Pain, presence, paradox: healing prayer as lived theology amid vulnerability

This article presents a qualitative study investigating how participants in two Lutheran congregations in Norway navigate the tension between faith in divine intervention and enduring vulnerability within the practice of public healing prayer, a question of particular importance for practical theology given the continued presence of healing practices in Western Protestant church contexts and the limited empirical research addressing how faith is sustained when healing does not occur. The findings demonstrate that participants in this study do not primarily experience unanswered prayer as a theological problem requiring resolution; rather, they inhabit the tension between hope and suffering through four interrelated orientations: making room for pain and lament, accepting temporal ambiguity, cultivating trust beyond measurable outcomes, and discerning divine presence within ongoing affliction. The article concludes that, in these Lutheran contexts, healing prayer functions as a lived theological practice that sustains relational faith, legitimizes honest engagement with suffering, and supports holistic endurance amid unresolved vulnerability, thereby redirecting practical-theological attention from efficacy and explanation toward embodied and relational practices of faith.