F. F. Bosworth (1877—1958)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
Traditions
- Pentecostal
Ministries
- Healing evangelist
Fred Francis Bosworth believed God could heal the sick. He himself was healed from tuberculosis as a teenager when a Methodist “Bible woman” had prayed for him. In 1912, as the founding pastor of a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Dallas, he had seen the dramatic results of Maria Woodworth-Etter’s five-month tent meeting. While numerous people got saved in Bosworth’s evangelistic meetings, he did not venture to give a healing message of his own until invited to preach on divine healing in Lima, Ohio. In prayer, he asked, “Lord, suppose I preach on healing, and the people come and don’t get healed?” The voice of God seemed to respond, “If people didn’t get saved, you wouldn’t stop preaching the gospel.”
For the next four decades, Bosworth proclaimed that healing was as central to the gospel as salvation. Afflicted people were made whole by the tens of thousands. Among them were the deaf. In Chicago, where he eventually headquartered, the Chicago Daily News reported that so many students at a school for the deaf were miraculously healed that the school was closing its doors. At a January 1921 meeting in Detroit, a woman was healed of blindness. In Pittsburgh, a well-known veteran of World War I was healed from a mustard gas attack that had taken his voice. After fourteen surgeries with no results, Bosworth prayed for him, and he instantly began shouting, “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” The next day’s newspaper headline read, “John Sproul Can Talk!”
By 1924, Bosworth’s sermons had been compiled into a book entitled Christ the Healer, which remains a classic to this day. Among its stirring lines:
Don’t doubt your faith; doubt your doubts, for they are unreliable.
Your symptoms may point you to death, but God’s Word points you to life.
Later, Bosworth accepted the challenge of a debate on divine healing with a prominent Baptist minister in Houston named W. E. Best. Before a large audience he presented his case for God’s healing promises, while Best argued that such things were for the apostolic age only. Eventually Bosworth asked for all those who had been cured by faith to stand. Hundreds arose. After they sat down again, he asked, “How many of you are Baptists?” According to one newspaper report, “At least 100 stood up.”
Despite testimonies like these, Bosworth was not pugnacious. Unlike other boisterous Pentecostal evangelists of the day, his speaking style was steady and calm. One Pittsburgh reporter wrote about his meetings, which moved to Carnegie Hall after the churches had proved too small, “The simplicity of the services and the wanton lack of any attempt to play upon the emotions of the great throngs who crowd themselves into the building naturally incites the onlooker to inquire, ‘What manner of man is this?’” (alluding to Luke 8:25).
He was also noteworthy in that he picked no fights with medical science. In Christ the Healer, he wrote:
I truly thank God for all the help that has ever come to sufferers through the physician, through the surgeon, the hospital and the trained nurse; but, if sickness is the will of God, then, to quote one writer, “Every physician is a lawbreaker; every trained nurse is defying the Almighty; every hospital is a house of rebellion, instead of a house of mercy.
Bosworth's gracious temperament showed in the matter of whether speaking in tongues was the only “initial evidence” of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Bosworth spoke in tongues himself following the 1906 laying on of hands by Pentecostal pioneer Charles Parham. Many in his meetings did so also. He was one of the founding fathers of the Assemblies of God, which established tongues as part of their "distinctive testimony.” Bosworth saw the value of tongues but cited other manifestations of the Spirit’s work as well. When he could not convince his Assemblies brethren of his view, he quietly surrendered his credentials in 1918. He wrote a booklet, Do All Speak with Tongues? that lays out his position.
Bosworth was willing to pay the personal price for matters of conviction. In 1909, while still a pastor in Dallas, he was invited to travel 150 miles south to the town of Hearne, Texas, where a Black camp meeting was underway. Though white, he gladly went in view of his visit to the Azusa Street Mission, which had shown him that the Holy Spirit had no interest in discriminating by race or gender. Music filled the air that night, and a number of whites stood around the edges of the tent to listen to Bosworth’s message on the love of Christ for all. At the end of the meeting, a mob of angry white men stormed from behind with clubs and sticks. They spit and yelled at Bosworth for coming to preach to a Black gathering. They ordered him out of town, and followed him to the train station where they attacked him on the platform. “You’ll not leave here alive!” they shouted, knocking him to the ground. They beat him with boat oars and used a baseball bat to break his left wrist. Despite his wounds, Bosworth began walking north. At one point, he tried to flag down a coming train, but failed. It took him two days to get home, where he collapsed in front of his frightened wife. After a month of being bed-ridden, he remarked that the ordeal reminded him of the apostles of old, who had rejoiced for being counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus.
Bosworth's theological compass was not always perfect. In the mid-1930s, he affiliated with British-Israelism, the notion that British and Americans were the direct descendants of the “Ten Lost Tribes” of Israel, and therefore preferred by God. By 1944, however, Bosworth publicly apologized for this belief and was welcomed back into fellowship with those who had withdrawn from him.
With the rise of post-World War II healing evangelists, the elderly Bosworth became something of a mentor. He became known as "Daddy Bosworth" and influenced many including T. L. Osborn. In addition to his writings, his legacy was a man who wanted hear and speak for God, as well as be the conduit of his healing power.
Further Reading
- F. F. Bosworth, Christ the Healer.