Hobart Freeman (October 17, 1920 – December 8, 1984) was a charismatic preacher and author, who ministered in northern Indiana and actively promoted faith healing.

Hobart Edward Freeman was born in Ewing, Kentucky, and grew up at St. Petersburg, Florida, where he became a successful businessman after studying at Bryant and Stratton Business Institute, despite being a high school dropout.

[4] Freeman felt called to the ministry, and was subsequently educated at the Georgetown College with a Bible and History major, and then at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (A.B., Th.M.)

[6] However Freeman explicitly rejected their Doctrine of Identification, which asserted that Jesus died spiritually,[7] and he also repeatedly warned his congregation about the leaders and their teachings.

[17] Within a few years, Freeman established a house church at Claypool in a "pink house next to the water tower", where the meetings followed a simple format: After much singing and what sounded like people quoting the Bible, a tall lanky man, who looked remarkably like Billy Graham, walked stiffly to the front with an obvious limp.

The pastor told stories of people being healed of sickness and being protected in storms by commanding the winds to stop.

... At the end of the service, we went to the front for prayers ....[18]From there the church moved to a three-car garage, then on to an old sheep barn near North Webster where they had been holding a coffeehouse ministry on Friday nights.

His theology was as solid as a Baptist minister, but he had the fire of a Pentecostal maverick like Smith Wigglesworth or William Branham.

We eventually heard him teach on every passage in the Bible, and he backed up his positions, putting them in the context of church history and current events.

[21] There were some 15,000 in daughter congregations elsewhere in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Tennessee and Florida, as well as in England, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Germany.

Freeman also began teaching college-level classes on Saturday mornings covering Old and New Testament theology, Christian ethics, church history and even Hebrew.

[22] In 1978 after conflict with the owner, Freeman took the congregation to a large circus tent just north of Warsaw and then on to another near Goshen throughout that summer and autumn.

A sense of community care, cohesion, exclusiveness, superiority and persecution grew with the breadth, authority and enthusiasm of his teaching.

[28] These teachings were comprehensive and logical, including the roles of women, music, jobs, medical science, government, the military, education, birth control, sports and holidays.

A typical Faith Assembly family on their way to church consisted of a man, who was probably a construction worker, carrying a notebook and Bible under one arm and a diaper bag over his shoulder.

[21] Christianity Today reported that "According to Freeman's faith-formula theology, God is obligated to heal every sickness if a believer's faith is genuine.

We must deliberately empty our minds of everything negative concerning the person, problem, or situation confronting us ..."[33] And he continued writing that "Sickness often can only be overcome by maintaining a positive confession of God's promises in the face of all apparent evidence to the contrary.

[36] Deaths of several women, infants and babies were reported, and the local media blamed Freeman's teachings as medical treatment had been declined or refused.

The boys' mother, Peggy Wahl (née Nusbaum), also claims to have been involved in their rescue, along with their daughter Penny who was not injured[citation needed].

In May 1983, the Chicago Tribune ran a story on David Gilmore whose 15-month-old son, Dustin Graham, had died five years previously from an easily treatable form of meningitis.

The Tribune further identified fifty-two deaths from Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky which, they asserted, were attributable to church teaching.

[47] For some time afterwards, his wife, June Freeman (d. January 29, 2000), left his suit over the end of the bed, expecting him to one day walk in and have need of it.

Continuing congregations include groups at Larwill, Goshen and Indianapolis Indiana, Grand Centre/Cold Lake Alberta and Shelbyville Kentucky.

[citation needed] In March 2015, Joshua Wilson, son of former Faith Assembly members, and Jack Pennington, a freelance filmmaker from Winston-Salem NC, announced their plans to film a documentary they called Children of Faith Assembly,[55] which was promoted on the blog Friendly Atheist.