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Experiencing Healing Prayer: How God Turns Our Hurts into Wholeness

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When I was a junior in college at a major state university, Rick Richardson led a weekend retreat for the healing of past family wounds (see chapters 11 & 12 of this book). At this retreat, I heard the quiet voice of God for the first time tell me, "You are not a hypocrite." (Chapters 5 & 6) I then saw an image of my father embracing me and my whole family: and I wept. From that day God has continued to bring restoration and wholeness into my life through many experiences of healing prayer minsistry, and I have had the privilege of leading others in healing prayer as well. The stories and teaching found in this book are REAL. Chapters 13 & 14, focusing on Forgiveness/Healing of Memories and Battling Sexual Addiction, deal with two of the most important challenges our churches and culture face today. This book is filled with profound yet accessible understanding and practical help for those needing healing themselves, and those who are called to be ministers of Jesus' healing to others as pastors, prayer leaders, and friends of God. I highly recommend it!

Leaders of prayer ministries can tend toward a fear-based emphasis--fear of quelling the Spirit or abandoning Scripture or overlooking devils behind every bush. But for Richardson, quoting Augustine, "the healing journey is a journey of setting love in order." Healing has to do with the soul, torn and woven through past and current physical and relational experiences. With ordered love for both the recipient of prayer and the intercessor, fear has no place and neither does control. What does have predominance, established in early chapters, is God's presence, always available, always near, always the "marker" of our identity.

Healing prayer brings us into an awareness of God's presence but does not necessarily bring the results we want. The activity of intercession moves from performing for answers to collaborating with God. Intercessors ask Jesus: What are you praying? How can I enter into your prayers for this person or this situation? For Richardson's own journey, "The greatest gain has been the increase of my capacity to know, understand and love God."

Co-author of The Heart of Racial Justice, Richardson urges prayer ministers to affirm varying expressions of prayer based on culture, personality, and experience instead of revering intuitive prayer. Although he comments on ethnicity, he does not acknowledge potential differences of prayer language based on gender. Nonetheless, he covers the centrality of gender identity to our healing journey as well as sexual addictions, forgiveness, and the influence of family of origin, areas through which he encourages prayer ministers to walk. Readers process these middle chapters through reflection-and response-sections, guiding them to ponder, pray, and worship.

When I have described Richardson's final chapter to other prayer ministry leaders, their eyebrows raise in intrigue. Leaders fret that those who come to receive prayer will depend emotionally on the ministers: they vary the prayer ministers each week and use both genders. Richardson inverts this concern at the book's end. The pitfalls are numerous for prayer ministers themselves--to find their sole sense of intimacy through listening to others' cares, to take on another's anxiety, and to attach their identity to their power and performance.

Ultimately, in his book, he has urged the creation of an emotionally and spiritually safe place for both recipients and prayer ministers, encircled by the presence of God within the church community.

On the whole I like this book, however on some topics it just loses me. Rick pointed out that man has a tendency to worship the phallus or the reproductive system in the absence of God, but to me it seems here what has happened is an attempt to pin every single problem we face on our parents. The theories are a bit confusing and convoluted. I don't exactly fit neatly into any one of them so far as I can tell. For example, I had a controlling mother and yet I have no difficulty in committing to relationships. I've struggled with porn and my sex drive over the years and God has dealt with it in ways very different than as described in the book. I'm no misogynist, but in general once someone starts insisting that I need to delve back into my childhood and recapture the nurturing feeling of being at my mother's breast, they lose me. I'm not saying that this book won't help anyone, but it certainly isn't for everyone. I did find some things helpful (like where it discuses how to better discern Gods voice). It was good to have a brief part of the book devoted to how things can become "sexualized". I would have liked to have read more about that because it seems that satan can and will corrupt people desires in this way.