To those familiar with Pentecostal history, Smith Wigglesworth is a treasure.

     Smith Wigglesworth was an Englishman who lived from the mid-1800’s to 1947. He never read any book in his life except the Bible. He said, “Why should I read books when I can read the Book of all books?” He was also a man of deep and continuing prayer, praying usually for a few moments every 30 minutes for all his waking hours. Each day for many years, he refused to go to sleep until he had won at least one person to the Lord. Wigglesworth was also very strong on living a holy life separated unto God.

     Smith had an exceptionally powerful healing ministry which reached its greatest prominence in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He had a faith in prayer for healing that was far beyond bold. It was insistent. It was absolutely DEMANDING. However, don’t misunderstand his demanding faith. He was not demanding anything of God. As he prayed, his faith demanded that sickness, disease, and devils bow to the victory Christ won against them at Calvary and depart the minds and bodies of the suffering. His friends referred to him as an “Apostle of Faith.”

     Although he attended the national conventions of the Assemblies of God in his native England, and some of their meetings in the US, Smith never formally joined any denomination.

     Charles Goodwin told me of Mom and Dad's brush with Smith Wigglesworth.

     The year was 1935.  Charles Goodwin was 18 months old.  He had been born with a hernia.  Mom and Dad had prayed and believed God since his birth for the healing to come.  Mom and Dad were members of the Assemblies of God, but it would be three years yet before they entered full time ministry.

      Smith Wigglesworth came to Dallas, Texas to preach and hold a healing meeting at the largest Assemblies of God church in Texas at the time.  It held 1,700 people.

     After the sermon, Wigglesworth began ministering to those in the healing line.  Mom and Dad got in line, with young Charles in Mom's arms.  Wigglesworth worked his way towards them.

     He quickly laid his hands on Charles, and simply said, "God bless the baby!"

     Wigglesworth looked directly at Dad and said, "You're called to the ministry!"

     Dad replied, "I know it.  I'm making preparations for it now."

     Wigglesworth said, "Ok," and moved to the next people in line.

     Mom left there a little upset.  She had  expected Wigglesworth to perhaps pray with a bit more fervency, and a little bit longer.  She certainly didn't expect a simple, "God bless the baby!"

     No healing manifested.

     Time passed.

     One day while Dad was at his job as assistant engineer at the Brown Cracker and Candy Company in Dallas, he began to feel the Spirit of God move in his spirit.  He took a break, and walked out a second floor door that opened onto the roof of the first floor.  He stepped behind some air circulation equipment on the roof where no one could see him.  He knelt down and began to pray for his son.  In just a few minutes the prayer burden lifted and he knew his son was healed.

     That night when Dad went home, he found his son's hernia healed.  The healing manifested at the time Dad knelt and prayed.

     Charles told me, "It wasn't Wigglesworth's prayers that healed me.  It was the prayers of my Dad!"

     The story may not have ended there.

     This was in 1935--three years before Mom and Dad went into ministry as pastors.  

     There was an interesting spiritual similarity between the Goodwins and Wigglesworth of which I wish to make note.  I'll need to go into Mom and Dad's history a bit--years before this contact with Wigglesworth.

     Mom grew up in a Christian home.  Her father was a strict lay-Baptist preacher.  Her mother was a strong Christian also.  Mom's mother had a lot of spiritual experiences such as visions, dreams, and times in which she perceived some things in her spirit.  Among her siblings, Mom and her sister Julia--who everyone called "Ainee" (pronounced A-nee)--seemed to inherit this spiritual trait also.  Even as young children, Mom and her sister Ainee had visions and spiritual experiences from the Lord.

     Let's stop here and learn something for a moment.

     Is it possible for a spiritual heritage to come down through a family?  Certainly.  Look at what Paul wrote to Timothy:  

"When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in you also."--II Tim. 1:5. 

     It is not unusual at all to see a godly or demonic spiritual heritage pass down from one generation to another in a family.  Many times with psychics, you will see a fortune-telling ability pass down generation after generation in a family.  In some families, the women have all been fortune tellers going back for many generations.  Edgar Cayce, the notable psychic of the 1940's, had a father that was a water-witcher--a person who could find water by holding out a forked tree branch.  And his grandfather, had an odd ability to speak to snakes and charm them.  That tendancy towards the demonic came from grandfather to father to son in the Cayce family.

     A godly heritage can also affect generation after generation as we see with Timothy and his family.  An "unfeigned faith" passed from grandmother to mother to Timothy.  Paul acknowledged this heritage that resided in Timothy.

     Don't misunderstand me.  There is an old saying that is true, "God has no grandchildren."  Every person in every generation must accept or reject Christ and his plan for their lives.  No one gets a free ride, or a leg-up on anyone else.  But the Bible and years of personal observation have shown me that there can be a spiritual tendancy to the demonic or towards the godly, come down through a family.

     So it was also in Mom Goodwins' family.

     Mom Goodwin's parents were strong Christians.  In one sense, perhaps a little too strong.  Her mother was a kind and godly woman, but her father was quite strong and very direct in his spiritual opinions.  

     Mom inheirted some of his directness.  As anyone will tell you who knew Mom more than about 15 minutes, if you said anything in Sister Goodwin's presence that she thought didn't line up with the Word of God, she would rebuke you in the name of Jesus.  And when you've been rebuked by Sister Goodwin, you know you've been rebuked.  It just took a piece out of your hide.

     The first time I ever visited Mom in her home, I got a dose of Mom Goodwin's corrections.

     I had been there only a few minutes, when I started to say something and I didn't even get the chance to finish my sentence.  The conversation went like this:

     I said, "Sister Goodwin, I believe God has given me the gift of--"

     And Mom corrected me immediately.

     Increasing in volume by the second, She said:

    "No He didn't!

     No He didn't!

    NO HE DIDN'T!!"

     She continued, "Honey, God didn't give YOU anything.  It is His gifts, and His power, and He will not share His glory with anyone.  You are just a vessel He uses."

     My jaw had dropped to the floor, and it took me a few seconds to recover.

     It is funny, you would think such corrections and rebukes would be damaging to a person.  And if delivered in a condeming or hateful way, they would have been damaging indeed.  But delivered in love, they jerked you hard enough to shake the religious nonsense out of your head.  They forced you to shape up and mature much faster than a bunch of pampering would have done.

     God chooses sometimes to mature his servants in this way--by putting them in very challenging situations, which forces them to grow up fast.  We see this in the life of Joseph.  He started out as the pampered favorite son of a Patriarch.  As such, he was useless to himself and to God.  So God prepared him for a great work by putting him first in slavery, and then in prison.  You talk about a rude awakening!  But the difficulties brought Joseph into great wisdom, discerning, and maturity. 

     Be careful when you ask God to use you mightily.  The price you have to pay may be much higher than you realize!

     A long-time member of the Goodwins' church has told me that the maturity-producing corrections weren't limited to one-to-one exchanges.  This person said, "Whenever we saw Mom step up on the platform, put one hand on her hip and point her finger at us, we knew we were about to get it!  [a collective stern correction]"

     The corrections could sting quite a bit.  But the reason we all tolerated such stern corrections was because we knew Mom genuinely loved us, she had our best interests at heart, she knew more than we did, and her corrections were almost always 100% on target.

     Sometimes when I left her house, I would think on the corrections she had just given me, and say to myself, "She couldn't be more wrong!" 

     Then after I got back home, and a few days had passed, her corrections would begin to break through my thinking and I would say to myself, "Well...yeah...Sister Goodwin was right about that....And...well...she was right about this other thing too...and this...and this..."  And I would begin to accept her corrections.

     We all experienced that.  She treated everyone like they were one of her kids.  I need to ask Brother Copeland some day if she ever let him have it with both barrels.  I'll bet his answer will be, "Oh yeah!...And she was right..."

     So the spiritual heritage of stern corrections came to Mom from her father.  

     Similarly, there was a tendency towards spiritual gifts that came into Mom from her mother.  

     The spiritual experiences of Mom's mother took place in the late 1800's.  Mom and her sister's experiences started probably around 1910.  These took place before and outside the Pentecostal outpouring that took place in Topeka in 1900 and spread to Azusa Street in LA about 1906, and from there eventually to other parts of the United States and to the world.

     At the time these experiences were happening with Mom and her sister Ainee, Pentecostal churches that taught and embraced spiritual gifts were few and far between.   Mom attended a Nazarene church as a child and was born-again at a young age.

     Mom and her people had very little understanding of these strong spiritual experiences, except that they always proved out to be true, and that they came from God.

     As the years passed, the experiences from God continued to come to Mom.  She and Dad married, were filled with the Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues, and began attending an Assemblies of God church in the early 1930's.  Even at that time, there were very few books published about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

     Mom and others had messages in tongues in the early years of the Goodwins' church ministry, but no one had the ability to interpret them.  They began praying and seeking God, and they felt it best to ask God to give the gift of the interpretation of tongues to Brother Goodwin since he was the pastor.  Eventually, that gift did begin operating through Brother Goodwin.

     As these experiences came, Dad would search through the Bible and find similar experiences and expressions in Scripture that validated the experiences they were having.

     Then in the mid-1940's, Howard Carter's books about spiritual gifts were published and the Goodwins came across them.  From his teachings, Mom and Dad were able to begin to categorize diffferent revelations as the Word of Wisdom, or the Word of Knowledge, etc.

     But the most prominent spiritual gifts they had in manifestation were speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues.  And these gifts would manifest in unusual ways. 

      As Mom spoke out a message in tongues, she would usually accompany the message with certain actions and gestures. Usually without having observed Mom’s specific actions, Dad would then interpret the message into English, repeating similar gestures and mannerisms which would prove to be illustrative of the message.  Also many times as Dad was preaching, he would pause, and Mom Goodwin would speak a brief message in tongues, which Dad would interpret, and the interpretation of the message in tongues would fit in precisely with that point in Dad’s sermon, sometimes expounding or re-emphasizing the importance of some statement Dad had made.  It was very moving to see the Spirit preach a sermon along with Mom and Dad Goodwin in that way.

     I asked Charles Goodwin if his mother and father had ever sat under a ministry that ministered in tongues in these specific ways, or if they had known anyone flowing in this particular pattern.  He told me they hadn't.  He believes it originated uniquely with them, and so do I.  However, there was an interesting similarity between Smith Wigglesworth and the Goodwins.  

     I was reading a biography of Wigglesworth written by a close friend who had sat in many of Smith’s meetings over the course of 40 years. The author reported that Smith did something which was considered most unusual at the time.  In fact, the author had never seen anyone minister in this particular way before or since.  Smith would preach along, suddenly pause briefly, speak a sentence or two in tongues, interpret the message, and continue right on with his sermon. The author said the brief messages in tongues always fit in with whatever point Smith was emphasizing and were a great blessing to all who heard it.  The Goodwins operated identically to Wigglesworth in giving brief messages in tongues in the midst of sermons.

     However, ministering in tongues in this fashion developed in the Goodwins and Wigglesworth, independently of each other.   

     The Goodwins and Smith Wigglesworth ran their race, they finished their course, and they kept the faith.  They've gone to Glory now, but their ministries continue on today in those of us who knew them.  Praise God.   

     To read an online biography of Wigglesworth, click on the following link from The Pentecostal Pioneers Organization:

     CLICK HERE. 

Copyright 2006 Mel C. Montgomery. All rights reserved.  Material may be copied and shared with others if done so in entirety, without charge, and if attribution is given.