IN AN ATTEMPT to probe the meaning and validity of the unique ministry we have been called and commissioned to do as a healing church, last month we dealt with the "ministry" of healing and the ministry of healing persons. This month we will consider the putting together of a healing ministry and the "healing" of ministry.
The preparation of the way for the communication of divine power and grace through healing persons is an extremely complex task, and deserves the utmost in professional competence, institutional concern, and spiritual commitment from the whole church.
We must keep working at approaches and ways that will integrate all of the best of our experiences, training, and committed gifts to help God bring healing in the midst of human existence as we know and feel it today.
Because healing goes on through persons more than through programs or institutions, the ministry of a healing church begins with the individual and his own personal experience. In lieu of a hortatory harangue, a personal and spiritual inventory set of questions is listed for thoughtful and honest consideration.
Am I a Christian? Am I in Christ by repentance and faith? Is Christ in me by His Holy Spirit? Do I understand theologically and experientially what the words in these questions mean?
By God's grace and His power, have the old things passed away the old lusts, pride, hate, habits, envies, jealousies, insecurities, doubts?
Are all things becoming increasingly new new freedom through reconciliation and union with Christ; new views of God and self; new views of the world and others; new views of sin and salvation; new concepts of duties and privileges; new affections, new desires, new aims; new enjoyments, new habits; new expectations, new hopes; even new conflicts?
How much am I actually Spirit-taught, Spirit-led, Spirit-controlled? Am I a surrendered saint? Am I obedient to the will of God in all areas of my life? Have I claimed and received the fullness of the Spirit since first I believed? How much of my life and work would go on credibly if there were no Holy Spirit?
What is the true nature and status of my devotional habits of Bible study, prayer, worship? Do I know how to study, pray, and worship? Does my schedule and use of time say anything about my priorities in life, about my hungering and thirsting after righteousness?
What do I understand the church to be? What is my relationship to the church? Am I a Seventh-day Adventist?
Do I know what gifts I have through the Spirit for ministering in the church and out of it? Am I letting the Spirit exercise these gifts through me?
Do I regard the people as subjects or objects? How much do I really care about their temporal and spiritual needs what does my personal involvement with them suggest?
What are my attitudes toward my colleagues and their needs? How do I feel and speak about those in administration? How much are they in my prayers? Am I only an organization man, knowing which backs to scratch and which to stab, or do I speak the truth in love?
Am I in the world but not of the world? What is the nature of my witness to the community? Do they know I am a Seventh-day Adventist Christian with all it means?
Is my only aim in life that of bringing glory to Christ regard less of how, where, and when He wills?
Role Conflict
A part of the frustration we have faced as a church in putting together a valid ministry of healing is found in the role identity and role conflict faced by the professional persons in the church, in particular the doctors and the pastors.
We are well aware of the counsel that the gospel of Christ is to be bound up with medical missionary work, and "the medical missionary work is to be bound up with the gospel ministry" (Medical Ministry, p. 240). Yet from Battle Creek days to the present we seem to be more "hung up" than bound up.
The doctor and the pastor--- each master of his domain, each wearing a particular garb, each working in his building with his assistants. Each has his own ritual in word and symbol, each is surrounded by the tradition-laden esoteric atmosphere of medicine and theology. In the hospital the pastor is tolerated as a privileged "outsider" permitted to carry on his priestly duties. In the church the doctor may teach a Sabbath school class, but with no particular Christian significance stemming from his profession. It is easy to see how territorialism, mutual ignoring, stereotyping, and one-upmanship have developed through the years.
Should the doctor be excused from doing that in which he is an amateur and devote all of his time to clinical excellence? Should the pastor be restrained from doing that in which he is thought to know little or nothing? Must the doctor be limited to the purely curative and preventive, and the pastor limited to the purely restorative?
A Blended Ministry
From what we have said thus far, how do we put together the charismatic gifts and professional components that both doctor and pastor have for the kind of ministry God intends and expects?
The following opportunities are cited for collegiality toward in creasing interdependence and interpenetration of the professions of medicine and ministry:
1. Opportunities for interprofessional and interpersonal communication.
Members of each profession must come to know, respect, and understand one another so that they may meet at the bedside, in the home, or in the pew as colleagues and consultants and as fellow ministers.
Individually, or in groups, men of medicine and ministry must discover and discuss their common healing goals and how these can be reached by working together. It is imperative that there be a clear spelling-out of role expectations and assignments so that there is a complementary interrelatedness of roles without conflict, competition, or com promise.
There can be mutual sharing and understanding of competencies, knowledge, insights, and concepts unique to each profession.
There must be continuing communication in areas of overlapping concerns and interests (e.g., the terminal patient, the unwed mother, birth control).
2. Opportunities for functional relationships in shared ministry to the sick.
Out of continuing communication and mutual growth there should develop mutual respect and trust, which elicits bona fide doctor-minister teamwork in a healing approach.
Is it possible that a doctor and minister could, with the patient's permission, interview patients on a colleague-consultant basis, each bringing to bear on a given case the resources inherent in both professions? In addition to helping the patient toward healing, the doctor could learn something of the spiritual dynamics involved in pastoral care to use in subsequent patient care; and the minister could better see the relation ship of disease to emotional and spiritual health and be more aware and open in his delivery of pastoral care.
Is it possible for the doctor and minister to see some parishioners together, where the doctor shares his spiritual insights as well as his medical knowledge? And where the minister might communicate his understanding of the body-mind relationship? This would, of course, be more difficult.
Other consultative and functional relationships can be explored when there is a willingness on the part of doctors and ministers to work together as a healing team.
3. Opportunities for mutual community involvement.
Even in the face of all of the demands on the time of doctors and ministers, time should be made to work together in some coopera tive way in helping communities to solve community problems. What better access can we have to such public worlds as govern ment, business, other professions and vocations, and communityaction groups? Who reaches these people with the everlasting gospel?
Besides helping to heal the hurts of communities, the regular work of both doctor and minister will be enhanced by the sociological insights available in the communal settings in which our patients and our parishioners suffer, sin, become guilty, anxious, and despairing.
4. Opportunities for continual research.
At the frontiers of the doctor-minister cooperation venture there is ample opportunity to experiment ethically with all kinds of approaches to patient care. Is it too ambitious to suggest the possibility of collaboration by the team in publishing findings in the leading journals of each profession? (e.g., Whoever talks to the patient and/or parishioner after treatment or counseling to see what his reaction has been to the approach of the doctor and/or minister who attended him, possibly to find what would have made the doctor and/or minister more effective? And who has published on this?)
As a regular program to provide materials for discussion and mutual understanding, the doctor and minister should become more acquainted with the literature and research in each other's profession. They should then seek to apply their new understanding in actual practice all followed by serious reflection.
5. Opportunities as educators.
The now famous Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking has demonstrated what teamwork can do in temperance education. Surely there are other areas of health education and preventive medicine where the same team could innovate and collaborate.
To date there has been little attempt on the part of Seventh-day Adventist doctors and ministers to present our health principles to the public, or to the church either. Where this has been tried, the response has been most gratifying and encouraging.
Human illness, as it runs its whole course, provides the meeting place for the doctor and minister. It provides the most challenging opportunities for the best efforts of both, one in support of the other. We have yet to see the real possibilities for this divinely ordained team approach.
In the midst of all current conversation on cooperation between the professions, we must not for get that we are also to be very much concerned with the healing ministry of the whole church. Doctors and ministers are not the only healing persons in the church. The counsel is clear: "We have come to a time when every member of the church should take hold of medical missionary work." --Testimonies to the Church, vol. 7, p. 62. "There is room for all to labor who will take hold of this work intelligently."--Ibid., vol. 9, p. 113.
"Togetherness" was not the chief goal of the early Christian church. There was a mutual sharing of burdens, a mutual ministry to each other's needs, and a mutual commitment to help each other in their outreach with the gospel. There was indeed a pastorhood and a priesthood of all believers. And it all took place through the operation of the gifts of the Spirit. Some were evangelists, some were pastors and teachers, some had the gift of healing. Every Christian had his own ministry in his own uniqueness. The fellowship existed for ministry to one another for their ministry in the world. This made for real community. This makes for real community, and for real healing ministry.
The time has come, and almost gone, for us prayerfully to inventory the gifts that are in the church, and to find ways to include them in the ministry of a healing church.
The Healing of Ministry
In the Gospel of Luke there is an account of the imprisonment and discouragement of John the Baptist. During hours of tortured spirit, the shadow of fear crept over him. He was not sure the Deliverer had come. If He had not come, what was the meaning of John's ministry and mission? He deter mined to send two of his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Luke 7:20, R.S.V.).
On this occasion the Saviour did not begin with Moses and all the prophets to explain concerning Himself. Rather, He let them watch His ministry thus: "The sick and afflicted were coming to Him to be healed. The blind were groping their way through the crowd; diseased ones of all classes . . . were eagerly pressing into the presence of Jesus. The voice of the mighty Healer penetrated the deaf ear. A word, a touch of His hand, opened the blind eyes to behold the light of day. . . . Jesus rebuked disease and banished fever. His voice reached the ears of the dying, and they arose in health and vigor. Paralyzed demoniacs obeyed His word, their madness left them, and they worshiped Him. While He healed their dis eases, He taught the people. . . . He spoke to them the words of eternal life. . . . The evidence of His divinity was seen in its adaptation to the needs of suffering humanity. --The Desire of Ages, pp. 216, 217. The disciples bore the message to John, and to the world, and it was enough.
We have come full circle back to our Christian credentials and the purpose of the church and its ministry in all its forms. The question, "Are you he ... or shall we look for another?" is implied in the question "Who?" being asked from behind barred doors.
When prisoners are visited, when lonely men and women find comfort, when light shines in darkness, when wounds are dressed with tenderness, when words of courage and counsel get spoken, when Isaiah 58 is a reality, when the sick are being healed, we will be earning the right to speak, the right to give the three angels' messages. God can thus use our total witness in His own way to speak to our world and bring healing and salvation.
Our greatest difficulty when we are confronted with the call to healing ministry as it is in the Spirit, is fear! We are afraid to commit ourselves completely to approaches that might be considered visionary and revolutionary. We are afraid of change. We are afraid of failure. We are afraid of getting hurt. We are afraid of the spiritual consequences that may come to our lives the necessity of a firmer faith and a more complete consecration.
What shall we say to this? "All who consecrate soul, body, and spirit to God will be constantly receiving a new endowment of physical and mental power. The inexhaustible supplies of heaven are at their command. Christ gives them the breath of His own spirit, the life of His own life. The Holy Spirit puts forth its highest energies to work in heart and mind. The grace of God enlarges and multiplies their faculties, and every perfection of the divine nature comes to their assistance in the work of saving souls. Through co-operation with Christ they are complete in Him, and in their human weakness they are enabled to do the deeds of Omnipotence."— The Desire of Ages, p. 827. (Italics supplied.)
