Well, it kind of defeats the purpose of praying for healing for the sick though, doesn’t it.

We really should have a ban on all those types of prayers (for those with cancer to those who’ve stubbed their big toe) because (a) they don’t work, (b) they give false hope, and (c) they distract from the true nature of prayer and/or our mortality.

We had a conference a few years ago and the theme was “The Power of Prayer.” The speaker kept on giving examples about “believers in Korea (or some other country) praying five, six hours a day.” If his reports are to be believed, some Christians in Korea prayed upwards of twenty hours a day, while shut up in a cave. The examples he gave may have truth in them, but the impression that was left was prayer in itself is powerful. The fact that it is God who is sovereignly hearing and answering prayer was somehow lost or overshadowed. Now we have people who think that “longer prayers are holier prayers.”

Hi Mike, I hope you’re well! I agree with your statement about subjectivity - prayer’s effects have got to be more than subjective. But my point is that the objectivity of prayer isn’t about a simple mechanical “cause and effect” thing - it comes from the fact that we pray as children to our heavenly Father who is at one and the same time the creator, sustainer and judge of our world. To try to measure the objective effects of prayer divorced from their relational context is, therefore, a highly dubious exercise at best.

As to your question about an outsider trying to size up my effectiveness as a dad by observing my responsiveness to my children - a couple of points. Firstly, my response to my children is primarily for the sake of my relationship with my children, not primarily for the sake of outsiders. And secondly - if outsiders were trying to assess me purely on the basis of how I react to some such bizarre experiment, I would say that such outsiders are completely misguided and need to take a reality check. If they really want to see what I’m like as a Father, they should hang around with my family for a while and observe my normal interactions with my kids. To push the analogy into the realm of God, prayer and evangelism - the best way for outsiders to see how good God is as a Father is not to conduct a clinical “prayer experiment”, but to observe real family interactions between God and his children. Primarily between God and his one and only Son - e.g. we could point them to Jesus’ prayer in John 17 and help them to reflect on how God has responded to that prayer, both in the life of his Son and in the lives of his children ever since.