Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Agnes Sanford.
Agnes Sanford was born in China in 1897 to Presbyterian missionary parents. She became one of the most influential teachers in the healing ministry of the Camps Farthest Out. She wrote The Healing Light, founded the School of Pastoral Care with her husband, Ted Sanford, and taught a ministry of healing that brought together prayer, the Bible, the work of Christ and the healing of memories. Her own ministry was changed by a healing she witnessed in her home.
Agnes Sanford was born in China on November 4, 1897. She was raised as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries and grew up with a view of God that emphasized His justice and authority. “I was brought up with the idea, you see, that God’s will was usually the very most dismal thing that could be thought of,” she later said. She returned to the United States when she was nearly fifteen and completed her education in Raleigh, North Carolina. Sanford was converted when she was nine years old. She did not consider it a dramatic story, but she remembered it clearly.
“However, I was converted at the age of nine. I remember it very distinctly. I remember my love of the Lord Jesus. I remember my tears of repentance.” She believed in the blood of Jesus and in His sacrificial death, but there was still something she did not understand about the life and ministry of Christ.
Agnes married Ted, known as Sandy, Sanford, an Episcopal missionary who had also served in China. After their marriage, he became rector of a church in Moorestown, New Jersey, where he remained for more than twenty years. With a young family, Agnes went into a severe depression. Her doctor did not expect her to live through the year. Then something happened in her own home that changed the direction of her life. Hollis Colwell, an Episcopal priest from a neighboring parish, visited her husband. He heard that their baby had been running a fever for six weeks, went upstairs and prayed for the child.
“The baby got well right straight away. And I saw it. I saw it happen. So that made all the difference in the world.” Agnes had been praying for the baby herself, and the experience raised an important question for her: Why had the baby not been healed during the six weeks she had been praying?
The answer became part of her teaching about prayer. She came to understand that prayer works according to spiritual laws, just as the natural world operates according to laws. As she later put it, apples do not grow on potato plants. Her own healing from depression came in two stages. At the communion rail, she heard an inner direction to go to Colwell. He prayed for her with the laying on of hands, and the depression lifted immediately. When it returned, another experience finally broke its hold.
“And this time, it lifted me up so high that I’ve never gone back in mental depression since. And the next thing that lifted me up was a CFO.” Colwell had encouraged her to write and to pray for the sick. She began doing both, and healings followed. Her experiences eventually became the foundation for her first major book, The Healing Light.
For twenty years Agnes prayed for the gift of healing without understanding what she was actually seeking. “For twenty years I prayed every day for the gift of healing,” she told a camp. “I didn’t know that there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit.”
She initially resisted the baptism in the Holy Spirit. She was an Episcopalian and was cautious about some of the groups and teachings associated with it. Eventually, friends who had received the Holy Spirit prayed for her, and she was filled with the Holy Spirit. She kept the experience largely to herself at first, but said that it transformed and deepened her prayer life. Healing prayer became the central work of her ministry.
One of Sanford’s most important contributions to Christian healing was her teaching about the healing of memories. She taught that Jesus Christ is not confined by time. He can enter the memories of a person’s life and bring His presence into experiences that continue to cause pain. Sanford connected this directly with the biblical understanding of the forgiveness of sins. “Yes, the biblical term for it is the forgiveness of sins. And that’s exactly what it is.” She divided the causes of these wounds into two basic categories: “The sorrows are caused either by the sin of the individual or by the bitterness of the individual concerning the sins of others toward him.”
In other words, there are things we have done and things that have been done to us. Sanford taught that Christ can move through the years and reach experiences that are buried below ordinary consciousness. She sometimes pictured time as a scroll that could be rolled back. “He can move back through the years and he can operate in the hidden areas, even way down below the level of consciousness.” She also warned against confusing healing with simply excusing wrongdoing. “That’s not the forgiveness of sins. That would be the toleration of iniquity. And God does not tolerate iniquity.”
Isaiah 53 was central to her understanding of this ministry: “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4, KJV). For Sanford, the healing of memories was not an exercise in endlessly examining the past. It was an invitation for Jesus Christ to enter the past and bring healing to what had remained unresolved.
After World War II, Sanford spent about two years as a Red Cross Gray Lady in an Army hospital. She was not supposed to speak to patients about religion or touch them while praying. She did both. One of the patients was Harry Goldsmith, a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia who had been drafted into the Army. He had osteomyelitis in his leg and told Sanford that six inches of bone had been destroyed. She prayed for him. “All of that bone was built into his leg again.” Goldsmith immediately wanted to know whether he could pray for other people. He gathered twelve men, and together they went through the ward praying for the patients.
“Every single man in the ward got well.” Later, Goldsmith told Sanford that the hospital had closed the ward after she left because there were no patients left in it. He eventually became a clinical psychologist and later taught at Sanford’s School of Pastoral Care. Sanford kept her own method of prayer simple. “I just asked Jesus to come in. That’s all.” When she prayed for someone, she pictured Jesus Christ between herself and the person receiving prayer. She considered herself a channel through which Christ could work, not the source of healing. She frequently taught that Christians were to be “channels, not reservoirs.”
Sanford did not separate the work of Christ into a spiritual part dealing with sin and a physical part dealing with sickness. She taught that the atonement included both. “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, gave his life for the forgiveness of our sins, and not only that, but for the healing of our wounds.” Again, she returned to Isaiah 53. “Do you not see that literally by his stripes we are healed?” She understood salvation as wholeness. “Salvation means wholeness, which includes health.” Her approach to praying for the sick was direct. She did not believe a person needed to add uncertainty to Jesus’ commands.
“Did Jesus say, Lazarus, come forth, if it be God’s will? You won’t find that in business.”
One of the healing cases Sanford told repeatedly involved a young woman named Juanita. She was twenty-one years old and had cancer throughout her body. She was hemorrhaging and was expected to live only through the night. Her mother-in-law brought a priest to the hospital to give her communion. The two of them laid hands on her and prayed. Three hours later, Juanita was sitting up. Sanford said that X-rays taken afterward showed no sign of cancer, and that monthly examinations for the following year continued to show no cancer.
Stories like this became part of the ministry Sanford developed over decades. She continued to teach that healing was a ministry of Jesus Christ and that Christians could participate in it through prayer.
Agnes and Ted Sanford founded the School of Pastoral Care to help ministers learn how to pray for people and minister to them in practical ways. The school eventually reached ministers across the United States and in other countries. One of its students was Francis MacNutt, who became the first Catholic priest to attend the school. He would later become one of the best-known healing ministers of his generation. Sanford’s vision was larger than individual physical healing. She wanted the ministry of Christ to affect the whole person and ultimately the whole world.
She described the purpose of the work as being “not only for the saving of souls and the healing of bodies, but even more for the healing of the nations.” The School of Pastoral Care became one of the most important ways her teaching was passed to another generation of Christian ministers.
Ted Sanford’s health declined after a succession of heart attacks. Agnes continued her ministry, but eventually the demands of caring for him and carrying on her work affected her own health. She was told to rest and devote more time to writing.
In addition to The Healing Light, her books included Healing Gifts of the Spirit, Lost Shepherd, The Healing Power of the Bible, Sealed Orders, Creation Waits, Dreams Are for Tomorrow, Behold Your God, Oh Watchman, Let’s Believe, Route 1, Twice Seven Words, The Healing Touch of God, A Pasture for Peterkin, Melissa and the Little Red Book, and The Second Mrs. Wu. Agnes Sanford died on February 21, 1982.
Her influence continued through the ministers she trained, the books she wrote and the thousands of people who learned to pray for healing through her teaching. Her influence was especially strong within the Camps Farthest Out, where her understanding of prayer, healing, the Holy Spirit and the healing of memories became foundational to the ministry. It all began with something very simple: a priest went upstairs in her own house, prayed for a sick baby, and Agnes Sanford watched the child get well.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.