The Secret Place of Kathryn Kuhlman

Kathryn Johanna Kuhlman was born on May 9, 1907 in Concordia, Missouri, the daughter of German American parents who taught her Scripture and reverence for the Holy Spirit from the earliest days of her childhood. As a teenager she experienced a deep stirring toward Christ and soon found herself helping with evangelistic work, first alongside family and then on the road, preaching where doors opened and trusting God for the next step. The contours of her later ministry were already visible in those beginnings, a blend of simple faith, intense devotion to Jesus, and a growing awareness of the Spirit's presence as the true power behind every meeting.

Her path was not without heartbreak. In 1938 she entered a marriage that her conscience could not carry, and by the mid 1940s she separated and later divorced, speaking in later years of the grief it brought to others and the sorrow it brought to her own walk with God. The failure did not end her calling, but it chastened her soul. She returned to the work with a new tenderness and a keener resolve never to wound the Holy Spirit. The dates and public facts are clear, yet the more important truth is how the valley became an altar. From that season forward she spoke often of surrender, of dying to self, and of her absolute dependence on the Spirit for any result in ministry.

The first public signs of the healing dimension of her ministry appeared in Pennsylvania in the late 1940s, when people began testifying to cures while she was preaching. She soon established regular services in Pittsburgh, where for years crowds gathered at venues like Carnegie Music Hall and Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, later at First Presbyterian Church downtown. The meetings were not built around a healing line. They were built around worship, a Bible message exalting Christ, extended waiting upon God, and a palpable sense of the Spirit's nearness. She would often stand quietly and then begin to identify conditions being healed across the auditorium while people rose weeping, telling what God had done.

In the last decade of her life she added monthly services in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium, where thousands came with expectancy and reverence. She also became a familiar presence through radio and a nationally syndicated television program titled I Believe in Miracles, which ran through the 1960s and 1970s and brought testimonies of Christ's saving and healing work into homes across North America. In every medium she insisted that the Holy Spirit was the minister, that Jesus alone was to be exalted, and that human showmanship must give way to holy awe.

Her physical heart failed in the mid 1970s. After open heart surgery in Tulsa she went to be with the Lord on February 20, 1976. Even in the telling of her death you feel the same note that marked her life, the quiet certainty that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. She was laid to rest in California, but the living testimony she left is not a grave marker. It is the continuing witness of lives awakened to the reality of the Spirit of God.