Are televised faith healers genuine?

Question 60023.

Televised faith healers have produced a recognisable style: the platform, the word of knowledge about a condition somewhere in the auditorium, the hand on the forehead, the person falling backwards, the announcement of a miracle, and then the appeal for a gift of faith. Millions watch. Many send money they cannot spare. And a great many sick people are left afterwards wondering what is wrong with them.

Before I say anything critical, let me say what I do believe, because this subject is regularly handled by people whose real objection is to miracles as such, and that is not my position at all.

What I am not saying about faith healers

I believe God heals. I believe He heals today, sometimes suddenly and inexplicably, and I have prayed with people who got better in ways medicine could not account for. I hold that the gifts of the Spirit were never withdrawn, and that includes the gifts of healing, which I have written about in what the gift of healing is. So my problem with television faith healers is not that they claim too much for God. It is that what they actually do bears very little resemblance to what the New Testament describes.

Nor am I saying that everyone on that platform is a deliberate fraud. Some are. Others are sincere people carried along by a culture of exaggeration where nobody counts, nobody checks and nobody is ever allowed to say that it did not work.

What healing looks like in the New Testament

The healings in the Gospels and Acts have a set of features that are difficult to miss once you look for them. They were immediate. They were complete. They were public and verifiable, involving conditions the whole town knew about, such as a man lame from birth sitting at a gate everybody passed. They were done for strangers rather than for supporters. And they were free.

Peter’s line at the temple gate is the one I keep coming back to. Silver and gold I have none, but what I do have I give to you. The man walked, and everyone who had watched him beg for years could see it. There was no offering, no partnership level, and no explanation afterwards about why the healing had not manifested yet.

There is also no record of failure being blamed on the sick. When the disciples could not heal a boy, Jesus addressed the disciples, not the father. That single detail overturns the whole approach of modern faith healers who explain a disappointing outcome by telling the sufferer that his faith was insufficient.

What happens on television instead

Watch what television faith healers actually do and the pattern is different. The conditions announced are overwhelmingly things that cannot be checked from the outside: back pain, arthritis, tumours nobody has seen, breathing difficulties, a leg said to have lengthened. What you do not see are the conditions that would be obvious to the camera, the withered limb restored or the person blind from birth walking out unaided.

There is also almost never any follow up. A ministry that believed it was seeing miracles would surely want them documented, with medical records before and after, because that evidence would be the most powerful witness imaginable. Instead the testimony is gathered in the emotional heat of the meeting and the outcome is never revisited. When healings have been independently followed up, the results have been sobering.

And there is the crowd itself. Expectation, music, sleep deprivation and adrenaline can genuinely reduce the sensation of pain for a few hours. That is not a miracle, it is a body under excitement, and the return of the symptoms in the car park a week later is a familiar and heartbreaking story.

Money is usually the tell

The strongest single indicator is where the appeal lands. When the healing is attached to a gift, a seed, a point of contact, or a promise that God will multiply what you send, we have left the New Testament entirely and arrived at something Peter dealt with in Acts 8, where a man tried to buy spiritual power and was told his heart was not right before God.

Jesus told His disciples that they had received without paying and were to give without pay. Any ministry that presents the power of God as available in proportion to your donation has told you what it is, whatever the doctrinal statement says. This is the same machinery I have described in what the prosperity gospel is and why it is dangerous.

The real damage

The financial exploitation is bad enough. The deeper harm is what this teaching does to sick believers. If healing is guaranteed to those who believe hard enough, then the person still in the wheelchair has a second burden laid on top of the first, and it is the worst one. She is not only ill, she is now guilty of being ill.

That is a lie, and Scripture will not support it. Paul left Trophimus ill at Miletus. He told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach and frequent ailments. He asked three times for his own thorn to be taken away and was told my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. If unanswered prayer for healing proves a defect of faith, then the apostle who wrote most of the New Testament was defective. I have dealt with this more fully in why some prayers for healing fail.

When exposure has come

Some of the best known faith healers of the last fifty years have been publicly and thoroughly exposed. The most famous case involved a healer receiving the names and ailments of audience members through a concealed earpiece, fed by his wife from prayer cards collected before the meeting, which was broadcast to a national audience in the 1980s. The ministry recovered and continues.

That last sentence is the sobering part. Exposure has rarely finished these ministries, because the audience is not primarily assessing evidence. They are desperate, and desperation is easy to farm. Which is why I would rather teach believers to know what Scripture leads them to expect than spend my time chasing individual scandals.

How then should we pray for the sick?

James gives the pattern, and it is strikingly undramatic. Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. Local, ordinary, in the church rather than in an arena, with no audience and no camera, and with the prayer of faith offered to God rather than commanded of Him.

Pray boldly and specifically, and mean it. Then leave the outcome with God rather than manufacturing an announcement. Thank Him for medicine, which is His provision too. Sit with people who are not healed and do not treat them as a problem for your theology. That is a less exciting ministry than the platform offers, and it is the one Jesus actually left us.

Why televised faith healers keep going

It is worth asking why this survives every exposure, because the answer explains a good deal. Suffering people are not weighing evidence, they are looking for a door. When a woman has been in pain for eleven years and the consultant has run out of options, a man on the screen promising a miracle is not competing with an argument. He is competing with despair.

There is also the way the meetings are constructed. Nobody counts. The testimonies are gathered in the room and the disappointments go home quietly, so the ministry only ever sees its successes and genuinely believes its own numbers. Faith healers of this kind are rarely lying about everything; they are operating a system that filters out the evidence which would correct them.

And there is our appetite. Modern faith healers exist because there is a market, and the market is Christians who want the spectacular more than they want the ordinary means God has actually given. A church well fed on Scripture, sober about suffering, and honest about unanswered prayer is a poor market for this, which is one more reason to do the unglamorous work well.

So, now what?

If you have sent money to televised faith healers, or been told your faith failed, I want to say plainly that you were wronged and that God is not the one who wronged you. He is not withholding health until you produce a sufficient quantity of belief, and He is not weighing your bank transfer. Come back to a Father who welcomes you with nothing in your hands.

If you are well and simply watching all this from a distance, do two things. Learn what the New Testament healings actually looked like, so that the counterfeit is obvious to you. And find someone in your own congregation who is ill, and pray with them at their kitchen table, without a camera. That is where most of the healing ministry of the church has always happened.

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.

James 5:14 to 15 (ESV)