Over the years Charisma has celebrated it’s anniversary in various ways. On our tenth anniversary we had a banquet featuring Phil Driscoll. On our 20th we had a banquet with Oral Roberts. At year 25 we sponsored a conference featuring Benny Hinn and others. At year 30 we had a huge food giveaway in downtown Orlando to the poor.
So how to celebrate our 40th anniversary? We decided to make the celebration in the magazine itself. I believe the result is one of the most beautiful issues we’ve ever produced! My congratulations to Dr. Steve Greene, the newly named publisher of Charisma and his team for an outstanding job.
While this isn’t a promotion to subscribe, I urge you to track down a copy. The easiest way is to subscribe this month so that your subscription begins with this keepsake edition.
We decided to not focus on ourselves as much as on the people we covered. In 40 years we’ve covered hundreds of people and written thousands of stories. It wasn’t easy to narrow it down to 40. Today we reprint here the article from the August 2015 issue of Charisma in which we explain how we selected the “40 People Who Radically Changed Our World.” It’s an overview telling about all 40.
Beginning tomorrow with Kathryn Kuhlman and Bill Bright, we will print two of these stories every weekday (Monday through Friday) all month. In most instances we will also publish an article these leaders wrote in Charisma. I’ve been spending time going through old issues and being reminded of some great teaching articles, many of which are as helpful today for our readers as when we published them!
On weekends we will run other articles from the past that we believe will edify and inform our readers. These will go on social media for a new generation to benefit from.
Today because we’re kicking off our month-long celebration I decided to run the cover story from our second issue about Kathryn Kuhlman. It is a rewritten version of a story I wrote for The Orlando Sentinel where I worked at the time. I pitched my editors on a story on this famous “faith healer” (as the media liked to call her. They made it the cover story for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
I took a bus from Orlando to St. Petersburg, FL where her meeting was held. I wrote about the experience including a couple of people who said they were healed!
I found a wonderful video on YouTube of a Kathryn Kuhlman service from 1974 at the Mabee Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is classically Kathryn Kuhlman! We plan to run that video on our website today and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did. It was much as I remember the service in St. Petersburg.
I was able to interview Miss Kuhlman backstage after the service. It was a powerful meeting and she seemed to be excited by the experience. She was known for gesturing and being overly dramatic. She was like that in our interview which was conducted standing as a bodyguard with a nasty scar on his face stood by and watched.
I took no photos of the interview and I can’t remember if I recorded it on a cassette tape recorder. But I vividly remember asking her who would take over her ministry someday. She was about 68 at the time and apparently in good health. It seemed like a reasonable question for a reporter to ask.
She bristled and said that Jesus was going to come back before her ministry was over. And we moved on to another question.
Later when I read Jamie Buckingham’s biography of her called “Daughter of Destiny,” I discovered her health was not good and she probably knew she was had not long to live. She died the following February 20, 1976 only four months after this article appeared in Charisma. I rewrote the Sentinel story for this fledgling magazine. I believe it was the last feature written about her before she died (It’s a glimpse at the last year of her ministry and is sufficiently different than what we will run tomorrow that I felt it warranted republishing today).
A couple of years later I got to know Benny Hinn and he and I have been friends for many years. Some have said that he took up her healing mantle. However, while he sang in the chior at some of her services, and was influenced by her, he never met her. And when I interviewed her she probably had no idea who Benny Hinn was!
I was pleasantly surprised as I went back through our bound copies of the printed magazine to be reminded of how interesting many of the articles were even in those early days of our magazine. Each weekend we will publish ones we think will bless you. And all will have appeared in our first decade leading up to 1985.
Let me comment on another article we will post today. It’s called “My Friend the Bible” by my longtime friend John Sherrill.
He and his wife Elizabeth wrote or coauthored many books including The Cross and the Switchblade and God’s Smuggler which I read as a teenager. As a beginning journalist I considered them to be famous authors and never imagined I might get to know them someday. That happened through Jamie Buckingham who considered Sherrill his writing mentor! I continue to be in touch with John, now 91, and entertained he and Elizabeth in our home last year. So when we came across this article I was reminded how good it was. And with our emphasis on Bible engagement with the publishing of the Modern English Version, we decided to republish it later today.
It will be interesting to post these articles from our archives (we are calling them “Pages from our Past”) on social media for a generation who never saw them the first time. And to think that when they were printed, the internet didn’t exist and computers were just becoming common.
If you don’t subscribe to the print issue, click here for a special rate and start with this keepsake edition. And keep coming back each day.
Stephen Strang