Evangelical Teen Camps & 'Faith Healing'

I've been watching the half-hour long 'best of' clips compiled by Soul Survivor, an evangelical Christian festival aimed at teens. One of the most striking features, between clips of rock music that's pretty far off my taste, was an extended sermon by an attractive, young woman in friendly clothes with a nice, confident voice. I'm sure it wasn't sold as a 'sermon', come to thing of it. It was a loose collection of anecdotes about experiences she had had or heard about when people had been remarkably healed by prayer.

To take two examples:

1. John Wimber had visited an African village where a young boy had been cursed by the local 'witch doctor' after his parents had converted to Christianity. He was mute and shrunken but after Wimber's group prayed for a bit and the boy began to grow and speak. Soon he was fully developed for his age.

2. The woman reported an exchange with her nail technician, one of whom's arms was 1.5cm shorter than the other. After prayer again her arm miraculously grew to full length.

I'm not interested here to assess whether these events took place, although it is hard not to be a little sceptical, but rather what it would mean if they were true, which is what this woman evidently believed and what she was encouraging the enormous crowd of teens listening avidly to her talk.

First, what would it mean for the boy's parents in example 1? Had they not prayed for their son? Had they not prayed hard enough? Were their prayers not good enough? Were they not good enough Christians?

Secondly, what would it mean for other sufferers who don't get better? Her prayers were able to extend the arms of a person she had only just met but why do some good Christians, from loving churches, die from cancer? Were they not really that good? Did they pray wrongly?

Thirdly, did she change God's mind? Had God intended that the little boy should remain cursed unless a prayer group from the USA turned up to help? What about other little boys who are cursed but weren't on Wimber's itinerary, does God give up on them?

In other words does God only act when someone, typically an evangelical Christian, prays to him and why does he act sometimes but, apparantly, not others? My biggest fear about this kind of understanding of 'the power of prayer' is what it means for the practice overall. Prayer, it seems, is like a shopping list of physical ailments for God to fix. If you do it right, he fixes them. For some reason, unknown, He sometimes doesn't. In this sense He's like a capricious car mechanic and we're trying to buy an MOT. Anyone with some knowledge of the history of prayer knows that this is selling prayer far too short and that it simply doesn't reflect our experience of how God works. I don't intend to give a definition but prayer involves, at the very least, a listening exercise not a speaking one. It is about opening ourselves up as a channel or conduit, the traffic is two way. We are in dialogue not monologue.