What is prayer? St. John Damascene wrote, “Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.” Some non-Catholic Christians have expanded the definition of prayer, emphasizing the authority of the believer to such an extent that, instead of requesting good things from God, the believer is told to command and change reality. Such commands are called decrees and declarations. For some, even the word “intercession” can refer to a believer using “authority and power” to make things happen.
These non-Catholic ideas about prayer began with 19th- and 20th-century Protestant preachers and missionaries. Revivalists like Charles Finney, before going to a town, would send someone ahead to pray for his upcoming mission; these men were called “intercessors” or “prayer warriors.”
Later, Protestant missionaries in pagan lands who encountered opposition to their evangelizing efforts blamed hostile spiritual forces. Missionary leaders like John A. MacMillan of the Christian and Missionary Alliance advised them to use their power and authority to disarm hostile spiritual powers. For MacMillan, Christ assumed full authority when he took his seat at the right hand of the Father (see Heb 8:1).
Now, every born-again believer is also seated in the heavenly places (see Eph 1) along with Christ and shares in his full authority. God’s people have power to command the “spirits of the air,” the “principalities and powers” at work in this world. MacMillan taught that a believer could “command” the power shared with him by God: “God is waiting for those whom He can trust and use, who will have the discernment to foresee His steps and the faith to command His power. Authoritative intercessors are men and women, whose eyes have been opened to the full knowledge of their place in Christ.”
MacMillian’s ideas were spread by Kenneth Hagin and others in the Word of Faith movement; recently, they have been adopted by some Catholics. You can watch a YouTube video called “How to Make Your Prayers POWERFUL – Intercession” in which a Catholic layman urges his listeners to “unlock the God-given power you have inside of you … when we know who we were created to be, then we’re able to operate with power and authority.”
In the New Apostolic Reformation, believers are told to use their authority to expel “territorial spirits.” A territorial spirit is a demonic or spiritual force that has control or influence over people who live in a certain area. Demon-controlled areas are called “strongholds.” In the New Testament, however, we don’t see Christ or his followers casting out national, territorial, or generational spirits or teaching others to do so. When Christ gave his apostles and their successors authority to bind and loose, he said nothing about this kind of spiritual warfare. St. Paul advised the Ephesians to stand against evil forces by “putting on the full armor of God,” embracing truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God in constant prayer. He said nothing about using the believer’s “power and authority” to command spirits.
Behind today’s preachers of “power and authority” is “dominionism.” Dominionism says that Adam and Eve had “intimacy” with God and authority over all creation. Then they stopped believing that God had given them a royal identity of being like God, and instead tried to earn their identity by taking and eating the fruit, thus handing dominion over creation to Satan. The devil tried to secure this authority, offering to give it to Jesus if he would worship him (cf. Luke 4:5-7). Jesus chose obedience to the Father, and reclaimed the dominion lost in the Fall. The risen Jesus handed this authority to his followers. Now all Christians have a royal identity and royal authority, including dominion over all creation, and the commission to destroy the works of the enemy: death, disease, disorder.
People in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) believe they can make “declarations” or “decrees,” “verbal statements spoken in faith that change reality.” NAR megachurch Bethel Redding even sells a “declarations counter” you can use to count how many declarations you make every day. One Catholic influenced by the NAR has written, “Through your words, you are prophetically declaring what God the Father wants to bring about. You are boldly speaking into existence a particular way God wants to bring about His kingdom here and now. … Whenever you make a proclamation of faith, you release God’s power into the world. Every time you proclaim the things God wants to do, you activate grace in your own life to accomplish this.”
All this goes against the basic Catholic definition of prayer. Our model of prayer is the Our Father, which is made of petitions, not declarations. Intercession, too, is a prayer of petition, not an exercise of the believer’s authority.
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “ … prayer is an act of reason, and consists in beseeching a superior; just as command is an act of reason, whereby an inferior is directed to something (ST IIaIIae, q 83, art 10, resp.).” Catholics cannot accept a redefinition of prayer that makes it into something other than a petition addressed to a superior. If you hear someone defining prayer in terms of power and authority, advancing the kingdom, demonstrating the power of the Holy Spirit, etc., you are not dealing with a reliable teacher.
What makes the prayer of Christians powerful? It is not that we are already seated in the heavenly places next to the risen Jesus Christ; it is the mediation of Jesus himself. He, the only Mediator between God and man, never ceases to intercede for us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The prayer of Jesus makes Christian prayer an efficacious petition. He is its model; He prays in us and with us. Since the heart of the Son seeks only what pleases the Father, how could the prayer of the children of adoption be centered on the gifts rather than the Giver?”