Smith Wigglesworth was born on June 10, 1859, in Menston, Yorkshire, into a very poor family. As a child he worked picking turnips in the fields alongside his mother and later in factories, with no chance to attend school. He reached adulthood unable to read.
At the age of eight he gave his life to Christ. He learned the trade of plumbing as an apprentice to a man connected with the Plymouth Brethren, who gave him his first solid biblical teaching. In 1882, at twenty three, he married Mary Jane “Polly” Featherstone, a Salvation Army preacher, who taught him to read using nothing but the Bible.
In 1888 the couple opened the Bowland Street Mission in Bradford, a simple work among the poor of the city. There they distributed food and prayed for the sick of the neighborhood, while Wigglesworth kept working as a plumber to support the family. The mission grew steadily, gaining a reputation in the region.
In 1907, during the revival led by Alexander Boddy in Sunderland, Wigglesworth received the laying on of hands from Mary Boddy and experienced what he described as the baptism in the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues. The experience launched him decisively into itinerant ministry.
A plumber with no formal training, he became one of the most sought after preachers of early Pentecostalism, traveling through the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, India, Ceylon and much of Europe, always proclaiming healing through faith in Christ.
His manner of praying for the sick, however, was marked by harsh methods: he was known for striking the abdomen of sick people forcefully, claiming he was confronting “the devil,” not the person. He also preached the total rejection of doctors and medicine, teaching that seeking medical treatment was a sign of lack of faith, a radical conviction that did not spare his own family: his daughter remained deaf, and he himself lived, without treatment, with kidney stones until the end of his life. Reports of people raised from the dead through his ministry circulated widely, but historians point out that no case was independently documented.
Widowed since 1913, when Polly died, Wigglesworth kept preaching into his final years, recording his sermons in the books “Ever Increasing Faith” (1924) and “Faith That Prevails” (1938), works still read by Pentecostals and charismatics around the world.
He died on March 12, 1947, at eighty seven, during the funeral of a close friend in Wakefield, Yorkshire. His journey, from illiterate plumber to preacher heard in dozens of countries, remains a reminder that God can use simple lives radically surrendered to faith, even when their methods demand historical discernment.
