by Francis MacNutt
Jul/Aug 2002

As we all know, cancer is one of our deadliest diseases, and if you have prayed for cancer patients, you have discovered that it is also one of our most difficult and mysterious ailments to pray for.

At times, we have seen amazing results when we have prayed and occasionally we have actually seen tumors shrink before our very eyes. But we also need to be honest and say that it doesn't always go that well.

At other times, the cancer remains but, nevertheless, the pain diminishes or disappears. Sometimes with prayer the harmful side effects of the chemo or radiation treatment are reduced or even eliminated: the patient's appetite remains normal, the hair does not fall out, and his/her strength and vigor remains.

Still another wonderful effect of prayer: a person who is given three months to live, lives on another two years beyond what the doctors predicted.

Most wonderful of all: at the moment of death, the patient is in great peace; some seem to experience a vision of angels, or better yet, of Jesus.

And so, even when there isn't a total physical healing, a notable partial healing takes place. It is no small thing if the pain goes away, while the patient remains at peace.

From what we have learned about cancer, there are several things I would like to share.

1. Inner healing

Apparently, all of us have cancer cells in our body but usually our immune systems deal with them, especially when we are younger. But, if we suffer a severe loss or emotional trauma, the immune system can become depressed and our bodies fail to contain or destroy the unhealthy cells. For instance, some studies indicate that the most dangerous period comes for a married man if his wife dies before he does: his desire to live is weakened by his mourning and loneliness. His body picks up on this sadness and stops fighting against the force of diseases, such as cancer.

The practical application of this is simply: if you are praying to heal cancer, you may suspect that an inner healing — a healing of the memories — may also be very helpful. It will take time from the moment the emotional blow first strikes until the cancer grows large enough for us to notice it, perhaps a year. So if you are praying to heal cancer, check and see if the patient suffered an emotional trauma about a year before the onset of the cancer. Was a wife deserted by her husband — or vice versa? Did a beloved family member die — such as a child, a mother or a father?

Praying to heal the pain of that loss or rejection may be crucial to the physical healing of the cancer.

2. Soaking prayer

Everything we have learned about spending time in prayer specially pertains to praying for cancer. Occasionally, someone is healed immediately (as was Judith, my wife, 1979), but ordinarily the healing takes time — what we call "soaking prayer." As I see it, soaking prayer applied to cancer is like God's radiation treatment; the longer our hands are held near the cancer site, the more the cancer cells wither away, while God strengthens the healthy cells and the immune system to fight back. (Occasionally, too, there is a "spirit of infirmity" or of "cancer" that needs to be confronted and cast out.) Praying for cancer can be a long–time process. Just as we do not expect a cancer patient to be cured by one chemo treatment, neither do we ordinarily expect that one single, brief prayer will be sufficient. Usually, when we have seen cancer healed through prayer, the patient's family and church have really persevered in continuous prayer.

(The wonderful thing about prayer is that it has no harmful side effects, as do continued chemo and radiation treatments.)

3. When cancer seems to return

I don't like to talk about people "losing" their healing, as if the sick person is to blame. I have known one person, at least, who seemed to be dramatically and instantly healed of stomach cancer. And then, a year later, the cancer returned — this time in the lungs.

I think the best way to explain the mysterious relapse is that almost all the cancer cells were eradicated. But a few unhealthy cells were left, taking a year for them to multiply. What was missing was follow–up prayer. We rejoiced in her total healing but it wasn't as total as we thought. And so we neglected to keep on praying as a precaution; in those days it almost seemed that we were lacking in faith if we prayed again, after her apparently miraculous healing. But just as in the natural order, we return to the physician for a check–up after an operation, we likewise need to be spiritually prudent and continue to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread."

4. How to Pray

The way to pray for cancer ordinarily has two elements in it. One is the prayer part where we ask God to heal the cancer or we command the cancer cells to stop multiplying. This takes just a short time.

Then comes the laying on of hands, which is like God's own radiation treatment. This part can take plenty of time. The longer the cancer is held in God's force–field, the more healing takes place. Sick cells die, while healthy cells take on added life. If you pray in tongues, this would be a good time to do it. The laying–on of hands can take anywhere from a minute to an hour or more. It can be repeated every day (in a family especially, where husbands and wives pray together) or every week or so, if they visit a prayer minister. In churches or prayer groups, it is usually not feasible to spend a lot of time praying for one individual, so this is one reason we at CHM stress that every church and prayer group needs a small, dedicated group of prayer ministers who can spend time in praying with the sick.

Above all, as Jesus encourages us, "Pray continually and never lose heart!" (Luke 18: 1).

Love,
Francis and Judith,
Rachel and David

Francis MacNutt is a Founding Director and Executive Committee member of CHM.

by Francis MacNutt
Jul/Aug 2002

Hilaire Belloc, a famous British Catholic writer of the last century, confidently asserted, "Europe is the Faith." No more.

Most Christians in Europe and North America probably don't realize it, but non–white Christians will soon be the overwhelming Christian majority in our world. Scholars who study population growth assert that by the year 2050, four out of every five Christians will no longer live in Europe or North America. This will be a revolutionary change, "one of the most transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide."¹

Ironically, at the very moment when Christians in Europe and the United States comment on how the number of Christians attending church services in Europe and England is dwindling, and then predict that Christianity may be a dying religion, the Third World — Asia, Africa and Latin America — is seeing an explosive growth of Christianity. The largest church in the world is in Seoul, Korea — a Pentecostal church with over 500,000 members — and the healing evangelist, Reinhard Bonnke, recently gave a healing service for 1.6 million people in Lagos, Nigeria. To say that a shrinking remnant of the world believes in Christianity is an "outrageous"² assertion, according to a fascinating book I have just been reading — which I would encourage you to read if you are interested in the global aspects of Christianity.³

The facts are extraordinary. Did you know that the Anglicans in Africa outnumber by far the Anglicans in England and, probably, by 2050, only a tiny minority will be white Europeans; even today there are 20 million Anglicans in Nigeria. In Uganda there are 7000 flourishing Anglican parishes and their condition is far healthier than are most parishes in the originating country of England. Roman Catholics in Africa, as late as 1955, numbered only 16 million, but today they total 120 million!

In a few years the world's Christian population centers will no longer be Rome, Geneva and Paris, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires and Manila. Today the largest block of Christians are still in Europe but in a short 20 years, Europe will probably fall to third place behind Africa and Latin America. We can see the era of western Christianity passing away in our own lifetime.

The sad thing is that, generally, speaking, Western church readers are unaware of what's happening. The church in Europe may be in its dying days, but this dwindling strength, is countered by the explosive growth of Christianity in the poorer Third World countries.

The cynical view of some analysts in regard to Christian foreign missions is that they were foisted on overseas nations by the Western colonial powers as a cultural backup for their political aggression and greed. They hold, for example, that the Catholic missions in Latin America were forced on the Indians by the greedy, violent conquistadors and, therefore, their religion only goes skin deep. One African statement goes like this, "When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened our eyes again, we had the Bible and they had the land." This cynical point of view (which is largely true) predicted that when the colonial powers pulled out — such as England, Spain, Portugal, (and the U.S., too, in the Philippines) — these nations would quickly drop the imported Christian religion. The liberal point of view within some Christian denominations has even become hostile to mission work: "All religious traditions have roughly the same value, so why force our culture on them?"

Actually, the reverse happened: when the colonial powers pulled out, Christianity exploded numerically in almost every country that had been dominated politically by Europe (e.g. Nigeria gained independence only in 1960).

Again, sadly, the very Christian leaders who express theological disbelief in the miraculous — who doubt the reality of supernatural healing and the existence of evil spirits as described in Scripture — devalue what is happening in Third World Christianity, calling it a form of primitive superstitious religion which is closer to paganism than to true Christianity.

Both Bishop John Spong and the Rev. Arthur Peacocke (Anglican), the winner of the esteemed Templeton Award, call for us to abandon outmoded supernatural doctrines and moral assumptions in order to become relevant to our society by presenting the faith in a more credible manner.⁴ They discount what Philip Jenkins describes as "the most successful social movement of the past century."⁵ From this new point of view, the Spong–Peacocke point of view, which these "modernists" believe is on the cutting edge of the future, is already out of date.

A most encouraging realization is to find that what these Third World churches are discovering is exactly what we at CHM have also discovered — and also experience every day.

The key difference between what the majority of mainstream Christian Churches in the West and the exploding churches of the South believe include:

• The supernatural,
• The power of the Holy Spirit,
• God's intervention in the daily lives of believers,
• Healing, and
• Exorcising evil spirits.

Soon the two main centers of Christianity will be Africa and Latin America, and these churches feature enthusiastic, spontaneous worship. They believe not just in social evil, but in supernatural evil, which requires real spiritual warfare. They differ from older denominations in that they believe that "God intervenes directly in everyday life."⁶

These, of course, are beliefs that you will find in many independent churches ( as well as Pentecostal churches) in the U.S. and Europe, such as the Vineyard, and also among charismatic segments of the more traditional churches. What we are trying to do at CHM, as best we can, is to bring all these groups together, to engage in a struggle against the hidden pride that disdains healing and deliverance as unscientific and the product of primitive religion.

What we believe about the power of the Spirit is, I believe, at the core of traditional Christian belief of all the main denominations, but it has been obscured and sometimes lost. What we at CHM believe and do is relevant to the life of every human being. This relevance is being dramatically demonstrated by what is happening in the young churches in the Third World.

We should be humbled by what is going on in the poor regions of the world, rather than disregarding these new Christians as being superstitious, and barely rising above the laud of witch–doctors and shamans. In 1940 there were only one million Protestants in Latin America, compared to 50 million today — and these Protestants for the most part, do not belong to mainline denominations.⁷ They are evangelical — Pentecostal. Demographers document an extraordinary increase worldwide at the rate of 19 million new members a year in Pentecostal churches.⁸ For example, in Rio de Janeiro, in a three–year span in the 1990's, 700 new Pentecostal churches were planted, along with 240 spiritualist temples, but only one new Catholic parish.⁹ There are twice as many Presbyterians (mainly charismatic) in South Korea as there are in the U.S.¹⁰

What is God saying in all this?

I think it's very good news and the churches in the West should take note of what is happening in what used to be mission lands and recognize that perhaps we are now the mission lands. I'm reminded of how the religious leaders responded when Peter healed the lame man at the Gate Beautiful. Instead of rejoicing at what God was doing, they dismissed Peter and John as "illiterate laymen" (Acts 4: 13). Instead of learning from these uncredentialed disciples, they ordered them to be quiet and stop preaching (Acts 3:1–10; Acts 4:1–22).

At the very least the Western churches should be like the prudent Rabbi Gamaliel, and withhold judgment until they could see what God might be blessing (Acts 5:34–38). "Otherwise you might find yourselves fighting against God" (Acts 5:39).

— Francis MacNutt

P.S. As you can see, this article is, in a sense, a book review of Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom. Ordering information is on page 3.

¹ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2002), p. I.
² Ibid., p. 3.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid., p. 9.
⁵ Loc. Cit.
⁶ Ibid., p. 77.
⁷ Ibid., p. 61.
⁸ Ibid., p. 65.
⁹ Ibid., p. 64.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 7.

Francis MacNutt is a Founding Director and Executive Committee member of CHM.

by Dr. Grant Mullen
Jul/Aug 2002

Part 4 of a Series on Emotional Disorders

Men and Women are Different

Depression is more common in women due to poorly understood genetic factors. It is not because they are the "weaker sex" or because emotional issues are "women's problems." There are some medical conditions that are more common to one sex or the other. Heart disease for example is more common in males for genetic reasons only. It has been estimated that ten to twenty percent of women will at some time in their lives have symptoms of chemical imbalance depression. The condition for the majority of them will usually be mild and remain untreated but that means that there are a very large number of untreated women who are not feeling as well as they could be.

The lifetime risk for men is a much more difficult statistic to estimate. When I first started treating depression, the lifetime risk for depression in men was four percent. The number has now climbed closer to ten percent in the past fifteen years. I'm not convinced that men are more depressed now than they were when I started practicing. I think the difference has come due to improved detection techniques for the symptoms of depression in men. It is much more difficult to diagnose depression in men and I have a theory as to why that is so.

We know that the difference between the sexes in the incidence of depression is due to genetic factors. The genetic difference between males and females is that males have a Y chromosome that females don't have. After many years of observation of men and through being one myself, I have come to the conclusion that the Y chromosome is likely made of "denial!" It is extremely difficult to get a man to admit he is depressed or to accept treatment.

In my years of practice I have noticed a profound difference in how men and women suffer with depression. When a woman is depressed, she will usually come to my office and complain that there is something wrong with herself, that it is her fault and she wants help to fix the problem. When a man is depressed, if he comes to the office at all, which in itself is rare, he will say that there is something wrong, it's the fault of his wife and would I please fix her.

Instead of admitting to the problem, he will run from it, busy himself, watch TV or abuse alcohol to distract himself from the discomfort. It is very frustrating to try and get men into treatment for depression. It is even more difficult if they are serious Christians since they will always have a spiritual explanation for the problem that excuses them from medical treatment.

At least ten percent (some researchers say twenty percent) of the population will suffer from a mood disorder at some time in their life. Most will not be treated because of the stigma attached to the diagnosis and treatment. Stigma is the single most important obstacle to treatment. Sufferers are afraid to report their symptoms due to the negative consequences which may come in their work, family and church as a result of their diagnosis.

Through these articles, we hope that your understanding will increase and the stigma surrounding depression and other mood disorders will decrease.

Next issue we will discuss depression in the Church.

Dr. Grant Mullen is a mental health physician in Grimsby, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Why do I feel so down when my faith should lift me up?

Jul/Aug 2002

Dear Christian Healing Ministries Prayer Team:

I am a professor at a Christian university... I was scheduled to teach Health Psychology this last semester. Part of the reading requirements included Francis' book Healing. The [30] students were also asked to participate in a healing experiment. They were to choose 3 "healing projects:" two people who needed minor healings and one major healing. Throughout the class I taught 4 healing presentations; answering questions, teaching ways to pray, sharing testimonies of healing. After the first presentation, I encountered a lot of resistance, so much.so that I came home and called your prayer team to pray that God would be revealed to my students. (Later I found the resistance ranged from unbelief to being disappointed in praying for healing at other times in life.) Within 2 weeks after my call to your ministry, a student asked if I would pray for her mother. When we met I discovered that she had suffered with bleeding stomach ulcers for 28 years. They had gotten so bad that her doctor ordered a series of tests, scheduled in two days from our meeting. Our time was limited to ten minutes for prayer. Her daughter, another student and I were in the room to pray. A few days later the student reported to the class that her mother had the tests and the [same] doctor stated, "I don't know why I even ordered these tests, you don't have any signs of ulcers or any damage." She continues to have no pain or symptoms since our prayer. This testimony launched the student's faith!

At the end of class I asked each student to report on the results of their prayer projects. I'm enclosing comments from their reports because I feel that your prayers have played a large part in the results we have seen.

In closing, I want to thank you again for your prayers and support. God must be so pleased! Even those who did not see immediate results from their prayers are encouraged in faith and the power of prayer and feel fully equipped to take on prayer projects. Thanks for your great ministry and your obedience to the call of God in your life to a prayer ministry.

Sincerely,
Peggy Robinson