Can I “Stand in Proxy” for Someone Else in a Healing Line?

If the idea is to be a conduit for the tangible anointing to go into the other person, no.

There is no Bible precedent for standing and having hands laid on you on behalf of someone else.  The healing anointing is not transmitted that way.  Actually, this disrupts the flow of the anointing in a service because the power will not flow into you, and the minister will notice a “break” in the flow of the anointing, which can be distracting and make it harder for the next people to receive.

Part of the problem is that you cannot “believe you receive” a healing on behalf of someone else.  (See Can I Believe and Receive a Healing for Someone Else?.)

Now if “standing in proxy” is simply a means for praying the “prayer of agreement” according to Matthew 18:18-20, you can get results on that basis.  The prayer of agreement is the issue, not standing in line.  There is no Bible record of the anointing jumping to another person who wasn’t in a meeting because someone in the meeting was the “lightning rod” for it.  If you do pray in agreement, please understand that the person to be healed needs to be one of the people in agreement with your prayer if you expect to see results.  There are cases where people have been prayed for without their knowledge and God has indeed moved on their behalf through the gifts of the Spirit, but this is not something that you can claim with certainty the way you could claim your own healing in agreement with someone.

There are at least three biblical alternatives.  You should suggest these if you are the one laying hands on the sick if you can afford the time to explain them:

Have Someone Minister the Word and Laying On of Hands in Person

The best way to minister to the sick is to have a believer share the Word with them concerning healing and lay hands on them in person.  Any believer is authorized to do so; no ministerial credentials are required!  (See Mark 16:18.)

Anoint a Cloth and Have It Taken to the Person

This has biblical precedent (Acts 19:11-12), but it was not the norm.  You would only want to do this if there is a tangible anointing present.  You would not do this if you are simply laying hands on the sick in faith according to Mark 16:18.  It was not a general practice in anyone’s New Testament ministry to do this all the time.

My wife and I have had unusual success with this method, but even the passage above calls such things unusual miracles.  I won’t preach something as doctrine just because of my own experience.  God can and does use different people different ways.

I prefer not to use this method if the person could reasonably drive to the meeting.  If he is able-bodied and just unmotivated or unbelieving, a cloth that’s been prayed over won’t be of much help.  Some people look for the easy way out of things, but in Jesus’ ministry, if you didn’t go to where He was, you didn’t get healed unless you encountered one of His disciples.  Someone willing to put forth the effort to attend a healing service is more likely to receive healing.

I have found that small cloths will do quite nicely so that you can have a lot of them.  I preached on a certain Caribbean island where people were bringing up beach towels for me to lay hands on.  I suppose that they reasoned, “If a cloth is good, a beach towel is better because it’s bigger so it can hold more anointing.”  I don’t think it really works that way, but I can tell you that a lot of people down there were getting healed from anointed beach towels (which they referred to as “prayer rags.”)  If people are willing to release their faith when they put an anointed item (even a beach towel) on themselves, they can be healed.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we do away with normal means of healing and establish a new Beach Towel Doctrine and try to make lots of money selling high-markup DVDs with this “new revelation.”  (Or worse yet, make even more money selling anointed beach towels.  Can you picture that?  “This beach towel could sell for $99.99, but you won’t have to pay $59.99 or even $39.99 – this amazing towel is only $19.99 (plus $10 shipping and handling)!  And you can get a bigger bargain if you act RIGHT NOW, because we’ll send you a SECOND anointed beach towel FREE – you only pay shipping.  But wait, there’s more!  Mention this TV offer and code SUCKER2 to receive a free 3-ounce airplane-compliant tube of suntan lotion to use with your towels at the beach after you get healed!”)

I heard a story of a lady in the Midwest who received the Holy Spirit while her head was in her oven.  (I guess she was cleaning it.)  She got excited and told her neighbor, and her neighbor came over and stuck her head in that same oven and received the Holy Spirit too!  That doesn’t mean that they should go out and sell “Get Filled with the Holy Spirit by Sticking Your Head in the Oven” books.  (These days, they might get rich, and they’d almost certainly get an appearance on some Christian TV show that would hype the living daylights out of them and their new revelation, but we’re talking about what should happen.)  What really happened is that the second lady decided that the time at which she stuck her head in that oven was the definite point at which she would release her faith.  (Note: If you decide to try this just because it was mentioned in this book, please make sure that the oven is turned off first.)

Pray the Prayer of Agreement on the Spot – IF the Sick Person Knows About It and Consents to It

You can pray the “prayer of agreement” for the person’s healing if the person who needs it is in agreement with that!  You will find that attempting to pray the prayer of agreement for Aunt Glarda in Montana is generally insufficient unless Aunt Glarda agrees to it and knows what’s going on.  In my experience, many people come for prayer looking for the minister to wave a magic wand and get Aunt Glarda healed when Aunt Glarda has never even heard the gospel.  (Aunt Glarda is such a mean old grouch that no one wants to talk to her anyway; she just needs to get healed because the care facility’s bills are sapping the family’s finances.)  In this case, Aunt Glarda needs one of the first two options above.  Although God sometimes does respond to such prayers in His mercy, the problem is that Aunt Glarda won’t recognize or cooperate with the healing anointing even if it does hit her, and even if she gets healed, she’ll have no idea how to keep her healing if she wakes up feeling crummy the next day.

Given the number of people who request such “long distance” prayers, it is noteworthy that there is not one single case in the New Testament of believers praying in agreement for healings long-distance for people outside the immediate household.  You cannot rule out the “gift of faith” in such cases, and someone may get healed if the minister senses the anointing to pray for a particular case.  But that is not the Scriptural norm.

The Bible pattern is not, “They shall stand in proxy for the sick” or “They shall minister to the sick from another place 2,000 miles away,” but rather, “They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover” (Mark 16:18).  This is how Jesus and His apostles ministered as a rule, so it should be our rule as well.

Jesus did not go around making “house calls” on the sick.  As a believer, you can certainly make a “house call” to visit the sick, but you can’t usually call up the local healing evangelist and ask him to come pray for Uncle Joe.  The clear pattern is that the sick were brought to Jesus.  If you want a healing evangelist to minister to Uncle Joe, you should take Uncle Joe to one of his meetings.