Modern Miracles Journalist-Pastor Finds Abundant Evidence Of Divine Intervention Into Contemporary Lives

Paul Prather began the path that led to his new book on miracles 20 years ago by witnessing one.

Seeing his father healed instantly from cancer began his own path to spiritual renewal and sparked his interest in the question of whether and why God intervenes in people’s lives.

Prather’s 220-page book, “Modern-Day Miracles: How Ordinary People Experience Supernatural Acts of God,” (Andrews and McNeel, $19.95) is an inspirational and informative look at the reported increase in miracles today and what it might mean.

Religion reporter and columnist for a daily newspaper in Kentucky, the Lexington Herald Leader, Prather also is pastor of a small Christian church and has written another book, “Life’s a Dance: The Story of John Michael Montgomery.”

Prather said that while he is “unabashedly a Christian,” he also feels sort of “schizophrenic” about miracles. He has master’s degrees in the liberal arts and social sciences, has taught at the University of Kentucky and been a journalist for nine years for a secular daily newspaper.

Meanwhile, his personal spiritual journey has been from being raised Southern Baptist, with no real belief in modern miracles, to marrying into a Pentecostal family, being asked to pastor a tiny Pentecostal church, and rather slowly adopting many of its members’ beliefs.

“I have a sort of intellectual, secular and skeptical point of view and, at the same time, a religious heritage that has exposed me to a lot of these miraculous phenomena, many of which I have no secular explanation for,” he says.

Such as the healing of his father 20 years ago.

A Southern Baptist pastor who did not believe that miracles still happen, Prather’s father was stricken with deadly cancer.

“It was supposed to be terminal,” Prather said in a telephone interview. “He had a tumor on his head, on his kidneys, and in his bone marrow.” Doctors debated how to treat it.

But one day his father told Prather that while he had been praying, God had told him that he would be healed.

“We didn’t know what to make of that,” Prather says, because their father had never been one to believe in such things, much less predict them. “Within two or three days, his cancer just spontaneously disappeared,” Prather said. “I wasn’t religious when this happened. I was in college, and a partier, beer drinker and a skeptic.

“But I was present when he was healed, and I saw that and I couldn’t deny it.

“If it had happened to someone else, I would have said it was an amazing coincidence or a misdiagnosis. But I knew what bad shape he was in, and I knew what the doctors had said.

“And I knew he had said beforehand that God was going to heal him. So there was no doubt in my mind that he had been supernaturally healed in those circumstances.”

His father’s health continues to be clear of cancer. Over the years, both as a journalist and as a pastor, Prather kept running across similar stories he couldn’t shake.

“A lot of time they didn’t want to talk on the record, because people would think they were crazy.”

The question drove him to research.

He learned that apparitions of the Virgin Mary are being seen more and more often by Catholics and others all around the world. And Harvard theologian Harvey Cox’s recent book on Pentecostals impressed on him how fast that particular religious tradition, defined mainly by its belief in modern-day miracles, was growing faster than any religious group in the world.

Something seems to be going on, he says.

Prather defines miracles broadly, to include not only law-of-nature violations but also, in the words of theologian James Packer, “remarkable coincidences that occur in situations where desperate people have been praying.” They are reported in nearly every religious tradition around the world, yet the phenomenon seems to lie under the consciousness of secular America, partly because our post-Enlightenment heritage tells us miracles can’t happen, he says.

He devotes one chapter to arguments against miracles and one to arguments for them, handling both with a good journalist’s fairness. The chapters serve as handy reviews of both historical and contemporary thinking on the matter of miracles.

It does come down to world views, though, he says.

“The conclusion I came to is you can never document a miracle well enough to convince someone who is truly a skeptic,” he says.

So he lets people tell their stories, including:

The miraculous Christian conversions of hardened and politically ambitious Watergate felons Charles Colson and Jeb Magruder into sincere ministers who have stood the test of two decades.

The mysterious healing of Donn Hollingsworth, a Protestant minister and businessman in China of life-threatening angina under the hands of a Buddhist healer, Madame Moe.

A Hindu yogi seeing his spiritual master, in the flesh, even touching him, in an apparition three months after the master had died.

The deliverance from demonic possession of a longtime drug user and agnostic, hostile to the Christian faith, by a minister.

A grieving widow facing financial ruin, at the end of her rope, sitting in despair, crying out to God and getting a clear response that turned her life around.

A man suffering with Lou Gerhrig’s disease who encountered a tall stranger who helped him and told him he was the man’s guardian angel.

There are many other stories.

Some miracles seem trivial, some incredible, some stories persuasive, and a few poignant. And they are a lot more common, perhaps, than we in the modern, scientifically oriented West often realize, Prather says.

“One survey found that 82 percent of Americans believe God still performs miracles,” he said. “People don’t go out and talk about it, but they believe it in their hearts.”