The Christ for the Nations Institute was founded by revivalist preacher and novelist James Gordon Lindsay, who was born on June 18, 1906, and died on April 1, 1973.
Early Life
Lindsay was born in Zion, Illinois, to parents who were followers of John Alexander Dowie, the American founder of healing revivalism. The little kid was influenced by John G. Lake after the family relocated to Portland, Oregon, and Charles Fox Parham converted him to Pentecostalism.
When he was eighteen, he started his ministry as a traveling evangelist, holding meetings at Pentecostal groups, British Israelite churches, and the Assembly of God. He began planning major convention gatherings by 1940, such as the Anglo-Saxon World Federation meetings in Vancouver.
He started working for William Branham in 1947 as a publicist and campaign manager, and in 1948 he co-founded Voice of Healing magazine. The Voice of Healing association, which launched and popularized the ministries of Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen, and numerous other well-known evangelists, was eventually fully run by Lindsay. Lindsay changed the organization’s name to Christ For The Nations in 1971 to better reflect its expanding missionary focus. Until his passing, he served as its leader.
Ministry
James Gordon Lindsay was brought up in a healing and Pentecostal environment. On June 18, 1906, he was born in Zion City, Illinois. Thomas Lindsay and Effie (Ramsey) Lindsay were his parents. They were followers of John Alexander Dowie, a well-known healing evangelist in the late nineteenth century who established Zion as a religious commune and professed to be the return of Elijah the Prophet.
When the city became bankrupt, after the collapse of Dowie, the Lindsay family moved to a Christian community led by Pisgah Finis E. Yoakum in California, and later to Portland, Oregon. At a gathering conducted by Charles Fox Parham, a pioneer in the Pentecostal movement in Topeka, Kansas, Lindsay became a Pentecostal convert.
He later became friends with John G. Lake, who was in charge of the Divine Healing Mission in Portland, Oregon, and Spokane, Washington, and had previously been a devotee of Dowie. Lindsay accompanied Lake on mission trips in California and the southern states in the 1920s. He then returned to Oregon and married Freda Schimpf after serving as a pastor of a Foursquare Gospel church in California.
Lindsay organized the 1940 Anglo-Saxon World Federation Convention in March in Vancouver, Canada, and was active in the British Israelite movement. Speakers at the gathering included Canadian clergyman Clem Davies, a KKK recruiter and supporter of an early version of Christian Identity Theology.
Published Books
Some of his published books are:
- Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia
- Adam Lindsay Gordon Poems
- Apostles, Prophets and Governments – Gordon Lindsay
- Christ; The Great Physician – Gordon Lindsay
- Common Murder – Lindsay Gordon Mystery
- Conferences Are Murder (The Fourth Lindsay Gordon mystery) – Gordon Lindsay
- God’s Master Key To Prosperity – Gordon Lindsay
- Prayer And Fasting – Gordon Lindsay
- The Charismatic Ministry – Gordon Lindsay
- William Branham A Man Sent From God – Gordon Lindsay
