Healing Prayer:

Do We Really Believe In It Anymore?

Where Are We Now?

• Our history

• Are we still in the same place of expectation and experience?

• Why is this the case?

• Is that ok? Or not ok?

My Story

• My early experience / expectation

• My Vineyard introduction: pray for 200

• The Langley Vineyard

• Healing conferences

• Our present environment

Faithful versus Faith-filled

• Are we praying more out of compassion than out of faith?

• Already / not yet: which is the exception and which is the rule?

• Why keep placing so much emphasis on something that so seldom seems to work?

A Shifted Focus

• From disease to dis-ease (and restoring shalom)

• Including the concerns of justice, creation care and unity

• “Which is easier…?”

Is It Us?

• Wimber re: lack of faith (Luke 18)

• Are we paying the price for faith that we did in the beginning?

• To some degree we get what we fight to make room for

Why Fight?

• Healing is a “taste” of our / God’s desired end (resurrection)

Healing

Death Resurrection

Disease

Why Fight?

• The centrality of healing prayer in the New Testament and the first three centuries of the church

• Ramsay MacMullen – healing and other “miracles” were the key to the early dramatic growth of Christianity within the Roman Empire – what about today?

Building a Faith Environment

• Establish a theology of healing

• Learn how to pray prayers of command

• No risk / no faith (create room)

• Get healing prayer out of the church

• Lower the bar (be a blessing)