Alexander Boddy

Alexander Alfred Boddy (15 November 1854 – 10 September 1930) was an Anglican vicar and one of the founders of Pentecostalism in Britain.

Boddy was born into an ecclesiastical family: his father was a vicar, and his mother was a descendant of Mary Vazeille, who had been married to John Wesley. Although he trained to be a solicitor, a religious experience at the Keswick Convention convinced him he should become ordained into the Church of England. Following several appointments, the Bishop of Durham, J. B. Lightfoot, placed him in All Saints Church in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland in 1884. In 1891 he married Mary Pollock.

Boddy was inspired by the Holiness Movement, and he had an intense religious experience in 1892. In 1899 his wife Mary experienced a healing from asthma and they both believed that she had a gift for healing through the laying-on of hands. In 1904 he visited Wales during the Welsh Revival and met Evan Roberts, and the following year he travelled to Oslo, where T. B. Barratt was leading a religious revival modelled on the events of the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. Barratt was invited to Boddy's church, and subsequently Boddy and his wife began to experience glossolalia.

All Saints in Monkwearmouth became a centre for British Pentecostalism, and Mary Boddy laid hands on the evangelist Smith Wigglesworth. From 1908 to 1914 Boddy hosted a series of Sunderland Conventions, which gained national press attention.

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