After a series of arguments with Myrtle in Boise, Idaho, Everett abandoned Myrtle as well as year old Kathryn and Helen Gulliford, the revival pianist, as he traveled on to South Dakota. The women were unable to make enough to continue by themselves. Myrtle was unwilling to continue due to the dire financial situation and had already decided to return to Everett.
Despite her misgivings, Myrtle chose to go back to Everett, and she left the two women to their independent path.
Kuhlman was ready. She was an eager, enthusiastic, ambitious young woman determined to take the revival circuit by storm. Kuhlman began to travel with Helen throughout Idaho to preach. One participant in her Idaho services remembered the evangelists regularly filled the Baptist churches during their two to six week revival meetings.
Kuhlman and Gulliford met with success in Denver, and established the Denver Revival Tabernacle in the s. Kathryn Kuhlman adored her father. His death was a stunning blow to Kuhlman. She received a phone call on the Tuesday after Christmas. At the age of 28 she was finally coming into her own as a leader of the thriving congregation at the Denver Revival Tabernacle.
Soon she made the acquaintance of Burroughs Waltrip, an evangelist who came to Denver on a preaching junket in The pictures of Kuhlman and Waltrip during their courtship show a handsome and happy pair, smiling and obviously enjoying each other and their friends.
The pair began to make the mile trip between the churches a little too often for simply professional reasons. Their congregations began to suspect an affair. Such a union would be disastrous for the couple, especially for Kuhlman, due to the fact that Burroughs Waltrip was still married at the time, with a wife and two young sons in Texas. Despite the danger to his ministry, Waltrip divorced his wife Jessie and abandoned his children, Burroughs Waltrip, Jr.
Kuhlman made the staggeringly foolish decision to accept his proposal. Helen Gulliford resigned her position in protest.
She moved to Pittsburgh, where she began the transformation into the Miracle Lady. Judging from the rapidity with which she left Waltrip to return to her work, she instantly regretted her decision to marry him. Kuhlman faced a difficult problem. To preserve any shred of her career, she had to leave Waltrip and try to start again, but such a decision could itself destroy her.
A divorced female evangelist was not much better than a female evangelist married to a divorced man. In a masterful reinterpretation of her life, Kuhlman chose instead to present her decision to leave Waltrip as a difficult moment of submission, the yielding of a strong-willed woman to the relentless call of God on her life.
She obliquely indicated throughout her career that she had realized her decision to marry Waltrip separated her from God and from her call to ministry. She represented this moment as one of consecration, where she was baptized in the Holy Spirit and set aside for what would become a ministry of miracles through the Holy Spirit. If the divorced Kathryn Kuhlman was dead, then critics had little to work with.
With this reinterpretation of her persona, she was able to move beyond what should have been a career-ending mistake and even turn it to her own benefit.
Turning Point 4: Producing the talk show I Believe in Miracles : Kuhlman was the first to combine the power of television talk with charismatic Christianity. Between and , during the height of the charismatic renewal movement, Kuhlman recorded over episodes of I Believe in Miracles. Her show was broadcast in syndication throughout the United States and Canada. Televising Christianity did more than simply offer a new field for revival and evangelizing; it changed the way the Christian message was presented and received.
I Believe in Miracles contributed to the changes in American Christianity produced through the media of television. Never before had a religious leader hosted a television talk show like Miracles. Television viewers could now experiment with new forms of Christianity in the privacy of their own homes without the risk of public exposure. This was an important component in the transformation of charismatic Christianity, since popular culture, the press, and mainstream Christianity still regarded charismatics as freakish.
In the new format of the talk show, the experience of the audience changed from worship participant to detached onlooker. Kuhlman and her guests conversed with each other as the television audience watched. It was a significantly different means of communicating the charismatic Christian gospel. The non- threatening space of television combined with the everyday appearance and behavior of the guests made I Believe in Miracles a significant contributor to the transformation of charismatic Christianity.
Turning Point 5: Filming a Miracle Service: Throughout her career, Kuhlman refused to film her Miracle Services, preferring to share the testimonies of those who experienced the miraculous through her books and television show.
In , she finally allowed a miracle service to be filmed in its entirety. Despite her enthusiasm for all media, especially television, Kuhlman did not record a miracle service in its entirety until very late in her career. When those who knew Kuhlman only from her talk show tuned in for her special, they saw a markedly different vision of Kathryn Kuhlman and charismatic Christianity. In Vegas, cameras captured the same events with all their attendant chaos and emotion.
Kuhlman also presented a much more melodramatic image of herself inside the Shrine in Vegas. She removed the mediating presence of testimony and gave audiences access to the complete miracle service experience. Throughout her career, Kuhlman worked ceaselessly to hone an image of her ministry as refined, professional, and most especially, not fanatical.
The carefully crafted media image of Kuhlman as the grand dame of gentrified charismatic Christianity predominated on her television show and in her books. Kuhlman the talk show host shared cultural space with genteel colleagues such as Dinah Shore and Barbara Walters.
Kuhlman the miracle lady did not share such gentrified associates. For those outside the historic Pentecostal churches and other Christian groups with a revivalist past, the service itself had little cultural or historical context. The Vegas miracle service offered a vision of charismatic Christianity that was genuine but also disconcerting for the viewer who resided outside of charismatic circles.
Her mother was a harsh disciplinarian, who showed little love or affection. On the other hand, she had an extremely close and loving relationship with her father. She would describe, as a small child how, her father would come home from work and she would hang on his leg and cling to him. She often said that her relationship with God the Father was extremely real because of her relationship with her own father. Kuhlman was converted, when she was 14, at an evangelistic meeting held in a small Methodist church.
When she was 16 she graduated from high school, which only went to tenth grade in their town. He older sister Myrtle had married an itinerant evangelist, Everett B. They spent their time traveling and asked that Kathryn could join them for the summer. Her parents agreed and she went to Oregon to help out. She worked with them, and often gave her testimony.
When the summer was over she wanted to stay, and the couple agreed. She ended up working with them for five years. The evangelistic team was made up of four people, Everette, Myrtle, Kathryn, and pianists named Helen Gulliford.
In Everette missed a meeting in Boise, Idaho. Myrtle and Kathryn preached to cover for Everette. The pastor of the church encouraged Kathryn to step out on her own. Helen agreed to join her. Her first sermon was in a run-down pool hall in Boise, Idaho. The team covered Idaho, Utah, and Colorado for the following five years. In they moved into Pueblo, Colorado. They set up in an abandoned Montgomery Ward warehouse. They stayed there for six months.
Denver, being a much bigger city, was the next stop. They moved several times but ended up in a paper company's warehouse, which they named the Kuhlman Revival Tabernacle. Then in they moved once more to an abandoned truck garage they named the Denver Revival Tabernacle. Kathryn was seeing a lot of success in Denver. The church grew to about members. She began a radio show called "Smiling Through" and invited speakers from all over the country.
One of them was Phil Kerr who taught on divine healing. In another invited evangelist was Burroughs Waltrip. Waltrip was bad news for Kuhlman. He was a charismatic, handsome man several years older than she was. There was an immediate attraction, and one family claims to have seen the couple embracing in , but he was married and had two children. Waltrip left Denver and went home to Austin, Texas, but the relationship simmered between Kuhlman and Waltrip.
In he was invited back to Denver to take the pulpit for two months. Shortly after he divorced his wife and abandoned his two sons. He then spread the story that his wife had left him. He moved to Mason City, Iowa, where he told everyone he was single, and started a new ministry. It was state of the art with a disappearing pulpit and an art deco style.
He appeared to be a successful and dynamic preacher. There was an ongoing relationship between Kuhlman and Waltrip, and they married in September Kuhlman was naive about the consequences of her choices and the marriage was a disaster. She announced to her church that she and Waltrip were married and they would go between Denver and Mason City preaching at their two churches. Most of the people in her congregation left due to her relationship with Waltrip.
She gave up her church in Denver, lost some of her closest associates, and moved to Mason City. Waltrip's success turned out to be a pipe dream as well. The Radio Chapel was completed in June of By October Waltrip could not meet his debts. In December Waltrip was demanding a higher salary, even with the shortfall in income. His Board of Directors quit and left him to deal with the finances.
His solution was not to pay the mortgage or debts on the Chapel. Radio Chapel went into bankruptcy.
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