A time for Healing

With so MUCH up for discussion in Church circles at the moment, why should every parish take time to read the new Time to Heal report, and review their practice in the area of Christian healing?

Jesus told his disciples to go preach the Gospel and heal the sick, which must be taken in its widest context. Hans Kung said ‘God’s Kingdom is creation healed’ and many of us in the churches will already be working for social healing, creation healing and relationship healing. Surely this emphasizes the need for congregations to include people who reach out to the physically, emotionally and spiritually sick?

Jesus met people at the point of their need in his day, and today many are in great need both physically and mentally. The incarnation of our Lord teaches us that our bodies and our human life are important and come under God’s authority. We in the churches cannot hand all the responsibility over to scientific medicine much as we rejoice in the devotion and progress made in the medical professions.

God made our whole being, therefore he has a place in our healing. Sometimes this is to recovery and life; sometimes it is to peace of mind and death. We once had the privilege of praying with a lady in the advanced stages of chest cancer. She had been brought as a ‘last resort’. Asked what she wanted God to do she said that the pain was unbearable, like ‘two burning coals in her back’. This was brought to the Lord in prayer, and hands laid on her. She witnessed that the pain went – never to reappear. She died five months later, not in agony but able to pray with her family and to prepare them for her death.

We in our local situation frequently have great needs thrust upon us. In this last week we have shared with a woman who feels at the end of her tether with her verbally abusive husband. There is a member of a congregation with cancer of the liver. There was the lady whose dementia-suffering husband had just died. Do we say ‘I’ll keep you in my prayers’, or do we as a Christian body ask Christ how we should pray for them and offer prayer as a therapy alongside the professional help they may be receiving from other sources? If we don’t do the latter are we not saying ‘God is not interested’?

A Christian doctor was once asked in an interview, ‘Doesn’t most Christian healing qualify under the heading ‘psychosomatic disease’? His reply was that people under that heading were really ill and not ‘faking it’. He implied that many more afflictions were the result of emotional turmoil and external factors than had been previously acknowledged.

We see this in the Scriptures when Jesus said to the paralysed man ‘Go and sin no more’. Jesus was looking beyond the presenting symptoms and releasing the man from the underlying cause.

Those in the churches who are called to the costly ministry of prayer for the sick can ask for the Holy Spirit’s help in seeing behind the presenting symptoms and so bring into the open the underlying cause of the disease. As the cause is acknowledged the light of Christ can shine on it. When it is hidden, unacknowledged, the fear and desperation caused can be a fruitful playground for the forces of darkness. It is an area which scientific medicine cannot always treat and has brought into being many alternative therapies.

So there is no choice for the Church. It is not a case of either we have a healing ministry or we just support the work of the medical professionals. It is both. We are people who acknowledge that God has made each individual and so knows the inner context of each disease. We are also those who acknowledge that God has given special insights, ability and training to advance medical science and we can support that work. I believe prayer will advance healing even if it is, as with the lady with cancer, a healing in the process of dying. If we ask in his name his will will be done.

A Time to Heal brings up to date the 1958 report to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. If we think of the advances in medicine since then, is it not time to acknowledge the advances in our understanding of the local Christian healing ministry? We may need to assess our commitment to that ministry in our local church, and to dedicate ourselves to good practice in our endeavours. This new report should help us to do this.

A Time to Heal: A contribution towards the Ministry of Healing is published by Church House Publishing (£9.95) A handbook to the report The Development of Good Practice in the Healing Ministry costs £2.95. You can buy both at Church House Bookshop. Tel: 020 7898 1304.