Tamyra Horst writes for Women of Spirit Magazine:

Last year I began praying for the healing of two young people, each battling cancer. I pleaded with God. I claimed Scripture. I fasted. I asked others to pray. I truly believed that God would heal them.

Both died within a few weeks of each other.

I deluged God with questions: ‘Does it matter if I pray? Why do You heal sometimes and not others? Why bother praying for people if it rarely seems to make any difference? Why do You answer prayers for lost keys but not lost health?’

I wanted to understand. To continue to pray, believing that it made a difference.

So I went searching for answers.

Tamyra turns to the Bible for answers, and finds them in Scripture.

Can our prayers make a difference?

God promised that they would: “The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up” (James 5:15). “And these signs will accompany those who believe: . . . they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well” (Mark 16:17, 18). When Jesus sent out the 12 disciples, He told them to not only go out and preach the gospel but heal the sick (Matthew 10:7, 8). Healing is even listed as a spiritual gift (see 1 Corinthians 12:9).

If Jesus commissioned His disciples (us) to preach the gospel and heal, if the Spirit gives healing as a gift, and if God promises to answer our prayers, then why do we too often feel like Catherine Marshall, who said, “Persistent prayer, using all the faith I could muster, had resulted in, well, nothing?”

The truth may be that God does answer, but it doesn’t look like the answer we wanted.

Too often we want miracles. Sudden healing. Life, when death seems inevitable. No scars or struggles. No pain.

It appears that God tended to use miracles when they would enable people to recognize Him in a way that they hadn’t before. The man at the pool believed that healing was hopeless; he learned that God loves the hopeless. The woman had tried everything else; she found God to be everything she needed. Peter needed more than healing; he needed to learn to trust God’s grace and strength instead of his own.

Sometimes the miracle isn’t healing; it’s learning to trust God when healing doesn’t come.

It’s an interesting proposition. But how does Tamyra reconcile God deciding not to answer a prayer, when He said He would?

God tells us to pray for healing. Promises to answer. Does answer. But His answers may not always look the way we want them to. People will still die. (All of us will die until He comes.) Children will have to battle chemotherapy and radiation. Loved ones will forget who we are and the moments we’ve shared together. Many times it will appear so unfair;why does God answer other prayers and not this one? Why do people who live healthy and good lives get ill? We may seem to have more questions than answers.

We have to remember that we live in a sinful world in which an enemy seeks to destroy us. He?ll do that through whatever means he can?illness, cancer, pain, discouragement, doubt, busyness. Yet God promises to work all things to good for His children. Like Joseph, we can say, “You meant this for evil, but God used it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

I’m not convinced, Tamyra. While God can do whatever He wants for whatever purpose He wants, this sounds like a cop-out to me.

It sounds like God hasn’t answered your prayers, so you are justifying His decision to ignore your prayers, even when He promised to not just answer but fulfill the prayers of the faithful.

If He promised to fulfill the prayers of the faithful but doesn’t answer yours, why could that be?

Would it make a difference? Even though I didn’t want to, I questioned.

Ah.

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100203/parents-convicted-in-botched-faith-healing-of-son/index.html

A Clackamas County, Ore., jury found a faith healing couple guilty of criminally negligent homicide for failing to seek medical help for their son.

Jeff and Marci Beagley were convicted Tuesday, nearly two years after their 16-year-old son, Neil, died.

When Neil grew sick in 2008, the parents called family members and friends to lay their hands on him and pray for healing. Marci on Friday testified that her son said he didn’t need to or want to go to the doctor.

“We waited out and tried to make a decision doing the best we could,” said the mother, who is part of the controversial Followers of Christ Church, which promotes faith healing.

The mother said the decision to not go to the emergency room was influenced partly by her faith and partly by her son’s wishes.

The defense argued that the Beagleys were not aware of how sick Neil was and “believed in the healing powers of God.”

Neil died from complications from a urinary tract blockage, an easily treatable condition. Just months earlier, the Beagleys’ 15-month-old granddaughter died of pneumonia and a blood infection.

Most states have religious exemptions to child abuse laws. Oregon law formerly provided some protection to parents who relied solely on spiritual treatment for their dying child. The protection was withdrawn in 1999 amid cases of children from Followers of Christ Church dying from untreated medical conditions.

The Beagleys may face 16 to 18 months in prison.

Some would say that this indicates that prayer does not work.

In this instance, prayer did not work. The Beagleys’ prayers also failed for their granddaughter a few months ago, and as the article notes, Oregon removed child abuse protections for faith healing families following a number of cases of their church’s children dying.

This seems like a clear-cut case of a cult which promotes false teachings, and whose followers do not have the ear of God.

A parody site has sprung up to mock their failed faith:

http://www.followersofchristchurch.com/

Come Join Us!*

We are always looking for (healthy) new members to join our flock.
Since insuring our youngest members make it to adulthood is not a priority of ours, we must look outside our congregation to grow. Oh woopsie, we just lost another member: a 16 yr. old boy. Please hurry!

The church does not appear to have a website of its own. However, it seems their faith has been weak for years:

[March 31, 2008] 15-month-old Ava Worthington [the Beagleys' granddaughter mentioned above - Matt] died at her Oregon City home on March 2nd of pneumonia and a blood infection.

Until this month, it had been many years since the “Followers of Christ Church” had lost a child to sickness. Sunday, parishioners declined to discuss their faith healing practices and religious beliefs with KGW.

Ten years ago, several children from the same church died from untreated medical conditions like diabetes.

Here’s what the medical examiner told KGW reporter Pat Doris back in 1998: “It’s an awful way to die, little Bo Phillips is not the only one. We’ve had 3 cases in the past 9 months out here. Some have been lingering, horrible, painful deaths, all of them unnecessary deaths”, said Larry Lewman, a former state medical examiner.

This is what spurred Oregon to remove protection for faith healing families in 1999 . . . the failed faith of a cult, not the failures of God.

Brandeis University’s Wendy Cadge is an assistant professor of sociology. She also writes for ReligionDispatches.org.

She notes a series of studies.

Between 1965 and 2006, about 75 researchers working in small teams published eighteen research articles in English language medical literature reporting on intercessory prayer studies.

She links to two with positive outcomes:

Intercessory prayer studies first gained broad media attention in the United States in 1988 when Dr. Robert Byrd published an article, “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population,” in the Southern Medical Journal.

The study included 393 people admitted to the cardiac care unit at San Francisco General Hospital, half of whom were prayed for by born-again Christians who were active in local churches. Each intercessor was given the assigned patients’ names, diagnoses, and general conditions, and asked to pray for “rapid recovery” and for “prevention of complications and death.” After analyzing the data gathered, Byrd concluded that “intercessory prayer to the Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect in patients admitted to the CCU [cardiac care unit].”

Patients who were prayed for by born-again Christians they had never met, he argued, had better health outcomes than those who were not the subjects of prayer. A later study, “A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit,” led by William H. Harris and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1999, claimed to confirm these positive findings.

While Cadge notes that other studies had inconclusive or negative results, she only links to the Big Study, released in 2006, which ran almost ten years and involved 1,800 people:

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

The study method?

The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul’s Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients’ first names and the first initials of their last names.

The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were instructed to include the phrase, “for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.”

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

How about the results?

In another of the study’s findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers’ prayers also may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.

“It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?” Dr. Bethea said.

The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group — 18 percent — suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers. In their report, the researchers suggested that this finding might also be a result of chance.

The study authors seem easily able to explain why people being prayed for had more complications, why people not being prayed for had more serious complications. But they add more reasons:

the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.

Reaction of “pray-ers”?

Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry’s mission.

“A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,” Mr. Barth said, “but we’ve been praying a long time and we’ve seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.”

There is an interesting difference between this unsuccessful study and the successful studies, which many may jump at. Who did the praying?

Silent Unity describes itself as:

Unity is a positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity based on the teachings of Jesus and the power of prayer. Unity honors the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path.

Not born-again Christian, but “interfaith”.

The Teresian Carmelites?

We are a Carmelite community of consecrated men, women and lay members who live in allegiance to Jesus Christ. As sons and daughters of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, we are faithful to the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church. The call to prayer embraces our whole life, sustained by the Word of God and the Eucharistic Liturgy. We look to Mary, the Mother of God, as our model in the Christian life.

Catholics. Not born-again Christians.

St. Paul’s Monastery?

Our Vision
We, the sisters of St. Paul’s Monastery, are a community who live the Rule of St. Benedict based on Gospel values. Through our liturgical life and wise stewardship, we create sacred space from which we respond to the needs and challenges of church and society.

Catholics. Not born-again Christians.

My point is not to say that born-again Christians have a line to God’s ear while Catholics and “interfaith” sorts do not. I’m merely pointing out the difference between the studies.

What do you think? Post a comment here, or on the thread in the discussion forum!

While PZ seems happy “Pharyngulating” polls — that is, sending his readers to sway results of polls with questions like, “Do You Believe in an Afterlife?” or “Is That Really Mary in the Sun?” — he stayed out of one.

There was another poll out there that I studiously ignored, because I was on it: Which miracle do you think Americans would most support? One of the possible answers was “PZ Myers publicly converts from atheism to follow the One True God.”

You can guess who won.

While I found some of the poll responses more compelling, like “a miraculous display”, or “Stephen Hawking healed of his ALS”, I imagine that God responding to prayer by showing evidence of His existence to an outspoken and well-known atheist would be a convincing display.  I don’t think the ladies hosting the “pray4healing.com” site will be very successful; people seem to think their site is a gag.  Probably because it started as “pray4trig”, which sure smacks of one.

So, I’ve set up this page and also a section in the discussion forum.  I’d like to see this little experiment happen, and will do what I can to help.  I’ve even registered the domain name “Pray4PZ.com” and directed it to this site.  (Really, try it out!)  I don’t have the “pray4healing” ladies’ buy-in yet.  Easier to ask forgiveness than permission, they say!

But as I’ve already explained, I’m not sure I believe God answers prayers, so I’m probably not the one to “git ‘er done”.

Click HERE to head over to the discussion forum!

From the time I was a child, I was taught not  to take things on faith.  If something can’t be demonstrated with evidence, there’s no reason to believe it.  My parents subscribed to this belief, yet also attended church regularly and prayed.

They saw sufficient evidence that God was listening.  To date, I’ve seen many conflicting reports but have yet to be convinced either way.

This site exists not so I can personally promote a position one way or the other.  Instead, it’s my goal to gather information about the efficacy of prayer — from scientific studies, from the anecdotes of people joining the forum, from newspaper articles and newscasts — in one repository and encourage open discussion of that evidence.  I’ll be storing links to scientific papers, news articles, and the like in the Library (see LIBRARY link in top navbar).

I’ve set up a forum which I hope you will join; just click the FORUM button at the top of the page!  People of all beliefs (or lack thereof) are welcome to join.

If you know of research which has been completed or is underway, please provide a link.  If you have stories to share, please do.  If you just want to discuss what you see in the forum, do that!

UPDATE:  A friend emailed me about what could be an interesting experiment.  I’ve added the link PRAY4PZ at the top, where you can read about this interesting development!