Lindsey, Gordon J.
Lindsey, Gordon J.
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)Pentecostal minister Gordon J. Lindsey emerged in the 1950s as one of the most important proponents of miraculous healing, though his work was largely in the background and thus not as well known as that of his contemporaries, such as William Marion Branham or Oral Roberts. Lindsey was born at Zion, Illinois, the community founded by pioneer healer John Alexander Dowie. His family moved during his childhood years and for a time stayed in southern California as members of the Pisgah Grande Christian commune.
Lindsey was fourteen when he first heard John Graham Lake, an early Pentecostal healer from the West Coast. Soon afterward, he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. Within a few years he had become a full-time Pentecostal evangelist. He eventually married a woman who was a member of the church founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, another prominent West Coast healer.
Lindsey began to move out of obscurity in the years after World War II. He was pastoring a small church in Ashland, Oregon, when he met William Branham. Impressed, he left the pastorate and became Branham’s manager and the editor of a new periodical, Leaves of Healing, heralding the emergence of a new wave of spiritual healing activity in the larger Pentecostal movement. The following year he founded the Voice of Healing Fellowship and began organizing annual conventions. The fellowship’s headquarters, established in Dallas in 1952, became the publishing center advocating not only Branham, but a host of new healing evangelists that soon came on the scene, such as Oral Roberts, Morris Cerullo, and Velmer Gardner.
In 1962 the Voice of Healing Fellowship was superseded by the Full Gospel Fellowship of ministers and churches, a new Pentecostal denomination. In 1966 the many far-flung ministries that Lindsey had initiated were brought together under a new umbrella organization, Christ for the Nations. Lindsey died in 1973, but his work was carried on by his very capable spouse. Over the next decades, Freda Lindsey emerged as a leader in her own right and built the ministries initiated by her husband into a major force in the Pentecostal world.