Many Christians, after conversion, feel something is missing: a more stable Christian life, less anxious, more surrendered to God day by day. It was this search for a “higher Christian life” that William Boardman put into words for millions of readers in the 19th century.
Born on October 11, 1810, in Smithboro, New York, Boardman had a skeptical youth, distant from faith. Converted while still young, he nearly abandoned his call to ministry for the temptation of business, until financial failures and the spiritual steadfastness of his wife, Mary Adams, whom he married in 1837, brought him back.
He studied theology at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati between 1843 and 1846 and became a Presbyterian pastor. He worked for the American Sunday School Union and held pastorates in New Jersey and California, besides serving with the YMCA and the Christian Commission in Philadelphia during the American Civil War.
In 1858 he published The Higher Christian Life, a book that became a bestseller in the United States and England. The work argued that, beyond conversion, there was a second decisive experience of surrender and the power of the Holy Spirit, and it helped ignite a holiness revival on British soil.
Between 1873 and 1874, Boardman traveled through England alongside Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, contributing to the rise of the Keswick Convention. He later settled in London, where he would spend the rest of his life.
From the mid-1870s, he drew closer to the teaching of faith healing, influenced by Charles Cullis, Dorothea Trudel, and Johann Blumhardt, and helped found, with Elizabeth Baxter, the Bethshan healing home in London in 1882. His discouragement of the use of medicine and his emphasis on experience over careful exegesis of Scripture were criticized by other evangelicals of the time. One of the healing testimonies he most publicized, that of a boy whose broken arm was said to have healed instantly, was later disputed by the young man himself, by then an adult, who described the case as merely a minor fracture that healed naturally.
In 1885 he organized, at the Agricultural Hall in London, the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness, gathering preachers such as A. B. Simpson. Historians see the event as a bridge between the holiness movement and emerging Pentecostalism. Boardman died in London on February 4, 1886.
His conviction that conversion is not the finish line, but the beginning of a daily life dependent on the Spirit, still echoes today in the spirituality of those who serve on the mission field, where weariness and distance demand precisely this pursuit of a deeper life in Christ.
