The Word of Faith movement traces its theological roots to Essek William Kenyon, a Free Will Baptist pastor born in 1867 who founded Bethel Bible Institute in Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1898 and led it for the next 25 years. Kenyon's later writing, shaped by exposure to New Thought metaphysical teaching, coined the formula "what I confess, I possess" and argued that spoken faith could claim healing and financial provision directly from God, a teaching that circulated through his books and periodicals for decades after his death in 1948.
Kenneth E. Hagin, a Pentecostal minister, took Kenyon's teaching and built an institutional movement around it. Hagin incorporated the Kenneth Hagin Evangelistic Association in 1963 and established Rhema Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, training a generation of preachers directly in his own classrooms. Scholars, including apologist Robert M. Bowman Jr. writing for Watchman Fellowship, have documented passages in Hagin's published teaching copied nearly verbatim from Kenyon's earlier work, evidence of just how directly the movement's founding generation drew on its nineteenth century source.
Word of Faith teaching holds that believers, as God's spiritual offspring, can exercise a form of divine authority through confessed faith, extending to healing, deliverance and financial prosperity. It affirms the Trinity as orthodox doctrine, though critics have argued that its teaching on believers' spiritual status blurs the distinction between Creator and creature, a characterization Word of Faith teachers themselves reject.