Allen Lockwood Withee was born on March 7, 1871 in Wessington Springs, South Dakota. He was raised in the big city by caring traditional parents who valued the simple life and devoted personal piety. At the tender age of 12 “A.L.” had an intense spiritual awakening and began traveling and preaching the gospel of Jesus on skid row and along the rural byways of the Midwestern United States….

Allen Lockwood Withee was born on March 7, 1871 in Wessington Springs, South Dakota. He was raised in the big city by caring traditional parents who valued the simple life and devoted personal piety. At the tender age of 12 “A.L.” had an intense spiritual awakening and began traveling and preaching the gospel of Jesus on skid row and along the rural byways of the Midwestern United States. It was during those early years that he was given the nickname “preacher” by curious onlookers, who found it odd to see this tormented skinny pimply-faced boy, carrying a sweaty Bible under his arm, laboring for the gospel so earnestly. The late 1880’s were a time of widespread doubt, irreligious behavior and distaste for old time religion. Preacher Withee was out of step with his generation. And yet he also found himself at odds with the conventional religious establishment. A.L. was strangely warmed by the primitive life and message of Jesus and simultaneously drawn toward the avant-garde philosophies and aesthetics of the French Bohemia. (The influence of post-impressionism had spread quickly across the American prairie as an underground movement). Withee endeavored to blaze a spiritual trail firmly rooted in the historic life and message of Jesus, yet consciously and fully engaged in the issues and possibilities within contemporary society.

Withee spent his late teens living in rural Alabama, studying at the University and working with children in a state-run insane asylum. It was there that A.L. discovered that he felt more alive that he had ever felt before while caring for and connecting with criminally insane children. And he would later comment, “The closest I ever came to seeing Jesus was in the faces of the desperate and forgotten.” The other significant event of this time was Withee’s gradual awakening to the mystical dimensions of Christian faith. On long walks in the woods and through the swamps of Alabama he would practice silence and solitude and deep communion with God in nature.
Following his marriage to Dorcas Joy in 1891, they spent the next few years happily working together among poor children and families in the mining camps of Northern Minnesota—offering spiritual guidance and practical care. Children arrived one by one, and during that time Withee was invited to become the pastor of a local church and he began studying for a Masters of Divinity. This station in life was a testing ground for Withee’s convictions and calling. He felt like he had to choose between the respectability of joining the religious establishment and the risk and adventure of imagining and working towards “a renewed vision of Christ-consciousness in contemporary society.” Returning to the big city, Withee’s fanaticism and naïve literal interpretation of the message of Jesus led to confusion, disillusion and failure. From this dark period Withee emerged with a deeper humility, being less critical of the establishment, and a renewed sense of creativity. He began collaborating with other outsiders to create new communities, launched a wildly successful literary career and founded various social reform movements whose impact is still felt today.
Historians have suggested that Withee was never able to land on singular theme in his life or ministry. “Everything matters,” he would say, in his enigmatic manner. Part preacher, part artist, part social reformer, part revolutionary activist and part dilettante sophisticate, Preacher A.L. Withee’s enduring contribution seems to be more through his influence and permission-giving to others who were able to take his tinkering visions and dreams and make them into something more accessible.
Later in life, Withee became something of a phantom, disappearing for months at a time and was erratic in his public behavior. Rumor has it that he spent much of his time secluded in a barn in rural France, working on monumental stone and bronze sculptures. After his wife died he abandoned their family home and wandered the countryside, greeting neighbors and wayfarers, writing cryptic poems and prayers and occasionally dropping in to stay with his children and grandchildren, which he loved dearly, until the day he left for another long walk from which he never returned.