F. F. Bosworth Biography and Books

Fred Francis Bosworth spent most of his life telling sick people that God was willing to heal them, and he could tell them so because he had once been given up to die himself. He became one of the best-known healing evangelists of the twentieth century, but the moments that show him most clearly are not the packed auditoriums. They are a night walk along a Texas railway line with a broken wrist, and a family putting their heads one by one into an empty bread tin and saying “Glory.”

A prairie boy with a cornet

He was born on 17 January 1877 on a farm near Utica, Nebraska, and raised in a Methodist home. His father, Burton, was a Civil War veteran. At a soldiers’ reunion he heard a cornet played, and he wanted one so badly that he eventually traded animals for it and taught himself to play. Music stayed with him for life.

He left home at sixteen, and around that time, at a revival meeting in Omaha, he gave his life to Christ. As a young man he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and told his case was hopeless. “I coughed much of the time for ten years,” he later said, “and finally got up from what I supposed would be my death bed and went from Illinois to Georgia for the purpose of saying good-bye to my parents and brothers and sisters before going to heaven.”

He stayed in Fitzgerald, working as a barber, a bookkeeper and for two years the city clerk, a post he lost after backing a prohibition candidate. He led the town band, and around 1900 he married Estella Hyde. They were to have two daughters and a son.

Zion, and a new fire

In the early 1900s the Bosworths moved to Zion City, Illinois, the community that John Alexander Dowie had built around his teaching on divine healing. Bosworth kept books there until Dowie heard him play and put him in charge of the Zion band. When Dowie’s empire collapsed under debt and scandal, Bosworth lost confidence in the man, but not in the God he had preached.

In September 1906 Charles Parham came to Zion preaching the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the Bosworth home became one of the places where seekers gathered. On the night of 18 October 1906 Fred Bosworth received the experience himself, and with it a call he dreaded. “I feared that if I gave up all to God that He would ask me to preach the Gospel,” he admitted. “I would say, ‘Lord if you should call me to preach how could I support my family; what would we live on?’” He went anyway. He evangelised with Cyrus Fockler, met William Seymour of Azusa Street in 1907, and held meetings in Indiana and across the South. About 1909 he took his family to Dallas to plant a church.

The road to Calvert

In August 1911 Bosworth was asked to come to Hearne, Texas, where Black Pentecostals were holding a camp meeting under a tent. White onlookers who would not enter the tent had asked for a white preacher to teach them. Bosworth stood on a platform between the two crowds and preached to both. Afterward armed white men stopped him, accusing him of putting the races on a level. He told them he would not resist: “I am ready to die and will offer no resistance to anything God permit you to do.” They let him go, if he took the next train. At the station a mob of about twenty-five men beat him to the ground again and again with clubs made from boat oars. His left wrist was broken, his back was beaten raw all the way down to his knees, and they would not let him board the train.

In that letter, written to keep his mother from worrying, he told her that if the mob had come because of some unwise thing he had done he would be very sorry, “but since it came for plain obedience in preaching His gospel to every creature, it has given me great joy.” Then he added a line that sums up the man:

I would much prefer to be faithful and have some little tribulation now than to fail to overcome and have to pass through the great tribulation soon to come.

— F. F. Bosworth, letter to his mother, August 1911

A costly conviction, and a heavier loss

When the Assemblies of God was formed in 1914, Bosworth was among its early leaders. He brought his Dallas church into the fellowship and served a term on its executive presbytery. The new denomination soon made speaking in tongues the required “initial evidence” of the baptism in the Spirit. Bosworth had spoken in tongues himself, but he did not believe Scripture taught that every Spirit-baptised believer must. He argued his case before the General Council, published a pamphlet titled Do All Speak with Tongues?, and in April 1918 resigned rather than hold credentials on terms he could not accept. His church split, and one fellow minister misrepresented him to the council and to his own congregation. He joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance and started again.

Then came his worst sorrows. His little son Vernon died at four. In November 1919 Estella died, worn out by years of hard work and weakened by influenza and tuberculosis, and she left him with two young daughters. It should not be passed over that a man about to become famous for preaching healing had just buried his wife and his son. He did not stop believing, and he did not stop preaching.

“If people didn’t get saved”

In August 1920 he held meetings in Lima, Ohio. They began so slowly that the team drove a Ford around town ringing an engine bell to draw a crowd. The pastor then asked him to preach on divine healing. He believed in healing and had prayed for the sick, but he had never made it the plain message of a campaign. The question he took to God was an honest one.

From Lima the invitations poured in. Through the 1920s he and his brother B. B. Bosworth held long campaigns in city after city across the United States and Canada. In October 1922 he married Florence Valentine, a Nyack-trained Alliance evangelist who preached at his side for the rest of his life. The best-remembered campaign was seven weeks in Ottawa in 1924. By his own count six thousand came forward for healing and about twelve thousand for salvation, and he was sure which drew which: “I doubt if there would have been more than one thousand for salvation had it not been for the miracles of healing which displayed the compassion of the Lord.”

That same year he published his sermons as Christ the Healer, written, its preface admits, “under great pressure and weariness” between revivals. Its argument is that healing, like forgiveness, was purchased at the cross, and that faith cannot rest on a hope that God might heal. It has to rest on a knowledge that He wills to.

Faith begins where the will of God is known.

— F. F. Bosworth, Christ the Healer (1924)

Appropriating faith is not believing that God can but that He will.

— F. F. Bosworth, Christ the Healer (1924)

Enlarged in later editions, it has never gone out of print. Its teaching has also been seriously contested. Many Christians do not accept that healing is guaranteed in the atonement, and its emphasis on confession fed later “faith” teaching that others have criticised sharply. Bosworth never claimed everyone went home healed, and he himself lived with diabetes that was never cured.

A wandering, and a return

He published a magazine, Exploits of Faith, and from Chicago became a pioneer of gospel radio with the National Radio Revival. In the 1930s he also embraced British Israelism, the teaching that the Anglo-Saxon peoples descend from the lost tribes of Israel, and it cost him his standing in the Alliance. It was an error, and in 1944 he said so. He publicly apologised for having been wrong and was welcomed back.

“He did not believe in … retirement”

By 1948 he was past seventy, semi-retired and wondering, his son said, whether his course was run. Then he went to hear William Branham at a healing campaign in Miami. The two men took to each other at once, and Bosworth joined Branham’s team as a teacher and elder adviser. Branham would become a deeply controversial figure, and by one account Bosworth told him to his face in 1951 that he was wrong. But it was South Africa, that year, that changed Bosworth. Past seventy-four, he preached three and four times a day and taught crowds of tens of thousands in Durban. He spent his last years returning to Africa again and again, and preaching in Cuba, Japan and Europe.

He came home to Miami in failing health, with heart trouble and a stroke on top of the diabetes, and told his family his work was done. His son remembered the family gathered by the bed, talking, laughing and singing, when the old man looked past them all and began “to greet and hug people — he was enraptured,” for several hours. Then he lay back smiling and went to sleep. He died on 23 January 1958, six days after his eighty-first birthday.

He made real mistakes, and admitted at least one of them in public. But the young man who rose from his deathbed, the pastor who prayed all night for the men who beat him, and the old man who would not retire while anyone remained unreached are the same man. He preached above all the compassion of Christ, and he had tested it himself on a dark road outside Calvert.