preacher.
He could speak to individuals.
He could urge people toward conversion.
But public preaching intimidated him.
Polly often took the platform.
This long ordinary period is important because Wigglesworth was nearly fifty before the Pentecostal experience that changed the scale of his public ministry.
He had already spent decades working, raising a family, helping the poor, conducting street evangelism and participating in Christian meetings.
The international evangelist grew out of that foundation.
Divine Healing and Personal Testimony
Wigglesworth became strongly convinced that Christians should pray for the sick.
Early Pentecostal accounts connect this conviction partly with his own experiences of illness and healing.
One famous story concerns a severe abdominal condition, described in later sources as appendicitis or a ruptured appendix, from which Wigglesworth believed God had raised him after prayer.
His confidence in divine healing deepened.
He began praying for sick people with an intensity that later became one of the defining features of his ministry.
Historical language has to be careful here.
The fact that Wigglesworth testified to healing and that many people reported healings through his ministry is well documented.
The medical verification of every individual claim is not.
Some accounts survive primarily through Pentecostal testimonies, biographies and meeting reports written by believers who interpreted the events through faith.
A responsible record should preserve the testimonies without turning every report into a medically established fact.
Sunderland and the Pentecostal Turning Point
In 1907 Pentecostal teaching was spreading in Britain.
The Anglican vicar Alexander A. Boddy had become an important leader of the new movement at Sunderland after contact with the Welsh revival and the Pentecostal awakening associated with Thomas Ball Barratt.
Wigglesworth went to Sunderland.
He wanted the experience Pentecostals described as baptism in the Holy Spirit.
Accounts of the event emphasize that he initially resisted the claim that speaking in tongues had a particular relationship to Spirit baptism.
He nevertheless continued seeking.
During prayer connected with the Boddy household, Wigglesworth experienced what he understood as baptism in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues.
He was forty-eight.
The result most visible to people around him was not simply the new spiritual language.
He began preaching with a confidence and fluency that had not characterized his earlier public speaking.
Polly, who knew his previous limitations better than almost anyone, recognized the difference.
The plumber was becoming a preacher.
From Reluctant Speaker to Travelling Evangelist
After 1907 invitations expanded.
Wigglesworth preached in Pentecostal meetings across Britain and then abroad.
His lack of formal theological education remained obvious.
So did his confidence.
He preached as though the promises of the New Testament should be expected in the present.
Salvation, holiness, the Holy Spirit, healing and bold faith were not separate departments for him.
They belonged to one gospel centred on Christ.
He also developed a distinctive platform presence.
He could be humorous.
He could be abrupt.
He could interrupt passivity in a meeting with commands to believe or act.
This made him memorable.
It also meant that his ministry depended heavily on a strong personality.
Admirers saw spiritual authority.
Some observers found his manner rough.
Both perceptions are understandable from the surviving record.
Faith, Scripture and the Holy Spirit
Wigglesworth became known for an unusually simple relation to Scripture.
Later biographies often summarize his practice by saying he read little besides the Bible.
That statement should not be turned into a virtue of ignorance.
Polly had helped him become literate, and Pentecostal periodicals, testimonies and Christian conversation also shaped him.
The deeper point was priority.
He wanted Scripture to govern his imagination.
He preached Mark 11, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians and other passages with direct expectation.
Faith, to him, was not positive thinking.
It was confidence in God rooted in what God had said.
He also emphasized the Holy Spirit.
His Pentecostal experience convinced him that Christian ministry required more than doctrinal agreement.
The Spirit empowered believers for witness and service.
Yet his language could sometimes move quickly from biblical promise to absolute expectation.
That is where the historical and pastoral questions become more difficult.
Reported Healings and Historical Caution
Healing testimonies followed Wigglesworth throughout his international ministry.
People reported recovery from serious illnesses.
Pentecostal newspapers published accounts.
Witnesses described dramatic meetings.
Biographers collected stories of deaf people hearing, tumours disappearing, crippled people walking and people near death recovering.
Some stories are supported by named witnesses and contemporary reports.
Others entered oral tradition and were repeated later with little documentation.
A few of the most extraordinary claims became increasingly dramatic as they moved through retellings.
Spirit Broods should not flatten this material in either direction.
To dismiss all healing testimony simply because it is religious would be poor history.
To present every story as independently established fact would also be poor history.
The sound wording is that Wigglesworth prayed for the sick throughout his ministry and that many participants and observers reported healings they attributed to God.
Where a specific case lacks strong independent documentation, it remains reported testimony.
That distinction honours both faith and truth.
A Forceful Way of Praying
Wigglesworth sometimes prayed for sick people in ways that shocked observers.
He could press hard on an afflicted area.
He could shout.
He could command sickness to leave.
Stories circulated of him striking or pushing a person while praying.
His own explanation was that he was not attacking the person but confronting the disease or demonic oppression he believed was harming the person.
That explanation reflects his theology.
It does not remove the need for caution.
Physical force in ministry can injure vulnerable people and can be imitated irresponsibly by those who lack the context, consent or restraint necessary for safe pastoral care.
Wigglesworth’s unusual methods should therefore be described, not prescribed.
Their existence also prevents sentimental portraits.
The man was not gentle in every outward manner.
His ministry could be physically and emotionally intense.
Polly’s Death
In 1913 Polly Wigglesworth died suddenly.
Pentecostal archival sources confirm the death as a major turning point.
Smith had depended on her through more than three decades of marriage and ministry.
She had been the stronger reader.
She had preached when he hesitated.
She had shared the Bradford mission.
Her death came only six years after the Pentecostal experience that had opened his international ministry.
He continued for another thirty-four years without her.
Later Pentecostal biography sometimes treats his continuation as evidence of extraordinary faith.
The simpler human fact should not be lost.
A man who preached healing could not keep his wife from dying.
The loss did not cause him to abandon his belief in divine healing.
It did prevent any honest account from pretending that his theology meant everyone he loved would be spared death.
International Ministry
Wigglesworth travelled widely through Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and other regions.
He became one of the international figures linking the early British Pentecostal movement with a broader global network.
His meetings contributed to Pentecostal growth in several countries.
He preached to established Pentecostal congregations and to people encountering the movement for the first time.
In the United States he held Assemblies of God credentials for a period during the 1920s.
Pentecostal publishers printed his sermons.
His reputation grew through both meetings and print.
He never founded a denomination bearing his name.
His influence worked more through itinerant ministry, testimonies and the people who heard him.
Ever Increasing Faith and Faith That Prevails
Gospel Publishing House issued collections of Wigglesworth’s sermons under titles including Ever Increasing Faith in 1924 and Faith That Prevails in 1938.
These books helped stabilize an oral ministry in written form.
They also require the same editorial awareness needed with other preachers whose “books” grew from spoken messages.
The printed voice is connected genuinely to Wigglesworth.
It also passed through transcription and editorial processes.
Exact quotations should therefore be traced where possible to identifiable editions or periodical sermons.
The books reveal recurring themes.
Faith is active.
Christ is sufficient.
The Holy Spirit empowers.
Prayer for the sick should be offered boldly.
Unbelief should not govern Christian expectation.
The repetition is part of the man.
He did not spend his later ministry constantly discovering new subjects.
He pressed a comparatively small number of convictions again and again.
Simplicity, Weakness and Strong Claims
Wigglesworth has often been presented as if simplicity itself proved spiritual purity.
The real life was more complex.
Limited education did not make a person immune to error.
Confidence did not make every interpretation correct.
Reported miracles did not remove human weakness.
His forceful healing practices should not become a universal model.
His statements about faith can become damaging if they are used to blame sick people who are not healed.
That misuse is especially important to resist.
The New Testament contains prayer for healing, but it also contains faithful believers who suffered physically and eventually died.
Wigglesworth himself knew bereavement and bodily weakness.
The strongest way to preserve his witness is therefore not to turn him into a man for whom every prayer produced the result desired.
It is to see a working-class Christian who became convinced that God should be trusted boldly and who carried that conviction around the world.
Final Years and Sudden Death
Wigglesworth continued preaching into advanced age.
He remained active close to his eighty-eighth year.
In March 1947 he travelled to a funeral in Wakefield.
Donald Gee, a major British Pentecostal leader, recorded what happened in a contemporary obituary.
Wigglesworth arrived before the funeral party and was speaking with others in the vestry.
He suddenly suffered what Gee described as a stroke.
Within minutes he was dead.
There was no long public farewell.
He died while still moving within the Pentecostal community he had served for decades.
The April 5, 1947 issue of the Pentecostal Evangel carried Gee’s notice and republished a Wigglesworth sermon.
The early movement was burying one of its best-known travelling evangelists.
What Remains in the Record
Smith Wigglesworth’s life sits in a part of Christian history where testimony and documentation must be handled carefully.
He really was born into poverty.
He really did work from childhood.
He really did spend years as a plumber and local Christian worker.
Polly really did play a formative role.
The 1907 Pentecostal experience really did mark a major change in his public ministry.
He really did preach internationally and become a prominent figure in Pentecostalism.
Thousands of people really did hear him pray for the sick.
Many reported healing.
Those facts are substantial.
The record becomes weaker when later admiration turns every remembered story into equally certain history.
Wigglesworth himself preached faith in God.
That faith does not require exaggeration on his behalf.
The human life is already remarkable without it.
Sources and references
- • Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, archival and historical materials on Smith and Polly Wigglesworth. • Darrin J. Rodgers, Assemblies of God historical study, “This Week in AG History — April 5, 1947.” • David W. Dorries, “The Making of Smith Wigglesworth,” Assemblies of God Heritage. • Smith Wigglesworth, Ever Increasing Faith and Faith That Prevails, collections of published sermons. • Donald Gee, contemporary 1947 obituary and Pentecostal Evangel material on Wigglesworth’s death and ministry.