MANNAFEST

The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Revival Streams

Smith Wigglesworth

1859–1947

A plumber who could barely read, whose wife taught him the Bible and whose prayers for the sick filled halls across the world.

The life

Smith Wigglesworth (June 8, 1859 – March 12, 1947) was a British Pentecostal evangelist known throughout the 20th-c. evangelical world as "the Apostle of Faith." Born in Menston, Yorkshire, England to a poor working-class family, he worked from age six (pulling turnips) and later as a plumber's apprentice; he was illiterate well into adulthood — his wife Polly Featherstone-Wigglesworth taught him to read, using only the Bible as his text.

He was converted at age 13 in a Methodist context; subsequently joined the Salvation Army for several years, attended Wesleyan-Holiness meetings, and was influenced by the Keswick Higher-Life and Plymouth Brethren streams. His decisive Pentecostal Spirit-baptism with tongues came in 1907 in Sunderland, England, under Alexander Boddy's All Saints Anglican parish-house meetings (a key early Pentecostal site in the British revival).

After his Spirit-baptism, his preaching ministry exploded — he traveled internationally across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, France, India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and elsewhere with documented healing ministry that included roughly twenty raised-from-the-dead testimonies (per ministry-historical documentation), thousands of healings, mass conversions, and substantial congregational impact.

His teaching was famously direct, faith-confrontational, and physically forceful in prayer-for-the-sick contexts. He was widely regarded across the early Pentecostal movement as one of the most-anointed healing voices of the era — peer to John G. Lake, Aimee Semple McPherson, Charles Parham, and the broader Azusa-Street-and-British-Apostolic-Faith generation. He died in 1947 at age 87, remarkably reportedly during prayer at the funeral of a close friend.

Go further

Read them yourself — the works below are the next step, and the public-domain ones are free to read in full.

Why this voice is honored here

**Founder note (per Marcus Brown, 2026-04-25, brief reference):** Marcus Brown has personally engaged Wigglesworth through two audiobook works in his library — *Bold as a Lion* and *Sermons by Smith Wigglesworth* (compiled posthumous sermon collection). The "only believe" framework, the documented healing-and-raised-dead testimony catalog, and the integrated holiness-and-faith Wesleyan-Holiness-Pentecostal synthesis carry forward into Marcus Brown's understanding of how operative faith functions in believer-life. Wigglesworth's value to the MannaFest registry is generationally foundational: he is the architectural PD voice for the entire 20th-c. classical-Pentecostal healing-revival stream that produced (in various streams) Hagin, Bonnke, Bill Johnson, Heidi Baker, Mahesh Chavda, Daniel Kolenda, and broader contemporary continuationist Christianity. Without Wigglesworth in the registry as a Tier 1 anchor, the historical-architectural lineage for the contemporary healing-revival stream is left implicit; promoting him to Tier 1 makes the lineage explicit and queryable.