Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Marcia Brown.
Marcia Brown was an atheist before she was anything else in this story. She had been raised in a Christian family, taught Sunday school as a teenager, and then argued herself out of the faith. At the University of Washington, where she studied botany, she was taught to examine things, test them, and refuse to accept conclusions without evidence. She applied the same approach to Christianity—and became convinced that the whole thing was foolish. Then, on a Sunday morning in October 1928, something happened that she could not explain away. She encountered God.
She called it the biggest miracle she had ever experienced. From that morning until the end of her life, she approached the promises of Jesus Christ much as she had approached a law in the laboratory. If Jesus said something, she intended to find out whether it was true.
Marcia was born in Seattle in 1907, a twin. “I was Marcia. She was Margaret.” Her mother came from the Disciples of Christ, while her father came from Church of the Brethren and Quaker stock. Marcia was teaching Sunday school to twelve-year-old girls by the time she was fifteen. That was when she began to realize she had questions she could not answer. She was teaching those girls about God and Jesus while recognizing that she did not really know much about either one herself.
At the University of Washington, the head of her department told her that he was an atheist and explained why. Then another student told her that God had killed the department head’s little daughter because he did not believe in God. That pushed Marcia in the opposite direction. She began attacking the Scriptures and the people who believed them, trying to convince them how foolish they were. “I too was an atheist. Not an agnostic. An agnostic is willing to be persuaded.” She was not.
Marcia eventually went to Chicago to run a laboratory. Dr. Chamberlain, head of botany at the University of Chicago, had recommended her and gave her a room in his home. He had attended the same Baptist church for forty years and took her with him to the church across the Midway. There she met Roland Brown. “But the name of that associate minister was Roland Brown,” she said. “Roland Brown was my husband two years later.” Marcia became head botanist of the General Biological Supply House. She attended church partly because she wanted to be polite, but she declined the evening services. She had heard enough evangelistic preaching.
Then came a Sunday morning in October 1928 that changed everything. The pastor, Dr. Boynton, was returning to the pulpit after being away for two months. Marcia had gone partly because she wanted to understand how he had persuaded Dr. Chamberlain to believe the way he did. Then something happened. She looked toward the place where the people had been sitting. “It was as if that place was empty. It was as if that place was filling with a light. I wondered where it came from. I wasn’t asleep.” She searched for a physical source. There was none. “It was an opaque light,” she said. “Not a transparent light.”
Then there seemed to be nothing but light. Within it came the realization that God existed. The Old Testament stories she had laughed at came back to her, and then the message centered on Jesus Christ. The words that kept coming were: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” Her scientific mind immediately went to work. She thought about the phrase “only begotten.” Then she thought about parthenogenesis, the development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg, something she had taught in the laboratory. The virgin birth no longer seemed impossible. Then John 15:7 came before her.
“Yes, that verse seemed to hang out there in space. And I could see it.” She understood that she had never abided in Christ, and His words had never abided in her. If she had not met the conditions Jesus gave, she had no reason to complain that her prayers had not been answered. From that point on, she took the Bible seriously. “And if that meant that I was sunk, well, I’ve been sunk ever since. I just hope I sink deeper.”
Marcia had been trained to understand that a scientific law had to be demonstrated repeatedly. One occurrence might be an accident. Two might be a coincidence. Repeated results established a law. After that Sunday, she turned the method around. “I’ve turned it right around ever since that morning, that Sunday in October, 1928. If a thing ever happens once, it can happen again. It doesn’t have to happen every time in order for me to believe it.” That became one of the most distinctive things about her teaching.
If one of the promises of Christ worked once, then it was true. If it appeared not to work another time, she did not throw away the promise. She looked for the condition that had not been met. She began comparing the promises of Christ with the principles she had learned in chemistry and physics. “And then I began looking at the promises. And comparing them to different chemical equations, different things I learned in the physics laboratory.” She did not want Christianity treated as poetry or vague inspiration. She wanted to know whether Jesus meant what He said.
The verse that became central to the ministry she shared with Roland was John 15:7. “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.” Marcia treated it almost like a mathematical equation. “To me it’s an equation. If you abide in me plus my words abide in you equals you can ask what you will and it shall be done unto you.”
Roland had wrestled with the same passage from another direction. He had decided that if he ever encountered something Jesus said that he could not believe, he would leave the pulpit. The promise that believers would do greater works brought him to this very issue. While he was praying, he received the answer: “Roland, it is not sacrilegious to believe what Jesus says. It is sacrilegious to disbelieve what Jesus says.” The Browns began putting those promises into practice in their Chicago church. People prayed together. The sick were prayed for and recovered. Prayer groups multiplied.
In 1948, Starr Daily lived with the family and worked through the church’s healing records. He later wrote Recovery about what he found.
The Browns attended their first Camp Farthest Out at Lake Koronis in 1935 after Glenn Harding persuaded them to go. They brought their three-year-old son. Glenn Clark was the only speaker. Marcia almost did not stay. An elderly woman was demonstrating physical orchestration with an orange balanced on her head, and Marcia wondered what she had gotten herself into. She stayed anyway. “That first CFO changed the history of the Brown family.” Ten years later, in August 1945, she was back at Koronis for a night of prayer. The next morning came the news that the war had ended.
From 1937 onward, Marcia read virtually everything Glenn Clark wrote before it was published—manuscripts, galley proofs, and page proofs. She began with I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes and continued through the rest of his books. She remained close to Clark during his final illness in 1956. Near the end, he asked her for just one thing. “Just love me.” When a new edition of Clark’s autobiography, A Man’s Reach, needed the final seven years added to the story, Marcia was asked to write them. “Well, I wrote it,” she said.
In 1948, Marcia left the laboratory. That was also the year Roland resigned his church pastorate. The two of them began traveling, conducting schools of prayer and helping establish Camps Farthest Out in other places. Marcia eventually made eleven complete trips around the world and ministered in about fifty countries. She was involved in the first CFO in India and in the work that developed in Australia. In India, she was told that the Gospel could not be preached there. Roland’s response became one of the stories she repeated for years: “Thank God. Then you will be forced to live it.” Marcia never stopped seeing the Christian life through the eyes of a scientist.
She used paraffin as an example. In the laboratory, paraffin has to penetrate every cell of a specimen before the specimen can be sliced thin enough to be examined. She wanted Christians to be that thoroughly permeated with Christ. “Are we permeated by him? It doesn’t have to be surrounded by him.” She also taught what she called the “even as” passages—loving and forgiving others not merely as much as we are capable of loving and forgiving, but as Christ loves and forgives.
Marcia was married to Roland Brown for fifty-six years. Their son, Roland Brown Jr., became a minister. She continued traveling and teaching well into later life, carrying the same conviction she had received on that Sunday morning in 1928: the promises of Jesus were not merely ideas to admire. They were meant to be lived. She had started as an atheist who enjoyed arguing people out of their faith. Then God convinced her of Himself. After that, she spent nearly seventy-five years doing what came naturally to the scientist in her—testing what she had been told was true. But there was something else she kept looking for, something no laboratory could measure.
“Why don’t we all see the beautiful eyes of people around us?”
*Note:
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