Rev. Kirby J. Hensley: Ideas, Teachings, Philosophy, and Influences

Pat 1: A New Life, Do You Want It?

This paper primarily reviews Kirby J. Hensley’s philosophy and teachings as presented in A New Life, Do You Want It? It argues that Hensley’s religious thought is best understood as a blend of revivalist preaching, radical egalitarianism, anti-institutional populism, and mid-twentieth-century metaphysical spirituality. Although his ideas drew on multiple traditions, their common center was a conviction that spiritual authority belongs to ordinary people rather than religious institutions.

At the center of this development is Hensley’s rejection of traditional Christian belief and doctrine. He does not simply dissent from particular churches or denominations; he challenges inherited assumptions about clergy, salvation, Christology, ecclesiastical authority, and the relationship between human beings and the divine. Yet this rejection does not place him outside the Christian symbolic world altogether. Much of his thought remains structured by biblical language, revivalist expectation, and Christian categories that he reinterprets in radically egalitarian and anti-institutional terms.

This emphasis is signaled from the beginning, when Hensley describes the book itself as “a baptism of fire, to burn out and purify the things that don’t work in your life” (p. 2). The phrase preserves revivalist imagery, but redirects it away from orthodox conversion and toward personal transformation.

Intellectual and Religious Influences

Influence of Revivalist Christianity

Even after rejecting much of orthodox Christianity, Hensley never stopped thinking like a revival preacher. His writing is full of conversion language, awakening language, revelation, hidden truth, rebirth, and expectations of coming transformation. For that reason, A New Life often reads more naturally as a long sermon than as a theological treatise. Its arguments frequently proceed through stories, symbols, emotional appeals, and rhetorical leaps rather than formal logical analysis.

New Thought and Metaphysical Spirituality

Of all the identifiable philosophical movements, New Thought may be the closest fit. New Thought themes found in the book include God as an all-pervasive reality, the divine within, positive thinking, mental causation, consciousness shaping experience, symbolic interpretation of scripture, and direct access to spiritual truth. His distinction between Jesus and Christ also resembles metaphysical Christianity’s common distinction between Jesus as the historical man and Christ as the universal divine principle. Unlike many New Thought leaders, however, Hensley pushes these ideas into a much more anti-institutional and egalitarian direction.

This interpretation is strongly supported by Hensley’s claim that “God is everywhere and God is within you. If you look within, you will find the power that resides there and that power will set you free” (p. 7). The passage joins divine immanence, inward discovery, spiritual power, and liberation in a way that closely resembles New Thought and metaphysical Christian language.

Influence of the Human Potential Movement

Many concepts in A New Life sound more like the 1970s than the 1950s, including programming, reprogramming, consciousness, self-actualization, inner potential, and personal transformation. His citation of Ken Keyes Jr. is especially revealing because Keyes was associated with the Human Potential milieu. This suggests that Hensley’s theology continued to evolve after the church was founded, absorbing Human Potential vocabulary during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Human Potential element becomes especially visible when Hensley writes, “I believe that everything that Man will ever do or ever think about is already in his subconscious mind and as his consciousness is awakened he realizes what he can and cannot do” (p. 19). Here salvation is described less as pardon from sin than as the awakening of latent human capacity through consciousness.

Influence of Metaphysical Christianity

Hensley never really abandons the Bible. Instead, he treats it as symbolic, coded, psychological, and spiritually allegorical. He also remains intensely attached to biblical characters such as Adam, Eve, Paul, Peter, Jesus, and Christ. Rather than rejecting Christianity outright, he seems to believe he is uncovering Christianity’s true meaning beneath centuries of misunderstanding.

Gnostic-Like Parallels and Spiritual Awakening

Hensley was probably not a Gnostic in any historical or theological sense. However, A New Life contains several strongly Gnostic-like themes, including awakening from ignorance, discovering hidden truth, locating the Kingdom within, and achieving liberation through transformed understanding. These themes appear to have been blended with Human Potential psychology, revivalist Christianity, New Thought metaphysics, and Hensley’s own egalitarian philosophy.

A particularly revealing passage states, “Let me tell you that Man is looking there now! Put the soul within Man, because that is the last place he will ever look” (p. 21). The line suggests that the deepest spiritual reality is hidden not in a remote heaven or ecclesiastical system, but within the human person, concealed precisely because people have been trained to seek spiritual authority elsewhere.

For that reason, Human Potential spirituality with Gnostic overtones may be a more accurate description than simply “Gnosticism.” The emphasis on awakening is present, but it is directed toward the empowerment of ordinary people rather than the recovery of an ancient secret tradition. In Hensley’s hands, hidden truth is less an esoteric deposit reserved for initiates than a liberating recognition that spiritual authority has always belonged to everyone.

Possible Quaker Connection

One useful historical comparison is George Fox and the early Quakers, though the evidence here is comparative rather than demonstrably direct. The similarities include distrust of religious elites, direct spiritual access, decentralized authority, and an emphasis on the individual rather than clergy. Reported descriptions of Modesto services, in which participants could stand and speak, strengthen the comparison to Quaker-style religious practice. The difference is that Fox emphasized the “Inner Light,” while Hensley emphasized universal spiritual equality and freedom.

Millennial Structure and Transformational Expectation

Hensley retained the structure of Christian apocalyptic thinking even after rejecting traditional doctrine. He effectively replaced the Second Coming with an awakening of consciousness, the Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Man, salvation with liberation, and Christ’s return with collective human awakening. His vision therefore remained fundamentally transformational and prophetic. In many ways, he never stopped being an end-times preacher; he simply changed what the coming age would look like.

Religious Temperament and Anti-Institutional Motivation

Hensley appears less like a systematic theologian and more like a lifelong religious rebel. His own story about being "born again" at age 13 and becoming disillusioned almost immediately suggests that suspicion of authority and hypocrisy emerged very early in life. His deepest value does not seem to be metaphysics, New Thought, Gnosticism, or even Christianity. It appears to be fairness: the conviction that ordinary people should not be treated as spiritually inferior to religious elites. Throughout the book, he displays a consistent hostility toward institutions that claim authority over others. Churches, governments, courts, clergy, and hierarchies are repeatedly portrayed as systems that have usurped power that properly belongs to ordinary people.

This anti-institutional concern is captured in Hensley’s observation that “People became the servants of the Church that they themselves had created to serve them” (p. 13). The criticism is not merely doctrinal; it is social and political. Institutions originally formed by human beings have, in his view, reversed their proper relationship to ordinary people.

He was probably not primarily a theologian, philosopher, or church administrator in the conventional sense. He is better understood as a highly intelligent oral thinker and self-taught synthesizer whose ideas were organized less by formal doctrine than by a persistent concern for human freedom, fairness, and dignity.

His Most Fundamental Belief

The strongest thread running through Hensley’s life and theology may be the belief that no institution has the right to tell another human being that they are spiritually unqualified.

Put another way, the central question running through both his public record and A New Life, Do You Want It? is this: why should anyone need another person’s permission to be spiritually, socially, or personally significant?

Universal ordination was not merely an administrative gimmick. It appears to have been the practical expression of this belief. Where most religious reformers create a new hierarchy, Hensley’s solution was to democratize spiritual authority itself. This helps explain why he writes, “We are not looking for a Kingdom ruled by a group of people. We are looking for a Kingdom ruled by all people...” (p. 41).

Because Hensley’s writings often synthesize ideas rather than document their sources systematically, the question of influence requires some caution.

A Note on Influence and Evidence

Several of these influence claims should be read as interpretive comparisons rather than proven lines of direct transmission. The New Thought, Human Potential, metaphysical Christian, Quaker, and Gnostic-like parallels help clarify Hensley’s ideas, but the document should distinguish between influences supported by textual evidence, influences suggested by historical context, and similarities that may reflect broader religious currents of the period.

Rather than developing one coherent philosophical system from sustained formal study, Hensley appears to have gathered ideas from many sources and woven them into a single practical narrative. His writing contains themes associated with human potential psychology, positive-thinking movements, metaphysical religion, anti-institutional Christianity, populism, and awakening or expanded consciousness. Yet he rarely engages these traditions in great depth. Instead, he seems to absorb whatever reinforces his existing convictions about freedom, self-worth, human potential, and resistance to institutional control.

Final Conclusion

Taken together, these themes suggest that Hensley’s originality lay less in the invention of new doctrines than in the way he fused familiar religious and cultural currents into a radical democratization of spiritual authority.

He was a revival preacher, radical egalitarian, religious populist, anti-authoritarian, and self-taught synthesizer who absorbed influences from New Thought, metaphysical Christianity, the Human Potential Movement, positive-thinking traditions, and 1960s counterculture. Yet beneath those influences remained a remarkably consistent conviction: ordinary people possess dignity, freedom, self-worth, and spiritual authority that institutions have no right to monopolize. Universal ordination, the Kingdom of Man, and much of A New Life, Do You Want It? can therefore be understood as different expressions of that central idea.

Hensley is therefore best described as a religious maverick whose lasting significance lies in his insistence that spiritual legitimacy should not be mediated, licensed, or monopolized by institutional authority.

by

David F. Garner

Chaplain and Minister of Universal Life Church of Hamilton Co. TN