The Church's Healing Ministry. David Atkinson
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people hearing God’s welcome. It places the law in the richer, healing context of grace.
If the pastoral ministry of the Christian Church is to be caught up into the ministry of Jesus, it needs to be understood as part of the gracious work of God’s kingdom, bringing life to individuals, breaking down the barriers that stop people hearing God’s welcome.
Second, the healings of Jesus were community events. Usually they were in public – visible signs of God’s kingdom. When Bartimaeus is healed of his blindness,[8] Jesus faces him with his own responsibility and needs by asking: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ Jesus hands responsibility and choice back to Bartimaeus. But everyone who is watching is confronted with the presence of God’s kingdom power – what does this mean for them? Is Jesus, perhaps, confronting the whole community with its blindness and responsibility and choice? In such healing events, society as a whole is called to the bar of God’s kingly rule.
A further social dimension to the healings of Jesus can be seen in his attitude to the demonic. As Jeffrey John makes clear, the New Testament uses the same terms ‘principalities and powers’ to refer both to supernatural forces, and also to ‘the very real powers – armies, nations, institutions, individuals – which represent them on earth . . . The freedom Jesus brings is freedom from both personal and systemic evil; his confrontation with the demons parallels and symbolizes his confrontation with the Jewish authorities. The relevance of this for us is that ‘the healing Jesus brings is as necessary for systems and societies as it is for individuals’.[9]
The pastoral ministry of the Christian Church, then, needs to be concerned not only with the individual, but with the whole society in which that person’s life story is set, and this takes us into political questions of community health, as well as questions of deliverance from ‘principalities and powers’.
Third, the healing ministry of Jesus changed people’s priorities. This is nicely illustrated in the story of Zacchaeus – the chief tax collector who had been economical with the truth.[10] After his encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus promised to return goods to people whom he had defrauded, and his business priorities are turned around in the light of God’s rule. And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house.’ Or, as William Tyndale’s translation has it, ‘Today, health has come to this house.’
If the pastoral ministry of the Christian Church is to be caught up into the ministry of Jesus, it needs to be concerned with lifestyle as well as with cure, with ethics as well as with feelings, with business as well as with private life. God’s kingly rule concerns all of life at all levels – as must the Church’s ministry.
Fourth, healing is linked to forgiveness. Four friends bring a paralysed man to Jesus and, because of the crowds, let him down through a hole in the ceiling.[11] Jesus first says, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ Then later says, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’ The healing work of Jesus touches this person’s need for forgiveness as well as his hope to walk again.
Healing at all levels comes from God. This is beautifully expressed in the words of the prayer after communion in The Book of Common Prayer, which thanks God for ‘the forgiveness of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion’. Those ‘other benefits’ we can take to include the ministry of healing and wider pastoral care.
God, it seems, sometimes withholds healing at one level in order to heal us in other ways first. Sometimes we need to hear about the forgiveness of our sins before we can receive the other word about health for our bodies. Healing is a process: it doesn’t happen all at once. The theologian T. F. Torrance referred to ‘eschatological reserve’, by which I think he meant there is a gap between the word of forgiveness and the word of full healing. With this paralysed man, the gap was a few minutes; with some of us it takes a lifetime.
In the cross of Jesus, the word of forgiveness has been spoken, and in that sense there is healing in the cross: ‘By his wounds you have been healed.’[12] But the working out of that promise takes a life of growing into wholeness. God’s word of health comes to us sometimes just in part in this life, and in its fullness not until we reach the fullness of the kingdom. The Church’s ministry of healing – and indeed all our pastoral ministry – takes place in that gap between the presence of God’s kingdom in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus – with all the blessings that flow to us from that here and now – and the fullness of that kingdom in the life to come.
And it is that kingdom that is inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The resurrection demonstrates the messianic hope that Jesus is the Messiah who brings shalom. It is an affirmation of creation and the beginning of its healing.
The resurrection is the resurrection of the body, which gives to our bodily life a value and meaning to be cherished. It established the victory of the cross, and provides the hope that one day there will be no more death, nor crying, nor pain. And it is the resurrection of Jesus that gives power to the Church’s pastoral ministry: the Church lives in the power of the Spirit given through the resurrection of Jesus.
Historical sketch
After New Testament times, there considerable evidence for a continuing charismatic healing ministry being exercised by the early Christian Church, and there are records of healing miracles during the first three centuries of the Church’s life.[13] There seem to have been close links between the Church and medical practice, but over time the Church’s healing ministry became more sacramental, combined with anointing and exorcisms. During the Middle Ages, around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the growth of monastic orders, there is a phase of records of miraculous healings, often through contact with the relics of saints. Despite caution from some church leaders, at the level of popular devotion much of the healing ministry of the Church was associated with magic at this time.
By the sixteenth century, at the time of the Reformation, many Christians attempted to take the magic out of religion.[14] Many believed that illness was sent by God, and that suffering was to be endured patiently. Neither of the great continental Reformers, Luther or Calvin, believed in miraculous physical healings, but concentrated on the miracle of the spiritual healing of the soul. The first Anglican prayer book of Thomas Cranmer, in 1549, provided an ‘Order for the Visitation of the Sick’, which included a long exhortation reminding the ill person that sickness is ‘God’s Visitation’, and that they should ‘take in good worthe the chastisement of the Lord: for whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth’. It concluded with a form of anointing with oil – anointing that was omitted from Cranmer’s second prayer book of 1552.
Since the Reformation, the split between Church and medical practice, fed by a dualistic view of human nature separating body from soul, has developed still further. During the seventeenth century, with the growth of the view of the world as a large machine, working according to Newton’s laws, there emerged a large split in some people’s minds between the physical world, which they believed could be understood by science and medicine, and the spiritual world, which was of concern to God. Medicine and religion tended to be kept in separate compartments. People went to the priest to confess their sins, and to the doctor for their physical health. More recently, and in the twentieth century in particular, with the founding of various Guilds of Health, the Church’s healing ministry has become more identified with the sacramental ministry, and the Church’s ministry of healing has become well established, clergy working alongside medical professionals in striving for the health of the ‘whole person’. In particular, the growth of the Pentecostal churches in the twentieth century, and of the charismatic movement within older Christian denominations, has brought ‘gifts of healing’ within the Church to greater prominence. In addition, the development of social and political dimensions to health within communities has been explored from a Christian perspective and implications drawn for the corporate and social aspects of the Church’s ministry to the sick.
Pastoral care today
If we understand the Church’s pastoral ministry in relation to questions of health to include the three aspects of ‘shepherding’ identified by Hiltner[15] (healing, sustaining and guiding), as well as co-operation with the medical profession, involvement in counselling and psychotherapy for those with emotional problems, the ministry of deliverance in relation to