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Some Facts on Healing
Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact by social anthropologist David Lewis (published in England by Hodder & Stoughton).
Dr. Lewis studies the results of 1,890 questionnaires, returned after a John Wimber conference in Harrogate, England (By the way, the 1,890 returns are a 76,5% response – very high).
Now we want to share what they found out about how many people actually received physical healing, inner healing and deliverance. Instead of just giving people two choices (i.e. “healed” or “not healed”), Dr. Lewis wisely allowed for five possibilities:
1) Total healing
2) A great deal of healing
3) A fair amount of healing
4) A little healing
5) No apparent healing
PHYSICAL HEALING
Of the 1,890 people, 621 received prayer for 867 instances of physical ailments (some of us are sick in more than one area!).
Of these:
279 (32%) received either total or a great deal of healing.
222 (26%) received a fair amount of healing.
304 (42%) reported little or no healing.
Lewis did follow-up interviews with 35 of these respondents and found that for 57% the healing was sustained. (By the way, 68 reported total healing.)
The questionnaires revealed several more things:
a) Young people ask less often but receive more healing than those over 60. Also “words of knowledge” focused more on younger people.
b) The less educated (the poor of the Gospel) report a higher degree of healing than the better educated, more academic group, even though a large proportion of the conference participants were drawn from the professional academic groups (doctors, teachers and clergy).
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