American religious leader
Frank Weston Sandford (October 2, 1862 – March 4, 1948) was a charismatic Christian religious leader in the United States who attained notoriety as the founder and leader of an apocalyptic sect known as "The Kingdom".
Born in Bowdoinham, Maine, to a farming family, Sandford was exposed to concepts such as premillennialism, the Higher Life movement, the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, and divine healing in his thirties. In August 1891, after performing an exorcism and claiming to hear the voice of God warn him of "Armageddon", he established a commune called the "Shiloh" in Durham, Maine. Commune members were forced to fast, pray for hours-on-end and obey Sandford's orders absolutely. After commune members disagreed about his biblical interpretations, he instituted a chain-of-command in which his orders were limited by only by those of God and Jesus Christ. Eventually he declared himself the incarnation of the prophet Elijah and King David, and established The Kingdom.
Considered by former members and many of his neighbors to be an autocrat who insisted on unquestioning loyalty, Sandford regularly starved his followers, which resulted in deadly outbreaks of smallpox, diphtheria, and other infectious diseases. The death of 14-year-old Leander Bartlett lead to his conviction for manslaughter and cruelty to children in 1904, though a 1905 ruling by the Maine Supreme Court reversed the convictions. Sandford then sailed to Jerusalem on multiple missionary voyages. In 1910, he traveled aboard the barquentine "Kingdom" to Africa with more than seventy men, women, and children. In March 1911, "Kingdom" went aground and was destroyed off the coast of French West Africa, an event that inspired Sandford to sail to Greenland in an attempt create a mission station there. Because he knowingly sailed with insufficient food and supplies, six crew members were stricken with scurvy and died on his return to Portland.
Sandford was detained by authorities and sentenced to seven years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. While there, he sent letters to his followers that were distributed among members of his commune. In 1918, Sandford was released on good behavior and returned to the "Shiloh", resuming his responsibilities after previously attempting to install his son, John, as leader. Nevertheless, two years later, the death of another commune member led his sect to be forcibly dispersed in "the Scattering". After the commune was evacuated by law, Sandford moved to New York's Catskill Mountains to be closer to God. On March 4, 1948, Sandford died and his body was secretly buried by his followers. All of his belongings burned in various house fires. Although his absence retarded the growth of the small sect, it survived, in attenuated form, into the 21st century with the creation of the Kingdom Christian Ministries in 1998.
Early life and education.
Frank Sandford was born in Bowdoinham, Maine, the tenth child of a farming family. An early companion recalled young Sandford as a natural leader, stating that he was always the one who "drove the horse and steered the boat"; if they played ball, "he was always a captain." Sandford's father died when he was age 14, and by age 16 he was teaching school during an era in which physical prowess was often necessary to establish classroom discipline.
During his second year of teaching, Sandford reluctantly attended a revival meeting at his mother's Free Will Baptist church and was converted on February 29, 1880. He threw away his tobacco and announced his conversion publicly, not only at church but also at Nichols Latin School, where worldly cosmopolitanism was the preferred pose.
Entering Bates College on a general scholarship, Sandford was elected class president and served as both coach and catcher of the baseball team. He graduated in 1886 with honors and was chosen to give a commencement address. For one summer Sandford captained a semi-pro baseball team and was approached by professional scouts. After a teammate ridiculed him for attending church during Maine's Fast Day, he returned to Bates to attend Cobb Divinity School.
Frustrated by the seminary's mixture of formalism and religious modernism, Sandford later said that God had addressed him directly with words from the gospel of Matthew: "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." For the rest of his life he distrusted academic religion. Soon thereafter, at age 24, Sandford dropped out of seminary after he was called as pastor by the Free Will Baptist church in Topsham, Maine. He was frenetically energetic, and within three years his revivals resulted in three hundred conversions and more than a hundred baptisms. Besides serving as pastor, he became principal of the Topsham schools and organized sports programs for both local children and workers at a paper mill.
Early travels.
Beginning in 1887, Sandford's religious views changed dramatically. In July, he attended Dwight L. Moody’s "College of Colleges" at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts, the second annual meeting of the Student Volunteer Movement. The college men who attended represented a revival of interest in foreign missions among more privileged Americans. Moody himself provided Sandford with three key religious concepts: personal holiness, living by faith, and informal preaching. Shortly thereafter, Sandford read Hannah Whitall Smith's "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life" (1875). Smith was an exponent of "higher life" Christianity; but what most attracted Sandford was her "emphasis on action, on a life that acts on faith, that obeys by doing."
Later that fall, Sandford was present for a religious conference that featured the Rev. A. B. Simpson, who had come to Maine specifically to organize the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Simpson's ministry emphasized not only missions and deeper life holiness but also faith healing. It was at this conference that Sandford met Helen Kinney, the daughter of a wealthy cotton broker, who had surrendered a career in art to become a foreign missionary. The following year, in the summer of 1888, Sandford attended the Niagara Bible Conference, which emphasized the imminent, premillennial return of Jesus Christ.
These diverse, yet related, strands of late 19th-century evangelicalism came together for Sandford after he accepted the pastorate of a more affluent Free Will Baptist church in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Following a period of emotional depression—perhaps a nervous breakdown—he was temporarily released by his church after the denomination invited him and another young minister to travel around the world. Sandford visited Japan, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire. In China he toured the China Inland Mission of Hudson Taylor, where he noted with admiration that "all depend upon God for support and divide their supplies equally"—a model for his own Shiloh. Visiting the Holy Land, he developed a lifelong passion for more knowledge about it, but he nearly died when his steamer sank off Jaffa.
Pre-Shiloh activities.
After Sandford's return to the United States, the pastorate seemed tame, his congregation narrow-minded. In August 1891, Sandford had two strange experiences: he tentatively, but (at least according to his own testimony) successfully, cast demons out of a friend; and the following morning, he heard whispered in the trees the single word: "Armageddon." Shortly thereafter, Sandford convinced Kinney, whom he had met again as a missionary in Japan, to marry him. When he suggested leaving the pastorate and preaching the gospel without visible support, she replied, "I think it would be lovely."
On New Year's Day, 1893, Sandford told his church that God had told him, "Go." He resigned his pulpit and gave away his savings in the teeth of an economic panic and depression. Sandford and his wife then began holding meetings in rural Maine—at the beginning with virtually no congregations and no financial support. Eventually he achieved some success among people in Maine's coastal hill regions and contributions came in plentifully, although Sandford did not solicit money or even pass a collection plate.
By the fall of 1894, Sandford believed that he no longer bore responsibility for his actions, that he need only respond to the movings of the Holy Spirit. Thus abandoning the Free Will Baptists, he began to issue a monthly magazine, "Tongues of Fire from the World's Evangelization Crusade on Apostolic Principles", in which he advertised for other workers to join him in his ministry. A year later, with a small but committed following of young people, Sandford announced the opening of a school, soon given the name "Holy Ghost and Us Bible School." The school charged no tuition, offered no courses, and had no teachers except Sandford himself and no textbooks except the Bible.
Shiloh.
In 1896, Sandford became convinced that God had told him to build a home for the Bible school on a sandy hill near Durham, Maine. Despite having only three cents in his pocket, he kept faith that God would provide the means of putting up a building without his explicitly asking for money. Although Sandford eventually decided that publishing a list of needs in his "Tongues of Fire" would be acceptable, the manner in which the money and volunteer labor was provided by supporters was nearly miraculous in any case. Sandford had intended to name only the school's main building "Shiloh" (after a place in the Bible), but the name "Shiloh" was found to be more mellifluous than "The Holy Ghost and Us" and thus became the informal name of his movement.
At its height, the Shiloh had more than six hundred residents who attempted to "live in the supernatural." None worked for pay, and all depended on God to supply their material needs. To live at Shiloh meant to "be in a constant state of readiness for the 'Holy Spirit's latest,' as Sandford put it. This meant no settling into ruts of any kind. It meant being ready to do any job, especially those you were least adept at...It meant being open to last-minute changes in schedule." What little schedule there was consisted of one or two hours of private devotions in the morning, breakfast and kitchen chores, prayer at 9:00am, classes until noon, and lunch before personal household or office duties. The schedule might be interrupted at any moment by some special request for prayer; "God's work could not be crammed into a human schedule, and fussy ideas about order were not appropriate."
Theological development.
Except for celebrating Jewish Feasts and keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, Sandford's theology was, at this point, not far from mainstream evangelicalism. Nevertheless, because he believed that Thursday was the day on which Jesus was crucified, he and his followers prayed for six hours (from 9:00am to 3:00pm) on that day. In the summer of 1896, Sandford publicly discussed the two witnesses mentioned in the Book of Revelation who would appear before Christ's Second Coming, and he declared that his school would "stand by and if need be die" with them. When Sandford's son John was born shortly after the dedication of Shiloh, he said that (like John the Baptist), the boy had been "filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb."
British Israelism.
By 1898, Sandford had found additional spiritual and material support among Higher Life Christians in Boston and London, and he concluded that God now wanted him to establish an outpost in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. Visiting Jerusalem for the first time, he dashed off a paper announcing that the Ten Lost Tribes were England and the U.S., blood descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been carried into captivity by the Assyrians in 721 BC. British Israelism was a religious version of ideas about Anglo-Saxon supremacy that were common to the contemporary English-speaking world, and the doctrine made the Bible all the more relevant because its prophecies seemed to apply to the people of Shiloh and the nation of which it was a part.
Divine healing.
By the early 20th century, the doctrine of divine healing had become an important part of Sandford's teaching. Initially skeptical, he resolved to “preach that part of the Bible” after attending an 1887 meeting where A. B. Simpson had spoken on the subject. In 1897, Sandford had witnessed and praised the miracles of contemporary faith healer John Alexander Dowie. Soon "Tongues of Fire" reported healings of pneumonia, cancer, diphtheria, catarrh, "sick headache," sprained wrist, dropsy, typhoid, mental derangement, broken bones, and "utter exhaustion." A local three-year-old girl who had been pronounced permanently blind by medical authorities suddenly regained her sight after prayer was offered for her at Shiloh. But the most spectacular case was the "resurrection" of Olive Mills, who had been