Word of Faith

The Word of Faith movement traces its theological roots to Essek William Kenyon, a Free Will Baptist pastor born in 1867 who founded Bethel Bible Institute in Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1898 and led it for the next 25 years. Kenyon's later writing, shaped by exposure to New Thought metaphysical teaching, coined the formula "what I confess, I possess" and argued that spoken faith could claim healing and financial provision directly from God, a teaching that circulated through his books and periodicals for decades after his death in 1948.

Kenneth E. Hagin, a Pentecostal minister, took Kenyon's teaching and built an institutional movement around it. Hagin incorporated the Kenneth Hagin Evangelistic Association in 1963 and established Rhema Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, training a generation of preachers directly in his own classrooms. Scholars, including apologist Robert M. Bowman Jr. writing for Watchman Fellowship, have documented passages in Hagin's published teaching copied nearly verbatim from Kenyon's earlier work, evidence of just how directly the movement's founding generation drew on its nineteenth century source.

Word of Faith teaching holds that believers, as God's spiritual offspring, can exercise a form of divine authority through confessed faith, extending to healing, deliverance and financial prosperity. It affirms the Trinity as orthodox doctrine, though critics have argued that its teaching on believers' spiritual status blurs the distinction between Creator and creature, a characterization Word of Faith teachers themselves reject.

Hagin's Bible school trained preachers; satellite and cable television gave those preachers a national audience without requiring them to build a congregation from scratch. Networks such as Trinity Broadcasting Network, founded in 1973, gave Word of Faith teaching a permanent, dedicated broadcast home, carrying its preachers into households far beyond the reach of any single church, in exactly the pattern earlier religious broadcasters, from Aimee Semple McPherson's radio station to Oral Roberts's televised healing crusades, had already established for the wider prosperity gospel of which the movement is now the most systematized theological expression.

The movement's reach brought sustained outside scrutiny alongside its growth. Evangelical apologetics organizations have published extended critiques of its teaching for decades, and beginning in 2007 the United States Senate Finance Committee opened an inquiry into the tax exempt finances of several prosperity preaching ministries with roots in Word of Faith teaching, closing in 2011 without a finding of unlawful conduct but with published findings unfavorable to several of the ministries it examined.

The movement remains institutionally decentralized: rather than a single denomination with shared governance, Word of Faith exists as a network of independent ministries, Bible schools and broadcast programs united by shared teaching and, in many cases, by direct lineage back to Hagin's own training center rather than by any formal denominational structure.