I Get Some Healing in the Agrarian Heart of California

So, I’m in Santa Maria, one of the plenitude of saint-named cities in California. And I came here for some healing. Santa Maria has one of the most popular non-denominational Christian healing rooms in the country, and one of its oldest.

Healing through prayer is certainly not a new thing, and not unique to Christianity. But the current trend is rather new. In less than a decade, the International Association of Healing Rooms went from zero to about 800 healing rooms in about 40 countries.

This is how the story goes:

In 1898, a man named John G. Lake saw his wife healed of a chronic illness by Christian healer John Alexander Dowie, and a few years later moved to Dowie’s Christian community, Zion, Illinois (which I visited in August). In 1908, Lake went to Africa as a preacher, and legend says he was responsible for converted a million people, helping found 625 churches, and establishing 1,250 preachers in five years of ministry.

He eventually moved to Spokane, Washington, and started the healing rooms in a downtown office building in 1915. John Lake believed in repeated prayer for a sick person, for as long as necessary until healing occurred in their body.

The rooms only lasted five years, but are said to have witnessed 100,000 healings.

But almost 80 years later, they were reopened. A man named Cal Pierce from Redding, California studied past revivals and felt that God was calling him to re-establish Lake’s mission in Spokane, which he did in 1999. (I had originally planned to go to these healing rooms in Spokane, but when I arrived there, they weren’t going to be open for a few days, and I had a schedule to keep. That’s not to say that the Santa Maria rooms aren’t as good.)

The Santa Maria healing rooms started soon after, when Rick and Lori Taylor read about what Pierce was doing on the internet and went all the way up to Spokane to see what he was up to. As Rick puts it, he had a stellar vision, which is why he decided to open his own rooms in Santa Maria:

“I had an open vision where I was laying on a rocket pad and I was underneath this rocket. I was looking up at it and it had four burners, and all of the sudden it ignited and all this fire was hitting me as watched it launched. When it got into the atmosphere it split into four different rockets – one went to the north, one to the south, one to the east and one to the west. Through that I felt like the Lord was speaking to me that I was going to launch this ministry to the nations.”

And so it began in 2000. Now, Rick and his wife have helped open hundreds of rooms in California and travel the world constantly, speaking at conventions and spreading the healing room mission. It’s astonishing how much they’ve done in less than a decade.

The rooms are open four days a week, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. I arrived late in the morning on this lazy, sunny Tuesday, and there was no one around. Tucked in the back wing of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Santa Maria, it looked more like a doctor’s office than I expected. Actually, I don’t know what I expected. In my mind, I had images of choreographed old-school revivals in a folksy wooden home.

As I entered the office, the first thing you see are the myriad of miracle sheets, making wallpaper on the wall. These are meant to document all the healings that have taken place here, as grateful recipients can fill them out whenever they feel better. There’s everything from heart arrhythmia to AIDS to strokes to blindness. It’s quite a lot to take in, especially for a skeptic like me.

Here’s one of my favorite testimonies by a fellow named John:

“I was diagnosed with AIDS two days after my fortieth birthday. The doctors gave me very little hope. I’ve been coming to the healing rooms for several months now and I know that I am healed. My eye, which was partially blinded by the illness, is now having restoration of vision. But, more importantly, our Lord is making my spirit vision ever more clear. Praise God!!! Though I know I’m healed, I joyfully and patiently await His full manifestation of the healing. Praise God for the blood of Jesus.”

I have to say that even though I believe in God and I do believe in healing through prayer, something inside me had a hard time dealing with the immediacy of some of these miracles. Cancer cleared through three times in a healing room? It seemed a bit hard for me to accept. If miracles were so easy to gain, why wasn’t everyone Christian and praying for them? I’m an over-thinker, I don’t go heart-first, and leaps of faith like this can be hard for me.

But I also know I am not always right.

The lady behind the desk was very nice in signing me up, and as it was such a slow day, she said there would be very little wait. Still, if I wanted, I could go hang out in the waiting room, where miracles were known to have occurred even before the prayer sessions. (In my religious mindset, I kept thinking she was saying “wading room” and I was excited to see an indoor pool as part of this ceremony.)

But it turns out there was absolutely no wait, and I could be prayed for immediately after I fill out a small form. It asked the standard questions of name, age, and address, but also your religion and your baptismal status. Now, I have never been baptized, having parents that were rather anti-religious when I was a kid. I went through a naive self-baptismal process in a stream when I was 13, but that’s a long story. So I wrote down that I wasn’t baptized.

I was assigned to the Miracle Room, which I was told was one of the more special ones. Inside, I was shown another mural of testimonies, this time color-copied and on all walls. It looked a bit like a child’s playroom. The volunteer healers were seated and smiling, awaiting my presence.

The Santa Maria healing rooms runs on about 80 volunteers from 40 area churches of all denominations, and my group showed that somewhat. Denise Schweigl, on the left, attends the Vineyard church that the healing rooms are housed in, Bob Burrows is a nondenominational evangelical, and Cary Nosler, on the right, was raised Catholic, but is now also a nondenominational evangelical.

Volunteers arrive at the healing center an hour before it opens to pray in a group, take communion, and get assigned teams, which are always different. So essentially, every time you arrive at the healing rooms you will have a different experience. But I wouldn’t trade mine for the world.

The thing that I really liked about the healing rooms is the uniqueness of the three participants on the team. Each had their own view on religion, Christ, and spirituality, and they all tried to impart it on me.

In the beginning, we discussed my faith, what it meant to be a Quaker, and how that relates to evangelicals and other Christians. Bob could not get past the fact that I hadn’t been baptized – which I only took to mean water baptism, as it ordinarily refers to. He opened his extremely well-worn Bible and started quoting scriptures on baptism and all its forms, turning to them rote from memory. He then started talking about baptism of the spirit, which I tried to explain was similar to the Quaker view on a personal relationship with Jesus, in different terminology.

I wish I could explain Bob’s manner to you. He was so gruff and single-focused. He kept saying that I should get baptized in their manner, and how important it was. When Cary, who was genuinely interested in Quakerism, would speak, he’d interrupt her, and Denise seemed frustrated with the whole thing.

I mention all of this because it carried on into my healing. I asked to be healed of depression, which is something my whole family has dealt with. Many times, the healing ministries not only try to pray for the symptoms to be healed, but also the cause, which they call a trauma, a buildup of resentment or unforgiveness that is causing the illness. But depression and other inherited traits fall into a different category, called generational curses. This, they say, is because someone put a curse on the family a long time ago, or an ancestor dabbled in the occult and allowed a spirit to enter, and it gets passed down through the generations.

This was beginning to be a lot to handle. They asked if they could anoint me, lay hand on me, and speak in tongues. I said yes, closed my eyes, and they began.

They surrounded me, with Bob on my right, Cary behind me, and Denise on my left. Bill rubbed oil on my forehead in the shape of a cross and began praying for the spirit to enter me. “Jesus, invade Matthew’s body,” he pleaded. “Take this boy over and fill him with your light.” His hand rested lightly on my shoulder as he recited verses from the Bible. “And if he feels moved, let him be baptized,” he continued. “Today, even.” Wow. A lot of pressure.

Then came Cary, who had a softer touch on the crown of my head. “Oh Lord, we thank you that Matthew has such a curiosity about you, and is able to take such a journey that he is on,” she cooed. “Thank you for allowing him to see the light in so many faiths and we see the light in him.” She asked God to lighten my mental load and see the good around me, no matter what.

Denise followed, praying for my safety on the bicycle. The meekest of the three, she only prayed aloud for a bit, before the other two began speaking again, reiterating prayers on the same themes they had expressed. All in all, it probably lasted 10 or 15 minutes.

How did I feel? Very calm, of course. But sometimes it felt as though I were expanding, incorporeal. I’ve always described my feelings of the divine as a cold lightning down my back, an extremely acute sensation, as though I were more real than ever. This, in a way, was the opposite and the same, simultaneously. I was dissipating, and it was nice.

Afterwards, I sat and spoke with the three volunteers for a while. Or rather, Cary spoke and Bob huffed. He hadn’t liked what she had said about me seeing light in many religions, and wanted to make sure that I knew John 14:6, where Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

But Cary wanted to converse. She said she sensed a kindred soul in me, and wanted to tell me of her experiences, no matter how much Bob interrupted her. And I loved her story. It’s pithy, and here it is. If only I could convey the soft plaintiveness of her voice as she weaved her story though Bob’s huffs.

“I grew up Catholic and I always felt like I didn’t really know who God was, and I wanted to know, but I kept putting it off. Then, at 32 years old, all of the sudden I saw in my mom that she knew God. That night I said God, whoever You are, I don’t care who You are, I want to know You. And that started my journey. … I discovered that Jesus is his son and that’s who he is. … I was 5 months pregnant and I told the Lord, ‘Jesus, I believe I’m a sinner and you died for me.’ I woke up the next morning and I had so much joy and I saw that the sky was so blue, and everything was so amazing.”

“But two weeks later, my baby died in my stomach. I was mad at God, I said, ‘God, I just gave you my life and you let this baby die.’ And I heard his voice, saying, ‘I knew it was going to happen all along, and I wanted to be there for you.’ So now God was personal. I went, God is real, he knows me, he hears me, he loves me, he doesn’t make stuff like that happen – all of that in that one sentence. And I’ve been chasing God ever since.”

Beautiful, no?

Well, I ended the day with an interview with Rick Taylor, and this post is already very long, but I’ll give you a little bit more information and some choice quotes.

Rick told me that they shouldn’t have asked to speak in tongues, which I thought was interesting. Rick said that even though they believe speaking in tongues is an effective tool, it scares many of the non-Christians that come to the rooms, and contradicts their mission.

“We ask people to dial it down, because when they dial it down, God dials it up,” he said. “If people don’t feel safe, they’re going to close up and aren’t going to receive what God wants to give them. A lot of people don’t understand what tongues is, some people think it’s demonic, and if you’re praying over someone in tongues, they’re going to put up a roadblock. So we ask people not to do it when they come to the healing rooms not to do it. When you read about praying in tongues, it’s to edify yourself, not the person you’re praying for. Paul says I rather you prophesy, so we prophesy.”

They’re also not supposed to proselytize as hard as Bob was, apparently.

And I’ll end with this long, but good quote:

“A lot of people think, because of wrong theology that God made them sick because He’s trying to punish them for a sin that they did, so they brought this sickness on them. You could get AIDS from having premarital sex with somebody, and that is a sin, but God didn’t put that on you. God doesn’t put cancer on anyone. Sickness came and disease came during the fall of Adam. When Adam sinned, the Devil established dominion and authority on Earth and he released all the things we don’t like at that time – sickness, disease, poverty, oppression. … Jesus came to break the power of this enemy. He died on the cross to do that and then he descended into Hell to reclaim the keys of authority which established dominion on Earth and he returned them to mankind, he returned them to us. Now we have those keys of authority, and when we pray for the sick, we’re not just doing a nice thing, but we’re invading the kingdom of darkness and advancing the kingdom of God. That’s what healing is.”