Kathryn Kuhlman was born on May 9, 1907, in Concordia, Missouri, the daughter of a Baptist father and a Methodist mother. At 14, she had a conversion experience at a gospel meeting that would change the course of her life. Still a teenager, she began preaching alongside her sister Myrtle and her brother-in-law, at a time when women rarely stood in the pulpit.
At 21, in 1928, alone in Boise, Idaho, she took the pulpit when the scheduled preacher failed to show and decided to pursue her own ministry. She settled in Denver in 1933, where she founded what became known as the Denver Revival Tabernacle, drawing large crowds, but it was also there that she met evangelist Burroughs Waltrip.
In 1938, Kuhlman married Waltrip, who had left his wife and children to be with her. The scandal drove away much of her congregation and her team; the marriage ended in separation in 1944 and divorce in 1948. She would later call this episode one of the greatest regrets of her life, especially for the suffering it caused Waltrip’s children.
Starting over in Franklin, Pennsylvania, she built a radio ministry and, beginning in 1946, began preaching on the Holy Spirit and witnessing cases of healing in her services. She moved her headquarters to Pittsburgh and, in 1954, created the Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation to sustain the work.
Unlike other healing evangelists of her time, Kuhlman avoided theatrical display and overt physical touch. Her services were marked by long moments of praise and silence, in which she said she was simply discerning what the Holy Spirit was already doing among the people.
In 1962, she published I Believe in Miracles, which would become one of the most widely read books on divine healing, and in 1965 she launched the TV program of the same name, one of the first Christian talk-show formats on American television, with more than five hundred episodes over a decade.
Success also brought scrutiny. A doctor who, in the 1970s, followed up with people who claimed healing at her services did not confirm the healing in several of the cases examined, and toward the end of her life she faced a lawsuit brought by a former administrator over the use of ministry funds. Kuhlman denied any wrongdoing, and the case was settled out of court before going to trial.
Kuhlman died on February 20, 1976, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from complications following heart surgery. Her legacy remains in the conviction that healing comes from the Holy Spirit, not from the preacher, a reminder that continues to shape charismatic and Pentecostal churches around the world.
