Figure · 1917

Kenneth Hagin

Kenneth Hagin (1917–2003), American preacher from Texas, often called the father of the Word of Faith movement and a central figure of the Prosperity Gospel.

History

Roots

Kenneth Erwin Hagin was born on 20 August 1917 in McKinney, Texas. By his own account he was born with a deformed heart and a blood disease, and at fifteen he became bedridden and partly paralysed (biography, secondary). He said that during his conversion in April 1933 his heart stopped three times and he felt himself drawn toward hell before praying and coming back. In August 1934, reading Mark 11:23–24 (“whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”), he decided to believe he was healed before he felt any change, and got up from his bed. That passage, and the idea of believing first and seeing later, became the centre of everything he taught.

He began preaching as a teenager, first at a small community Baptist church in Roland, Texas. In 1937 he received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues, which put him outside his Baptist setting, and he joined the Assemblies of God, the largest denomination to come out of the Azusa Street Revival. Over about twelve years he pastored a string of small Pentecostal churches in Texas, including Tom Bean, Farmersville, Talco, Greggton and Van (obituary, Christianity Today, secondary).

Causes

Two currents shaped him. The first was the post-war healing revival. In 1949 Hagin left the pastorate for travelling ministry after what he described as a call from Jesus, and in the late 1940s and 1950s he worked in the “Voice of Healing” circuit alongside Oral Roberts, Gordon Lindsay and T. L. Osborn. That movement gave him an audience that expected healing and believed that faith could claim it.

The second current was the writing of E. W. Kenyon (1867–1948), a New England evangelist who was never a Pentecostal. Kenyon taught that believers have a legal standing in Christ, that the words they confess shape what they receive, and that sickness and poverty belong to the defeat Christ already won. Hagin read Kenyon, and much of his vocabulary (“what I confess, I possess”, the believer’s authority, the “God-kind of faith”) came from him, as critics later showed in detail.

Hagin’s visions also gave his teaching its sense of authority. He reported that Jesus appeared to him eight times over several years (God In Prints biography, secondary) and instructed him on faith, healing and demons. He told these stories in I Believe in Visions (1972; no confirmed online text).

Influence

Hagin’s reach came from organisation as much as preaching. He formed the Kenneth E. Hagin Evangelistic Association in Garland, Texas, in January 1963, and moved it to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1966. Radio (“Faith Seminar of the Air”), cassette tapes, the Word of Faith magazine and a stream of short paperbacks from his own Faith Library followed; Christianity Today reported more than 65 million copies of his books in circulation by his death (obituary). In 1974 he opened Rhema Bible Training Center in Broken Arrow, near Tulsa (now Rhema Bible Training College, the ministry’s site). Its graduates, numbering in the tens of thousands, planted churches across the United States, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Through Rhema and through younger preachers who took his message further, among them Kenneth Copeland, Frederick Price and later a generation of televangelists, Hagin’s teaching became the backbone of what outsiders call the Prosperity Gospel and insiders call Word of Faith. It moved well beyond the Assemblies of God into the independent Charismatic churches that grew in the 1970s and 1980s. Hagin died in Tulsa on 19 September 2003, and his son Kenneth W. Hagin succeeded him at Rhema.

Key ideas and contributors

The God-kind of faith. Hagin read Mark 11:22 (“Have faith in God”) as “have the faith of God”. God created by speaking words in faith, and believers can share that same faith. The key move is to believe that a promise is already fulfilled before any evidence appears, as Hagin did on his sickbed. Faith is a law that works for whoever applies it.

Positive confession. Faith is released through the mouth (Romans 10:8–10). A believer should speak God’s promises aloud and refuse to speak doubt, sickness or lack, since a negative confession undercuts faith. Hagin’s booklets such as Right and Wrong Thinking and How to Write Your Own Ticket with God (both 1960s–1970s) set this out in step-by-step form.

Healing in the atonement. Christ bore sickness as well as sin (Isaiah 53:4–5, 1 Peter 2:24), so healing is already provided and believers should claim it. Earlier healing evangelists held this too; Hagin’s distinctive turn was to treat lingering symptoms as a test of faith to be resisted, not a sign that healing had failed. This places him firmly in the continuationist camp on Spiritual Gifts.

The believer’s authority. Because Christ defeated Satan, believers share his authority over demons, sickness and circumstances. Hagin’s The Believer’s Authority (Faith Library Publications, 1967; copyright page of a later translation) is one of his most widely read books.

Prosperity. Hagin taught that God wants believers to prosper financially, reading 3 John 2 and the blessing of Abraham in Galatians 3:13–14 as covering material as well as spiritual blessing. His version was milder than that of many who followed him, and late in life he wrote against its excesses (see below). The wider debate is covered under Wealth and Blessing.

Revelation knowledge. Hagin distinguished “sense knowledge”, which trusts what one sees and feels, from “revelation knowledge”, which trusts God’s word against the senses. The distinction comes straight from Kenyon.

Key controversies

Kenyon and plagiarism. D. R. McConnell, a graduate of Oral Roberts University, argued in his 1982 master’s thesis and then in A Different Gospel (1988) that Hagin’s core teaching came from Kenyon and that many passages in Hagin’s books reproduce Kenyon’s wording without credit. McConnell traced Kenyon in turn to New Thought and Christian Science, so the charge was doctrinal as well as ethical: Word of Faith, he argued, was metaphysical cult teaching dressed in Pentecostal language (summary, secondary). Defenders reply that Hagin’s books were edited transcripts of sermons, that preachers absorb phrases without tracking their sources, and that Hagin acknowledged Kenyon in at least one book. A Kenyon publishing ministry made this case and said the Kenyon family did not object (Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, an interested party). Dale Simmons’ E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty (1997) later qualified McConnell, arguing that Kenyon drew as much on the Holiness and Higher Life movements as on New Thought.

Faith as a formula. The most common theological objection is that Hagin’s “laws” of faith make God an instrument who must respond to correct technique. The Assemblies of God, Hagin’s own denomination, adopted the position paper The Believer and Positive Confession in 1980, warning against treating confession as a means of compelling God and against blaming the sick for their lack of faith. Pentecostal New Testament scholar Gordon Fee made a similar case in The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels (1985), arguing that the movement misreads texts like 3 John 2 and ignores the New Testament’s teaching on suffering (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

Pastoral harm. Critics point to believers who stopped medical treatment or who were told their illness persisted because their faith was weak. Hagin did not forbid doctors, and he said he had no quarrel with medicine, but the logic of resisting symptoms made such outcomes possible. This is the charge behind the popular dismissal “name it and claim it” (obituary).

Christology and the atonement. Following Kenyon, Hagin taught that Jesus “died spiritually”: separated from God, he took on a sinful, satanic nature and became Satan’s prey (Atkinson, Edinburgh PhD thesis abstract, secondary). Critics such as Hank Hanegraaff in Christianity in Crisis (1993) called this a departure from the classical doctrine of Christ and from orthodox accounts of the Atonement, which locate the saving work in the cross itself. Critics also objected to Hagin’s statement, quoted in his Christianity Today obituary, that “the believer is as much an incarnation as was Jesus of Nazareth,” which they read as erasing the line between Christ and the Christian. Defenders read such lines as overstated preaching about union with Christ.

The Midas Touch. Near the end of his life Hagin wrote The Midas Touch: A Balanced Approach to Biblical Prosperity (c. 2000; editions date it 1999 or 2000). He criticised the “hundredfold return” promised for donations, fundraising that played on greed, and the idea that wealth proves godliness. Some saw this as a rebuke of his own heirs; others noted that he never withdrew the core teaching that God wills believers’ financial prosperity. Kate Bowler’s Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013) treats this tension as typical of the movement’s founders.

What remains unresolved

Two judgments about Hagin pull against each other. To his supporters he was a plain-spoken Bible teacher who restored confidence that God still heals and that faith matters. To his critics he was the channel through which a metaphysical theology of mind-over-matter entered Pentecostalism. The facts are not much disputed: he did borrow heavily from Kenyon, and his teaching did spread worldwide through Rhema. What is disputed is whether faith that “believes it has received” is a recovery of New Testament trust in God or a technique that puts the believer in charge.