Messages spoken at the California Healing Camps Farthest Out
California Healing CFO:
54 messages from 15 gatherings, 1954 to 1996.
Campers first gathered for a California healing camp in November 1950 at Forest Home, one of the Christian Healing Seminars of the Camps Farthest Out, with Rebecca and Wally Beard, Ethel and John Banks, Marcia and Roland Brown and Agnes Sanford as the leaders. For thirty years campers alternated between northern and southern California, most often meeting at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, and the name changed with the place. From 1984 they gathered every other year as California Autumn at Asilomar.
The recordings run from 1954 to 1996 and include Genevieve Parkhurst, Agnes Sanford, Roland Brown, Norman Elliott, Patrick Crowley and Horace Hilton, among many others.
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The Airplane Salesman Who Built an Altar
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A professor took seventeen hours to pull apart two linked pieces of metal that a child solved in seconds. Roland Brown uses the puzzle to tell the 1958 California Healing CFO at Forest Home: fixed assumptions about how healing must come are the real obstacle. He asks campers to set those assumptions aside and follow the week's program.
The Girl Who Chose Her Blindness
The Cuckoo Clock Wedding
Ulcers and the Fish In Water
The Boy Who Was Not Expected To Live
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The Slap Meant for Her Brother
At the 1959 California Healing CFO, Genevieve Parkhurst tells of a mother who slapped her disrespectful son. The mother then realized she had really struck out at a brother she was never allowed to hit forty years earlier. Parkhurst gives the illustration to show how old, unforgiven hurts erupt onto those nearest us.
Teaching at the 1959 California Healing CFO, Genevieve Parkhurst says the Holy Spirit gives both gifts and fruits. The gifts are like a bridegroom's wedding presents. The fruits are the nine children of love, joy, peace, and more, and they remain even after any gift is lost.
All He Has Left Are the Covers
From the 1959 California Healing CFO. A man boasted to Starr Daily that he had read the Bible cover to cover six times. The answer came back: "all he has left are the covers." On the opening night of one of the camps, Starr Daily urges reading a verse or a good book slowly enough that it turns into prayer.
The Morning the Chaplain Could Not Preach
Starr Daily teaches the campers how to go to church: enter as a little child, keep a secret prayer life, and bring reverence instead of criticism. This comes from the 1959 California Healing CFO. He remembers a prison chaplain broken by his daughter's name in gangster headlines. The chaplain told the men "I can't preach this morning," and instead laid a hand on each of the two hundred who came forward.
[Read the "The Morning the Chaplain Could Not Preach" Transcript]
The Return Address Said "Kingdom of God"
Starr Daily calls Jesus "the contact man." He tells the campers that the power of God is neutral, running a refrigerator or an electric chair according to what we hook it to. He gives four ways to make and keep that contact, ending in a meditation that breathes in light and breathes out love. Given at the 1959 California Healing CFO.
[Read the "The Return Address Said "Kingdom of God"" Transcript]
The Crumpled Letter She Kept Reading
A Boa Constrictor In the Ward
Three Chaplains and a Poker Game
Conception of God
Seek First the Kingdom
The Poodle Who Fought His Rope
Abiding In Christ
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He Remembered That Someone Prayed
From the 1960 California Healing CFO. Bill Reed tells of a comatose Oklahoma City teenager and of a minister's son unconscious with hepatitis. He urges families in the movement to pray aloud at the bedside. He believes even unconscious patients can hear and later remember it.
The Girl Who Came To Say "I Love You"
The Strengthener, Not the Comforter
How I Got Into the Healing Ministry
The Fellowship of the Mystery
Name the mask each one wears over old unhealed hurts, Agnes Sanford tells the California Healing CFO in 1961. She uses the story of a minister whose defenses broke open like a struck iron drum once forgiveness finally reached those hurts.
The Rose Windows Are Your Eyes
Ruth Robison opens the 1964 California Healing CFO at Asilomar by telling campers "there is no such thing as a little handicap." A toothache fastens the mind on self as surely as an incurable illness does. She recalls the two rose windows of a French cathedral as the eyes of the body's temple, and she presses her hearers to say "I know" about God rather than "I think."
The Great Wisdom That Guides the Swallows
In an opening-night orientation to the California Healing CFO at Asilomar in 1966, Genevieve Parkhurst explains how Dr. Glenn Clark founded Camps Farthest Out. She argues that the same "great wisdom" that guides migrating swallows is at work as "the life within" the body, which does all real healing, doctors included. She notes that "one verse in every seven in the Gospels pertains to a physical healing."
[Read the "The Great Wisdom That Guides the Swallows" Transcript]
On the second morning of the 1966 California Healing CFO at Asilomar, Genevieve Parkhurst opens with John 15's vine and branches. She recalls a childhood memory of watching a gardener graft and wax-seal a fruit tree bud as a picture of the new birth. A loosened wax seal, she warns, lets water and decay back into the graft the way sin lets decay back into a life. She closes with the line "God has no grandchildren": no one enters God's family except by a will of their own.
Get In the Bath With Your Shirt On
Brother Mandus jokes that years earlier, at a different camp, a fellow camper found him scrubbing his shirts by hand in the tub and told him simply to wear the shirt in the shower, his picture of how Christians overcomplicate a simple faith. He closes his address at the 1966 California Healing CFO by leading prayer for a young camper named Harry, and an elderly woman recovering from a fall.
Eleven Months to Miss Leonard's Miracle
Genevieve Parkhurst describes finding a personal "lever" for healing prayer at the 1966 California Healing CFO at Asilomar. Her examples run from a woman's faith in touching Christ's hem to a Roman officer's trust in his own authority. She closes with Edith Leonard's eleven-month recovery from a diagnosed brain tumor.
[Read the "Eleven Months to Miss Leonard's Miracle" Transcript]
Genevieve Parkhurst tells of a Jewish man who survived a concentration camp as a boy. Years later, on Armistice Day, he suddenly smashed a store window display holding a German officer's helmet. She pairs his story with that of a woman still shamed by a childhood piano recital gone wrong. Both show, she tells the 1966 California Healing CFO at Asilomar, how Jesus can heal hurts still felt beneath the surface of an adult life.
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Most people use only a tenth of their God-given potential, Agnes Sanford tells the California Healing CFO at Asilomar in 1970. A skeptic, she adds, could test it by walking across the hotel pool. She then teaches a five-part daily discipline for retraining the subconscious.
Agnes Sanford praises a small woman minister who called herself God's little brown cookie. That minister prayed her city's gang territory covered with the blood of the Lamb. She did it so thoroughly that a terrified man once walked straight through it unseen. The talk was given to the 1970 California Healing CFO at Asilomar.
Cutting the Spiritual Umbilical Cord
Closing a two-night meditation begun at the 1970 California Healing CFO at Asilomar, Agnes Sanford leads campers through a prayer of forgiveness. She then describes cutting, in the name of Jesus, any spiritual umbilical cord of old resentment. Both they and the ones they forgive go free.
[Read the "Cutting the Spiritual Umbilical Cord" Transcript]
At the California Healing CFO at Asilomar in 1970, Agnes Sanford leads a prayer of faith for the wildfires burning across the state. She recalls her granddaughter's prayer circle that healed an injured rabbit. She also recalls the years she has spent praying to ease the strain along a fault line.
The Burning That Lasted Two Weeks
Agnes Sanford describes the night she and two friends prayed together until the Holy Spirit filled them. For two weeks afterward she was left with an intense burning in the middle of her head. She names for the California Healing CFO at Asilomar in 1970 the three gifts that came with it: joy, truth and peace.
Weaving the Threads of Contradiction
Reconciliation means taking what was torn apart and putting it back so that the pieces complete one another, Tommy Tyson says. In the closing hour of the California Healing CFO at Asilomar in 1970, he asks campers to carry opposing sides into themselves and to weave them together "on the loom of your own being."
[Read the "Weaving the Threads of Contradiction" Transcript]
Inside Out
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Pilgrimage With God and Prayer of Faith
A Chance Meeting With Hope Peale
Bert Kerley recounts a lunch appointment canceled during the California Healing CFO in 1982. It led him, through what he calls "no such things as chance," to a chance meeting with Hope Peale, a relative of Norman Vincent Peale. He then turns to teach that Christ dwells within every believer.
The Young Pianist Who Thought of Love
Bert Kerley asks whether "God is love" can still be true in the face of tragedy. He recalls a Welsh mining disaster that killed sixty schoolchildren, and a young pianist who said she thought of everyone who loved her as she played. He gave this talk on trusting that love has the final word to the California Healing CFO in 1982.
[Read the "The Young Pianist Who Thought of Love" Transcript]
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The Tea Through the Screen Door
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Except You Become as Children
Congregation, Aggregation, and Aggravation
Alex McCullough asks campers "who is they?" and answers with two encounters from before he was even a Christian: comforting a homeless man in Manhattan and a trembling kitchen worker newly arrived from the Caribbean. Fear sees "they" while love sees "us," he insists, and a true congregation, unlike a mere aggregation, becomes one. He preached it at the 1988 California Healing CFO.
[Read the "Congregation, Aggregation, and Aggravation" Transcript]
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Peace That Passes Understanding
To Hell With Death
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Do Not Be Afraid, Peter
Fill the Jars To the Brim
Formation of a Disciple
I Knew That I Knew
People Like Walking Trees
Peter's Daybreak
The Corset On the Dog
The Foot of the Cross
Wrap Your Burden Before You Pray
Preparing to pray can take half an hour when the prayer itself takes two minutes, Ruth Robison tells campers at the California Healing CFO at Asilomar. Wrap the burden and tie it up beforehand, she says, instead of spilling it out unsorted in God's presence. Five marks of vital prayer close the hour, among them unity in love and plain brevity.