Jack Coe

“The Man of Reckless Faith”

God’s going to open the eyes of the blind and cause the lame to walk, and the deaf to hear. He’s going to do it right here in this church tomorrow night.1

Jack Coe was an independent and determined force for Christ. He had an unreserved faith in the Word of God that he combined with a frank audacity which made him both controversial and effective as a healing evangelist. During the height of the Voice of Healing revivals, from 1945-1956, Coe ministered throughout the nation to multitudes of lost, sick, and dying. His crusades were unprecedented as his tent revivals grew to become the largest in history. He boasted of a tent larger than even Oral Roberts or the Ringling Brothers big top, and still turned away thousands every night.

But perhaps most memorable was his compassion for orphans. He built a home for children called the Herald of Healing Children’s Home, as well as a Christian day school at the Dallas Revival Center he established. Among his other notable accomplishments were the construction of a live-in faith home for the sick where healing was ministered through teaching as well as prayer; the Revival Center Church where people could attend services every night of the week; and the Herald of Healing publication that reached 300,000 subscribers by the time of his death in 1957 at only the age of 38.

A Long Road to Zion
Jack’s youth was not a happy time. His father was a gambler and alcoholic leaving his mother to single-handedly raise their seven children. When Jack was nine years old it proved too much for her and she left Jack and his older brother at an orphanage. To make things worse, Jack’s brother was hit by a car and killed when he tried to run away. When Jack was seventeen, feeling aimless and alone, he left the orphanage and took up a life of drinking and carousing. His health soon began to suffer and his doctor told him that his next drink could kill him.

Desperate for help, Jack moved to California where his mother lived hoping she might provide the accountability he needed to stay sober. As soon as he arrived, his sister invited him to a dance from where he was soon brought home in a drunken stupor. The next evening he grew very weak and thought he was dying. An ambulance brought him to a hospital where he was examined, and while there, he cried out to God for just one more chance. Suddenly, his symptoms disappeared and he went home fully recovered.

Getting Right with God
Jack took his mother with him to Fort Worth, Texas, where he was offered a good job as a manager for the Singer Sewing Machine Agency. He soon forgot about his promises to God and began to drink again. One night when he couldn’t sleep after a night of drinking, he noticed his heart was bothering him. It would stop and start causing Jack to panic. Again, he cried out to God and heard Him say, “This is your last chance, I’ve called you several times, and I’m calling you now for the last time.”2 At this, Jack fell to his knees and pleaded with the Lord to give him until the following Sunday to set things straight.

When the next Sunday came, Jack arbitrarily chose a church out of the phonebook. His finger landed on a Nazarene church so that’s where he decided to go. When the pastor made the altar call, Jack ran up to the front without hesitation. After he was prayed for, he knew his heart had changed and shouted, “Hot dog, I’ve got it!” Over the next six months, his hunger grew for God. His mother was so curious about what had caused such a change in her son, that she went to church to check it out for herself and got powerfully saved.

A year and a half later, Jack came across a “Holy Roller” meeting that intrigued him greatly. When he attended a service out of curiosity, the pastor pointed him out in the crowd and asked him if he had ever been baptized in the Holy Ghost and spoken in other tongues. Jack said he hadn’t nor did he want to. The preacher challenged him to go home and read everything the Bible says about it and so Jack did. Undeniably, the baptism and tongues were spoken of all throughout the book of Acts. Initially, Jack was reluctant to return to the meetings, but so eager was he to learn more, he couldn’t stay away. Ultimately, he yielded, and so powerful was his infilling that he spoke in tongues for three days, having to write English words on paper in order to communicate.

They Thought He Was Crazy
Not long after that, Jack attended an Assemblies of God Bible college for about a year. Then in 1941, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, he joined the army. Still on fire for God, he prayed and witnessed to his fellow privates and soon found himself in the psychiatric ward. He was moved to seven different companies over the course of fifteen months, each time spending a season in the psyche ward.

After his army service, Jack longed to preach. He approached a local Church of God pastor and asked for an opportunity. The pastor invited him to do altar work but Jack was insulted and turned to walk away. The Lord prompted him to return and tell the pastor he would be willing to do whatever the pastor needed. The pastor promptly put him to work as the janitor. To this he turned and walked out again, and after a sleepless night, once again returned to the church to be their new janitor.

His faithfulness soon paid off as he was promoted to Sunday school teacher, then song leader, youth minister, and finally associate pastor. At last, when the pastor was called to another church, Jack was asked to fill in as the interim pastor. When they hired a new pastor, Jack was ready to start his own church. During this time he met Juanita Scott who would soon become Mrs. Jack Coe. They set up house and slowly but surely began to prosper. They were blessed with gifts of furnishings, a car, and were even able to put a thousand dollars in savings.

Called to Divine Healing
Jack began to pray for an understanding of divine healing. He studied and sought the Lord until one night he had a dream. His sister was lying in a hospital dying, given up for lost, when suddenly a bright light entered the room and she was instantly healed. She jumped up shouting and praising God. The next day, Jack found out that his dream was true. His sister had suffered double pneumonia and was given up to die. He went immediately to go visit her in the hospital and heard of the series of events that had transpired exactly matching his dream. This experience was a turning point for him.

However, in 1944, when Juanita was expecting their first child, Jack Coe became gravely ill himself. He suffered from tropical malaria and lost ninety-five pounds. He was now twenty-six years old and nothing but skin and bones. His fevers were high and recurring, and his spleen and liver had become painfully swollen. Jack was in agony and prayed that God would let him die. After crying out to God and repenting of all that God showed him, he told the Lord he was ready to go. It was then God said he didn’t have to, his heart was now right, and he was miraculously healed. He would never suffer another attack of malaria.

The next night Coe went out to preach on the street. Three people were saved. Later that same year, the Assemblies of God ordained him into the ministry. In 1945, Coe went to Longview, Texas, where he continually studied and prayed on the subject of divine healing. He asked God for a special manifestation of His power, and then decided to announce a healing meeting.

Restoring Sight to the Blind
Coe boldly proclaimed that at his healing meeting the blind would see, the deaf would hear, and the lame would walk. When the next evening arrived, the church was full. People lined up for prayer after he finished preaching and then came the blind woman. Coe hesitated, asking the Lord what he was supposed to do. The Lord said, “Son, whatever made you think that you could open the eyes of the blind? Do what you are supposed to do, and I will do what I am supposed to do.”3

Coe repented and then prayed and anointed the blind woman with oil. Her sight slowly came as vague impressions, so Jack prayed for her again, and then she suddenly cried out, “I can see! I can see!”4 From that point on, Jack Coe’s healing ministry was launched.

His ministry was soon in such high demand that he would often stay until dawn praying for the sick. He traveled throughout the area staying in people’s homes wherever he ministered, but those seeking prayer would come to the home where he was staying at all hours of the day and night and ask for prayer so that Jack couldn’t get any rest. Finally, the Lord told him he needed to get proper rest and so he reworked his ministry strategy.

The Revival Years
In 1946, Coe joined forces with Lindsey in co-editing The Voice of Healing. It was in 1947 that the Coes sold their beautiful home and invested in a tent, a truck, and a trailer in order to travel the road full-time, but still have a place where he could get the rest he needed. By 1948, Jack felt the Lord calling him to Redding, California. It was here that a lame woman about to have her leg amputated was miraculously healed. Her testimony stirred the entire city when Coe aired it on the radio. Even the station manager was saved. That night a wealthy woman arrived in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac and was also saved.

Until this time, the offerings had been small and creditors threatened to take the Coe’s truck. So Jack stood up and told the people he needed $740 badly. When he did, a woman walked up to him and wrote a check for the entire amount. Two nights later he announced he would sure like an organ or some kind of music for the tent, and the same lady bought him an organ. The revival team would stay in Redding for seven weeks, receiving money enough to pay for the next crusade.

In 1950, Coe started publishing the Herald of Healing and by 1951 it had reached a circulation of 35,000. As the self-proclaimed fastest growing magazine, by 1956 the circulation had reached 250,000. During this same time Coe was determined to have the largest tent in America. In 1951, when he visited an Oral Roberts meeting, he measured Oral’s tent and ordered one slightly larger. He boasted in The Voice of Healing that both tents were larger than the Ringling Brother’s big top.

In 1952, Coe went on the radio. His broadcasts eventually grew to one hundred different stations per week. It was around this time that creative miracles—the miraculous recreation of missing body parts—began taking place in his meetings. Sadly, during the same year, the Assemblies of God felt Coe was too radical and independent, and expelled him from their circles. This caused Coe to envision establishing his own independent churches he would call Revival Centers to be duplicated throughout the country. In 1953, he launched the Dallas Revival Center, and by 1954 he had built the Dallas Revival Center Church.

Homes for the Hurting
During this time the Coes were also dedicated to building a home for orphans outside of Dallas. They built the Herald of Healing Children’s Home complete with four dormitories and a self-sustaining farm. Jack’s goal was to provide a home for two hundred children. He succeeded in playing the role of father to hundreds of children whenever he wasn’t traveling—caring, clothing, and instructing each one as if they were his own. He made sure their clothes, manners, and schooling was as fine as any child raised anywhere.

Nearby he built Jack Coe’s Faith Home where those seeking healing could learn about faith as well as receive prayer. And not far from these homes was the Dallas Revival Center complete with a ministry training center and Christian school. When the Dallas Revival Center Church was built in 1954, bus service was provided for those who didn’t have transportation, and free ambulance service was offered for those in the hospital who wished to attend the healing services.

An Early End
Jack Coe continued to hold healing crusades around the country, facing all sorts of persecution, including being arrested. By 1956, however, he was physically worn out. Doctors reported that he had the body of a ninety-five year old man even though he was only thirty-eight. It is believed that the Lord had told Coe about his early death a year earlier causing him to work that much more relentlessly to spread the Gospel.

Coe was diagnosed with Polio late in 1956 and was admitted to the hospital where he was unconscious most of the time. On a few occasions, he was able to speak to his wife to make his desires known, and relay that the Lord had said he was ready to take Jack home. Early in 1957, Jack went home to be with the Lord.

Billy Sunday

William Ashley “Billy” Sunday
"Faith is a warrior invading the enemy's country and burning every bridge behind, for it expects to live there. Faith makes no provision for relapse. Faith is going to the goal for a touchdown. Faith will put the ball over the fence in the last half of the ninth inning, score 3 to 0 against you, bases full, two men out and two strikes and three balls called on you."

William Ashley “Billy” Sunday began his career in the public eye as a professional baseball player, but he ended it as one of the most prominent and enigmatic evangelists in America in the early 1900s. He was known not only for his evangelism, but also for his social influence in implementing the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, as well as his support of the war effort during World War I. With his colorful approach and fiery sermons, Sunday won many to faith in Christ and used his status as a public figure to speak a message of morality to American society.

On November 19, 1862, Billy Sunday was born in Bina, Iowa. Only a month after he was born, his father—a solider in an army camp in Patterson, Missouri—died tragically of pneumonia. Now widowed, his mother was faced with the grim prospect of raising three sons alone. Sunday spent most of his childhood in poverty, and when he was thirteen, he was sent to an orphanage in Glenwood, Iowa, along with his older brother. Eventually Sunday ran away from the orphanage, worked a series of odd jobs to support himself, and moved to Marshalltown, Iowa. It was there that he discovered his first great love. Billy Sunday excelled as an athlete, and whatever spare time he could find, he played baseball for the local team. One afternoon the celebrated player and team manager Cap Anson came to watch Sunday play and soon after signed him on to the Chicago White Stockings. Sunday’s fame grew with his skill, and he was acknowledged as the champion sprinter of the National League. Over the course of eight more years, Sunday would play for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia teams, setting records and enjoying the blessings God bestowed upon him.

During his baseball career, Sunday was invited to attend a service at the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago. One night in 1886, Sunday decided to give his life to Christ, and he began attending services at the Mission regularly. Two years later he married Helen Thompson, and in 1889 Helen gave birth to a baby girl. Even though he had everything he could ever want—fame, wealth, and family—Sunday knew he was missing something in his life. In 1891, he decided to devote more time and energy to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and accepted a job as the secretary of the religious department. He’d been stealing bases, but the Lord was ready for him to steal souls for God’s Kingdom.

Evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, who often held revival meetings across the country, visited Sunday in 1894 and offered to hire him as an assistant. With Chapman, Sunday got his feet wet in the world of evangelism. In 1896, Chapman decided to begin pastoring a church and left his nationwide ministry, and Sunday struck out on his own. During the first week of his revival meetings in Garner, Iowa, one hundred people accepted Jesus Christ, and this was just the beginning. In 1903 he was ordained as a minister by the Presbyterian Church, and Sunday began his ministry in earnest.

Sunday found that his success as a professional athlete had already made him a household name in the Midwest and the East, and his background in baseball provided him with a rich store of images, metaphors, and stories he could sprinkle throughout his sermons. He also was known to throw imaginary baseballs, hit homeruns, and slide into home while he preached to further underscore his message. Sunday’s energy in the pulpit was contagious, and both men and women found Sunday’s masculine Christianity appealing. He considered himself a warrior for Christ, and challenged men to be “real men” who could “stand up and give battle to the devil.” He despised the notion that a Christian could be considered “…a sort of dish-rag proposition, a wishy-washy, sissified sort of galoot that lets everybody make a doormat out of him.” Sunday embodied a virile, blunt, and brawny Christianity and declared, “Let me tell you the manliest man is the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ.”

Along with this emphasis on rugged manliness, Sunday encouraged new converts and seasoned saints alike to support the American war effort in buying bonds, conserving resources, and enlisting in the military.

As most popular evangelists of his day, Sunday was not without his critics. He knew little about theology and had no oratorical training. Mainstream journalists critiqued Sunday’s willingness to call people to a faith that church critics claimed he knew nothing about. Sunday was also attacked for his business-like manner in running his revivals, and the sizeable income that resulted. Nevertheless, Sunday’s appeal to America was undeniable. Many Americans found Sunday’s success story truly inspiring. “I have butted and fought and struggled since I was six years old. If ever a man fought hard, I have fought for everything I have ever gained,” Sunday would sometimes remark in his sermons.

Sunday continued to travel across U.S. In 1917, Sunday embarked on a ten week campaign to New York, and over 98,000 people came to trust in Jesus Christ. In his later years his popularity began to wane, as technologies and national attention began to shift from “big tent” preaching after World War I. Nonetheless, Billy Sunday remained in demand as a speaker and preacher until his death in 1935.

Maria Woodworth-Etter

I have been in great dangers; many times not knowing when I would be shot down, either in the pulpit, or going to and from meetings…But I said I would never run, nor compromise. The Lord would always put His mighty power on me, so that He took all fear away, and made me like a giant…If in any way they had tried to shoot, or kill me, He would have struck them dead, and I sometimes told them so.¹

Within a short time after Maria Woodworth-Etter responded to God’s call to “go out in the highways and hedges and gather in the lost sheep,”² and people were thronging to hear her speak with signs and wonders following. By 1885, without a public address system, crowds of over twenty-five thousand pressed in to hear her minister while hundreds fell to the ground under the power of God.³ Woodworth-Etter not only shook up denominational religion, she rocked the secular world with life-altering displays of God’s power.

Those who came to investigate, condemn, or harass her seemed most at risk of “falling out” in what was described as a trance-like state. Maria preached that these strong manifestations of the Spirit were “nothing new; they were just something the Church had lost.” 4 She was unwavering in her determination to break the strongholds that held people, communities, and whole cities in bondage. It seemed the more opposition she faced, the more she dug in her heels. Maria produced invincible strength through tenacious prayer that enabled her to take authority and minister with grace and power. She was known as a revivalist who could break towns open.

Maria Woodworth-Etter did not immediately heed the Lord’s call to evangelistic ministry in her life. As a single woman in the latter part of the nineteenth century, she felt the need to position herself by first obtaining an education and then marrying a missionary. Her well thought-out plans were interrupted when her father suddenly died in a farming accident and she was left with the burden of helping support her family. She met P.H. Woodworth upon his return from the Civil War, and after a brief courtship, they married and took up farming.

Over the course of time, P.H. and Maria became the parents of six children. Farming life proved difficult and they struggled with the demands of making a living and raising a family. Maria was frustrated that she couldn’t answer the call to ministry due to the demands of her life on the farm as a wife and mother of a growing family. She battled illness and disappointment that her husband did not share her desire for ministry. Then overwhelming tragedy struck as the Woodworth’s lost five of their six children to illness. P.H. never recovered from this loss and Maria did her best to support him while raising their only surviving daughter. Instead of growing bitter, Maria applied the Word of God to her heart.

She came to understand through her study of the Bible that God had used women as ministers, prophets, and leaders. From the prophecy of Joel she read that God would pour out his Spirit on both men and women. Still, she felt inadequate and ill-equipped to be of useful service to the Lord. She continued to study and later wrote, “The more I investigated, the more I found to condemn me.”5

Then Maria had a vision. Angels came into her room and took her to the West, over prairies, lakes, forests, and rivers where she saw a long, wide field of waving grain. As the view unfolded she began to preach and saw the grains begin to fall like sheaves. Then Jesus told her that, “just as the grain fell, so people would fall” as she preached.6 Finally, Maria yielded to the increasingly clear call and asked the Lord to anoint her for ministry.

And the Lord did. Shortly after she began ministering to small groups in her community, churches began inviting her to speak to their congregations. The result was always a deep conviction among the hearers as they fell to the floor weeping. Soon she was invited westward and began traveling extensively. It wasn’t long before she had held nine revivals, preached two hundred sermons, and started two churches with Sunday school memberships of over one hundred people. God honored Maria’s dedication and faithfulness restoring her heart and the years she had lost.

But it was not until she preached at a church in western Ohio that the meaning of her vision about the sheaves of wheat became clear. Here the people fell into what seemed like “trances”—an altered state which would come to profoundly mark her ministry and confound the wise of her day. “Fifteen came to the altar screaming for mercy. Men and women fell and lay like dead,” Maria recounted. “After laying on the floor for some time, they sprang to their feet shouting praises to God. The ministers and elder saints wept and praised the Lord for His ‘Pentecost Power’”7—and from that meeting on, her ministry would be marked by this particular manifestation with hundreds miraculously healed, and hundreds more coming to Christ.

At every meeting she held, there was a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. One reporter wrote, “Vehicles of all sorts began pouring into the city at an early hour—nothing short of a circus or a political rally ever before brought in so large a crowd.”8 Maria couldn’t answer all the invitations she received to minister, but the ones she did accept created a national stir that has never been silenced. The writings of then young F.F. Bosworth described the spectacular meetings that took place in Dallas, Texas, from July through December. As a result, Dallas became a hub of the Pentecostal revival.

Along with Maria’s ministry success came great pressures and severe persecution. It was during a controversial crusade in Oakland, California—where she had met with unusually challenging opposition—she decided to leave her unfaithful husband after his infidelity had been exposed. After twenty-six stormy years of marriage, they were divorced in January of 1891. In less than a year, P.H. remarried and publicly slandered Maria’s character. He died not long after on June 21, 1892, of Typhoid Fever.

God, however, continued to honor Maria. As she persistently sowed, labored, and reaped a momentous harvest for the Lord, God sent her a true friend and partner in Samuel Etter. Again her sorrow was turned to joy as the two were married in 1902. Samuel became a vital part of Maria’s ministry in every capacity and the two co-labored for Christ until his death twelve years later. Maria never wavered in her dedication to the healing and evangelistic ministry she was so powerfully called to. She seemed invincible in her ability to carry on in the face of tragedy and opposition. Her fame for miraculous healings and revival services grew, as did her critics. But God silenced them all.

She has been called the grandmother of the Pentecostal movement. None has done more than Maria Woodworth-Etter to shed light on the convicting power of the Holy Spirit, the role of women in ministry, and the power of miracle crusades to revive a nation. In addition, she brought insight on how to effectively administrate massive miracle crusades, build sustainable ministry centers and manage opposition in the public arena. Her commitment and dedication personally influenced such great heroes of the faith as Smith Wigglesworth, Aimee Semple McPherson, John Alexander Dowie, John G. Lake, E.W. Kenyon, F.F. Bosworth, and Kathryn Kuhlman.

Her legacy is evidenced by the ongoing ministry work of healing evangelists around the world. Though, for the last six years of her life, she confined herself to ministering from the Tabernacle she had erected in Indianapolis, ID, her healing anointing remained as powerful as ever. She continued to speak with power from the Word of God until her very last days. As she became weaker, she was carried in a chair to the pulpit, and finally ministered a touch of healing or a word of hope from her bed.

In 1924, at the age of eighty, Maria B. Woodworth-Etter fell into a deep sleep and went home to be with the Lord. Her passing was mourned by all whose lives she touched and was felt by the entire nation. She ministered God’s healing power with the last ounce of her strength, proclaiming God’s love with the last of her breath