Asa Alonzo Allen was born on 27 March 1911 in Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, into a bootlegging family. Converted at a Methodist tent meeting in 1934, he was ordained by the Assemblies of God in 1936 and began an itinerant healing ministry in 1949 after attending an Oral Roberts meeting in Dallas.
His signature drew crowds — miracle oil that reportedly appeared on foreheads and hands, cash offerings collected in wash-tubs, and radical racial integration at a moment when few American tents did the same. In 1958 the pastor of a Miracle Revival Fellowship congregation in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Arizona deeded him 1,200 acres of desert; Allen renamed it Miracle Valley and built a Bible college, printing plant and radio station.
Miracle Magazine reached a claimed peak circulation of 340,000 in the mid-1960s — larger than that of any other independent Pentecostal evangelist of the era. Allen's ministry was expelled from the Assemblies of God in 1955 after a Knoxville arrest for drunk driving; he denied the charge and continued as an independent.
He was found dead in a San Francisco hotel room on 11 June 1970. The San Francisco coroner ruled the cause acute alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver — a diagnosis Allen's ministry publicly disputed but which the medical record confirmed. Miracle Valley itself was later the site of a violent 1982 confrontation between a successor congregation and local sheriff's deputies.