Healing room movement taps power of prayer

Throughout the centuries, people have gravitated toward faith healers seeking cures for physical and emotional problems that lie beyond the hope of medical science. They gathered around Jesus seeking a healing touch.

Now people are gravitating toward a worldwide ministry, which originated in Spokane, Wash., for more personal, intensive prayer taking place in established healing rooms throughout the nation—and the results are frequently amazing.

The International Association of Healing Rooms, led by Director Cal Pierce, has sparked a healing movement that is sweeping across the nation focusing on training lay people to release the presence and power of God to heal. The healing rooms movement encourages local churches to band together to open a healing room where trained volunteers spend hours praying for those in need.

“In the past we’ve relied in healing evangelists to come into the community, do a crusade and leave, taking the anointing with them,” Pierce said. “Now the healing anointing is coming into the church. Our commission is to see cities transformed. The work of the healing rooms is to heal the body (the church) so the body can evangelize the city by releasing the healing presence of God.”

In 1996, Pierce experienced a dramatic encounter with God and, three years later, found himself reopening the healing rooms of Spokane that were initially established by healing evangelist John G. Lake 80 years ago.

“We started with eight people praying for the sick on the very location that John G. Lake had owned and people came from all over,” said Pierce, author of “Preparing the Way - The Reopening of the John G. Lake Healing Rooms.”

At present, 140 volunteers from a variety of churches—Baptist, Presbyterian, charismatic and Pentecostal—pray for upward of 1,000 people a month that flock to the IAHR healing rooms in need of physical and emotional healing. The ministry now owns a 15,000-square-foot building operated by a staff of 35 that serves as a world training facility teaching individuals how to pray for the sick as well as raising up regional directors to oversee healing rooms.

Volunteer candidates are monitored to be sure they have the appropriate skills for the healing ministry. In addition, they train in established healing rooms before launching their own center.

Centers popping up
As a result of Pierce’s ministry, 300 additional healing rooms affiliated with his organization are now located in 20 nations, and countless others that have opened on their own or through local churches in the United States. Healing rooms typically have set hours for prayer and do not charge for their services.

Most of the people who come to the healing rooms suffer from illnesses that are not visible to the prayer team, such as cancer, arthritis and diabetes, Pierce said. “Some are healed instantly, others return frequently until they have received a measure of healing or a complete healing. Because healing can be so progressive, we never make the assumption that they were not healed after being prayed for.”

Results are often noted days, weeks or months after receiving prayer when a person notices that their symptoms have abated or a physician documents the healing.

Many healing rooms have physicians taking note and in some instances verifying the healings. In Seattle’s Harborview Hospital physicians were amazed to see symptoms quickly abate in terminally ill people and other patients completely healed after a hospital social worker prayed for them. As a result of her success, hospital administrators gave her space and permission to open a healing room in the hospital.

“Some people come in expecting a miracle and they take hold of it right away,” Pierce said. “But healing itself is a process.”

He told the story of one woman who was HIV-positive for 20 years and for whom they prayed for over for five months. Over that time, Pierce said that as the prayer and Word was built up in her, the levels by which HIV is measured dropped to undetectable levels.

“Not only did Jesus heal her body, she now has a ministry here,” he said. “Had she come in and received an instant healing she would have missed her destiny to minister to those who are on the street.”

Volunteer effort
Part of the phenomenon of the healing rooms includes the vast numbers of volunteers reaching out to the sick in their communities. San Diego Healing Rooms Directors Dan and Sarah Shepler were trained at the Spokane IAHR center and now oversee more than 100 Christians from over 40 churches in the San Diego region who volunteer to pray for the sick when the healing rooms are open.

According to the Sheplers’ Web site, the volunteers come from diverse churches including Assembly of God, Baptist, Foursquare, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Vineyard, and various independent fellowships. Each worker must have a release from their pastor to qualify, as well as an interview with the directors. Then an intensive training process begins, followed by a three-month commitment to serving in the Healing Rooms.

Colorado Directors Richard and Debra Wilson have launched two healing rooms in the Denver and Lakewood area over the past three years, with three more planned to open in the coming year. At present, the largest healing room they oversee involves 22 trained volunteers ministering out of Hope of Glory Church in Lakewood.

Skeptics abound
Despite the interest and overwhelming need for divine healing, many evangelicals are skeptical of faith healers and movements. Pastor and author Joe McIntyre of Seattle, Wash. has researched the topic for years and discovered that the late 1880’s divine healing movement was actually spread by such evangelical leaders as Andrew Murry, A.D. Simpson, who was the founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance, and A.J. Gordon, a respected Baptist leader in Boston who wrote a book on healing.

McIntyre is president of the International Fellowship of Ministers, which has licensed and ordained about 400 ministers, some of whom serve as directors of IAHR healing rooms worldwide. He is also the author of “E.W. Kenyon and his Message of Faith—The True Story,” based on voluminous research of Kenyon’s unpublished materials. According to McIntyre, both Lake and Kenyon believed in Dominion theology, the basis of the Healing Rooms ministry.

“It is an aggressive approach that believes we are supposed to demonstrate the kingdom of God with power, not just words,” McIntyre explained. “Much of the church passively waits on God’s sovereignty rather than taking the kingdom. God wants to keep his promises but we need to develop our faith to receive and aggressively take them.”

McIntyre also believes that the criticism against faith healing stems from a Greek and rational worldview of Scripture.

“The reason we reject healing and Christ’s work is because our view of scripture is not Hebrew, it’s Greek,” McIntyre said. “Cessationism, the idea that God doesn’t do miracles today, is a Greek idea. In the Hebrew worldview all of life is holy and important and to be lived with a thankful heart. As we return to the Hebrew worldview, the Scripture that says He bore our sickness and pains, (Isaiah 53) is an argument for Christ’s atonement providing healing as well as forgiveness.”

Pierce, a fellow practitioner, agrees.

“Dispensationalist teaching leads us to believe we hope they are healed but you don’t pray for the lost and hope they’re saved,” he said. “Why can we impart salvation by faith but not for healing? They are not separate issues they come from the same place—the word of truth.”

Unbelief cited
Regardless of criticisms about the modern faith movement, McIntyre said he believes that the greatest sin in the body of Christ is unbelief.

“We haven’t believed the gospel,” he said. “A critic of the faith movement, Gordon Fee, said that he was against the faith movement but if he were to measure the level of faith existing in the evangelical church it would be a minus five. To me that says we may not like everything coming out of the faith and healing movement, but at least they’re seeking God to have more faith.”

Both Pierce and McIntyre said they believe the healing rooms movement is here to stay and will flourish over the coming years.

“The growing ground-swell of intercession around the world is drawing the presence of God and when His presence comes we see more miracles, healings, and salvation,” McIntryre said.

For more information on the association, log on to healingrooms.com.

Published, January 2005

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