Meditations on a Healing Service

Or perhaps I should call it thoughts resulting from meditations on a healing service. But that makes a long title.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife and I recently transferred our membership to First United Methodist Church in Pensacola. This past Sunday we had the opportunity to attend a healing service at our new church. I enjoyed the service a great deal. It was done with a traditional liturgy and gently contemporary styling in the music, by which I mean that a band with guitars, drums, and keyboard (they used the grand piano so no effects!) played a combination of more modern choruses and familiar hymns. Unlike some contemporary praise groups who seem to think that comprehending the lyrics is not important and that volume is the key element, the words were sung clearly and at a quite reasonable level.

The service included reading of scripture, prayer, and a medication (see comments!) meditation, then communion was served, or rather the ritual was carried out through the blessing. Once the elements were blessed, and also oil for anointing, people were left free to come forward for communion, for prayer with anointing, or to peruse through pictures that represented situations about which we could pray. I’ll mention more about that in a moment.

The communion ritual was nicely done, with words added at the appropriate asterisks that tied that day’s worship activities to the service of healing. United Methodist readers will probably understand what I’m saying here. Way too often I hear a communion service conducted with no attention to the points at which “words appropriate to the occasion” can be added. A few tasteful lines there that tie in the day’s message, worship activities, or even people from that community can go a long way toward helping this to be communion and not merely a reading from the United Methodist Hymnal. In this case the words were very carefully chosen, and tied the afternoon service to the message of the morning services as well.

I noticed that the lines for communion and for anointing with oil and prayer were quite long, but little attention was paid to the table with the pictures that were offered so that we could take them home and pray about the items represented. Toward the end I went and picked up a picture almost randomly, that turns out to be one of a young soldier in Darfur. The picture has been haunting me. I was already aware of Darfur, but this has brought it home.

I certainly found the service a blessing. But now for what generally makes both my more rationalistic and my more charismatic friends crazy. Both would think that a healing service would be about healing, and that someone would come away cured–or not. The success of a healing service would be measured by healings.

But for me that is not the point. I know that is difficult to understand, and I don’t usually try very hard to explain it. If you feel blessed by a healing service, go. If not, not. But just as I say prayer can’t be measured by studies of the number of people who are healed, or the number of things that are received, so I do not believe a healing service can be measured in that way. Indeed, I doubt it can be measured except by the numbers who attend, and how much they appreciate it.

It is very much like any other variety of prayer. If prayer was designed to work like a vending machine, insert prayer, receive goodies, then we would say it failed if no goodies were received. And for those many people who teach just that, there is justification for the skeptical question of why it doesn’t happen. For me, both prayer and the healing service are about God and our communion with him. If we have communed, then we were successful.

In the meditation, the minister presiding seemed to indicate much the same thing. Unlike a faith healer, he didn’t whip people into a frenzy and suggest that if they had enough faith they would be healed. Rather, he simply suggested coming before God and receiving what God chose to give.

I’m thankful for the ministry of my new church and particularly for this service, which was a blessing to me.