Agnes Sanford (1897-1982) World-Renowned Spiritual Healer

Agnes Sanford was born in 1897. The daughter of a Presbyterian missionary in China, and the wife of an Episcopal rector, she is viewed as one of the preeminent spiritual healers of the twentieth century.  Her first book, The Healing Light, established her as a leading lay healer and minister within the Christian church.  Since its original 1947 publication, The Healing Light has sold over half a million copies.

It is not generally known, but Agnes Sanford herself suffered from severe, recurrent depressions for many, many years. In her autobiography, Mrs. Sanford said that she finally began to break out of her chronic depression after a Protestant clergyman laid his hands on her head and prayed for her. For the next year, she wrote, she went about her work repeating to herself, hourly and daily, the same prayer: “Lord have mercy on me, and fill me with Your Holy Spirit.” Little by little, over a period of time, the depressions vanished, and she was finally free of them.

It was not until years later, when she met an Orthodox priest and told him of her experience, that Mrs. Sanford learned that she had been reciting, unknowingly, the ancient Jesus Prayer of the Orthodox Church: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” a prayer which monks, nuns and the Orthodox faithful had been reciting for centuries.

Short, plump, breezy, and matter-of-fact, Mrs. Sanford taught that the principles of prayer and healing are universal--that is, they are included in all religions, yet transcend all religions. She said Jesus stood in church services all over Christendom with his hands tied behind his back because neither ministers nor people expected him to do anything. She said people who prayed had to expect miracles. That required them to pray down the voice of doubt within them based on old hurts, griefs, and failures. "There is more in the Bible than mere information. A spiritual energy we call faith, seems to connect with the very book itself."

Agnes Sanford believed “experience comes before theology.” She taught various visualization techniques, teaching that one could forgive another's sins through visualization.  The technique of visualization became the key to her inner healing teachings. One visualizes a situation in the past, then visualizes Jesus coming into their circumstance to solve the problem. She stated “I believe imagination is one of the most important keys to effective praying . . . God touches me through my imagination . . . Imagination is one of the keys to the relationship of prayer with God.” “Prayer through the imagination . . . picturing the healing.” She also promoted Jungian psychotherapy, and believed Jesus became a part of the collective unconscious of the human race.   Sanford called God “primal energy,”  “the very life-force existing in a radiation of an energy ... from which all things evolved,” that “God ... made everything out of Himself and  He put a part of Himself into everything” and called Jesus “that most profound of psychiatrists.”  Sanford's pastor was Morton Kelsey who studied at the C.G. Jung Institute near Zurich, Switzerland, and who became a Jungian psychologist, as did Sanford's son, John Sanford.

Agnes Sanford began a healing ministry in the '40s; received Pentecostal exp., in '53/54; pioneered teaching for the "healing of memories"; part of the "positive thinking" movement she presented God's healing work as following the laws of nature and positive thinking; she believed that God could work through "good" spirits as well as the spirits of people who have died; she taught that God used some mediums to heal; she believed that angels and dead saints could "speak and act in and through us."

Together with her husband, and alone after his death, she spoke to and taught groups all over the country about the power of prayer. She died in February 1982 after 35 years of ministry.

Excerpts from the following books may be read online:

The Healing Light

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