Christian "healing rooms" across the United States are reviving the biblical practice of calling on the power of prayer to help others.
By SHARON TUBBS
Published February 23, 2004
[Times photos: Chris Zuppa]
Pam Malone of Clearwater, center, prays with, from left clockwise, Donna Jalkanen of Palm Harbor, Sandi Odermatt of Tampa, her husband Wayne, Pam’s husband Bill, and Katherine Duke of Tampa during a prayer team training session at New Beginnings Fellowship in Tampa.
Bill Malone, who co-directs Healing Rooms of Tampa Bay with his wife, Pam, opens a prayer team training session in Tampa.
Donna Jalkanen, left, of Palm Harbor and Katherine Duke of Tampa take part in a prayer team training session by praying for Pam Malone of Clearwater, center, at New Beginnings Fellowship church recently. Malone was teaching the session with her husband, Bill. Pam Malone said she was having trouble sleeping at night and wanted people to pray for her.
TAMPA - The first step in healing prayer is to overcome your feelings of inadequacy, Bill Malone says, his eyes scanning the four faces in the room. Most people don't think they can do it, don't think they have the power.
Malone is here to assure them: Their prayers can heal the sick. All they have to do is believe that God wants people to be physically and emotionally fit.
"We're not faith healers, as you've heard the term," Malone says. "But our definition of faith healers is having faith that God can do the healing."
Enter the realm of "divine healing," an age-old religious practice being revived across the country. The practice has attracted a new following since 1999 when a couple opened a "healing room" in Spokane, Wash., on the site where a man named John G. Lake is said to have healed thousands through prayer in the early 1900s. When news of the Spokane site spread four years ago, people went from across the country and overseas, hoping to be healed of cancer, backaches, headaches and depression.
Healing rooms opened in other cities, many under the umbrella of the International Association of Healing Rooms in Spokane. The organization has 210 sites worldwide.
The rooms typically are set up in professional offices or shopping centers, rather than churches. The sick come during scheduled hours. Some make appointments, but walk-ins generally are allowed. There is no charge, but they can drop money in donation boxes. They fill out forms and wait to be called into a private healing room. The clients sit in a comfortable chair surrounded by at least three people trained to pray away sickness.
The association instructs its members to work with medical professionals. It doesn't tell people to stop taking medicine or stop seeing doctors. It encourages those who think they are healed to get documented proof from their physician.
Doctors, as well as many Christians, are skeptical. Some say prayer does not have a significant effect on physical disabilities; others say it's not God's plan to heal everyone.
But the healing movement continues to spread, and it has reached the Tampa Bay area. A group in Port Richey has been training people in prayer healing for several months. In late January, Malone and his wife, Pam, opened the Healing Rooms of Tampa Bay, and they held their first training seminar this month. Four people showed up at a cozy sanctuary off Himes Avenue.
* * *
The Malones want to show how things work in a healing room. Pam asks if someone needs prayer. Donna Jalkanen, a 58-year-old from Palm Harbor, raises her hand. She has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and has degenerative disc disease and arthritis. She uses a walker.
Bill helps Jalkanen to a chair at the front of the room and sits beside her. Pam stands on her other side with a hand on Jalkanen's shoulder.
Healing can take place for emotional or physical problems. What does Jalkanen want prayer for?
"I find I get really discouraged in the direction that God wants me to go," she says. "And I need strength to persevere."
Pam holds a glass flask. "Do you mind if we anoint you with oil?"
Jalkanen agrees, and Pam dabs her forehead.
"Holy Spirit, we just ask you to come in power," Pam prays.
Bill dabs more oil. "Pour out your power and touch her, God," he says. "Fill her with your peace now, God."
They speak softly and calmly. They say God isn't hard of hearing, so they don't yell or raise their voices. And they keep their eyes open to see "how God is moving."
"Give her that confidence, Lord, to know you are with her," Bill says.
Pam: "Give her true boldness, tenacity . . ."
They stop. Silence. Bill stares quietly into Jalkanen's face.
"How are you feeling?" he asks finally.
"I'm in a lot of peace," Jalkanen says.
"I know the healing is there. I can just touch it. It's right there."
* * *
The Malones, who live in Clearwater, became known in local religious circles for their involvement in the National Day of Prayer and as founders of the Pray USA! ministry. Bill, 63, has the peaceful face of Mr. Rogers. He sold electrical products before devoting his life to writing Christian books with Pam and overseeing the prayer ministry. Pam, 59, is the storyteller, often recounting something "the Lord showed me" on this trip or that.
They started to believe in healing prayer in the 1980s as Pam battled an immune deficiency disorder. She went through eight doctors. One day she went to a healing seminar and watched people pray for the sick. She asked them to pray for her. They did, but she still was sick. She studied teachings about healing. The teachings said Jesus' death paid the price for sickness. Even though she was ill, Pam started praying for other people. Some of them felt better, she says.
Finally, a doctor figured out that she'd contracted hepatitis during a trip to Hawaii and that a misdiagnosis had led to other illnesses. He gave her the right treatments. That, combined with trips to a chiropractor, vitamin therapy and prayer, made her better. Through it all, God was moving, she says. "But not all are healed, and people wonder why," Bill says. "Why aren't people healed? That's a mystery, and only God knows why people aren't healed."
Pam offers one explanation: Some people go for prayer only once, she says. They want instant healing. But healing doesn't always happen that way. In the prayer rooms, team members should encourage people who aren't healed to come back again and again until they get results.
"I often wonder how many times we stop praying right before the healing comes," she says.
But many Christians don't believe that God intends for everyone to be healed.
Joni Eareckson Tada is a Christian author and founder of Joni and Friends, a Christian outreach organization for the disabled in Agoura Hills, Calif. Tada has been a quadriplegic since 1967, when she had a diving accident. She wrote of her struggles in her 2003 memoir, The God I Love.
Tada has said she sought healing years ago in prayer lines but remained in a wheelchair. Today, she embraces her disability, saying God didn't heal her so she could be closer to him, continually ridding her life of sin.
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a psychology professor at Duke University, says growing research indicates that people who pray and engage in other activities of faith have less stress and are better able to cope with life. That can translate into better health among those people because they have fewer stress-related illnesses, such as heart attacks and strokes.
But when it comes to intercessory prayer - people praying for others - scientific studies are varied. "It's very much a mixed bag," Koenig says.
Researchers have performed about a dozen studies on intercessory prayer since 1969, he says. In about half, intercessory prayer had no significant effect. The other half showed only slight differences in favor of intercessory prayer, he says.
Margaret Poloma, a sociologist at the University of Akron in Ohio, is a member of a prayer team at the Healing Rooms of Greater Cleveland. Poloma says she has prayed for people who have later reported being healed of illness. But such healings would be difficult and costly to study and document, she says. For instance, the healing room's director had once been diagnosed with "probable" colon cancer. But before doctors operated, people prayed for him. He hasn't had any problems since. Did he really have cancer? It's hard to say, she says.
"I would suspect that many of the healings are more inner healings than physical healings," she says.
* * *
The Malones opened their healing rooms inside New Beginnings Fellowship church on Jan. 28. Eventually, they want a building of their own. Healing room organizers want to appeal to all denominations and people who are not Christians, so the ideal room is outside of a church.
For now, the pastors' offices at New Beginnings serve as private healing rooms on Wednesdays from 2 to 5 p.m. and Fridays from 4 to 7. The Malones say 32 people have signed up to be on prayer teams. A few have come by for prayer. Pam says she hadn't seen instant healings but people have felt God's "unconditional love." She has seen depressed people leave happy and at peace.
Arlene Tierce recently helped found the Healing Rooms and Soaking Worship Center in Port Richey. She has been using videos and reading material from Spokane headquarters to train people for prayer. Not everyone is cut out for a prayer team, she says.
"You don't want someone who's overbearing and can't listen to other people," she says. "We only need people who are team players; we don't need superstars."
She has about 15 team members and says they offer something that faith-healing evangelists who come to town don't: followup. If someone isn't healed the first time, he can come back.
* * *
As the training seminar in Tampa comes to an end, the Malones go over prayer team protocol:
* You can place your hand on a person's shoulder or back, but no rubbing or caressing.
* "Never make anyone feel they are unable to receive healing because they lack faith or are resisting the Holy Spirit. We're called to encourage, love and heal," Bill says, reading from a list of guidelines.
* "Everything is confidential."
* "Remember, no medical, nutritional, behavioral advice." Team members should encourage people to see their doctors, and refer them to spiritual counselors if they seem to have psychological problems that need treatment, Bill says.
* "Your own personal hygiene is essential (breath mints for frequent use, deodorant, clean hands, hair and clothes)."
* It's good to quote Scripture, including I Peter 2:24: "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed."
