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A personal experience of prayer for physical healing

By Martin Hobgen

At the beginning of the testimony I want to be clear that I do believe that God can bring about miraculous healings of the kind that we read about in the Gospels and elsewhere in the Bible. I believe that they are to be understood as the exception and not the norm.

I became a Christian in the mid-1980s while studying Maths at Bath University at a time when God was pouring out his Spirit in churches and charismatic gifts of healing, words of wisdom, speaking in tongues were being manifest. The University Christian Union was slightly influenced by this move of the Spirit and the Anglican church I joined was linked with the charismatic ministry of St Andrew’s, Chorleywood. They had in turn been influenced by the international ministry of John Wimber. As a life-long and full-time wheelchair user I was excited and a little confused by becoming aware of the possibility of physical healing and a community of people who thought this was a potential reality. Previously my experience had been limited to medical professionals who assumed that my congenital medical condition was stable and I would be paralysed from the waist down for life.

The Anglican church which I attended invited a small team of people, including one of the minsters, from St Andrews to spend a weekend in Bath, teaching on the charismatic gifts, leading worship and ministry and praying for God to touch people who might be able to become part of a prayer ministry team. During that weekend I received prayer for healing, following the model that St Andrews had developed. This was very non-directive: the person coming for prayer did not need to know or disclose why they wanted to receive prayer; the people praying did so with open-ended prayer along the lines of ‘Lord, please do what you want to do in the life of this person’ and then blessing what God was doing. Personally, nothing dramatic happened, I did not get up out of my wheelchair and walk, but I did experience a powerful sense of God’s presence with me. This experience of being prayed for, and many subsequent experiences was an affirming and faith strengthening experience. I felt called to join the prayer-ministry team and participated in regular prayer ministry towards the end of many church services while I was part of that church community. During that time God gave me the privilege of praying for people who did receive healing in a variety of ways, including one dramatic healing of a person with an injured back.

In the months that followed that first affirming experience I did have the first negative experience of being prayed for to receive healing. A visiting preacher led an evening service at the same Anglican church. He preached on the gifts of the spirit, strongly suggesting that we should expect God to answer our prayers for physical healing. After the sermon there was an opportunity to be prayed for by the speaker, a team that accompanied him or by members of the prayer-ministry team our church was developing. The speaker was deeply rooted in the belief that God would give him words of knowledge about who to pray for in the congregation. There was a repeated call for people with bad backs to receive prayer. Eventually I responded as the congenital condition I have is a malformation of the lower spine leading to paralysis. I do remember being extremely nervous as I moved to the front of the church, from where I had been sitting visible to the speaker. The speaker seemed relieved that I had finally come to be prayed for and fervently called upon God to send His Spirit to heal me and enable me to discard the wheelchair. Nothing happened and the speaker prayed for faith to believe in healing. Still nothing happened and I remember being a little confused: if the speaker was so convinced that God wanted to heal me and enable me to walk then why wasn’t I running up and down the aisles? I don’t recall how the speaker concluded his prayers but I do remember returning to the space at the end of the pew feeling that the prayers had not been answered and somehow it might be because of my lack of faith.¹

This experience was the most extreme of my experiences of being prayed for and has not been repeated so starkly since. I have received prayer-ministry in many situations in the 35 years since that negative experience and most have been positive and affirming. There is a recurrent and troubling experience that I have when in some large Christian gatherings. Some people will come up to me and, without asking, place their hand on me and pray fervently for me to get up and walk. At other times people ask, ‘Can I pray for you?’ and if I say yes they then pray along these lines. It is difficult to avoid the first scenario and in response to the second I now enquire why or what they feel they ought to pray for me. A few years ago, I joined the prayer ministry team being set up at the church where my wife and I are members. During one of the initial meetings with the minister to discuss the approach we would take it became clear that one couple had a very clear views on praying for healing. They were of the view that God would always heal someone if we prayed for them. If this didn’t happen then there was an issue that the person being prayed for needed to ‘deal with’ before receiving their healing. Both I and the minister gently but firmly resisted this approach and expectation of praying for healing and the couple decided to not participate any further in that aspect of ministry.

Praying for healing within a church context is a complex theological and pastoral issue that needs to be addressed with care. Prayer for healing with people on the fringes of the church or for those with no contact with church communities is fraught with further issues. These issues have been highlighted by a series of articles, blogs and programmes by BBC journalist Damon Rose, who is blind and who self-identifies as an atheist. He recounts the experience of a Christian, who he did not know, approaching him on the London Underground and “… asking if he could pray for my sight to be restored.”² He goes on to suggest that “… these encounters are a fact of life for people who are visibly disabled.”³While the online document’s title ‘Pick up your stretcher and walk’⁴ has clear allusions to Matthew 9:1-8, the written article’s title ‘Stop trying to ‘heal’ me’ indicates the strength of the negative response this approach invokes.⁵

I experienced a significant moment of receiving God’s healing one night about a year after I had become a Christian. I was reading my bible notes at the end of a long and busy day and read Psalm 139 for the first time. I sensed God speaking to me through verses 13-16, with the image of God knowing me as I formed in my mother’s womb. I was fully and completely known by God, that he knew all about my medical condition which first manifested itself in my mother’s womb and that he could and would use me for His purposes. I firmly believe that some of the most significant healing God does is to enable us to understand that he can and does use us as we are and we don’t need to be made perfect in any sense before he empowers us to serve him.⁶

In 20 years of ordained ministry, I have repeatedly had opportunities to minister to others in ways that would not have occurred if God had physically healed my soon after I became a Christian. I recognise that if that had happened then a completely different ministry would have followed.

Questions for Discussion

What is your own understanding and experience of prayer for healing?
What is your church’s understanding of this ministry?
How might we ensure that such ministry is affirming?
How might we encourage people to see the ‘little’ miracles that God does in our daily lives as well as the more obvious miracles that he does by his grace.

Bibliography

Lay, Geoffrey. Seeking Signs and Missing Wonders : Disability and the Church's Healing Ministry. 1998.
Rose, Damon. "Pick up Your Stretcher and Walk." In Heart and Soul. London: BBC, 2019.
Rose, Damon. "Stop Trying to 'Heal' Me." BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48054113.
Urquhart, Colin. Receive Your Healing. Hodder and Stoughton, 1986.

1 A popular book at time argued that lack of faith or unforgiven sin was the main reason why prayer for healing did not result in miraculous outcomes. Colin Urquhart, Receive Your Healing (Hodder and Stoughton, 1986).
2 Damon Rose, "Stop Trying to 'Heal' Me," BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48054113.
3 Ibid.
4 "Pick up Your Stretcher and Walk," in Heart and Soul (London: BBC, 2019).
5 "Stop Trying to 'Heal' Me".
6 An approach suggested in the book by Geoffrey Lay, Seeking Signs and Missing Wonders : Disability and the Church's Healing Ministry (1998).