There is much we can learn by looking at the history of inner healing prayer ministry. The following is a broad overview of a few seminal authors and practitioners told from my perspective.
My first exposure was in the 80s at a “Jan term” class at Trinity Episcopal School of Ministry, now Trinity Anglican Seminary. I was shocked and delighted to see how a skilled prayer minister could bring healing to a troubled soul by inviting Jesus to enter their painful memory, often from childhood. The minister invited the Holy Spirit to come and communicated to the recipient (while the class watched) what he heard Jesus say to the person in that memory, often an apt scripture verse. We witnessed God’s word heal person after person. Many people experienced new peace and freedom and praised God for it.
One of Jesus’ names, descriptive of His character, is that He is our healer. It was so in the Old Testament: “I am the God who heals you [Yahweh-Rapha].” (Ex.15:26) It was so in the New Testament: “Peter said to him, ‘Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you; rise and take your mat.’ Immediately he rose.” (Acts 9:34) It is so today!
Jesus heals us in our 3 parts: body, soul, and spirit. A common and needed kind of healing we see Jesus doing is inner healing, also called soul healing. The soul is also tripartite, consisting of mind, will, and emotions. Inner healing can be defined as prayer practices that bring us into a more intimate connection with God, so that our minds have faulty beliefs replaced by God’s truth; our wills submit to the Lord’s will as revealed in Scripture; and emotional and relational wounds from our past are healed.
While the term “inner healing” is not found in the Bible, it is a theologically descriptive word meant to encompass a variety of actions such as setting captives free from unresolved pain; release from generational sins; renewing of the mind; returning to joy from anger, fear, and shame; repentance from sin patterns; and experiencing and giving forgiveness. Inner healing prayer often helps identify and clear away blockages to our growth in holiness and character, and so is a means of grace that God uses to help us be conformed to His image.
The term “inner healing” was first used by Episcopalian Agnes Sanford, the pioneer in this prayer practice, in her popular 1947 book, The Healing Light. To oversimplify: a prayer recipient with emotional pain comes to a prayer minister, who leads them in prayer to remember the painful memory and re-experience the emotions associated with it. Then Jesus is invited into the painful memory, and he speaks his healing word. The practice of listening to God is typically used in most methods of inner healing, using our sanctified imagination to understand God’s will for our healing.
I describe this prayer model as “Inner Healing 1.0.” It was and is far more effective than secular therapy. Many followed in her footsteps. Nondenominational writers John L. and Paula Sandford, of Elijah House Ministries, starting in the 1970s, focused more on healing behavior patterns with confession and forgiveness. Their book Transforming the Inner Man demonstrated a strong biblical basis for this work and was insightful around healing performance orientation and bitterness. Evangelical writer Neil Anderson stressed replacing lies with God’s truth to break free from habitual sin, and negative thoughts and feelings, in his book The Bondage Breaker.
Anglican writer Leanne Payne brought great insight into the healing of a variety of conditions, particularly sexual brokenness. Her companion volumes, The Healing Presence and The Restoration of the Christian Soul, are a master class in the theology and practice of inner healing. I was privileged to participate in two of her Pastoral Care Ministries conferences in the 1990’s. As one who came out of a liberal Episcopal church tradition, I marveled at seeing scores of God’s people healed from addictive sexual behaviors and go on to live in godly, healthy, biblical marriages. Those experiences led me to explore biblical sexual ethics writers and biblical exegetes like Robert Gagnon in his excellent 2002 book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, and later, Christopher West in his Theology of the Body Explained. All these authors still have much to teach us today, when the cultural pull of the LGBTQ+ movement still entices new generations.
I was also exposed to Theophostic© Prayer in the 1990’s, which I’ll call “Inner Healing 2.0.” In this method, a prayer recipient follows an emotion to a painful memory with God’s guidance, with the aim of hearing God’s truth to both identify and correct the wrong belief which caused the memory to remain painful and unresolved. What was most notably new here is that the prayer minister encouraged the recipient to hear directly from God themselves, without any suggestion from the prayer minister as to content. This might be a mental picture, a word, a scripture, or a realization that replaces a lie-based belief. Baptist pastor Ed Smith, the founder of this ministry, licenses trainers who trained thousands in how to deal with complex issues associated with prayer ministry. (I had my first in-depth prayer training in this method at Church of the Apostles in Fairfax under David Harper, and I’m deeply appreciative of it.) Watching Ed minister expertly in person at a conference was like seeing a renowned musician play. It was dazzling, and enlightening, but I left discouraged that I could ever be that good.
The early 2000’s saw advances in neuroscience that were incorporated by some theologians in Dallas Willard’s circle, including psychiatrist Dr. Karl Lehman and “neuro-theologian” Dr. Jim Wilder. We learned that our more primitive right brain – our relational/emotional brain, is faster and more powerful in some ways than our left brain – our rational brain – in determining how and whether we change. To vastly oversimplify, our basal ganglia, amygdala, etc. determine:
1) our attachment – is this personal to me?
2) our initial assessment – it is good, bad, or scary?
3) our attunement – do I relate to this?
4) much of our identity – is this behavior like me, or my group?
Only after our brains process these 4 levels in milliseconds does our cerebral cortex get involved at all when presented with any stimuli. Lehman and Wilder say we are better off focusing first on attaching to Jesus and finding our joy in him before looking at pain in prayer ministry.
Thus, we come to what I’m calling “Inner Healing 3.0,” and Lehman calls The Immanuel Approach: for Emotional Healing and for Life in his definitive 2016 book by that name. This method builds on all that came before, but I find it yet more effective, simple, and accessible. This begins with the prayer recipient calming their body, praying for the Holy Spirit to lead, and then asking Him to lead them to a pain-free appreciation memory, ideally when they felt the Lord Jesus was near and experiencing that memory again – re-living it. This has value unto itself, since communion with Jesus is the very purpose of the Christian life and any healing we receive is gravy on top. This connection with Jesus also becomes a safety net from which one can more safely look at painful memories, and retreat to if one becomes overwhelmed. Similar to Theophostic, the prayer minster helps the recipient encounter God and hear from him directly, rather than hearing God for him in the manner of a prophetic word.
I’ve found that God always speaks a better, more appropriate and more healing word directly to the recipient than whatever it is that I might think God should say to him in response to a particular hurt. The Immanuel Approach is simpler than Theophostic, as almost anyone can do it with a bit of training.
I’ll be writing more on these topics in the days to come. If you’d like to learn more about healing, I do weekly zoom training and weekend conferences on these and other topics related to renewal. Please visit our website and sign up for a consultation on how to join us! If you would like to contact me for more information, please do so at cnixon@americananglican.org.