Church Leader’s ‘Balanced’ Take on Faith Healing Still Puts Lives at Risk

Pastor Joseph Mattera wants you to know he’s not one of those extreme prosperity gospel preachers. In his recent article addressing “9 myths regarding divine healing,” he positions himself as the reasonable voice correcting both skeptics and charlatans. But here’s the problem: even his “balanced” approach to faith healing contains dangerous ideas that can literally kill people. Mattera acknowledges that divine healing has been “overshadowed by extremes” (translation: too many obvious con artists made the whole movement look bad). So he’s here to clean up the messaging while keeping the core premise intact. The result? A more palatable version of the same harmful theology that convinces people to delay or refuse medical treatment. Look, I get why this sounds reasonable to believers. Mattera isn’t telling people to throw away their insulin or skip chemotherapy (probably). He’s just maintaining that God still heals today, which seems harmless enough. But when you dig into these “myth-busting” articles, they typically work by debunking the most ridiculous claims while reinforcing subtler but equally dangerous ones. The real harm happens in what these teachings don’t say explicitly. When church leaders spend time explaining why divine healing is real and biblical, they’re implicitly suggesting that sufficient faith should produce supernatural results. This creates a psychological framework where seeking medical help becomes a sign of weak faith, and recovery (or lack thereof) becomes a spiritual report card. Former evangelicals consistently report the same pattern: They weren’t directly told to avoid doctors, but they absorbed the message that “true faith” meant trusting God over medicine. Some delayed cancer treatment. Others refused mental health medication. Parents avoided vaccines or proper care for sick children, convinced that prayer should be sufficient. The tragedy is that people die from this theology while their leaders maintain plausible deniability. When medical neglect leads to preventable deaths, the response is always “we never told anyone to avoid doctors” (technically true) followed by “their faith wasn’t strong enough” (the real message). Mattera’s approach is actually more insidious than obvious faith healing frauds because it sounds so measured and biblical. He’s providing intellectual cover for a belief system that, in practice, creates shame around seeking professional medical help and normalizes the idea that physical healing is primarily a matter of spiritual faith rather than scientific treatment. What makes this particularly cruel is how it affects people facing serious illnesses. At their most vulnerable moments, they’re handed a theology that makes them feel guilty for hoping in medicine while simultaneously promising that adequate faith will produce miraculous results. When the miracles don’t come, they blame themselves rather than questioning the system that set impossible expectations. The bottom line: You can’t dress up faith healing in reasonable language and make it safe. Any teaching that positions divine intervention as a viable alternative to proven medical treatment is playing with people’s lives. The “moderate” version just makes the harm harder to recognize until it’s too late. Source: The Christian Post