A Conversation with Francis and Judith MacNutt, Interview by David Kyle Foster

David: What is your first memory of knowing God?

Francis: As far back as I can remember I believed in God. I went with my dad to church every Sunday. I was always serious about God and very intent on wanting to do His will.

David: How did that evolve into a call to be a Catholic priest?

Francis: It took a little time. I never was sure what I wanted to do with my life. It was only after graduating from Harvard and from Catholic University that Thomas Merton’s book, Seven Story Mountain, helped persuade me to become a priest. I was ordained a Dominican in 1956.

David: As a Roman Catholic priest, how did you become involved with Agnes Sanford and the healing ministry?

Francis: In 1967, I met Agnes Sanford at “The Camp Farthest Out” in Tennessee. I was fascinated with the idea that God still healed today and she prayed for me to receive the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” She also prophesied that God would use me to bring healing back to the Catholic church, which largely came true.

A year later, I attended a school of pastoral care that was taught by Agnes Sanford, Tommy Tyson and John Sandford. I learned a lot in those days.

I then began to share the news about the baptism of the Holy Spirit while giving talks to different groups, especially to priests, and there would always be some who would ask to receive prayer for it.

Eventually, I became the president of the Catholic Homiletic Society in St. Louis—an organization of 1,100 Catholics. While there, I simply followed Matthew 10, where Jesus said to preach that the kingdom of God is at hand, to heal, and to cast out evil spirits. I wrote and spoke about this quite openly, and many asked me to pray for them.

David: Did your bishop approve?

Francis: It was amazing how well it was received. Many sisters got baptized in the Spirit during weekly meetings that were often attended by as many as 300 people. I’d give talks on the baptism of the Spirit, they’d receive it and take it back to their parishes. By the time I left St. Louis in 1980 there were 60 priests involved in 100 charismatic Catholic prayer groups in the city. It was extraordinary.

David: Were your audiences all Catholic or was it a mix?

Francis: It was a mix, but mostly Catholic. Frequently, however, we had ecumenical teams, often with Tommy Tyson. Ruth Carter Stapleton worked on a number of those teams before her brother got elected president. In the 1970s I took extensive trips to Latin America and Africa – perhaps 30 countries in all. At one retreat in Australia, almost all of the 220 priests asked for the baptism of the Spirit.

David: When did you write your first book?

Francis: I wrote Healing in 1974, which has gone on to sell about a million copies.

David: Judith, how did you meet Francis?

Judith: I was living in Jerusalem, running a house of prayer called Jerusalem House. My pastor, Dr. Robert Lindsey, was a respected scholar in the Southern Baptist Convention who had just experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He encouraged me to go to a meeting to hear Francis.

Years later, the Lord led me to Clearwater, Florida, to work with The Spirit of God Community, (a large charismatic Catholic group), where I prayed and counseled people, and where I met Francis again.

David: What was a Baptist doing working for a charismatic Catholic community?

Judith: I felt drawn to the sacraments and liturgy. The Baptist church was closed to the charismatic renewal and I didn’t feel that I could have my prayers for people really blessed there. So I was received into the Catholic church.

David: How did you work through the fear that many Baptists and other Protestants have that Catholics aren’t really saved?

Judith: God gave me a beautiful exposure to the Roman Catholic church through the renewal. The community was 500 strong there, they really knew Jesus, they knew the Holy Spirit, and they prayed for healing. So any fears that I might have had about it being “the whore of Babylon,” as I had been taught growing up, were quickly overcome. I still love the Southern Baptist church, but it needs to have a fresh wind of the Holy Spirit to blow through it. So does the Catholic church, for that matter.

So, there I was, fellowshipping in the Catholic community, praying with their people, ministering to them, and unaware that the very people that I was staying with were friends with Francis. He would come there between trips to work on one of his books. Well, after quite a long time we both realized that we were falling in love. After several days of praying with the leaders, we felt like God was calling us to marry, and so we did, in 1980.

Francis: The leaders were mostly against it, by the way. I was 54 and she was 32.

David: Francis, how did you work through renouncing your vows of celibacy as a priest in order to marry?

Francis: It was very difficult because everyone was saying, “You can’t do this! You’ve made a vow! This will destroy the great ministry that God has given you.” I remember one Catholic leader just cried. So, it wasn’t always anger, but sadness, too.

David: Many of them probably believed that you would lose your salvation if you left the church.

Francis: Yes. In those days there was an automatic excommunication attached to a priest leaving to marry. You were out of the church. So that was hard. Also, upon marrying, I wouldn’t be able to receive the sacraments. So there was a lot going against our decision.

I didn’t make a decision to leave the church, however. The decision was to marry. It wasn’t like I wanted to leave the church, that wasn’t the point, but it was the inevitable consequence at the time.

David: What did you think about the Catholic church’s teaching that your excommunication would result in the loss of your salvation?

Francis: Only God can say who is saved and who is lost.

David: What happened in the years between your 1980 marriage and your 1987 move to Jacksonville, Florida?

Francis: I wrote The Prayer That Heals and Praying for Your Unborn Child. We also received various speaking invitations from Protestant groups, and Judith continued with her counseling practice. Then the Episcopal bishop in Jacksonville asked if we would like to move there. They wanted a healing center. And so, we started Christian Healing Ministries.

David: Why didn’t you become a priest in the Episcopal Church?

Francis: I tried not to join another church or ministry so as not to add one more divisive element to the whole situation. I did apply twice to the Vatican for dispensation, so that our marriage would be recognized in the Catholic church, but it took 13 years to come through. In 1993 our marriage was renewed by the bishop here, so we are now Catholics in good standing.

David: Are you a Catholic priest once again?

Francis: I am not allowed to exercise the ministry of a priest except in an emergency. If somebody was dying out there, for example, I could hear their confession. But I’m no longer clergy.

David: Did either of you struggle with bitterness and anger over having been excommunicated for those years?

Judith: It was more a grieving than an anger.

Francis: A sadness.

Judith: It’s a deep sadness that a person like Francis, who loved and embraced the Catholic faith his whole life, had to lose the fellowship of a church that he loved so much. There are many people who suffer similar losses with their denominations when they can no longer embrace what they are asked to embrace. We see that now in the Episcopal church with the consecration of the openly gay bishop. We’ve seen deep grieving among our Episcopalian friends.

Francis: The good thing is that since I don’t stand up in a collar anymore, I don’t represent something that most people can’t accept. Last month we had a conference in New Mexico sponsored by the Catholic church and four Pentecostal churches. I was the one speaker that both the Catholics and the Pentecostals could agree on.

David: How has the healing movement changed over the past 35 years?

Francis: There has been a maturation and a development. For example, in the early years you never heard about satanic ritual abuse. God has also deepened our understanding of the time element that is involved in healing. It’s not all instant. It wasn’t in Jesus’ ministry either.

David: Has the modern church grown in its understanding of how God heals and are we better at it now?

Francis: Some are. The problem is getting the word out. Recently I was given 15 minutes on the #1 Christian talk show to talk about healing. What can you say in 15 minutes?

Judith: In a lot of churches, there is still no understanding of the need to bring all of the healing disciplines together. For example, in some denominations you’ll find an understanding of deliverance ministry, but they’ll have no clue about inner healing. Ninety percent of all demonic activity is based in trauma or in wounding. Many will cast a demon out of someone, but they won’t do the inner healing work that heals the wound, and so the demon comes back.

A well-known speaker recently wrote in one of his books that you don’t need inner healing if you have forgiveness, and you don’t need Christian counselors if you have Jesus, and I found myself feeling very sad that a man who has great influence in our country doesn’t understand that people do need inner healing. I’ve never met a person who didn’t.

What we’ve come to understand is that in many cases you have to literally soak the person in God’s love over a period of time. You see the cancer diminish each time you pray. The person who is prayed for only once, and is told, “Go home and have faith that you are healed!”—that person is being deprived of life-giving prayer. They need to keep soaking in God’s healing presence.

There’s a deliverance ministry that recently made news, led by a woman who apparently has no understanding of inner healing. So what’s happening to those people that are being prayed for? My guess is she sees the same people over and over again, because the demons of pornography, rejection, self-hatred or whatever that she casts out are going to wander around and come right back to the same people. So the great need in the church is to understand that all of the Spirit-given ministries work together to bring wholeness to a person.

David: Let’s move on to the charismatic renewal. It seems to have ebbed and flowed in the last 40 years. Why do you think that has been, and what do you think the future holds for the charismatic renewal?

Francis: That’s a really great question. In the United States it has certainly ebbed in the mainline denominations. A lot of that, as I see it, is their inability to incorporate it into the Sunday worship where people are free to prophesy or pray or whatever. At best they have a little group of two or three people standing by the side alter to pray with people. That’s an improvement over 50 years ago, but for in-depth things, it is woefully inadequate. I’ve yet to hear of a mainline leader saying from the pulpit, for example, “If you’re smoking, (which is one of the top health problems in the country), come to us and we’ll pray for you and ask God to free you from your smoking addiction.” Too many times, there is no understanding of the charisms and the power of the Spirit among the leadership.

David: Why do you think the charismatic renewal got suppressed in this nation?

Francis: It wasn’t suppressed; it’s been controlled. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America the charismatic renewal is exploding, while in Europe and the United States, except in groups like the Vineyard or the Charismatic Episcopal Church, it’s stalled. In this country, by and large, it has been domesticated. But in other parts of the world it’s growing so explosively that the largest group of Christians next to Roman Catholics are Pentecostal Evangelical Christians! Most mainline Protestants in this country don’t realize that they are outnumbered. They still see charismatics and pentecostals as fringe groups. They don’t realize that the main centers of Christianity 25 years from now will not be Rome, Geneva and New York, but New Delhi, Lagos and other exotic centers. Already, there are 10 times as many Anglicans in Africa as there are in England!

David: Is that the inscrutable choice of God to pour out His Spirit in one place and not another or is there something about Americans and Europeans that quenches the Spirit?

Francis: I think there is a movement to quench the Spirit. It’s very human. One writer identified the problem as a spirit of phariseeism which keeps returning. God usually starts things with relatively poor people, like He did with the illiterate laymen, Peter and John. And it usually happens in distant places where there is no establishment control. For example, in Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, there was an extraordinary revival out on the frontier where the theologians in Boston couldn’t control it.

David: The problem with Westerners then is an over-intellectualization and institutionalization of what needs to be free in the Spirit.

Francis: In all the great religious movements, from the birth of the religious orders in the Catholic church to “The Great Awakenings” in America, the first 20 years were the glory years, but after that there were too many people and someone decided to organize it.

David: Judith, where do you think the Holy Spirit is leading us?

Judith: I wish I knew. My prayer would be that more people would learn to hear God, to spend time listening to Him. The Spirit comes to us in waves, again and again, but we don’t listen. We don’t follow up. We are not faithful with what He asks of us. And we tend to push Him into boxes.

I believe the reason He is visiting other countries right now is because those people have a very childlike spirit of openness. When I was in Africa, I found that if you say God will do this, they will respond, “Let’s do it.” But in this country people will say, “God doesn’t do that.” We spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to convince people that this is what God wants to do. Yet there is fear of the unknown. People are afraid of what God will ask of them. They want to know, “Will it take more than an hour, or a week?” And I say to them, “It will take your whole life,” and they go, “No, thanks.”

As far as the future of the renewal: I had an image several years ago, where I saw God tearing apart the denominations, and He said, “Some I will have to reduce to ashes, but out of the ashes I will build My church.” It frightened me when I first saw it, but where I see some of the denominations going now, I realize God’s going to have to do that. They’re not going to listen any other way. The church is going to have to reach a point where church as we know it no longer works, and out of desperation turn and cry, “Help us!”

David: What can you say to pastors about how to change their churches so that they become responsive to the Holy Spirit?

Judith: I was listening to a testimony of one pastor who lost most of his people after bringing back the renewal from the “Toronto Blessing,” and at first he said, “God, what are you doing? All of the people are leaving.” But God has since restored 10 times over with new members who are really hungry for God and the things of the Spirit, what he initially lost. So it’s not always a wonderful experience when we go with the Holy Spirit, because people will leave—especially people who give large amounts of money. If you start breaking out with things of the Spirit, many of those people will leave and take their money with them. But eventually God restores it. That’s the whole story of Job. Whatever God has to take away, He always restores.

David: Francis, your next book will attempt to show how man-made theologies have put a damper on the work of the Holy Spirit during certain historical periods. Give us a preview.

Francis: The reason why many believers today don’t pray for healing is that their theological forbears, such as John Calvin, didn’t believe in it. He believed that God shut it down after the apostles, which simply isn’t true. In fact, for the first 300 years of church history prayer for healing was generally accepted. One Yale scholar claims that the main methods used for evangelizing Rome were healing and casting out of evil spirits. It’s a historic question, not a question of theology.

David: In your research, have you noticed any patterns that consistently reappear when the Holy Spirit breaks out afresh?

Francis: Usually it happens in an out-of-the-way place where there are a small number of pastors who have begun studying the scripture and wondering why the miraculous has ceased.

David: Have you ever thought that these outbreaks of the Holy Spirit invariably must be temporary because man’s tendency will always be to start seeking the gift rather than the giver?

Francis: Yes, that’s part of it. Also, some leaders have tried to make money out of it. Some have became alcoholics. Others have run off with the church secretary or whatever. All these human things take place causing many legitimate moves of God to get sidetracked and discredited.

It may go underground for a while, but will eventually break forth, such as it did at Azusa Street in the early 20th century. That outbreak is so big now in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that no one can put it out. I pray that it continues so that everybody in the world will be touched somehow and understand what Christianity really is.

For a longer version of this interview, visit:

http://www.purepassion.us/index.php/mastering-life/articles/miscellaneous/item/35-interview-francis-judith-macnutt [as of March 16, 2014].

For more interviews by David Kyle Foster, visit the www.PurePassion.us website. “Pure Passion”—TV with One Pure & Holy Passion, may be seen on The Christian Television Network, Cornerstone TeleVision Network, Sky Angel Satellite Network, The Miracle Channel, The Russian Christian TV Network, and Alfa Omega TV Network. “Pure Passion” deals with sexual sin and brokenness and the issues that surround it.

Articles by Francis and Judith MacNutt from may be found online in the Healing Line magazine: http://www.christianhealingmin.org/current-issue