Religion: The Presence & Power

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"My love for the church of Jesus Christ is such that I cannot keep quiet when a defect becomes evident to me," writes the Rev. Edward S. Zelley Jr. of Trenton, N.J. in the current Christian Century. The defect that 34-year-old Pastor Zelley complains about is the average church's lack of emphasis on healing.

Last August the Reader's Digest published an article co-authored by Methodist Zelley about the victim of a train wreck who, given almost no chance to live, rallied to eventual recovery while his church congregation was praying for him. The flood of mail that resulted opened Zelley's eyes to the fact that vast numbers of ordinary churchgoers were being deprived of the "healing touch of Christ."

A Dead Faint? Roman Catholics and Episcopalians on the one hand and small cults and sects on the other pay more attention to healing, says Zelley, than the so-called "major denominations"—Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc. "[Suppose] a Methodist woman is taken with a severe case of neuritis. Her Roman Catholic friend will light a candle and make a novena for her healing. Her Christian Science friend will send her literature telling her how to remove the consciousness of pain. Her cultist friend will give her an 'anointed cloth' to be laid on the afflicted part. Perhaps after a while, her pastor . . . comes to visit. The conversation is light and encouraging. Before he leaves, he offers a vague prayer for her healing. If she were to stand up at that moment and cry out, 'I'm healed,' he probably would collapse in a dead faint.

"Finally she attends a healing service in an out-of-town church, and in a quiet and undramatic way receives her health back. Whether her ailment was purely physical or psychosomatic, the pain was real—and she was healed! What right do we of the Protestant Church have, by our shortsightedness or our blind spots, to deny this woman and many others the embracing love of the healing Christ and the help of loving fellow Christians who will take time to pray for their healing?"

In the Same Breath. Methodist Zelley's prescription is for pastors and laymen "to give some time to group prayer with specific aims. The size of the group is not as important as the quality of its ideals. There is no reason why every church could not investigate the possibility of holding regular 'healing services'. . .

"Jesus told his disciples to go and 'preach the word.' In the same breath he said, 'Heal the sick.' Certainly he did not intend for all of us to study medicine and become physicians or psychiatrists. But he did intend for us to have enough faith to bring the healing presence and power of Christ sanely and worshipfully to those in need."