E.M. Bounds

Edward McKendree Bounds was a Confederate Army chaplain, former attorney, and Methodist minister whose eleven books on prayer have outlasted nearly every other Protestant devotional writer of his era.

Shelbyville, Missouri, is where he was born on August 15, 1835, the fifth child of Thomas Jefferson and Hester Ann Bounds. His father had been among Shelby County’s earliest settlers and held several of its first civic offices: Justice of the Peace, County Clerk, and Commissioner. Circuit court convened in the Bounds home. Thomas Bounds also drove the construction of the county’s First Methodist Church in 1840 and died of tuberculosis nine years later, leaving Edward at fourteen. The name McKendree was almost certainly chosen to honor William McKendree, the fourth bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the man who planted Methodist congregations across western Missouri, though the Hendrickson Christian Classics preface to E.M. Bounds on Prayer flags this as surmised rather than documented.

Relatives heading west after his father’s death took young Bounds with them to Mesquite Canyon, California, where gold rush prospecting consumed four years and produced nothing. Back in Missouri, he read law in Hannibal and passed the bar shortly after his twenty-first birthday, reportedly the youngest licensed attorney in the state at the time. The law didn’t hold him. A brush arbor revival conducted by an evangelist named Smith Thomas turned him toward ministry instead. Centenary Seminary in Palmyra, Missouri trained him, and in 1859 he was ordained to pastor the Monticello Methodist Church in Missouri, his first charge.

War came while he was serving at Brunswick. Refusing the Federal oath of allegiance cost him his freedom: he was taken prisoner, held first in St. Louis and then transferred to Memphis, Tennessee. Release came eventually, and on foot he traveled close to a hundred miles to find General Pierce’s command in Mississippi. Appointed chaplain of the Fifth Missouri Regiment, he stayed in that role until near the end, when capture came again, this time at Nashville. The Fifth Missouri belonged to the Confederate Missouri Brigade, which saw action across the full arc from Vicksburg to Atlanta to Franklin and Nashville. What the war cost in bodies and moral coherence, Bounds watched up close, and that cost runs underneath the urgency in every book he wrote afterward. He didn’t leave Franklin when it fell. He stayed and organized weekly prayer meetings among the people who remained.

Tennessee and Alabama churches occupied him in the post-war years before an 1875 assignment to St. Paul Methodist Church in St. Louis, where four years of ministry followed. His first marriage, to Emma Elizabeth Barnett of Eufaula, Alabama, took place in 1876; she died a decade later. Harriet Elizabeth Barnett became his second wife in 1887, and five of their children survived him. Further pastoral work included a stint at First Methodist Church in St. Louis and three more years back at St. Paul. When those appointments ended, he took up a post as associate editor of the Christian Advocate, the official paper of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, published out of St. Louis.

He was fifty-six when he moved his family to Washington, Georgia, where the last seventeen years of his life were spent reading, writing, and praying.

Four in the morning was when he rose, most days, for decades. Homer W. Hodge, who completed the editorial work on Bounds’s manuscripts by 1921, set this down as plain fact, the same way a biographer records an address or a trade.

Bounds didn’t understand prayer as spiritual technique or self-improvement discipline. For him it was the primary medium through which God works through human beings, something more like breath than method. A minister who prays little can’t accomplish much, he thought, regardless of talent or organizational skill. He was suspicious of religious busyness, of eloquence substituting for intercession, of visible effort masking the absence of the harder invisible work. These convictions shaped six books that circle the same subject from different angles: The Necessity of Prayer, The Reality of Prayer, The Weapon of Prayer, Purpose in Prayer, The Essentials of Prayer, and Prayer and Praying Men. All six, plus five others, survive in complete form and remain in print. His other major work, The Ineffable Glory, addresses resurrection doctrine and draws on writers from the Apostle Paul through John Wesley to the Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford, which confirms that his intellectual range wasn’t limited to the one subject he’s remembered for.

It’s worth pausing on the reach of these books. Bounds wrote from inside one tradition, the Methodist South, in the wreckage left by a war that split both the country and his denomination. And yet Protestant readers of nearly every stripe found their way to his pages almost immediately. That kind of crossing tends to happen when a writer isn’t really defending a tradition’s particulars but pointing at something more basic about what it costs to be genuinely open to God. The sectarian specifics fall away. What remains is a description serious readers recognize from their own interior, whatever tradition shaped them.

Only two of his books came out while Bounds was alive. He seems to have written not for publication but from compulsion, filling manuscripts nobody was waiting for. He died on August 24, 1913, in Washington, Georgia, aged seventy-eight, and left those manuscripts behind. The Reverend Claude Lysias Chilton Jr., grandson of Alabama politician William Parish Chilton and an admirer of Bounds’s work, gathered the papers and prepared them for publication. Chilton’s foreword to The Necessity of Prayer is the most frequently cited personal account of who Bounds was: “He prayed because the needs of the world were upon him,” Chilton wrote, “and from his solitary prayer-vigils, year by year, there arose teaching equaled by few men in modern Christian history.” Homer W. Hodge brought the remaining editorial work to completion by 1921, and the full body of writing entered print.

Nine children in total survived him across both marriages. He’s buried at Resthaven Cemetery. Baker, Whitaker House, and Hendrickson have all kept his books in print, and they continue to move between readers who didn’t find them in a syllabus but in a moment when they needed them most.