E. M. Bounds Biography and Books

Edward McKendree Bounds died in 1913 in a small Georgia town, largely unknown outside the churches he had served. He left behind a stack of manuscripts, a modest library, and a reputation among a handful of friends for rising before dawn to pray. A century later his books on prayer have been translated into dozens of languages and have never gone out of print. He is one of the clearest cases in the modern church of a life whose fruit came almost entirely after its end.

A Missouri boyhood and an early ambition

He was born on 15 August 1835 in Shelby County, Missouri, and named for William McKendree, the frontier bishop of American Methodism — a name that turned out to be a kind of prophecy. His father died when Edward was fourteen, and the boy's education was cut short by the family's sudden need. Like many young men of his generation he went west in the years of the gold rush, but he did not stay a prospector. He came back to Missouri, read law, and was admitted to the bar while still a teenager, practising as one of the youngest attorneys in the state.

The law held him for only a few years. He was converted under the preaching of a Methodist revival, and the call to preach came with a force he could not argue away — which is worth noting about a man trained to argue. He gave up the practice, and in 1859, at twenty-four, he was ordained and sent to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, at Monticello, Missouri. He had traded a promising career for a circuit and a small salary, and he never showed any sign of regretting it.

Prison, and a war he did not choose

Two years later the country broke apart, and Missouri broke with it. In May 1861 Bounds, then pastoring at Brunswick, was arrested by Union troops along with more than two hundred other men suspected of Southern sympathies. He was required to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States or pay a fine of five hundred dollars. He refused both — not, by his own account, out of politics, but because he would not be compelled in a matter of conscience. It was a costly scruple. He was held at Jefferson City and then in a federal prison in St Louis, among non-combatants, for roughly a year and a half.

Released in an exchange, he made his way south and served the rest of the war as a chaplain to Confederate troops from Missouri. It was the hardest kind of ministry: burying men his own age, writing to their mothers, holding services in mud. At Franklin, Tennessee, he was struck in the forehead by a sabre and taken prisoner again. He carried the scar for the rest of his life.

It should be said plainly that the cause he served fought to preserve slavery, and nothing he later wrote about prayer alters that. What can be said alongside it is what he did when the war ended, which surprised the town he did it in.

Franklin: six men and a Tuesday night

When the war ended and he was finally released in the summer of 1865, Bounds went back to Franklin — to the town where he had been wounded and beaten, whose fields still held the graves of men he had buried. He did not go to rebuild it with money or lumber. He went to pastor the Methodist church there, and his method was almost absurdly simple. He looked for a handful of men who actually believed that prayer did something, and he found about half a dozen. Every Tuesday night they knelt together and prayed — for themselves, for the church, for the town, for revival in a wrecked and bitter country.

That decade shaped the rest of him. Everything he would later put on paper about the uselessness of machinery and the necessity of praying men, he learned first on the floor of a church in a defeated town, with five or six others beside him.

What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Spirit can use — men of prayer, men mighty in prayer.

— E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer

The editor's desk, and a grief that did not break him

Bounds's gifts were recognised. He pastored in Alabama and Missouri, and served as editor of the St Louis Christian Advocate and then as associate editor of the Nashville Christian Advocate, the official paper of his denomination — for a time one of the more influential desks in Southern Methodism. He was, by any ordinary reckoning, a successful churchman.

In September 1876 he married Emma Elizabeth Barnett, of Washington, Georgia; they called her Emmie. Three children followed — Celeste, Corneille, and a son, Edward. In February 1886 Emmie died. Twenty months later Bounds married her cousin, Harriet Elizabeth Barnett, and six more children came: Samuel, Charles, and Osborne, Elizabeth, Mary, and a daughter they named Emmie. The man who wrote so insistently about praying at four in the morning was not a monk with an empty house. He was a father with a full one, and he had known the kind of loss that makes a person either stop praying or start praying differently.

The hours before daylight

Around 1894 he left the editor's chair and moved his family to Washington, Georgia, his first wife's home town. He held no prominent pulpit again. He had long been an early riser; now, with no congregation to fill and no salary for it, praying became his principal work — and he seems to have regarded it as work, in the plain sense. He rose at four in the morning and prayed until seven.

Those who knew him described a man walking and praying aloud in the dark hours, often carrying a single text for days until it burned. He was not performing; almost nobody was watching. He travelled when invited, held prayer meetings, wrote for the papers, and gave his books away as often as he sold them. And in those pre-dawn hours he wrote — eight manuscripts on prayer, covering its necessity, its possibilities, its reality, its weapons, and the men who had prayed in Scripture.

The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees. He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest of the day.

— E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer

Only one of the eight found a publisher while he lived: Preacher and Prayer, issued in 1907 and later retitled Power Through Prayer, the book by which most readers still know him. The other seven sat in manuscript. He had no reason to believe they would ever be read.

"When He is ready, I am ready"

Bounds died at home in Washington, Georgia, on 24 August 1913, nine days after his seventy-eighth birthday. Not long before the end he wrote to his friend Homer W. Hodge a line that reads exactly like the rest of his life:

When He is ready, I am ready; I long to taste the joys of the heavenlies.

— E. M. Bounds, in a letter to Homer W. Hodge

The manuscripts might have ended in an attic. Instead two friends — Claudius Lysias Chilton, and after him Hodge — took up the labour of editing and placing them. Purpose in Prayer appeared in 1920, Prayer and Praying Men in 1921, and the rest followed through the 1920s and into 1931. Bounds saw none of it.

Why he still reads

Bounds is not a systematic theologian and does not pretend to be. He repeats himself. He hammers one nail. But he wrote as a man describing something he did every morning rather than something he had read about, and that is why the books have outlasted almost everything published alongside them. His central conviction never moves: God works through people, not arrangements, and the person God can use is the one who has learned to pray.

Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still.

— E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer

He is buried in Washington, Georgia, under a modest stone. He held no great office, founded no movement, and died with his best work unpublished. He simply got up, nineteen years running, while the town was still dark — and the church has been reading what came out of those mornings ever since.