Pastor and best-selling author Francis Chan has admitted that he spend "many years" not believing in miracles. Speaking at the virtual International Association of Healing Ministries conference, the missionary said he really struggled with charismatic Christian practices, including speaking in tongues.
"What I do know is for many years I didn't believe in healing, I didn't believe in miracles, it was pretty much what I was taught in seminary," he explained, before noting that he "used to ridicule people who spoke in tongues or prophesied or believed they could heal, even though when I personally read the Scriptures, I saw this available."
Francis, who now lives as a missionary in Hong Kong, said it "took years" for him "to be honest with what I saw in Scripture and start pursuing these gifts of the Spirit." He added: "I'm still somewhat on that journey."
The former California megachurch pastor, who resigned from his role back in 2010 and founded a house church movement in San Francisco, admitted that he has "been praying for gifts of healing for years" but that it "was only like a few months ago that I saw healing for the first time."
Earlier this year, the minister explained how he had seen scores of miraculous healings during a recent mission trip to Myanmar.
"Every person I touched was healed," he said. "This is craziness to me. I have never experienced this in 52 years."
Chan added:
"I'm talking, like, a little boy and a little girl who were deaf. We lay hands, she starts crying, and she's freaking out. And we're like 'lay hands on your little brother'. We lay hands on him and he starts hearing for the first time. You guys, this is out of my comfort zone. This is stuff I'd read about but I'm going, man, it happened. It happened.
"I thought I had faith. But my faith was at another level...I think there are some things that contributed...some of it was just faith in His word, that when Jesus says, ‘I am in you and you are in Me,’ to take that literally."
