Healing Line

Healing Line

The Headwaters of the Healing Ministry

by Rev. Ken Polsley
Summer 2017

I remember 39 years ago I was sitting with my girlfriend in the University of Iowa library; it was a study date. I was supposed to be studying European history, but instead I was reading Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I looked up from my Bible and asked my girlfriend about the passage I was reading (I Corinthians 12:27–28), “What do you think about this gift of tongues? Some people say they speak in tongues today, but do you think people really speak in tongues today?” She replied, as if it were no big deal, “Sure they do, I speak in tongues.” This was shocking news to me. I was immediately thrown into a crisis and thought, This woman is perfect for me — she is smart, musical, fully committed to the Lord, beautiful in every way, and she is organized (which was a foreign but attractive attribute to me), but how in the world can I possibly marry her? She speaks in tongues!

For years during college, as a missionary, and later as a pastor, I had a strong prejudice against several gifts of the Holy Spirit. I believed strongly that gifts like tongues, healing, prophesy, and miracles existed back in Bible times, but that they did not exist for now. I read the Bible selectively because I liked other gifts in the same list from First Corinthians — teaching, administration, and helping. Where in the world did I get that idea? I certainly didn’t get that idea from reading the Bible. It wasn’t my own idea — I inherited it through the teaching of Christian mentors. This idea of spiritual gift discontinuation had a long and complicated history that I didn’t know. Even though I believed the supernatural gifts that Jesus exercised were not available now, I still claimed to love Jesus with all my heart and wanted to be like him.

The reason why I remember the conversation in the library happened 39 years ago is because I have now been married 38 years. I came to my senses and married that woman, tongues or no tongues. Thank God I came to my senses!

I had to change my mind about healing prayer too. Let me be clear on what I mean when I say healing prayer. The healing prayer that we teach at CHM has five basic components:

  1. Anyone.
  2. Anywhere.
  3. Any disease.
  4. Personal Words.
  5. Personal Touch.

Anyone can be used by God as an instrument of healing; one does not need to be a special ordained person. Healing can happen anywhere, not just in special places like shrines or churches. Any disease can be healed. Healing involves a living breathing person speaking words, either asking God to do something or commanding something to happen. Likewise, healing involves touch — the laying on of hands. These components were modeled by Jesus and practiced by his disciples for the first 300 years. Then healing ministry waned, until it was almost non–existent. There were always healing opportunities available in a few places, but after 400 AD they were not carried out by the means that Jesus modeled.

Francis MacNutt wrote a book that he originally titled The Nearly Perfect Crime: How the Church Almost Killed the Ministry of Healing. The first thing to understand about this is that “the crime,” the almost murder of healing, was done by very good people. These are people who loved Jesus and who wanted others to love Jesus — people like me. I, like others, believed there were good reasons for what I opposed. I have changed my mind about all those reasons.

The main thing that Jesus did and taught his disciples to do was heal the sick. The New Testament contains about 40 stories of individuals, like Blind Bartimaeus, who were recipients of Jesus’ healing. That means that about 30 percent of Jesus’ recorded ministry events in the New Testament were healing events. We need to think of the 40 individual healing stories as the “highlights reel.” It’s like when Lebron James scores 50 points in an NBA game — the next day on ESPN the highlights are shown in two minutes. They don’t show his 10 or 15 free throws; they show a few spectacular baskets. It’s the same with Jesus and the disciples. For instance, there are 10 mass healing statements in Matthew involving Jesus (Matthew 4:23–24, 8:16–17, 9:35–36, 11:4–5, 12:15, 14:14, 14:34–36, 15:30–31, 19:1–2, 21:14.) When I say “mass healing” I refer to an event where all who were present were healed. There is one mass healing statement in Mark concerning Jesus’ disciples (Mark 6:13). We don’t have the individual stories from the disciples’ healing ministry in the Gospels, only that they healed “many.” We don’t have any of the individual stories from the mass healing events of Jesus. If these stories were all recorded, then the Gospels would be very, very long. In the New Testament we have the “highlights reel” of the mass healings.

Consider Matthew 14 — the feeding of the 5,000. The passage begins with a large healing service. The overall crowd size, including women and children, was likely between 10,000 and 15,000. People brought the sick to Jesus from a wide geographical area, so the percentage of sick people in the crowd may have been more than normal. Envision that if one person for every ten people in a crowd of 10,000 was sick (a modest estimate), and Jesus prayed one minute with every sick person, then the healing service continued for 16 hours. If he prayed only 15 seconds with each sick person, then it lasted 4 hours. However long the healing ministry of Jesus went on that day, the Bible tells us the meal didn’t start until evening. I picture in my mind a day of healing — the disciples organizing the crowds, Jesus moving from person to person, from family to family — Jesus loving, listening, looking into longing eyes and reaching out to touch and speak healing to the sick. All of this ministry is contained in one summary sentence, and not one of the personal stories of the healed is recorded. Then when the day of healing was done, Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Jesus trained his disciples by a continuous practicum of healing. They observed Jesus heal hundreds upon hundreds of the sick before they were sent out to do the same. The 72 unnamed disciples were trained in the same way — by observation, practice, and debrief (Luke 10:1–12; 17–20). When they were sent out to villages to preach the kingdom and to heal, they knew what to do. They had seen Jesus do it up close, daily.

The training of the disciples in healing ministry was an important consideration for me. When we receive training for an occupation, we expect to actually do what we are trained to do. When I was a car accountant for a railroad, I spent three months in Chicago being trained by another car accountant. I had every expectation of using that training in my new job. We also expect to see results from the training that we have received.

The disciples were commissioned by Jesus with words to reinforce expectations of continuation — “go and make disciples of all nations... teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). Jesus’ disciples were trained and commanded to do three cross–cultural ministry activities: 1) to preach that the Kingdom of God is at hand, 2) to heal the sick, and 3) to cast out demons (Luke 9:1–2; Luke 10:8–9,17). In the book of Acts we read the highlight reel of disciples doing the very things that Jesus trained them to do. The healings that are recorded in Acts served as catalysts to open up whole new regions for the message of the Kingdom.

It begs a question for me — I claimed to be a follower of Jesus and I claimed to love Jesus with all my heart, but I was opposed to any kind of healing ministry that followed the model of Jesus and the early disciples. I had to consider — Would I have been a follower of Jesus, since healing was the main thing that Jesus did? Would I have even liked being with Jesus and the disciples while they were doing so much healing?

What I didn’t know when I opposed healing was how the healing ministry continued after all the original disciples had died. During the time when Christianity was illegal throughout the Roman Empire, healing was one of the main reasons the church grew. That story, and the subsequent story of how healing began to wane in the church is complicated, but at the heart of it is that Christians were distracted from the original model taught by Jesus to his disciples. In the early post–apostolic churches, healing was common and practiced by normal, everyday believers. It is my prayer that all of us who love and serve the Lord Jesus recover this expectation of using the healing gifts.


Ken Polsley Rev. Ken Polsley is an ordained minister, CHM prayer minister and speaker at many of CHM's Schools of Healing Prayer®. Summer 2017 Issue