In 1983, Pope St. John Paul II called for a “new evangelization.” Since then, Catholics have sought the best way to respond. Recently, some Catholics are saying the best way to evangelize is to demonstrate the power of the Gospel through signs and wonders, especially healing the sick. Where does that idea come from? Not from writings of John Paul II or his successors. The short answer is, it comes from non-Catholics.
The originator of this emphasis on “signs and wonders” in evangelization was a Protestant pastor from California named John Wimber (1934-1997). In the late 1970s, he became convinced that Christians should heal just as they should evangelize. By 1982, Wimber’s church was reporting 50 healings a week.
Together with C. Peter Wagner, Wimber taught a course called “Signs, Wonders and Church Growth” at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. The course materials were gathered into the 1986 best-selling book Power Evangelism and a sequel, Power Healing. Wimber stressed that believers have “power and authority” to practice effective evangelism, which is proclamation backed up with a demonstration of God’s power through signs and wonders. The gift of prophecy also plays a role, as God will give evangelists a “word of knowledge” about someone they are preaching to, furnishing another reason to believe the message.
Some Catholics have attempted to repackage Wimber’s approach, renaming it “power evangelization” to make it sound like a Catholic idea. They claim that “evangelization accompanied by demonstrations of the power of God are (sic) part of our heritage going back to the early Church.” Often, they imply that power evangelization was once a normal part of Catholic practice that is now being revived. They also claim that many famous saints practiced it and taught others to do so, and that God wants ordinary people to do the same today. Typically, such groups teach a five-step “healing process” popularized by the Protestant preacher Randy Clark.
Some have gone so far as to claim that “healings” are an indispensable part of the Church’s mission of evangelization. If this were true, we would expect to see some mention of it in the writings of the popes and a consistent message about it from the great missionary saints. But we do not.
One Catholic has written that “throughout the Church’s history, most of the saints, if not all of them, manifested the charismatic gifts of the Spirit, performing miracles, healings, and exorcisms.” On the contrary, it’s easy to name many examples of saints who did not perform miracles and healings during their earthly life.
One saint, Eugène de Mazenod, even spoke of how to evangelize without doing miracles: “If we wish to achieve the same results as the Apostles and the first followers of the Gospel, we must use the same means as they, and this all the more because we do not have the power to perform miracles and so we must bring back those who have gone astray by the splendor of our virtues.”
When the popes asked for a new evangelization, they were not asking ordinary Catholics to “demonstrate God’s power” through “signs and wonders.” In his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, Pope St. John Paul II, instead of telling Christians to “demonstrate the kingdom” through miracles, said that the Church preaches the kingdom as the first Christian missionaries did “by proclaiming Jesus crucified and risen from the dead.” He added, “It is not possible to bear witness to Christ without reflecting his image, which is made alive in us by grace and the power of the Spirit. This docility then commits us to receive the gifts of fortitude and discernment, which are essential elements of missionary spirituality.” The spiritual gifts of fortitude and discernment are essential; extraordinary gifts of healing are not.
Some have claimed that St. Paul taught a “signs and wonders” approach to evangelization, appealing to the text: “our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction” (1 Th 1:5).
Pope Benedict XVI drew a different conclusion: “Evangelization, to be effective, needs the power of the Spirit, who gives life to proclamation and imbues those who convey it with the ‘full conviction’ of which the Apostle speaks. This term … in the original Greek is plerophoria: a word that does not so much express the subjective, psychological aspect, rather the fullness, fidelity, completeness, in this case of the proclamation of Christ. It is a proclamation which, to be complete and faithful, asks to be accompanied by signs and gestures, like the preaching of Jesus. Word, Spirit and certainty — understood in this way — are therefore inseparable and compete to ensure that the Gospel message is spread effectively.”
Why should anyone believe the Gospel message we preach? Because they see miracles? Some people think so, saying we should “preach the Gospel and partner with the Holy Spirit to demonstrate the reality and truth of the Gospel with the power of God that He has given us.” Does this mean no one should accept the Good News and be saved unless they have seen a demonstration of God’s power through signs and wonders? The Catholic Church replies, “no.”
The U.S. bishops, in Go and Make Disciples: A National Plan and Strategy for Catholic Evangelization in the United States, say nothing about demonstrating God’s power through miracles. Instead, they say, “Evangelization happens when the word of Jesus speaks to people’s hearts and minds. Needing no trickery or manipulation, evangelization can happen only when people accept the Gospel freely, as the ‘good news’ it is meant to be, because of the power of the gospel message and the accompanying grace of God.”
It is the power of the Gospel message itself that the world needs. “This vision we share is the power of the Good News. As it compels us, we believe it can compel, by its beauty and truth, all who sincerely seek God.”