'Wild, dark, demonic' forces: Woman's powerful ministry to confront evil, offer healing
Judith MacNutt, founder of Christian Healing Ministries, an organization dedicated to healing prayer, is on a mission to help people find hope — and spiritual recovery.
MacNutt, co-author of Deliverance from Evil Spirits: A Guide to Freedom from the Demonic Realm alongside her late husband, Francis MacNutt, grew up in a Christian home with a mother who believed wholeheartedly in healing.
"When I would listen to her, she would talk about the miracles of Jesus for healing and deliverance, and then I would go to our church, and they would pray for someone, like, in the hospital," she said on the "Playing With Fire Podcast." "But there didn't seem to be that same level of faith and authority that I saw when I read the Scripture."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Eventually, MacNutt went to college, studied psychology, and became a psychotherapist. This led her to work in psychiatric hospitals throughout the Boston area, where she started to notice something.
Listen to her explain her journey:
"It was during that time that the Lord led me to Isaiah 61," she said, quoting the Scriptures there about God healing the brokenhearted and setting the captive free. "And I began to see psychology as a wonderful diagnostic tool, and I was thankful for my training and I still am. But at the same time, it's limited in helping people."
MacNutt said research shows one-third of people get better, one-third remain the same, and another third "get worse," explaining her belief that these numbers aren't "great." One of the precipitating events that led her into healing ministry unfolded after a suicide at her hospital.
"One of my clients was able to find a gun and take his life on the hospital grounds," MacNutt said. "No one ever knew how he got the gun, but that created this real crisis for me, because I began to see the limitations."
She deeply loved her patients and used medicine and treatment, but too many "just weren't getting well." MacNutt said she felt at the time as though love simply wasn't enough.
"When this young man — he was only in his 30s — committed suicide, that's what drove me deeper into finding out more about Scripture, and about healing, and, ultimately — deliverance," she said.
MacNutt began to pray for her patients, which began a process that changed everything.
"When I started praying with my patients, I didn't tell anyone," she said. "I just started praying, and I was running a youth group at that time at a local church there in Boston, and I got my students to pray for these patients, like, first name only. They didn't know anything, but they were so zealous for God."
As those prayers progressed, MacNutt said she started seeing her patients "getting well."
"They really started getting free of the issues they had when they came into the unit," she said. "So, I saw real-life transformations in the psych hospital."
All of this paved the way for the work MacNutt does at Christian Healing Ministries, where she said they address four different types of healing: physical healing, inner healing, spiritual healing and deliverance.
"Most people are familiar with physical healing," she said. "And then there's inner healing, which is our emotions and our memories. And then there's spiritual healing, which is in the area of forgiveness. We need to forgive someone or be forgiven, and then the fourth area of healing is deliverance from evil spirits."
It's the last form of healing — deliverance — that often sparks debates in theological circles, as believers battle over the extent to which the demonic can impact Christians, the lengths to which evil manifests today, and other related issues. MacNutt is no stranger to these discussions.
"What concerns me is people take deliverance out of context and they attack it as some, you know, wild, dark, demonic force coming against people, which is true," she said. "But they don't put it in the context of our humanity, and certainly the love of God."
MacNutt continued, "And it's beautiful to see someone set free from a lifetime of drug use or a lifetime of self-abuse in some way, because the demons do have an awful lot of control, whether they're outside or inside a person."
She said she always encourages people to return to the Bible to see how Jesus handled evil. From the man labeled the Gerasene demoniac in Scripture to the people with mute spirits, Christ always confronted evil in a head-on, intriguing way.
As for the term "exorcism," a theological practice known more in Catholic circles than anywhere else as an expulsion of the demonic from a person who has been fully overtaken by evil, MacNutt said she has only seen one person in 50 years of ministry who needed to undergo such a process.
Most people, she said, simply need deliverance, which she differentiated from exorcism. And she said Christians are often in need of expelling evil that is somehow pressing in or attached to them.
"The rest of them either have like a demonic force kind of pressing on them, oppressing them, or they have one inside," MacNutt said. "And I know that's controversial always with a lot of Christians, but ... I've prayed with so many Christians that I do know that's absolutely true."
She continued, "There's a vast difference between exorcism and deliverance."
MacNutt said the actions we take in life can open us up to these spiritual evils. She recalled her own journey in middle school playing with a Ouija board. At the time, she didn't know the dangers. But a friend at a slumber party convinced her to take part in a seance.
Years later, while working in ministry, a man approached her who had a gift of "discerning spirits."
"He said, 'You have a spirit of the occult,'" she recalled. "And I said, 'That's impossible. I've never ever dealt in the occult.' And the Lord immediately brought back those two memories, and I had to renounce the occult. ... And when I had the prayer of renunciation, asking God's forgiveness, and then being set free, it really changed me in ways that I had a definite, new freedom."
MacNutt now helps others find that very freedom through her Christian Healing Ministries, explaining that finding freedom is a "very simple process." People will call or come to events hosted by the organization, including trainings and healing events.
People will fill out intake forms addressing their lives and backgrounds and then meet with prayer ministers to hear their stories and then work with them.
"Our prayer ministers are really trained in listening, and they know that love is what heals," she said, explaining how they then pray and help those move past these traumas and evils. Find out more about these efforts here.
