E. M. Bounds

Edward McKendree Bounds was born August 15, 1835, in Shelby County, Missouri, the son of Thomas Jefferson Bounds and Hester Ann Purnell. His formal education was limited, ending at age nineteen when he began practicing law in Hannibal, Missouri. The transition from law to ministry came suddenly in 1859 when, at twenty-four, he felt called to preach. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and assigned to a circuit in Missouri just as the nation was sliding toward civil war.

When war came, Bounds faced an impossible choice. His denomination had split over slavery in 1844, and his Missouri conference supported the Confederacy. In 1861, Union forces arrested him for refusing to take a loyalty oath to the federal government. He spent eighteen months in federal prison before being exchanged in 1863. Upon his release, he immediately enlisted as a chaplain in the Confederate Army, serving with the Fifth Missouri Regiment until the war's end. The experience marked him permanently — he witnessed the battles of Franklin and Nashville, ministered to dying soldiers, and saw his regiment decimated. After the surrender, he walked from Tennessee back to Missouri, a journey that took several weeks.

The postwar years brought a different kind of difficulty. Bounds served Methodist churches across Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, often in communities struggling with Reconstruction's aftermath. He married Emma Elizabeth Barnett in 1876; she died two years later. In 1883, he married Harriet Elvira Barnett, Emma's cousin, with whom he had three children. Throughout these pastorates, Bounds maintained a discipline of prayer that bordered on the extreme. He rose regularly at 4 a.m. to spend hours in intercession before beginning his daily work. Congregants often arrived early for morning services to find him already kneeling in the sanctuary, having been there since before dawn.

His Writing and Its Influence

Bounds began writing for Methodist periodicals in the 1880s while pastoring in Alabama and Georgia. His articles focused consistently on prayer as the central discipline of Christian life, drawing from his own rigorous practice and his observation that the church was losing its dependence on intercession. In 1896, he became associate editor of the Christian Advocate in Nashville, the leading Methodist publication in the South. This platform allowed him to develop the themes that would define his literary legacy: that prayer was not a supplement to ministry but its foundation, and that the spiritual decline he witnessed in American Christianity stemmed directly from prayerlessness among its leaders.

His major books — including Power Through Prayer, Purpose in Prayer, The Necessity of Prayer, and The Weapon of Prayer — were published posthumously from manuscripts he left at his death in 1913. The delay was not accidental. Bounds had spent his final years in Washington, Georgia, writing extensively but publishing little, believing his message would find its audience when the church was ready to hear it. His literary executors, recognizing the coherence of his vision, compiled his scattered writings into volumes that appeared throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The books shared a single, relentless argument: that everything in Christian ministry — preaching, pastoral care, evangelism, social action — depended entirely on the minister's life of prayer. Without it, even the most sophisticated theological education and organizational skill produced only religious activity, not spiritual power.

Bounds died August 24, 1913, in Washington, Georgia, having spent his final morning, characteristically, in prayer. His influence grew steadily through the twentieth century, particularly among evangelicals and Pentecostals who found in his writings a theological foundation for their emphasis on spiritual discipline and dependence on divine power. His work has remained continuously in print, appealing to readers across denominational lines who sense that something essential has been lost in the church's accommodation to modern efficiency.

Who should read Bounds: Christians who suspect that their prayer life is perfunctory rather than powerful, and who are prepared to be challenged about the time and intensity they bring to intercession. He is essential reading for pastors and ministry leaders who want to understand the spiritual foundations that must underlie effective Christian work. He is not for readers looking for sophisticated theology or nuanced treatment of prayer's complexities — Bounds offers instead the uncompromising testimony of someone who staked everything on the premise that God responds to persistent, faithful prayer.