One of the biggest hindrances to researching miracle claims in the evangelical movement is that Christians often don’t value the need for evidence. The purpose of Send Proof is to change their perspective by calling on those who claim to be healed, and ministries that report those healings, to allow the Global Medical Research Institute (GMRI) to investigate their claims. We believe the burden of proof falls on those making the claim. Thus, we want people to Send Proof of healing miracles. 

 It is the first documentary of its kind that shows miracle claims that have been researched and published in peer-reviewed journals. If miracles do occur, it challenges the prevailing naturalistic understanding of reality throughout the West. Modern miracles can point to the possibility of the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, and divine intervention in creation. 

The film was originally slated to be released in late 2016 or early 2017. The documentary took much longer than expected because this was Elijah’s first film. He did not realize the difficulty of taking on such a task, and his goal was to be faithful to God’s calling. Elijah and his wife Alison nearly emptied their retirement account of $175,000 to honor the commitment to their kickstarter backers and complete the film.

The original prize by James Randi required that one submit to a scientific test in order to claim it. Claims that cannot be tested experimentally are not eligible for the challenge. Thus, submitting a case study of a past miracle event would not qualify. The prize was designed so that a faith healer would have to agree to heal a person of a mutually agreed upon disease during a particular time period which was outside of the scope of the film. Our goal was to find good cases for miracles, with corroborating evidence, not to run an experiment. Lastly, the prize was terminated in 2015, the year filming began. 

Think of this as an investment in yourself. Hardback books or two movie tickets and a meal can easily cost $25-45.00. The film costs Elijah six years of his life. During this time, he could not work to earn an income. It costs $8-12 dollars to get one purchase from Facebook ads, plus we have to pay the team.

No one is unbiased. We all have worldviews that we bring to the data we examine. The key to thinking critically about topics is acknowledging one’s worldview and biases, and then directly addressing them. The team at Send Proof did this by defining our terms and methodology for what we would accept. We defined a miracle as when a supernatural being changes the normal course of events. Secondly, we concluded that every healing miracle claim can fall into three categories:

• A supernatural being healed the person
• The person was healed naturally
• The person was not healed

Our goal was to look at each claim from all angles and make an inference as to the best explanation. 

We relied heavily on the work of GMRI, which researched each case to demonstrate that the person had had an unexpected healing after a prayer event, and to identify possible naturalistic explanations. When researchers could not find any, they sought to publish the case studies in peer-reviewed medical journals. After their reviews, we included those cases in the film.

For more about GMRI:

https://www.globalmri.org/about/

Gastroparesis Healing: 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2019.03.004

Macular Degeneration Healing:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2020.02.011

The Mozambique Prayer Study:

https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:206086369