Spiritual Search
Beginning in 1887, Sandford's life 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 important religious ideas: 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 Smith's "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. (At the latter meeting Sandford also met Helen Kinney, the daughter of a wealthy cotton broker, who had surrendered a career in art to become a foreign missionary.) Finally, in the summer of 1888, Sandford attended the Niagara Bible Conference, which emphasized the imminent, premillennial return of 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 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, Egypt, and Palestine. 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, Sandford developed a life-long passion for more knowledge about it, but he nearly died when his steamer sank off Jaffa.
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