Biography
I never gave an altar call—never led a soul to Jesus—never preached the glory of the born-again experience. I was spiritually blind, leading my people into the ditch.
Charles S. Price spent the first dozen years of his ministry explaining God away. He was a gifted, popular, well-read preacher who could account for every religious feeling by the laws of psychology, and who never once, by his own confession, asked a sinner to come to Christ. Then he went to a tent meeting in San Jose to gather material for a sermon that would expose it, and the meeting exposed him instead. He spent the rest of his life as a healing evangelist, preaching to arenas of ten thousand — and, at the height of it, wrote a book confessing that his heart had been heavy for those who went home unhealed.
A Sheffield boy who drifted
Charles Sydney Price was born on 7 May 1887 in Sheffield, England. He never knew his mother. She died while he was still very small, and he was told that before she died she took him in her arms and dedicated him to the service of the Lord. His father married again, and Charles grew up loving his stepmother dearly. It was her insistence, and his parents’ sacrifice, that gave him a good schooling; he attended Wesley College, a Methodist school.
Somewhere in those years, he wrote, he began to drift. He came to think his parents’ faith old-fashioned and rather narrow. He worked for a time with a Sheffield law firm and was fascinated by the courtrooms, but he grew restless, and as a young man of about twenty he crossed to Canada, where the legal career he hoped for did not come and he ended up doing rough work instead. From Canada he felt drawn to Spokane, in Washington State.
A lamp post in Spokane
One night in early autumn he was leaning against a lamp post in Spokane, listening to a little band of mission workers sing in the street. When the meeting ended, an old woman stopped him and asked whether he knew that God wanted him. He was uncomfortable, excused himself rather rudely, and hurried off. Halfway across the Monroe Street Bridge he stopped. A feeling of dread and awe had come over him, a sense that God had spoken through her. He turned round and walked back to the mission. When the leader gave the altar call that night, he later wrote, he sprang to his feet, squared his shoulders and marched to the front, and gave himself to God.
He threw himself into the work of that Free Methodist mission, and before long he was ordained into the Methodist ministry. He married and began to raise a family. Then came the turning point he would regret all his life. News had reached Spokane of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Los Angeles, and Price, convicted, promised to meet with some workers to pray to be filled. On his way to that prayer meeting an older minister caught him by the arm and begged him not to wreck his future. Price spent the afternoon in the man’s study instead and went home with half a suitcase of books. He did not go to the prayer meeting.
The books did their work. He came to believe, he said, that he could explain every religious emotion from the standpoint of psychology. Pastorate followed pastorate, and his reputation climbed. He left the Methodists for the broader Congregational Church, spent a season in Alaska, and then took pulpits in Santa Rosa and Oakland, California. In the First World War he spoke from Oakland’s theatre stages as one of the “Four Minute Men,” work that earned him a letter from President Woodrow Wilson. At last he came to the First Congregational Church of Lodi, a fine church with generous people.
I never gave an altar call—never led a soul to Jesus—never preached the glory of the born-again experience. I was spiritually blind, leading my people into the ditch.
— Charles S. Price, The Story of My Life
The tent at San Jose
In 1921 Aimee Semple McPherson held a great tent campaign in San Jose, and members of the Lodi church began coming home from it saying they had been saved. Price laughed, and then grew bitter. He put an advertisement in the newspaper announcing that his next Sunday sermon would be titled “Divine Healing Bubble Explodes,” and drove to San Jose with pen and paper to take notes.
The first shock was the sponsor’s name on the banner: William Keeney Towner, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Oakland, a friend from Price’s Oakland years. The tent held about six thousand and was packed. Towner found him in the crowd, gripped his hand and told him that this was real and that it was what he needed. The only empty seat was in the section reserved for the crippled. The altar call undid him; he did not sleep that night. The next night the preaching, as he put it, punctured his theology until it looked like a sieve.
When the call for sinners came, he stood. A prominent minister beside him put a hand on his shoulder and whispered that she was calling for sinners, for people who needed to be saved. Price whispered back that he knew, and went down the steps. As he knelt, he wrote, the glory of God broke over his soul and an ocean of divine love rolled across his heart; he threw up both hands and shouted Hallelujah. Night after night afterwards he tarried in prayer at the Baptist church, and one night, praying for hours in a corner behind a piano until Towner came and urged him into the middle of the room, he was baptized in the Holy Spirit.
He went home to Lodi fully expecting to lose his pulpit. Instead the church was packed the next Sunday, and he told them plainly what they would hear from now on.
As long as I am pastor, you will hear one burning message from this pulpit—Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
— Charles S. Price, The Story of My Life
More than eighty people knelt at his first altar call. Prayer meetings multiplied, attendance reached a thousand, and a Lodi Gospel Team of close to a thousand members drove out in convoys to hold street meetings in nearby towns. When church authorities began to interfere, the revived congregation formed an independent church, Bethel Temple. On 17 August 1922, with a sad parting, Price left Lodi for the evangelistic field.
Arenas of ten thousand
His first campaign was in Ashland, Oregon, where the churches closed their own services to join him. When the first person he prayed for fell under the power of God, he admitted, he was afraid. Then came Albany, Roseburg and Eugene, and in April 1923 an invitation from Methodist ministers in Victoria, British Columbia. The meetings outgrew the Metropolitan Methodist Church and moved to an arena. Among those prayed for was Ruby Dimmick, a young woman crippled for years and the daughter of a Methodist minister; her healing was reported across Canada and the United States. In May he went on to Vancouver, where the Denman Arena held ten thousand, and its owner, Frank Patrick, reckoned that more than a quarter of a million people came in three weeks.
Honesty requires the rest of the story. The healings were contested from the start. Later in 1923 a committee of Vancouver ministers, doctors and others followed up some 350 people who had been prayed for, and reported that most showed no lasting change and that thirty-nine had died within months. Some who had endorsed him drew back, saying they had supported his preaching rather than his healing. Price’s supporters answered with testimonies of people still well years later, and he went on returning to Canada; converts from those campaigns helped fill Pentecostal churches in British Columbia and the prairies for a generation.
From 1926 he sent out a monthly magazine, Golden Grain, carrying his sermons and the testimonies of the healed. He held campaigns across Canada and the American Midwest, and in the late 1930s preached in Europe and the Middle East. The travelling was relentless, and it cost him. His marriage did not survive those years; he and his wife separated and later divorced. It is a sorrow his public story tends to pass over.
The faith that is given
The weariness of that life shows through in his own pages. One night in a tabernacle, with some five hundred sick people waiting to be anointed and no strength left to preach, he looked through a crack in the wall at the sufferers and felt like running away.
Out of such nights came his best-known book, The Real Faith, published in 1940. It opens with a confession. For years, he wrote, he had known that something was wrong. He had gone home from meetings with shouts of victory ringing in his ears, only to weep before the Lord for those who dragged their sick bodies home as needy as they came. He would not shrug off the gap between what was preached and what happened. His answer was that faith cannot be worked up by effort of will; it is not the same as believing a promise, but a gift that God Himself imparts to the heart.
We have made faith a condition of mind, when it is a divinely imparted grace of the heart.
— Charles S. Price, The Real Faith
The book is full of prayer rather than technique. He tells of a woman confined to an institution, whom he prayed for one morning with no visible answer, while her husband held him by the coat and begged him not to give up.
Just as honestly, he recorded nights when nothing happened and he felt, in his word, empty. When two men once pressed him to settle a controversy, he admitted he did not know the answer.
Brethren, the important thing is not what you believe, but in whom you believe.
— Charles S. Price, The Real Faith
In 1945 he felt the Lord calling him to stay at home, and he gave his last years in Pasadena to writing, local preaching, rest and prayer. He died there on 8 March 1947, aged fifty-nine, and was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. Golden Grain went on being mailed out for years after his death, and The Real Faith is still reprinted today.
He was not a theologian, and he carried griefs and failures along with the triumphs. But the man who once explained every emotion by psychology ended his life insisting that faith was not something he could produce, and that every good thing he had seen had come from Jesus alone. That confession is still what his books make.
No books or sermons in the library yet for this writer.
Questions and Answers
Who was Charles S. Price?
Charles Sydney Price (1887–1947) was an English-born Pentecostal evangelist. As a liberal Congregational pastor in Lodi, California, he went to Aimee Semple McPherson's 1921 San Jose meetings to expose them and was converted instead. His healing campaigns across North America drew huge crowds, notably in Victoria and Vancouver in 1923, and his book The Real Faith (1940) taught that true faith is not worked up but imparted by God.
When and where was Charles S. Price born?
He was born on 7 May 1887 in Sheffield, England. He never knew his mother, who died while he was very small; he was told she took him in her arms before she died and dedicated him to the Lord's service. He grew up loving his stepmother dearly, and her insistence gave him a good schooling at Wesley College, a Methodist school. He worked for a Sheffield law firm before crossing to Canada at about twenty, then moving on to Spokane, Washington.
How was Charles S. Price first converted?
One autumn night in Spokane he was leaning against a lamp post listening to mission workers sing in the street when an old woman asked whether he knew that God wanted him. He excused himself rudely and hurried off, but halfway across the Monroe Street Bridge a sense of dread and awe came over him. He walked back to the Free Methodist mission, and at the altar call marched to the front and gave himself to God. He was later ordained into the Methodist ministry.
How did Charles S. Price become a liberal preacher?
On his way to pray to be filled with the Holy Spirit, an older minister begged him not to wreck his future, and Price went home with half a suitcase of books instead. He came to believe he could explain every religious emotion by psychology. He moved to the Congregational Church, pastoring in Santa Rosa, Oakland and Lodi. Later he confessed, "I never gave an altar call—never led a soul to Jesus... I was spiritually blind, leading my people into the ditch."
What happened to Charles S. Price at Aimee Semple McPherson's San Jose meetings?
In 1921 he advertised a sermon titled "Divine Healing Bubble Explodes" and drove to San Jose to take notes. There his friend William Keeney Towner told him the meetings were real. The preaching punctured his theology "until it looked like a sieve," and on the third evening, when the call for sinners came, he went forward. As he knelt, the glory of God broke over his soul. Later, praying for hours behind a piano at a Baptist church, he was baptized in the Holy Spirit.
What happened at Charles S. Price's church in Lodi after his conversion?
He went home expecting to lose his pulpit, but the church was packed and he told them, "As long as I am pastor, you will hear one burning message from this pulpit—Jesus Christ and Him crucified." More than eighty knelt at his first altar call, attendance reached a thousand, and a Lodi Gospel Team of nearly a thousand held street meetings in nearby towns. The congregation formed the independent Bethel Temple, and on 17 August 1922 Price left for the evangelistic field.
What happened at Charles S. Price's campaigns in Victoria and Vancouver?
In April 1923 Methodist ministers invited him to Victoria, British Columbia, where the meetings moved to an arena; the healing of Ruby Dimmick, a young woman crippled for years, was reported across Canada and the United States. In Vancouver the Denman Arena held ten thousand, and its owner reckoned more than a quarter of a million came in three weeks. A later committee reported that most of some 350 people followed up showed no lasting change, while supporters pointed to people still well years later.
What did Charles S. Price teach in The Real Faith?
Published in 1940, The Real Faith opens with a confession that he had wept before the Lord for those who went home from his meetings as sick as they came. His answer was that faith cannot be worked up by effort of will; it is a gift God imparts to the heart. "We have made faith a condition of mind, when it is a divinely imparted grace of the heart," he wrote. He also said, "The important thing is not what you believe, but in whom you believe."
What was Charles S. Price's magazine Golden Grain?
From 1926 Price sent out a monthly magazine, Golden Grain, carrying his sermons and the testimonies of people who had been healed. He held campaigns across Canada and the American Midwest and in the late 1930s preached in Europe and the Middle East. The relentless travelling cost him dearly, and his marriage did not survive; he and his wife separated and later divorced. Golden Grain went on being mailed out for years after his death.
When and where did Charles S. Price die?
In 1945 he felt the Lord calling him to stay at home, and he spent his last years in Pasadena, California, writing, preaching locally, resting and praying. He died there on 8 March 1947, aged fifty-nine, and was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. The man who once explained every emotion by psychology ended his life insisting that faith was not something he could produce, and that every good thing he had seen had come from Jesus alone.