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> In 1959, 69-year-old Mrs. Myrtle Joseph of Youngstown, Ohio, was examined by Dr. O. Whitmore Burtner, now of Miami. A bone-marrow test indicated that she suffered from chronic lymphatic leukemia, which was spreading slowly. By 1964, Mrs. Joseph needed regular blood transfusions. Her liver, spleen and lymph nodes became swollen. Then, in May 1967, she wrote a letter to Kathryn Kuhlman asking for her prayers. Within a few days she felt so well that she stopped seeing Dr. Burtner. Alarmed, he asked her to come in for tests. Her marrow, liver, spleen, lymph nodes and white blood cells were normal. She is now a sprightly 80.
Among the Farmers. Kathryn Kuhlman herself has no elaborate theories about the origin of her apparent gift. The daughter of mixed-creed Protestants (she now belongs to the American Baptist Convention but her services are pointedly nondenominational), Kathryn dropped out of high school after her sophomore year because she "felt a definite call to the ministry." She took to itinerant preaching in Idaho, and for almost two decades "worked in the small places, among the farmers." She hated traditional tent healing services: "the long healing lines, filling out those cards. It was an insult to your intelligence." After visiting such a service once, she cried all night.
An intensely personal religious experience in 1946—which she speaks of only as her "baptism of the Holy Spirit"—inspired Kathryn to begin preaching regularly about the Holy Spirit. Healing came by accident, when a woman announced one night that she had been cured of a tumor during a previous Kuhlman sermon.
Today Kathryn runs her Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation from a hotel suite in Pittsburgh, where she prepares radio and TV shows and a busy staff keeps track of finances.* She draws a straight $25,000-a-year salary from the money collected at services. (She sometimes forgets to take up a collection.) Most of the rest—after operating expenses—goes to a variety of charities, especially a number of mission churches of different denominations.
Sovereign Act. Beyond her repeated assertion that it all is the work of the Holy Spirit operating through Jesus Christ, Kathryn preaches no theology of healing. She no longer believes that faith necessarily earns healing, or that lack of faith necessarily forbids it. She has seen too many nonbelievers cured, too many believers go away still lame or sick. She refuses to promise individual healings: "I can't," she explains. "That's the sovereign act of God."
She does see her ministry as a return to the supernatural element in the ancient church. "Everything that happened in the early church," she insists, "we have a right to expect today. This is exactly what we're going to get back to again." As for her own part in this return to the supernatural, Kathryn Kuhlman hesitates to look very far ahead. She is so convinced that her role is only that of an intermediary that she has a recurring nightmare about coming out on stage some day and finding the chairs empty, her gift gone. Her admirers believe that it may well be that very recognition—and her continued modesty—that have preserved the gift for so long.