When William Branham visited South Africa in the early 1950s I had taken a secular job as health inspector in the Local Health Commission near Pinetown, Natal. Thus I was not directly involved in organising the massed meetings he held in Durban, but Fred Mullan was on the national organising committee. However I did attend all the Branham meetings in Durban.
Pentecostal assembly where miracles and divine healings were ardently believed in. Nevertheless the fact was that I had never seen a spectacular miracle in all my 15 years of Christian experience. True, I had remarkable healings take place even in answer to my own prayers, but wonderful as these were, they were not mind-boggling wonder-works that could be classed as instantaneous, dramatic miracles. The Branham meetings gave me my first contact with anything of that kind. In fact, they gave me my first contact with “big-time” healing evangelism, so packed with drama, excitement, disillusionment and, yes, with blessing too!
Branham came as one of a team of three preachers; himself, F F Bosworth and Ern Baxter. Certainly there could not have been a more high-powered trio.
Baxter’s eloquence was spell-binding. The meetings started in the Durban City Hall, which every night was packed to the doors. One night I had to leave the meeting for some reason. As I left the main entrance of the hall in Church Street it was drizzling. The loudspeakers were blaring out into the Town Gardens area, relaying the service from the City Hall. Two men came from the Town Gardens into Church Street, hurrying to get out of the rain, for they had no overcoats. At that moment, Baxter’s voice boomed out over the loudspeakers, his Canadian brogue mellifluous and compelling. I watched the two men. At the sound of his voice they both halted, listening to Baxter intently, undeterred by the rain. Amazed, I watched them standing like statues where they had stopped in their tracks as though transfixed by his sermon. They stood thus until he had finished speaking. I had never before seen such a power in the spoken word.
F F Bosworth was the author of the book “Christ the Healer”, a classic exposition of divine healing. He claimed special gifts in praying for deafness, and indeed, sitting in the audience as I did, it seemed to me that a number of people did receive their hearing as he prayed for them.
I got to know him more intimately when he returned to South Africa after the Branham meetings. He was an old man in the twilight years of a great ministry. I helped him and his son Bob, to set up meetings in the Clermont native township near Pinetown in Natal where I was working as a health inspector. Every day he would come to Enid and me in our home in Pinetown, bringing with him a packet of sandwiches. I would drive him to his meetings. To our chagrin he would not eat dinner with us, fearing to impose on our hospitality. His meetings in Clermont were really an anti-climax after the excitement of the Branham Crusade, but it was a wonderful privilege for Enid and me to help this great and humble servant of God, and to drink from his store of experience as he recounted to us various events from his long ministry.
One night he prayed for a young African boy of about ten who was deaf. He used a cheap pocket watch to test whether hearing had been restored. He put the watch to the boy’s ear. The youngster’s face brightened into a smile. African-like, he started clicking with his tongue in a sound all the world like the ticking of a watch. Obviously he could hear.
Branham’s ministry was spectacular in the extreme. His preaching was unimpressive, but his word of knowledge was unerring. The impact he made was awe-striking. He used to cry out, “I can’t heal you; God must do that; but you can’t stop me knowing what’s wrong with you; that’s my gift!”
He claimed that many cases of disease, such as tuberculosis and cancer were demonic and he seemed to see spirits as he ministered to the sufferers in the congregation. Once, while ministering to a tuberculosis sufferer on the platform, he whirled around to a man in the gallery crying out, “Sir, why did you move? The spirit from this person seeks help from you. You have tuberculosis too! And you, and you, too, and you; you all have tuberculosis, don’t you?” He pointed to several people in the gallery. Indeed, they all stood up, acknowledging the fact. I mention the occurrence not with any intention to affirm that all cases of such disease are demonically caused. Not at all. I simply recount it as something that I witnessed on the occasion.
One of the most dramatic incidents I recall was when an Indian woman stood before him in the Greyville Racecourse for ministry. His voice rang out, “You are not sick; you are sick at heart; your husband beats you!” Our own hearts welled with compassion for the poor woman as Branham uttered a serious warning for the wife-beating husband to mend his ways.
Connected with our little assembly in Durban, there were two sisters, both godly young woman, but both needing healing. The younger suffered badly with asthma. She worked in Johannesburg as a nurse. In the Rand climate her asthma was severe, but could be tolerated. At the coast it became so bad she had to be hospitalised. Seeking healing, she flew from Johannesburg to Durban to have Branham pray for her. As she alighted from the plane in Durban the asthma struck. She was brought to the meetings by ambulance on a stretcher.
The older sister claimed she suffered from epilepsy, but we who had known her for years were baffled to understand her ailment. True, she used to have fits of a kind but no-one felt she was truly epileptic.
Branham’s method in ministry was to call out 15 people whom he ministered to personally on the platform. As the audience beheld the miraculous way Branham discerned their situation, he felt faith would rise so that healings would take place spontaneously in the body of the hall.
When the two sisters referred to received ministry, I happened to be on the platform helping Branham, directing people onto the platform and off again. I did not know who would be coming up for prayer.
When I saw the elder of the two sisters in the queue waiting for Branham’s ministry, my heart leapt in anticipation. Would Branham know what was wrong with her? How would he deal with her? As it was, his response amazed me.
I saw her advancing towards him. When she was about 20 feet away, he said to her, “You’re a believer! You get sort of ... sort of turns!” He could not have described her symptoms more precisely.
Then he turned from her saying, “You have a relative in this hall .... a sister ....”
I watched in astonishment as he scanned the people lying on stretchers in the aisle near the platform. He pointed directly to the younger sister lying in the aisle. He said, “It’s you! You are healed!”
I’ve known her for 60 years, since she was a child. From the time of that Branham meeting she has been free of asthma to this very day when she is serving God in a crèche and training centre for Africans living in an informal settlement near Johannesburg.
A similar healing was granted to a lady in East London. She was lying on a stretcher in the aisle crippled and bed-ridden. She was healed by Branham’s word. Later she was sent out by the East London Assembly of God as a missionary. When stationed in Durban I used to travel to Port Shepstone in Natal where she ministered in the Indian community and started a church. I used to preach there once a month to help the work under her hand.
These healings I have recounted concern people I knew personally. I can therefore vouch for them.
Another such healing concerned a certain Mr Daniels who became a member of our Assembly in Durban. Mr Daniels was an elderly simple hearted brother with his feet truly on the ground. He was an old timer who had been a professional big game hunter in his day. He had a disfigurement on the tip of his nose, a hole about one eighth of an inch in diameter as though it had been punched into his nostril. He told me there had been a growth there.
Branham had ministered to him. He had said these words, “Tomorrow at 7 in the morning you will sneeze and the growth will come away.”
The next morning Brother Daniels woke up, got out of bed, and as was his custom, he flung aside the bedroom curtains to greet the day. As he did so the sun smote his face, causing him to sneeze. Sure enough, in the palm of his hand was the growth which he had sneezed out. He looked at the clock. It was precisely seven.
Brother Daniels was convinced God had permitted the nose to remain with a hole in it as a reminder and testimony of the miracle.
The Natal Mercury, Durban’s morning newspaper gave a full and very fair coverage to the Branham meetings. Testimonies and photographs of miraculous healings had front page treatment. For a few days euphoria filled the Pentecostal community who had not witnessed the like in living memory. But soon there was disillusionment as many of the apparent healings suffered relapses and some people even died. The Natal Mercury gave an equal prominence to the failures as it had to the claimed miracles, publishing a rather sad and chastened editorial on the developments. The effect was devastating to our faith.
Yet the attendances at the City Hall swelled to the point where the meetings had to be transferred to the Greyville Race Course, a venue accommodating 70 000. It was Durban’s wet season and much of the time it drizzled. Yet the packed meetings continued, drizzle or no drizzle. Ern Baxter joked that it was his first experience of preaching to a congregation of umbrellas for most of the people sat in the open stands in the rain sheltering under umbrellas.
One did not know at the time that thousands who thronged the meetings were from Durban’s Hindu community where a rumour had spread that Branham was an incarnation or Avatar of the Hindu deity Krishna. Devoted Hindus did not mind Jesus Christ being preached as Saviour and Lord, for it was quite easy to accord Him a place in the vast panoply of gods they believed in, provided He was not extolled as the one and only true God, beside whom there could be no other. The situation was reminiscent of that described in Acts 14 where the people of Lystra called Barnabas, Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, two heathen gods.
It even happened that there went on sale a photograph of Branham with a light about his head like an aura. Whether genuine or fake no-one ever knew. The pictures of Branham with a “halo” sold like hot-cakes.
When all the flim-flam passed we were left quite deflated as we returned to our little assembly meetings wondering what had happened to all the many converts who had responded to Baxter’s powerful preaching. As far as I recall, not one of them ever visited our services. One can but trust that some grain of truth was forever lodged within their hearts, whether they attended our services or not.
Yet we did have two significant additions to our assembly, a man called John Sims, and his wife, Enid.
John Sims was a Londoner, a commercial artist who worked with my wife (also Enid) at Lyntas, the Lever Brothers advertising agency. He was a small man and highly temperamental. My wife Enid gave him her testimony of salvation but its only apparent effect was to provoke him to blaspheme and persecute her until she resolved with tears never again to discuss Christian things with him. Yet when the Branham meetings hit Durban, she relented to the extent that she lent him a book on Branham’s life “William Branham - a Man Sent from God”. He read it avidly, but he did not attend the meetings in the City Hall.
However, living on the Bluff, overlooking Durban, he could see spread out below him the lights of the city across the Durban Bay, with the City Hall flood-lit and prominent. He thought to himself “God is in that place and I should be there too”.
That was as far as it went. But he did speak to my wife about it, accepted an invitation to attend our services in the Assembly, and was converted. He followed the Lord until he died a few years ago. He volunteered to be an artist in the Emmanuel Printing Press in Nelspruit, the tract society started from the Elim Mission by H C Phillips.
He told of a dream he once had. In his dream he was in heaven’s operations room with maps and tables everywhere. Crowds of angels were there, all concentrating on their appointed tasks in utter silence. The atmosphere was charged with the sense of silent concentrated purpose. Then he saw the Lord. He prayed, “Oh, let me be part of all this!” In response, the Lord pointed commandingly to an artist’s desk set in a corner of the room. He knew that was his calling. At Nelspruit he helped to prepared literature and tracts that were distributed to the far corners of Africa, surely part of God’s war-time operation in preaching the Good News.
Looking back over the years, one sees that Branham’s visit to South Africa had a vast but imponderable effect. It broke a barrier. It brought an imminence to the miraculous that had previously been lacking; and it started a groundswell of revivalism that has continued to mount even to the present time. Viewed statistically, not many new converts were added to the churches, and not all those ministered to were healed (though make no mistake many were).
The impact was not statistical. In sum one could say the visit was an event in the spiritual life of the South African church. The doctrinal issues of healing and miracles were brought to the fore and made relevant in the charismatic movement of which the Branham meetings were one of the forerunners. Branham himself went into error. He was proclaimed a prophet by some of his followers and became a cult figure in a heretical sect. Finally he died in a road accident and his followers reportedly tried in vain to raise him from the dead.
Following Branham’s ministry there came an era of what may be called “Voice of Healing” evangelists. A man named Gordon Lindsey published a magazine, “The Voice of Healing” through which he helped to sponsor numbers of evangelists operating in tent crusades and massed meetings. He started “Christ for the Nations” Bible College in Dallas, USA, an institution that his respected widow still heads up.
The Voice of Healing wave subsided but their “name it and claim it” emphasis on faith re-emerged in the 70s through the teachings of Kenneth Hagin and his Rhema Bible Church in the USA.And so the work of God goes on, not without controversy, and even the taint of heresy, but with unstoppable dynamism, and thank God, with the capacity to be renewed, refined, chastened and purified. Christ builds His church using fallible instruments, achieving His purposes through them and often in spite of them. Whether or not one understands everything that happens, over-arching all is the “Holy Spirit factor” working in the church as it is to make it the church as it should be.
Article by John Bond