William Branham (1909—1965)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
Traditions
- Pentecostal
- Baptist
Ministries
- Pastor
- Healing evangelist
- Prophet
William Branham could appear to fit every early Midwestern American stereotype. Born in the backwoods of Kentucky, on a log cabin with a dirt floor, he worked on a farm and got very little schooling. While still a boy, his faily moved across the Ohio River to southern Indiana due to legal problems his father faced. His early years of deprivation were so severe that he was often seen wearing a buttonless coat pinned together with safety pins, since there was no shirt underneath. His hauling of water from the spring was not only for his parents and nine younger siblings to drink and use for washing, but also to supply his father’s whiskey-making still.
Initially, the Branhams had no religious tradition at all; the first time William heard a prayer was as a twenty-year-old at his brother’s funeral. However, he would later recall that God spoke to him directly at age three. He remembered hearing a “voice” from a nearby tree telling him that he would “live near a city called New Albany.” This came true decades later when his ministry bloomed in Jeffersonville, Indiana; both towns lie across the river from Louisville, Kentucky. At age seven, another voice warned him always to stay away from cigarettes and alcohol, despite his father’s negative example, “for there will be work for you to do when you get older.” Later while working for the public utility company, an industrial accident filled his lungs with gas, almost killing him. During recovery, a voice led him to begin seeking God. He showed up at First Pentecostal Baptist Church of Jeffersonville, where he was converted.
Branham grew rapidly in his faith, to the point that he began to speak publicly. Within a year, a group helped set up a tent for him to conduct revival meetings. A local newspaper reported his first fourteen converts. At a baptismal in the Ohio River on June 11, 1933, a bright star descended over him, and he heard a voice say, “As John the Baptist was sent to forerun the first coming of Jesus Christ, so your message will forerun his Second Coming.” Soon, a new church was organized, Branham Tabernacle, where he pastored for the next thirteen years while continuing his job as a game warden. He married during that season and became the father of two children—only to lose his first wife to tuberculosis and their infant daughter just four days apart, in 1937.
Branham remarried four years later and welcomed three more children. On May 4, 1946, he went away to a remote place to focus entirely on what God wanted for his future. About eleven o’clock that night, he reported:
I heard someone walking across the floor, which startled me…. [Then] I saw the feet of a man coming toward me…. He appeared to be a man who, in human weight, would weigh about two hundred pounds, clothed in a white robe, had a smooth face, no beard, but with dark hair down to his shoulders, rather dark-complected, with a very pleasant countenance, and, coming closer, his eyes caught with mine, and seeing how fearful I was, he began to speak. “Fear not! I am sent from the presence of Almighty God to tell you that your peculiar life and your misunderstood ways have been to indicate that God has sent you to take a gift of divine healing to the peoples of the world. If you will be sincere, and can get the people to believe you, nothing shall stand before your prayer, not even cancer.”
He told me how I would be able to detect diseases by vibrations on my hand. He went away, but I have seen him a number of times since…. A few times he has appeared visibly in the presence of others. I do not know who he is, I only know that he is the messenger of God to me.
Whatever doubts Branham or others had about this event, the angel’s words quickly proved true. In St. Louis the next month, his twelve nights of meetings drew a crowd of more than 4,000 according to a report in Time Magazine. Pentecostal historians often mark this as the birth of the post-World War II healing revival. Invitations came flooding in for Branham to preach and pray for the sick. A Jonesboro, Arkansas gathering in August drew 25,000 people from twenty-eight different states. He soon continued to Shreveport, Louisiana, San Antonio, Phoenix, Kansas City, Vancouver, and more. In the 1950s era of segregation, Branham insisted that his meetings always be interracial.
His preaching style was not flamboyant; he spoke in a normal tone of voice, even faltering at times. Yet people were inspired to believe that God could do any miracle. When he ended his message and began praying for the sick, the Spirit regularly gave him a word of knowledge about the individual in front of him. Said Ern Baxter, his campaign manager for seven years, “He would give accurate details concerning the person’s ailments, and also details of their lives—their hometown, activities, actions—even way back in their childhood. Branham never once made a mistake with the word of knowledge in all the years I was with him. That covers, in my case, thousands of instances.”
Unlike other evangelists who soon began holding their own services, Branham did not minister to long healing lines on the platform. Normally, he prayed for only a dozen or so before fatigue set in and his son, “Billy Paul” Branham, edged up behind him to touch his waist, signaling him to stop. But before sitting down, he would encourage those in the audience to receive healing right where they were.
While his accuracy regarding the sick was remarkable, he would occasionally misread guidance about his own schedule. On one occasion in South Africa, he wrapped up a successful time in Johannesburg but said, while riding south the next day, that the angel had come to him and warned him not to go on to the next city on the plan. A tense discussion ensued on the shoulder of the road. In the presence of the whole team, the elderly F. F. Bosworth (in some ways a mentor) dared to rebuke him: “Brother Branham, you’re wrong.” The evangelist backed down and continued the itinerary.
In matters of doctrine, William Branham charted his own course from about 1960 onward, straying outside evangelical guardrails. He had received no theological education, and it showed. He proclaimed the oneness of the Godhead as opposed to a Trinitarian view, insisting that believers be rebaptized “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” if necessary. He embraced annihilationism for the unsaved (“Eternal life was reserved only for God and his children”). He opposed denominations as “a mark of the Beast.” Most bizarrely, he came to espouse “the serpent’s seed”: the notion that Eve’s fall in the Garden involved more than a piece of fruit; she had in fact been seduced by Lucifer, resulting in the birth of Cain, who became the progenitor of original sin. Consequently, every woman potentially carried “the seed of the Devil,” he said.
These aberrations dimmed Branham’s legacy and alienated many of his friends. His life came to a tragic end at age fifty-six when he was struck head-on by a drunk driver on a Texas highway. He died on Christmas Eve, 1965, in an Amarillo hospital. Some prayed fervently for his resurrection up until Easter, 1966. When that did not happen, his body was buried the next day.
Further Reading
- Roberts Liardon, God's Generals.