by Lee Strobel
“That does muddy the waters,” I commented.
“Yes. Unfortunately, rheumatoid arthritis is relatively susceptible to psychosomatic improvements.”
“So what’s the answer?” I asked. “What kind of study can take all of these dynamics into account?”
“I conducted a study that takes these factors into consideration,” she replied.
“And the results?” I asked.
“They were fascinating.”
Miracles in Mozambique?
To go to a place that is reporting clusters of healing, Brown and her team flew to Mozambique, where reports of miracles abound. Located on the southeast coast of Africa, this desperately poor nation of twenty-five million people underwent a devastating civil war from 1977 to 1992. Slightly half of the country is Christian, 18 percent are Muslims, and the rest have animism beliefs or don’t claim any religion at all.19
Mozambique fits the four characteristics that Christian author Tim Stafford said are often shared by places where there are outbreaks of the supernatural:
1. There’s illiteracy. Miracles show God’s power without language.
2. People don’t have a framework in their culture for such theological concepts as sin and salvation. “Miracles demand attention even if you don’t yet grasp the nature of your problem and God’s redemption,” Stafford wrote.
3. There’s limited medical care, making miracles the only recourse for the afflicted.
4. The spirit world is very real to people, and “a conflict of spiritual powers is out in the open.” Miracles are demonstrations of God’s power.20
To connect with a ministry that reports a high success rate with healing, Brown’s team worked with Heidi and Rolland Baker, charismatic missionaries serving in Mozambique for more than twenty years. They have described how healing miracles have accompanied the spread of the gospel there.
Brown focused on the healing of blindness and deafness (or severe vision or hearing problems), which aren’t particularly susceptible to psychosomatic healings. Her team used standard tests and technical equipment to determine the person’s level of hearing or vision immediately before prayer. After the prayers were concluded, the patient was promptly tested again.
“The length of the prayer varied, from one minute to five or ten minutes usually, but it always involved touching,” she said. “For instance, there was a woman who couldn’t see a hand in front of her face at a foot away. Heidi Baker put her arms around her; she smiled at her, hugged her, cried, prayed for one minute—and afterward the woman was able to read.”
In all there were twenty-four subjects who received prayer. The results? “After prayer, we found highly significant improvements in hearing and statistically significant improvements in vision,” Brown told me. “We saw improvement in almost every single subject we tested. Some of the results were quite dramatic.”
“For example?”
“We had two subjects whose hearing thresholds were reduced by more than 50 decibels, which is quite a large reduction,” she said.
For comparison, 100 decibels is the sound of a nearby motorcycle or power lawn mower; 80 decibels is the sound of a garbage disposal or food blender; 50 decibels is the sound of a typical conversation at home; and zero decibels is silence.21
“Significant visual improvements were measured across the group that was tested for eyesight,” Brown added. “In fact, the average improvement in visual acuity was more than tenfold.”
The Deaf Hear, the Blind See
Brown mentioned the story of Martine, an elderly blind and deaf woman in the Namuno village. Before prayer, she had no response at 100 decibels in either ear, which meant she couldn’t hear a jackhammer if it were being used next to her. After prayer, she responded at 75 decibels in her right ear and 40 decibels in her left ear, which meant she could make out conversations.
After a second prayer, Martine’s eyesight improved from 20/400 to 20/80 on the vision chart. This would mean she was legally blind initially, but after prayer was able to see objects from twenty feet away in the same way a person with normal vision can see that object from eighty feet away.22
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of intercession like this. “What was going on during the prayers?” I asked. “What did people feel?”
“It was diverse,” Brown said, “but often the recipients reported feeling heat, cold, or even tingling or itching.”
In her book, Brown gives an account of Gabriel, who received prayer for his right ear. He said later, “I started to feel heat. And it started to feel like a little ant started to crawl up and down the inner ear, deep down inside . . . [Soon] it was like a whole ant nest was here crawling. And then it became a tingling . . . And then it was very hot, very hot, very hot. And then it suddenly became very cold . . . So exactly the moment that I felt this cold hand on my shoulder, [the intercessor] said, ‘Yes, Lord, thank you for your angels. They are here with us helping in this healing.’”23
To me, Brown’s methodology seemed uncannily simple but intuitively valid. The only thing that changed between the pre-prayer and post-prayer tests was the fact that someone prayed to Jesus for the person to get better. And virtually everyone did improve to one degree or another, often astoundingly so.
“So was this a scientifically sound study?” I asked.
“It was published in a peer-reviewed Southern Medical Journal. It was prospectively done. It was rigorous. It was a “within-subjects design”—a standard approach to psychophysical studies published in the flagship Science magazine and elsewhere. We had the proper equipment. We had a trained research team. We had statistically significant results. And the validity of the study was evaluated as being scientifically sound by the journal that published it.”
I raised my pen. “However,” I pointed out, “the number of tested people was pretty small.”
“There’s a misconception that if you’ve got a small sample, it’s not statistically significant. Actually, that’s not true,” she replied. “With a smaller sample, the effects have to be larger and more consistent in order to achieve statistical significance. And our effects were.”
Brown and her team then did a replication study in Brazil to check if they would get similar results—and they did. Again, sight and hearing were improved after hands-on prayer was offered in Jesus’ name.
In Sao Paulo, for example, a forty-eight-year-old woman named Julia could not see details on faces or read without glasses. “After prayer, she could do both,” Brown said. “A thirty-eight-year-old woman in Uberlandia could not count fingers from nine feet away. When she opened her eyes after prayer, she could read the name tag of the person who had been praying for her.”
I interrupted. “Could the results be the result of suggestion or a kind of hypnosis?”
“Not likely. A 2004 review article summarized the results of suggestion and hypnosis studies by saying they failed to demonstrate significant improvements in vision or hearing.”24
“So what’s your conclusion?” I asked.
“Our study shows that something is going on with Pentecostal and charismatic proximal intercessory prayer,” she replied. “This is more than just wishful thinking. It’s not fakery; it’s not fraud. It’s not some televangelist trying to get widows to send in their money. It’s not a highly charged atmosphere that plays on people’s emotions. Something is going on, and it surely warrants further investigation.”
In fact, her husband, Joshua, who earned his doctorate at Boston University, is spearheading the Global Medical Research Institute to apply rigorous empirical methods to investigate claims of miraculous healings.
In the meantime, Candy Gunther Brown’s work and analysis have already undermined Shermer’s claim that when research is conducted scientifically, it shows “zero” evidence for the miraculous.
Quite the opposite appears to be true. It seems that, upon further study, the evidence is good for the Christian side.
CHAPTER 8
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Dreams and Visions
An Interview with Missionary Tom Doyle
The brick wall was faded, uneven, and weathered; the imposing wooden door was more than seven feet tall but less than three feet wide, arched at its top and situated in a doorway that was a few feet deep.
The visitor stood outside in the darkness, peering into the warm glow of the Baroque interior—a cavernous room filled with tables overflowing with sumptuous food and chalices of wine. The people inside were ready to enjoy their feast, but they were all waiting as they looked to their left, as if anticipating someone was going to speak before the meal.
Peering in, the visitor saw his friend David sitting at a table not far from the doorway. Surprised, he called out to get David’s attention. “I thought we were going to eat together,” the visitor said.
David, his gaze never leaving the front of the room, was only able to reply, “You never responded.”
As he described the scene to me, my friend Nabeel was staring off to the side, his brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed as if he was reliving the experience. He turned to face me. “That was the whole dream,” he said.
My living room was quiet, except for the gentle hum of the air conditioner outside. “And this came after you had asked God for a clear vision?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he replied. “I called David the next day and asked him what he thought of my dream.”
“David was your Christian friend?”
“My only Christian friend. I was a devout Muslim; I didn’t like to sully myself by associating with too many Christians.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“He said there was no need to interpret what I had experienced. All I needed to do was open the Bible to the thirteenth chapter of Luke.”
Then Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem. Someone asked him, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?”
He said to them, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’
“But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from . . .’
“There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out. People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God.”1
“I was standing at the door and it had not yet closed, but it was clear I would not be at this banquet of God—this heaven—unless I responded to the invitation,” Nabeel said. “The door would be shut for good; the feast would go on without me, forever.”
“How did that make you feel?”
He paused before answering. “Chilled. Frightened. Alone. Desperate.”
“That passage in Luke—how many times had you read it before that night?”
Nabeel looked surprised by my question. “Not once,” he said.
“Never?”
“I had never read any of the New Testament before—and yet I saw that passage played out in my dream.”
“How do you account for that?”
“I’m a man of science. A medical doctor. I deal with flesh and bones, with evidence and facts and logic. But this,” he said, searching for the right words, “this was the exact vision I needed. It was a miracle. A miracle that opened the door for me.”
Awakening the Muslim World
This dream was pivotal in leading my friend Nabeel Qureshi to faith in Jesus and redirecting his career path from medicine to passionately defending the Christian faith on the global stage.2 He is just one of countless Muslims who have experienced supernatural visions or dreams—many of them corroborated by outside events—that have brought them out of Islam and into Christianity.
In fact, more Muslims have become Christians in the last couple of decades than in the previous fourteen hundred years since Muhammad, and it’s estimated that a quarter to a third of them experienced a dream or vision of Jesus before their salvation experience.3 If those statistics are accurate, then this phenomenon of Jesus supernaturally appearing to people is one of the most significant spiritual awakenings in the world today.
Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias first brought this worldwide trend to my attention nearly twenty years ago, when I interviewed him for my book The Case for Faith.
“I have spoken in many Islamic countries, where it’s tough to talk about Jesus,” he told me at the time. “Virtually every Muslim who has come to follow Christ has done so, first, because of the love of Christ expressed through a Christian, or second, because of a vision, dream, or some other supernatural intervention. Now, no religion has a more intricate doctrine of angels and visions than Islam, and I think it’s extraordinary that God uses that sensitivity to the supernatural world in which he speaks in visions and dreams and reveals himself.”4
In the Bible, God frequently used dreams and visions to further his plans. From Abraham, Joseph, and Samuel in the Old Testament to Zechariah, John, and Cornelius in the New Testament, there are about two hundred biblical examples of God employing this kind of divine intervention.
Today, reports of these miraculous manifestations seem to cluster among adherents of Islam, from Indonesia to Pakistan to the Gaza Strip. While the experiences are admittedly unique to the individual, in many cases there is authentication, such as Jesus telling the person something in the dream that he or she could not otherwise have known, or two people having an identical dream on the same night.
In addition, the stunning consistency of these experiences across international boundaries suggests that they are more than merely the product of overactive imaginations. A devout Muslim would have no incentive to imagine such an encounter with the Jesus of Christianity, who might lure them into Islamic apostasy and possibly even a death sentence in certain countries.
Why are we seeing these phenomena now? Why would a spate of such manifestations occur today among members of a faith that adamantly denies the crucial theological pillars of Christianity? What does Jesus tell these individuals that so radically rocks their world? And if Jesus can appear in dreams and visions like this, why not manifest himself that way for everyone? Doesn’t this phenomenon, in effect, put missionaries out of a job?
I had to admit: these divine interventions didn’t fit neatly into my theological framework, which made me all the more anxious to get to the bottom of them.
Leslie and I packed the car and pulled onto the highway for a three-hour drive to Dallas, Texas, where I was scheduled to rendezvous with an author and missionary to the Middle East who is a leading expert on contemporary dreams and visions experienced by Muslims.
The Interview with Tom Doyle, MABS
After graduating from a Christian college (Biola University) and getting a graduate degree (Dallas Theological Seminary), Tom Doyle eagerly dove into his ministry as a pastor for the next twenty years. He served at churches in Dallas, Albuquerque, and Colorado Springs, especially enjoying his role of preaching on Sunday mornings. Then in 1995, Dallas Seminary called and said they were taking some pastors to Israel. Would he be interested in joining them?
“That changed everything for me,” Doyle recalls. “I was immediately drawn to the Middle East—hook, line, and sinker.”
Over the next twenty years, he became a missionary to the region, eventually leading sixty tours of the Holy Land. Today, he is the founding president of UnCharted, a ministry dedicated to challenging Christians to join the movement of God among Jews and Muslims, as well as to come alongside persecuted believers.
What drew me to Doyle was his authoritative book, Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World? which he wrote with Greg Webster in 2012. In all, Doyle has authored seven books revolving around his expertise on the Middle East, including Two Nations under God:
Why You Should Care about Israel; Breakthrough: The Return of Hope to the Middle East; Killing Christians: Living the Faith Where It’s Not Safe to Believe; and Standing in the Fire: Courageous Christians Living in Frightening Times.
Doyle, now sixty-two and with his brown hair graying, married his college sweetheart, JoAnn, more than thirty-five years ago, and they have six children and several grandchildren. JoAnn ministers to women in Middle Eastern countries.
Friends who know Doyle call him “the real deal.” Said Rob Bugh, senior pastor of Wheaton Bible Church in suburban Chicago, “I have traveled with him overseas and seen firsthand his remarkable love for lost people, displaced people, for Muslims and Jews.”5
Another one of Doyle’s friends, well-known Christian novelist and biographer Jerry Jenkins, said Doyle’s personal ministry in the Middle East gives him special authority in discussing trends there. He said Doyle has “the credibility of a man who has the smell of the front lines of the battlefield on his clothes because he was there yesterday and will be back there tomorrow.”6
Leslie and I had dinner with Tom and JoAnn at a café the night before our interview, chatting for several hours about what grandparents usually obsess over: grandkids. Tom and JoAnn are gregarious, passionate, and empathetic—perfect qualities for missionaries. Pardon the cliché, but in their case it fits so well: their smiles are contagious.
The next morning, JoAnn and Leslie went out for a while to let Tom and me have a private discussion in our hotel room.
“Did you always have an affinity for working with Muslims?” I began as we sat down, facing each other in (uncomfortable) straight-back chairs.
“No, actually I had a lot of preconceived notions,” he replied.
“Prejudices?”
“You could say that.”
“What changed your attitude?”
“Shortly after 9/11, I was in Gaza City. A woman in a hijab came running up, grabbed my forearm, and said, ‘You’re from America, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ She said, ‘When the buildings came down on 9/11, did you see the video of people in Gaza cheering and celebrating?’ I said, ‘Yes, I saw that on TV.’ She said: ‘Not me. I was crying for those people. They didn’t deserve to die. That was wrong. I’m very sorry.’ She tapped her heart, and then she walked away.”