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Chapter One

A Tsunami of the Spirit

“Preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.”

— Matthew 10:7–8

The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.

— 1 Corinthians 4:20

It was a beautiful afternoon on the southern California coast, and 22-year-old Andrew Laubacher had just finished surfing. He was walking along the boardwalk in his wetsuit, heading back to his car, when he spotted a young girl sitting in a wheelchair on the beach. He knew he had to pray with her.

Andrew was in many ways a typical Catholic young adult. He loved surfing, playing music, and hanging out with his friends. In his teen years he had gone through a time of rebellion and had gotten into some trouble with the law. He had become an atheist for a time. Then he experienced a powerful conversion at a Steubenville Youth Conference,¹ and he began to learn that as followers of Christ we are called to bring the good news to others in the power of the Holy Spirit. He had even witnessed some miraculous healings. So when he saw the teenage Hispanic girl, sitting by the ocean in a wheelchair, he felt the prompting of the Holy Spirit to stop and pray with her. In his own words, Andrew recounts what happened next:

I got out of my wetsuit and dried off and approached the girl, who was with her parents. They didn’t speak English but the girl did. I went up and asked how she was doing and if she wanted prayer for anything. The fear of rejection and of having nothing happen when I prayed was real and strong, but I went anyway.

As I asked her what was going on with her and why she was in a wheelchair, she began to pour out her life to me. It was shocking. She had just gotten out of the hospital because she had tried to kill herself for the second time. She had done meth and several other drugs, and she struggled with depression and anxiety. She had difficulty walking because she had had cerebral palsy since she was born. After she said all this, I was extremely moved with compassion and the conviction that God wanted to encounter her, and boldness came over me, casting out all fear that I was not good enough pray with her. So I prayed for healing for her condition, for peace and the power of the Holy Spirit to flood her body.

After I prayed for a little while I asked her to get up and walk. She began to walk and realized she was walking straighter and with less pain. Then I prayed over her knees. They visibly were crooked and sticking out in opposite directions, but after the prayer they were perfectly straight. When her parents saw that she was walking better and her knees were straightened out, they were shocked.

After all this I asked her what she was experiencing and she said her knees were hot and her body was tingling and there was no pain in her body. I told her, “That’s Jesus, baby!” It turned out she was Catholic but not into her faith at all. I told her to get to Mass and confession and receive the forgiveness that God wanted to give her.

I stayed in touch with her after that day. She texted me to tell me she went to confession and Mass and said she felt free and lighter and experienced the love of God.

After reflecting on that experience and many more, I am convinced that, as the Scriptures say, the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power (1 Cor 4:20). As Christians, little “anointed ones,” we can bring people healing and redemption through Jesus everywhere we go. We seem to do a lot of ministry and mission trips, but what if every day in our very homes we prayed with the sick, the depressed, the lame, and the blind for healing? It would change everything. We would be manifesting the kingdom, which is his love. This is our mission, to go out into all the world and bring the good news of healing, mercy, compassion, and most of all, unconditional love!

Because of Andrew’s faith and courage in obeying the prompting of the Holy Spirit, that young girl’s life was changed forever. If he had done nothing but talk to her about God’s love, that alone would have been a very good thing. However, she might have thought to herself, “Sure, I know. I’ve heard all that before.” But because Andrew took the bold step of praying with her for healing, she experienced God’s love in her very body. In a most tangible way, this broken person encountered the power and mercy of the risen Lord, restoring her to the fullness of life.

I am convinced that Andrew’s story represents something immensely significant that God is doing in the Church in our time. The healing of the girl on the beach, while dramatic, is not unique. Thousands of similar healings have taken place around the world in recent years, as Catholics and other Christians have responded with new faith and fervor to the Lord’s call to evangelize in the power of the Holy Spirit. In this age when so many have wandered far from God, the Lord is once more clothing his followers with power from on high (cf. Luke 24:49). He is calling us to go out and proclaim the gospel not only in words, but also in signs and wonders that bear witness to the truth of the words.

Healing is one of the charisms the Holy Spirit bestows on Christ’s followers to equip us for mission. The gift of healing has been present in the Church in every age, but is being poured out in remarkable abundance in our time. Perhaps this is in part because of the tremendous physical, emotional, and spiritual woundedness in postmodern society. God has infinite compassion for those who suffer, and healing is one of the means he uses to manifest his real and powerful love.

There remain, however, many misconceptions about healing. Many Catholics assume miracles of healing are confined to the lives of great saints or to shrines like Lourdes, and that it is presumptuous for ordinary people to pray with expectation for such miracles. Many believe that God prefers his children to simply endure sickness or disability rather than to seek healing. Others would like to pray with people for healing, but are unsure how to go about it.

This book will seek to address these difficulties and answer questions like the following:

• Is Jesus really still healing people today?

• Are claimed miraculous healings authentic, and do they last?

• How do we know if God wants us to pray for healing?

• Who gets the gift of healing, and can I ask for it?

• How do I pray for healing?

• What if I pray and the person doesn’t get healed?

• How does prayer for healing relate to the saints and sacraments?

• Does the Lord heal broken hearts as well as bodies?

The Tsunami of Secularism

To understand clearly what God is doing in relation to healing, we need to consider it within the broader context of our times. Christians in every age are called to read the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the gospel.² We ought to regularly ask questions like these: What events and currents of thought are influencing the hearts and minds of people of our time? What are the global trends that will have an impact on future generations? What is the Lord calling us to do in response? What is the Spirit saying to the churches? (cf. Rev 2:7).

In October 2012, bishops from around the world were gathered in Rome for a synod on evangelization — three weeks of intense discussions on the current state of the Church and how to mobilize Catholics to spread the gospel. In an address to his fellow bishops, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., used a striking phrase: a “tsunami of secularism,” he said, has engulfed the Western world.³ With that phrase he captured the drama in which the Church is living today. The last few generations have witnessed an abandonment of Christian faith and a secularization of society on a scale never before seen in history. Vast numbers of people baptized as Christians are no longer practicing the faith and no longer have any connection with Christ or the Church. Many are living a practical Deism: they believe that perhaps in some sense God exists, but that he does not intervene in human history or act directly in our lives. The universe is a closed system in which everything can be explained by the laws of physics and biochemistry.

With the loss of Christian faith has come the denial of basic moral truths such as the inviolable dignity of human life and the sanctity of marriage. At the same time, a new kind of militant atheism has arisen, which not only argues against the existence of God, but ridicules Christianity and condemns all religions as equally irrational and dangerous. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

In our days … in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel…. The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.⁴

The absence of God in our society leaves an inner void that people seek to fill with all kinds of counterfeits. There is a growing culture of narcissism, in which the highest values are ascribed to self-fulfillment, physical attractiveness, sexual freedom, and the accumulation of possessions. These empty pursuits have in turn led to a landscape of broken relationships, broken lives, loneliness, addiction, and the whole array of societal evils that St. John Paul II summed up as “the culture of death.”⁵

A recent news item illustrates this profound darkness. A Belgian woman named Nancy Verhelst grew up with parents who treated her with utter contempt. “I was the girl that nobody wanted,” she told a reporter. “While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. ‘If only you had been a boy,’ my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more.”⁶ Perhaps it is not surprising that as an adult Nancy renamed herself Nathan and sought to remake herself as a man. We can only imagine the hurt and confusion of this broken person. But instead of offering her hope and healing, the best that a godless, secular society could do for her was provide sex-change surgery. After the operation, instead of feeling the peace she longed for, Nancy was disgusted with what she saw in the mirror and felt like a monster. And at that point, the best that a godless, secular society could do for her was to end her life. On September 30, 2013, Nancy was killed in an assisted suicide by lethal injection under Belgium’s euthanasia law.

Truly, Satan is a tyrant — the thief who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). The world has become a war zone, where countless people are spiritually wounded and in dire need of help. A fierce battle is going on for the hearts and souls and minds of this generation. The stakes are high. What is going to meet the challenge of our times?

No human strategy or plan or program will suffice. It is God alone who holds the answer. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zech 4:6). The answer to the “tsunami of secularism” is nothing less than a tsunami of the Spirit — a proclamation of the gospel in the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by healings, signs, and wonders that tangibly demonstrate God’s love and convince people that Jesus Christ is truly alive.

The Call to a New Evangelization

As society has descended into spiritual and moral darkness, the Church has been sounding a trumpet call to Christ’s followers to let their light shine all the more brightly. For more than three decades the popes have been ringing out a summons to engage in a new evangelization — a renewed proclamation of the good news of Christ to the people of our time. The pontiffs have made clear that it is no longer only remote, unreached peoples who need to be evangelized but also, and especially, those in our own post-Christian society who no longer believe or practice the faith.

The summons actually began with Vatican Council II, when bishops and theologians were led to reflect deeply on the Church’s evangelical mission. For centuries Catholics had been accustomed to thinking of evangelizing as a specialty work carried out only by priests or religious who are called to the foreign missions. The Council declared that in fact it is the duty of every Christian.⁷ Following the Council, Blessed Pope Paul VI wrote an apostolic letter in which he affirmed, “Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize.”⁸

John Paul II coined the term “New Evangelization,” explaining that it is new not in content — it is the same gospel that has been preached for two millennia — but “in ardor, in method, and in expression.”⁹ It is new in ardor in that all Catholics need to be rekindled in a fire of zeal to proclaim Christ to others in both word and deed. It is new in method in that we must use methods adapted to our own time, including new and creative means of reaching people as well as up-to-date technologies. It is new in expression in that we cannot simply repeat formulas from the past but must speak in ways that touch the hearts and minds of this generation.

In 2001, John Paul II expressed the urgency of this task:

Over the years, I have often repeated the summons to the new evangelization. I do so again now, especially in order to insist that we must rekindle in ourselves the impetus of the beginnings and allow ourselves to be filled with the ardor of the apostolic preaching which followed Pentecost. We must revive in ourselves the burning conviction of Paul, who cried out: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).¹⁰

When Pope Benedict took office in 2005, he ensured that the New Evangelization would remain a long-term top priority for the Church, first by establishing a new Vatican department devoted to it, the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, and then by making it the theme of the 2012 World Synod of Bishops.

Pope Francis has given the call an even stronger urgency. In his apostolic letter The Joy of the Gospel, the follow-up document to the 2012 synod, he wrote:

The new evangelization calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized. Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love. Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are “disciples” and “missionaries,” but rather that we are always “missionary disciples.”¹¹

Pope Francis insists that the call to evangelization demands a complete retooling and re-visioning of the way parishes and other church institutions function. All are to become completely mission-oriented. “In all its activities the parish encourages and trains its members to be evangelizers.”¹² From now on “we ‘cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings’; we need to move ‘from a pastoral ministry of mere conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral ministry.’”¹³

It would be hard to imagine stronger exhortations from the Church’s pastors. Yet it must be admitted that the New Evangelization has yet to take hold in a truly radical way. While many parishes and dioceses have made diligent efforts in responding to the call, often these efforts have resulted in relatively meager fruit. In some areas, the faithful do not yet know what the “New Evangelization” is. In others, it has become simply the latest catchphrase. Evangelization is sometimes interpreted to mean simply “everything we’re already doing,” and New Evangelization means simply “more of the same.” In many areas of the western world, the number of practicing Catholics continues in rapid decline.

Clearly, something is missing; something more is needed to awaken the Catholic Church. What will light a fire of evangelistic fervor in the hearts and minds of Catholics of the twenty-first century and enable them to proclaim the good news in a convincing way to the people of our time?

The First Evangelization

This question can only be answered adequately by taking a closer look at the first evangelization — the explosion of Christianity in the ancient world — and learning how it was that a tiny, ragtag band of Christians “turned the world upside down” for Christ (as was literally said of Christians in Acts 17:6). How did this little community of former fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, slaves, and ordinary people, while being subjected to waves of violent state persecution, so convince the world of the gospel that by the time Christianity finally became legal, and thus safe, in the early fourth century, Christians were already nearly a quarter of the population of the Roman Empire?¹⁴

The beginnings of this first evangelization are recounted in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels and Acts. These books give us the divinely inspired account of what the Church’s mission is meant to look like. The New Testament is not only a source of doctrine or of interesting historical data about early Christianity, but also the blueprint for the life and mission of the Church today. The apostolic Church contains the DNA, so to speak, for the Church in every age. Awakening Catholics to their evangelistic mission today therefore means taking a closer look at what Scripture itself reveals about that first evangelization.

Another reason the apostolic Church merits closer attention is that today we find ourselves in a cultural situation that is in some respects more like that faced by the early Christians than it has been at any time since. There is growing hostility to Christianity and intense social pressure to keep our faith to ourselves and stay out of the public square. Vast numbers of people are living an essentially pagan, hedonistic lifestyle. Many are completely ignorant of the gospel. This fact was vividly brought home to a religious sister I know who walked into a drugstore one day wearing her crucifix. Seeing it, the girl behind the counter innocently asked, “Oh, who’s the man hanging on that bar? My grandmother had one of those.”

In some ways we face an even more challenging situation than the early Christians did. Many people today have been exposed to just enough Christianity to be inoculated against it. They think they know essentially everything there is to know about Jesus and the Church. They have been influenced by a constant media barrage of references to Christian violence, colonialism, hypocrisy, hostility to science, and sexual crimes — some accurate, and many exaggerated or false. They rarely hear anything about the vast amount of good Christians do. People formed in these circumstances are far more difficult to reach than those who have never heard of Jesus.

In the biblical account of the first evangelization, one factor that is immediately obvious is the prominent role played by healings and other miraculous works of God. For Jesus and his first followers, the preaching of the good news was inseparable from the signs and wonders by which God himself corroborated the spoken message and convinced the hearers of its truth. As the letter to the Hebrews puts it, while Christians preached the word, “God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his own will” (Heb 2:4). Through these miracles done through faith in the name of Jesus, countless people personally witnessed Christ’s power and came to believe in him.

Are people today any less in need of an encounter with God than the people of the first century? In a world that has lost a sense of the transcendent, healings and miracles are all the more needed to demonstrate that God is the living God who acts in history and in human lives. They are a balm for the gaping spiritual wound in contemporary society: the wound of the absence of God. Healings convince even the most hardened and broken hearts that God has not left us orphans but is present and active and rich in mercy toward us. At the same time, they remind believers that evangelization relies less on human resources than on the Holy Spirit, the principal agent of evangelization.¹⁵ Healings are part of God’s providential answer to the spiritual darkness of our times.

Prayer for Healing

Most Catholics are used to praying for the sick. We do so at the liturgy, at special events, and in private whenever we hear of someone who is ill or injured.

But it is something else to pray with and over a sick person, confidently asking the Lord to heal him or her. That is outside the box for many Catholics. Many are not sure whether it is even legitimate to do so. Isn’t it prideful to expect God to work a healing at my request? I’m not worthy to be used like that. I don’t pray enough. I’m not virtuous enough. I fail too often. I can barely get through the day, much less live up to the holiness of the saints.

This hesitation is understandable, but it is based on a serious misconception. The truth is that God pours out his gifts, including the gift of healing, freely. He desires to give this gift far more abundantly than we think. He is not limited by our abilities, but only by our faith and our desire to be used by him. “By the power at work within us [he] is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph 3:20).

As someone who grew up Catholic, I too have prayed for the sick all my life. For nearly thirty years I have also often prayed with people for healing, sometimes with the laying on of hands. Only rarely did I witness even a slight improvement — a stomach feeling better or a headache gradually disappearing. But in the last three years, after observing and learning from those who have great faith for healing, especially Randy Clark and Damian Stayne,¹⁶ I have begun to see people healed on a regular basis, sometimes in amazing ways. The difference is that I pray now with greater faith that the Lord really does want to heal, and loves to heal, his children who are broken and hurting. I also offer to pray with people much more often than before. I have become convinced that miraculous healing is not meant to be something rare but ordinary in the life of the Church, and that the Lord does not want to use only spiritual superstars with special gifts, but every “little ole’ me,” as Randy Clark puts it.

In this book I share what I have learned from studying what Scripture, theology, and Church history have to tell us about healing, as well as my own experience and that of friends and co-laborers in the Lord’s vineyard. My hope is that you too will gain confidence to pray with others with expectant faith for healing, even in the most unexpected times and places, as Andrew did on the beach. As we pursue the daunting task of evangelizing the people of the twenty-first century, the Church needs the full endowment of supernatural gifts given to her by her living Lord. The Lord longs to lavish these gifts on his children so they in turn can lavish his mercy on the world. Obtaining these gifts is not complicated, but simple. “Ask, and it will be given you” (Matt 7:7).