Churches across the world differ in their beliefs about miracles. Miracles can be defined as anything that goes against or above the natural processes of life. Many churches in America generally avoid the subject of miracles either because of unbelief or fear. But some professors at Asbury have witnessed and experienced healings and other gifts of the Holy Spirit and believe they still happen worldwide.
Asbury theology professor Dr. Chris Bounds explained that there are two views about miracles in Christianity. The cessationist view is that miracles did not continue to happen after the apostles’ time. The continuationist view is that God continues to work miraculously and still gives Christians the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit.
“[Charismatic gifts have] always been a part of Christianity and [have] always been a part of the church,” Bounds said. “But at times what’s happened in the history of Christianity is these have sort of ebbed and flowed. So sometimes they’ve been more manifest in the church and other times they have not been as manifest.”
The Asbury Collegian published an article on Nov. 22 about art professor Chris Segre-Lewis’ experiences with the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues, words of knowledge and faith healing.
After Segre-Lewis was first able to heal people through the Holy Spirit in 2015, he felt a strong calling to go to Israel. He spent a month there in fall 2016 on sabbatical doing an art show and working with Jewish Christians to heal people in Jerusalem.
Segre-Lewis is part Jewish and part Portugese. During a Christian conference in 2015, he felt God tell him to join what the Jews call an aliyah, which is an immigration of Jews coming back to Israel.
He heard God say in prayer, “I’m anointing a group of people to heal the sick and heal every single disease, because there’s a great aliyah coming back from the West, from North and South America, and I’m going to heal them as they come back.”
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, aliyah is Hebrew for “going up.” In modern day, the phrase refers to “the ‘going up’ to Israel of immigrants from other lands.”
Segre-Lewis explained that a similar healing phenomenon happened in Scripture when God healed every disease as Jews came to present-day Israel from Egypt, as recorded in Exodus.
An Israeli told Segre-Lewis that Israel had not experienced significant healings and miracles in a long time, but they had been praying for the Lord to give them signs and wonders again.
In October 2016, Segre-Lewis joined Jewish Christians who were going out on the streets in pairs and healing people in the name of Yeshua, which is Aramaic for Jesus. During his first day in Israel, Segre-Lewis spent 20 minutes praying with a pastor friend and saw visions of people God wanted them to heal.
He saw a woman on a zoo park bench wearing white, and God told him she had a herniated disc. He saw someone under a bridge with a knee injury, a man with patch on his eye wearing glasses, a woman in a wheelchair and a man with a crutch under his left arm with a back injury.
The two of them went out and found all of those people, prayed for them and healed them. Segre-Lewis said that first day set the precedent for the trip and those kinds of miracles happened every day.
“Most Jews have never heard the gospel; they think of Jesus as like a Norse god; a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Northern European god,” Segre-Lewis explained. “They don’t know he’s a Jewish rabbi from 2,000 years ago and one of the greatest Jews.”
He explained that Jews are hardwired to seek signs. They understand that whenever wonders occur, God is present. The West is different because culture and schools train people to not believe something unless it’s provable.
Because of the Enlightenment, Western cultures are skeptical of anything intangible, and people view their imaginations as untrustworthy.
“It’s actually a materialist, naturalist way of looking that’s infected the church,” Segre-Lewis said. However, he said, neither miracles nor God’s existence can be proven; and most of the time God uses people’s imaginations to communicate with them.
He continued, “I think it has to do with the fear of the supernatural; it’s very fear-based and they’re also afraid of getting into uncharted waters and messing stuff up.”
Bounds said he holds strongly the continuationist view of miracles. He explained the difference between Charismata gifts, which includes healings, tongues, prophecy and words of knowledge, and gifts of being able to minister, which God gives to pastors, teachers, prophets and evangelists.
Bounds said that his wife takes part in healing people through prayer. She also experienced healing after struggling with a severe eating disorder for 23 years.
His wife had sought treatment and therapy for anorexia and bulimia throughout that time, but nothing had worked. Then a group of Christians in Wilmore prayed and fasted for Bounds’ wife for three days, then prayed over her for six hours.
“When they finished praying over her, she was so physically, spiritually, mentally and emotionally exhausted from that experience she really sort of got into bed for about two days,” Bounds explained. “But when she got out of bed she was set free from this bondage to this eating disorder.”
He believes that the world is in a time when miracles are more manifest, but that generally countries outside the United States see them more often.
According to the Pew Research Center, the population of Christians in Africa and Asia has been rapidly increasing, while the number of people that identify as Christian in America dropped a significant 8% from 2007 to 2014.
Another study by the Pew Center found that 16% of Christians in America identify as Charismatic and 11% as Pentecostal. Both Pentecostals and Charismatics are continuationist and believe Christians should seek baptism by the Holy Spirit and the spiritual gifts. Different denominations identify as Pentecostal, while every denomination has a wing of people that are Charismatic and a wing of people who are not.
Bounds explained that America has a strong tradition of cessationism. The first study Bible published in English, the Scofield Reference Bible, was cessationist and influenced Christians in 19th century America. The Charismatic and Pentecostal movements in the 20th century helped America rediscover gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Segre-Lewis explained that some people are born with natural gifts of being able to experience the supernatural and to communicate with and see spirits. But his gifts are not natural because he was not born with them; he asked for them. People with these gifts can choose to use them for God’s purpose or for evil.
“[The church] has seen [supernatural gifts] abused by people who have not been discipled well or are not under submission to the Lord, and also they’ve seen heresy arise throughout history.” He gave the examples of the Mormon church and the New Age movement arising out of Christianity.
He further explained that when people don’t believe miracles can happen, they are not able to perform them. But if they do believe, that creates a moral obligation on Christians to seek out those gifts.
Scripture explains that the Holy Spirit gives out gifts and callings as he wills. But Paul also wrote in 1 Corinthians to “earnestly desire and strive for the greater gifts,” referring to healing and prophecy.
“One major regret is that I wasn’t discipled into these things,” Segre-Lewis said. “These things were the bread and butter of the early church. This is what they learned to do.”
He said the starting point of being able to experience miracles is being open to them. God will not force himself onto Christians; they have to want him.
Next is to walk in righteousness. Segre-Lewis said that many people think they can be unrighteous and still be Christians, but people need to repent of their sins and understand that God will not hold them accountable anymore.
“Jesus says, if your heart does not condemn you, ask me whatever you will and it’ll be given to you,” Segre-Lewis said. “Once I understood that I was already there and what the Lord had done on the cross and what he’d bought for me, this love walk, suddenly the works came naturally.”
Segre-Lewis said people will then need to discern the voice of God. He was able to do this by joining a prayer group at Asbury where students laid hands on people in prayer and listened for the Lord’s voice in their minds. Students would sometimes say out loud what they were hearing and other students would say they heard the same thing, which confirmed for them it was God’s voice.
He also said God communicates through imagination and dreams, which he learned to pay attention to. He explained the importance of testing the spirits because not every angel or spirit is of God. Segre-Lewis tests them by determining whether it is good and in line with scripture or God’s purpose.
Bounds said, “With any gift, that gift needs to be sharpened and honed, there needs to be a maturation of it and it needs to be exercised with some degree of direction to make sure it’s not being used in ways that are detrimental to the body of Christ.”
Detrimental ways include using gifts for one’s personal gain and giving words of knowledge that are contrary to scripture.
Bounds said he believes churches should be more open to experiencing miracles. “I think Asbury is in a position today in which they are far more open to the gifts of the Holy Spirit in a way that it hasn’t been in years past,” he said.
Segre-Lewis concluded by saying that miracles are really the normal form of Christianity and they are the most effective way to show God’s love. “It’s one of the most tangible ways of showing the love of God. It’s one thing to say ‘God loves you,’ it’s another thing to see God loving somebody and see God moving in their life.”
Find Segre-Lewis’s story and watch the complete interview through the link on our website, or by watching “Asbury Professor Chris Segre-Lewis recounts miricals and Supernatural healings” on YouTube.