Agnes Sanford

Agnes Mary Sanford (November 4, 1897 – February 21, 1982) was an American author and lay healer widely regarded as a founder of the modern Inner Healing movement. Born in Kashing (Jiaxing), China, to Southern Presbyterian missionary parents and later the wife of an Episcopal rector, she came to her healing work out of her own struggle with chronic depression, which she said began to lift after a clergyman laid hands on her in prayer.

Her first and best-known book, The Healing Light (1947), has sold over half a million copies and established her as a leading figure in restoring healing prayer to mainline Protestant churches. Sanford taught that God is an indwelling creative life-force and that prayer for healing works by consciously turning toward and cooperating with that power, often through vivid visualization of the desired wholeness and the laying on of hands.

This framing, picturing the healed condition as already real and expecting it in faith, overlaps closely with New Thought’s affirmative-prayer method, even as Sanford kept it within a sacramental Christian setting. She extended the work into “healing of memories,” prayer aimed at emotional and remembered wounds, seeding the broader Inner Healing and later charismatic-renewal healing ministries.