Healing as God’s Intention for Ministers of Reconciliation

The History of the Church as a Healing Agent

There has always been a missional purpose for the people of God to be healing agents in this broken world. Historian Hector Avalos observed that in the emergence of Christianity, “Far from being a marginal interest, health care was part of the core of its mission and strategy for gaining converts.” Part of the dramatic rise of Christianity in the first two centuries CE was that health was portrayed as “one of the most persistent practical concerns of those who eventually converted to Christianity.” ¹ In the nineteenth century, medical missions were key elements in the spread of Christianity and the development of healthcare systems in the mission enterprise, considered in 1900 by the influential British mission leader Herbert Lankester as “the heavy artillery of the missionary army.” ² Medical missions has resulted and continues to this day in the development of health systems, training and discipleship of indigenous health professionals, widespread witness by community health workers through community health evangelism, and the development of Christian health associations to fill gaps in health services. Historian Mark Noll observes that, “the web of relationships between religion and medicine, between faith and bodily well-being, is thus extraordinarily dense.” ³ This close relationship between Christian faith and health transcends all cultures, times, and denominations. Amanda Porterfield documents that “Healing is a persistent theme in the history of Christianity, threading its way over time through ritual practice and theological belief, and across space through the sprawling, heterogeneous terrains of Christian community life and missionary activity.” ⁴ Healing gives tangible witness to God’s grace and sustainable hope. Daniel Sulmasy, a Franciscan Friar and physician, writes, “Healing is truly an evangelical act. It announces all this good news . . . [it is] a special sign of God’s promise of universal right relationship.” ⁵

Sixty years ago, Bernard Martin of the Reformed Church in Geneva wrote of the healing ministry of Jesus as the, “visible and convincing sign of the redemption of the Father. The will of God being the salvation of the human being, physical healing being one of its constituent elements.” ⁶ He then applied this to revitalize the healing ministry of the Church as of central importance in her role in mission. “Just as any missionary action or work of evangelism assumes its true significance only if it emanates from a community inspired by the faith and thought of the witness that it must give to the non-Christian world, so the healing ministry should never be anything but a direct and conscious emanation of the faith of the Church.” ⁷

Fifty years ago, Francis Schaeffer also identified the Church’s call for “a substantial healing” in the three domains of the inner life, social relationships, divine connection, and our relation to the natural environment, “a healing that is not perfect, but nevertheless is real and evident.” ⁸ Three years later, Morton Kelsey produced a comprehensive history of healing in the Church, observing that most modern churches in the West, both Catholic and Protestant, believed they had nothing to do with healing the sick, having been “swept clean of any idea of Christian healing,” at least not in a supernatural way, and because of the success of medicine. ⁹ The view of the Church as a healing agent in the latter half of the twentieth century was constrained in the West due to materialist and enlightenment presuppositions, dispensational views, and skeptical reactions to Pentecostal healing claims. In addition, due to the cost of hospital-based curative care approaches and criticisms of the lack of efficacy as instruments of measurable church growth, some evangelical mission agencies began to reduce their emphasis on health-related mission personnel and “mercy ministry” in favor of the “evangelistic ministry” of disciple-making and church planting. ¹⁰ Would recovering a health-related element to global mission be considered mission drift?

Reconciling Narrow Views of Healing

Part of the reason for an intermittent neglect of an inclusive healing paradigm for churches and mission agencies is a limited understanding of what healing really means. When the healing ministry of the church is relegated to any number of narrow definitions, it loses its place of central importance in the mission of God. If it is boxed into limited categories, it can be ignored, tokenized, or, worse, reviled as a distraction to the real “soul work” of the Church. If healing is understood only as charismatic, it will be deferred to those who may have the gift and ignored by the rest. If healing is understood only as miraculous, it will either become a main preoccupation of the church or be dismissed as a fringe activity only of Pentecostal churches. If healing is understood only metaphorically as inward and spiritual, the visible signs among enfleshed creatures in the world as a witness may remain hidden. If healing is understood only as a product of the professional enterprise of scientific biomedicine, the church easily defers her role as a healing community to professionals in public and private health systems. If healing is understood as a resolved dispensation of the Apostolic era or the early church, it’s practice for today is excused. If healing is defined only as cure from disease, instead of prevention, care and coping, it may remain elusive under the best of conditions. How, then should the church, and those who plant them, understand the Church’s healing ministry today? If the healing metanarrative for the mission of God has been neglected or misunderstood, how can it be recovered?

The Biblical Healing Metanarrative

The biblical perspective on healing and God’s mission is much more broadly textured than these narrow views and quite compelling. The Hebrew scriptures give a picture of God’s desire to heal (disease—a common result of disobedience to the Torah), to restore (to a more original good state (shalom)—before the results of the fall), to make whole (instead of fragmented), to give life (and avoid death), to speak blessing (instead of cursing), to deliver or save (from danger and enemies), and to forgive sin (the cause of much disease). In the New Testament there is strong biblical support for interpreting healing as a source of authentication of Jesus’s significance and the presence of God’s kingdom. Faith was an important element in healing, faith both of the healed and the healer (Matt 17:14–20). Throngs of people went to Jesus because he could deliver something more than the physicians of the day could give—complete healing (sozo) and a life-giving relationship. “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (Mark 5:34) He was attentive to the felt needs of the people, and some ended up following him, but many did not (Mark 10:51–52). Only one of the ten lepers who were cleansed (katharizo) and healed (iaomai) returned to praise Jesus and be fully healed (sesōken)—and that one was a Samaritan! (Luke 17:11–19) Jesus’s healing, which he extended to Romans, Samaritans, Greeks, and Canaanites who expressed faith, not only indicated justification by faith in the Messiah, but it also reflected his heart for the healing of all nations (Matt 15:24–28). Jesus’s Galilean ministry was mobile, characterized by teaching (didasko), preaching (kerusso) the gospel (evangelizō), and healing (therapeuo) all kinds of diseases (Matt 4:23–25). This drew great crowds since he addressed their felt needs. Motivated by deep compassion, he used the opportunity among the afflicted to display his healing kingdom, power, and glory. He cared for the whole person, cared for the individual, considered the crowds, was open to disruptions, and restored people to wholeness in relationships (eirene) by calling them to follow. Healing was both a demonstration of God’s grace to the suffering, and a method of leading people to himself. ¹¹

Though the writer of Luke and Acts was a physician, and used the medical language of the day from Galen and Hippocrates ¹² , all the other gospel writers also emphasized Jesus’s healing action as central to his ministry. Willard Swartley, the late professor of New Testament at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, proposed a trinitarian concept of God as Healer. His seven theses give a foundation for the church’s central mission of healing: 1. God intends shalom and community for humans and all of creation, but sin and Satan play adversarial roles, 2. God is God, and we are weak, mortal, and frail creatures, 3. Illness creates a quandary which leads to lament, 4. Suffering means not divine absence but testing, and healing reveals God’s love for us, 5. Jesus is Healer-Savior and leads us in faith and prayer, 6. The Spirit is healer and is the divine pledge of complete healing, and 7. The Church is called to be God’s face of healing in this world. ¹³ Recapturing this biblical perspective for churches, mission agencies, and seminaries will be true to the heart of God.

Reconciliation as a Vital Part of the Healing Work of God

Reconciliation is the ministry given to the people of God through whom he makes his appeal to the world—a direct reflection of the work of Christ to “reconcile all things to himself” (2 Cor 5). Broken relationships with God, with each other, with the natural world, and within ourselves need mending—a bringing together. All these relationships are important to begin to restore the shalom intended from the beginning to the end of time. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Col 1:19–20) A mission-centered theology of the cross, according to Christopher Wright, includes atonement of sin, defeat of evil, death giving way to life, the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, as well as “to heal and reconcile his whole creation. . . the whole created cosmos.”(Col 1:20) ¹⁴ Being saved by grace through faith as a gift of God (Eph 2:8–9) has its basis in God’s larger “plan (oikonomia) for the fullness of time to gather up all things in him—things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10) in order to actualize God’s healing intentions while at the same time being glorified. Attributing these reconciling efforts to the God who heals is the evangelistic work of the church. Howard Snyder states, “the key idea and dynamic here is reconciliation—a reconciliation that heals earth’s multiple alienations.” ¹⁵

The Reconciliation of Salvation and Healing

The globalization of the church has helped derive a deeper understanding of salvation. David Bosch in Transforming Mission wrote about the “dangerously narrow” definition of salvation (from wrath and to heaven) needing to give way to salvation, “in the context of human society en route to a whole and healed world. . . . Salvation is as coherent, broad, and deep as the needs and exigencies of human existence. . . . Anyone who knows that one day there will be no more disease can and must actively anticipate the conquest of disease in individuals and society now.” ¹⁶ Salvation means rescue from sin and its consequences, including death and separation from God. Many seminaries, Christian colleges in the West, and mission agencies teach salvation predominantly in a forensic sense—justification for entry into heaven. Wheaton professor Daniel Treier notes that Western soteriologies “apparently focus so much on the gospel’s personal benefits, in particular concerning an individual’s eternal destiny, that they neglect its communal and cosmic, perhaps even bodily dimensions.” ¹⁷ We must expand our understanding of the scope of salvation in Christ. The Apostle Paul clearly notes that salvation is “much more” than justification or reconciliation with God (Rom 5: 9–10).

Theologians from the West are starting to see salvation as more than just one-time forensic justification, removal of sin, and rescue from condemnation, but also as God’s ongoing magnificent work of healing all of creation. “Atonement,” writes Howard Snyder, “is about overcoming the results of sin, the hurt of violation which necessarily involves suffering the consequences . . . . Jesus is thus the great healer, and by his Spirit he summons the church to join in both suffering and healing.” ¹⁸ He sees salvation as the death of predation wrought by Satan, and the triumph of healthy symbiosis—as living together in mutual support for mutual benefit, changing hostile relationships into harmonious, synergistic ones. Brenda Colijn writes that one of the biblical images of salvation is, “rescue and healing, room to thrive, safety and wellbeing. It is present whenever people receive forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ, but also whenever people experience deliverance from danger or oppression or physical or emotional healing.” ¹⁹

This calls for synergy in Christian ministry toward the common goal of whole-person healing. Paul Tillich noted that, “if salvation is understood in the sense of healing, there is no conflict between the religious and medical, but the most intimate connection,” leading to an intensive collaboration of helpers. ²⁰

The globalization of the church has helped many of us see more robustly the intimate connection between salvation, healing, and mission. ²¹ Philip Jenkins notes that the burgeoning churches in the Global South are more often than not marked by healing action, attending to felt needs even in the absence of efficacious biomedical health systems, following biblical apostolic precedent, and as a witness to the central symbol of Christ as the new source of healing. ²² Simon Chan notes that the Asian church tends to stress the cosmic, corporate, and progressive nature of salvation instead of the limited juridical, individual, and immediate nature of salvation typically found in the West. ²³ According to Bénézet Bujo, African theologians emphasize reconciliation of ancestral connection and healing traditions, seeing Jesus as the “Healer of Healers” as Proto-Ancestor and Proto-Initiator, becoming the final source of healing (life force) through the Spirit, “who unites the new clan, or tribal community and promotes its growth.” ²⁴

In the general definition of salvation, the Latin root salus means health or soundness, so to save is to deliver from some danger, rescue from peril, and bring to safety. The Greek sozo is translated variously in the New Testament as saved or healed. The Hebrew term for saved (yasha) is used in literary parallelism with the term healed (rapha) in poetic assonance in Jeremiah 17:13: “Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise.” There is an intimate connection between healing, salvation, and worship. Physician-theologian Sigve Tonstad recently wrote that Western theology, “even more than medicine, has been complicit in habits of thought that have been individualistic rather than communal, ecological, and global. If medicine has been preoccupied with the “salvation” of individual human bodies, Christian theology has further narrowed the scope to concern for the individual human soul—even in the absence of care for the body.” ²⁵ Salvation (yasha/sozo) is rescue from mortal calamity, and involves intervening at the point of risk to the afflicted and vulnerable. We are saved not just from something but to something—from destructive and life-impairing ways in order to live, to love, to serve, and to witness. Seeing salvation as creation healed gives deep meaning to efforts in the health sector, and enlarges evangelical mission. Seeing salvation as an enduring hope beyond the grave gives a continuity of purpose at the point of care for the suffering and dying, as well as courage in the face of mortal adversity on the frontiers of mission and amid material and social deprivations and persecutions. Seeing salvation as a healing process instead of a punctiliar transaction helps one continue to pursue that end even through adversity as a robust form of transformational discipleship.

The Reconciliation of Spirit and Matter

If salvation is more than a state of forensic justification and more than spiritual reconciliation with God, how do we overcome what has been called “evangelical Gnosticism”? ²⁶ Embracing a paradigm of healing and reconciliation is based on an Asian view that the Spirit has a special relationship with the material world. As in the Incarnation, the Spirit “befriends matter” as a “first fruits” of a new creation (Rom 8:19–23). According to Simon Chan, as an inclusive paradigm for a more holistic mission, ministries of healing then take on special significance, serving the practical needs of suffering as a foretaste of the heavenly reality while awaiting full redemption in the resurrection. ²⁷

The distinct mark of the redeemed is a sound mind which meditates upon the truths of Scripture and is controlled by the Spirit, instead of by the baseness of the flesh (sarx) (Rom 8:5–9). Hotz and Mathews note that Paul’s use of sarx was to describe an orientation (or disorientation) of the whole person toward sin, and thus being subject to the law of sin and death. ²⁸ This was not to diminish embodied life, but to recognize the body-animating effect of the Spirit of God on the human person in the context of nature and community. The reconciled community serves as a witness, called out and set apart for God among all nations, and ideally characterized by love, a caring community, health-promoting practices, healing words, forgiveness, and a strong sense of hope. These communities are the salt of the earth for the healing of the nations. Or as David Bosch writes, the believer becomes a part of the church, “a sign of God’s reign, sacramentum mundi, symbol of God’s new world, and an anticipation of what God intends all creation to be.” ²⁹

The Reconciliation of Healing and Suffering

Rev. Dr. Ian G. Wallis from Cambridge University reconciled the tension between the God who heals and the God who suffers by understanding that Jesus’s presence in the church throughout history has meant both healing and suffering:

Jesus’s healing ministry is seen as a necessary and vital part of realizing the divine aphesis-making known the great forgiveness or release of God—by which the power of evil that constrains and shields from the love and purposes of God is broken. In this way, healing becomes an aspect of evangelism which anchors the call to discipleship and God’s offer of communion with himself within the concrete possibilities of human experience. Where the outward workings of evil inflict such physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual wounds that God’s love is rendered meaningless and out of reach, there needs to be a prior act of liberation by God before there is freedom to respond. ³⁰

Yet Wallis balances this by writing that this vital role of healing is not a desire to deny or escape the fallenness of a broken world, but to share in its sufferings. “Healing’s freedom to know God’s love and to respond to Christ’s call may mean being led back into suffering, perhaps even the same form of suffering; and yet it is in a most profound sense suffering transformed, for now it is suffering with Christ within the compassionate love of God.” ³¹ Instead of avoiding care for sufferers, or deferring to other resources on the outside, emerging Church leaders can embrace the challenges of ministering to the suffering in all domains of community life. Melanie Dobson, building on John Wesley’s holistic understanding of salvation and Thomas Aquinas’s theology of habit, notes that, “by completing ‘what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions’ (Col 1:24) the sick person shines forth to others the true joy of Christ’s triumph over the powers of death and darkness that sickness represents.” ³² So being inclusive in the enfolding of the infirm and disabled in the fellowship and in missionary service, the missional church embraces the Pauline pattern of the power made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9) and the sending forth of wounded (and healed) healers.

Naming the Reconciling Healer

All healing is a work of God and vicariously God’s people because of the exchanged life. “Christ in you the hope of glory.” (Col 1:27) Humans, both professionals and non-professionals, can be vice-regents of his healing work, whether they are aware of it or not. To attribute this healing to the Healer of Nazareth is the witnessing work of Christ-followers. Frederick Gaiser develops this in his 30 theses on healing in the Bible, and writes, “Naming the Healer becomes an important form of evangelical witness (Mark 1:45; Ps 40:1–3).” ³³ The collective works of Christ’s ministers of reconciliation, of his comforters, and his hands and feet are world-changing.

“Greater things you will do than I have done.” (John 14:12) Often this requires public witness to the presence of God embedded in cultures, advocating before political powers for the poor and oppressed, teaching health-promoting messages, and engaging in research and publications which highlight the work of the Church in the healing of the nations.

Healing as an Integral Part of Global Mission

Contextualized and indigenized health-related strategies have been and continue to be effective starting points for building bridges to understanding the fullness of the gospel, building local human resource capacity for healing, and establishing Christian presence in lands hostile to classic proclamation-based evangelism. Mission following Jesus’s example of incarnation, integration, intercession, and interdependence resonate with leading theologians in India like Prabhu Singh, who have embraced health-related approaches toward shalom. ³⁴ Interdependence requires reconciliation between disparate ethnos, castes, and religions. In pluralistic contexts, Bryant Myers writes that healing is often the first act, provoking questions to which the gospel is the answer, giving platforms for humble proclamation—the second act. ³⁵ Efforts to restore or protect bodily integrity remove obstacles to hear the gospel, and preserve life as Hezekiah experienced with a vision for the eternal: “Lord, by such things people live; and my spirit finds life in them too. You restored me to health and let me live . . . the living, the living praise you.” (Isa 38:16, 19a) The word for health here (chalam) means to dream prophetically or restore to health. Al Tizon notes that a kingdom dream enlarges our vision of the gospel in our “journey of healing and transformation from the ravages of sin.” ³⁶

Mission requires courageous engagement within the matrix of systems corrupted by human and angelic rebellion—a praxis of naming disorders, discerning the spirits, rebuking the powers of death, and casting out those things which demean and destroy life—being careful not to eschew redeemable and healing elements within diverse cultures and beliefs. Wilbert Shenk writes, “All the forces and powers that touch human life come under scrutiny. Those that oppress the poor and destroy life are to be exposed and denounced. Good news means that men and women can be set free from life-destroying powers.” ³⁷ The gospel is more than propositional truth, it is God’s total response to mankind’s total need and involves all of creation. “In Christ, God is reconciling all things” (2 Cor 5) It is breaking the web of lies that enslave billions and renewing the mind and in turn the culture. It is giving the poor hope and a vision for the future, overcoming their own difficulties as they learn God’s redemptive story and rewrite their own stories. As salt and light influencers of the social systems of culture, emerging churches seek to humbly fulfill the law of life through word-inspired fellowships which promote communal flourishing, transcending the walls of the church and affecting the community with God’s healing presence. This requires perseverance, born out through suffering, manifest in character which reflects God’s, leading to hope (Rom 5:3–5). Hope is needed when faced with the onslaught of the forces of disease and death, precisely because perfect health is elusive. “Who hopes for what they already have?” (Rom 8:24) So we are called to act toward that unfolding gift of health for all nations. This requires the God-given transcendent virtue acquired through faith in Jesus the Messiah, the Prophet-Priest-Healer-King who continues his work of healing toward all the families of the earth who come, “to hear him and to be healed of their diseases.” (Luke 6:18) In faith, we follow in his footsteps as wounded (and healed) healers—following the evidence (scientific and exegetical), promoting indigenization, and weaving cultural and community narratives into the grand healing narrative with a universal goal of health for all nations in the presence of the Living God.

Conclusion

Given the scriptural healing metanarrative, the strategic history of healing applied in church and mission engagement, and the compelling call of contemporary mission to engage in healing works of love and justice as integral to the gospel, the Church as it is propagated must retain or recapture her central purpose as a healing agent in the world. This requires envisioning preferable futures, and actualizing them. It means participating in seeing communities transformed from languishing to flourishing, and giving credit to God in the process. It means seeing sustainable development as an outcome of the strategic and relentless planting of churches which engage in the transformation of families, communities and nations with increasing measure, especially where God’s healing is most needed. This creates a deep and tangible witness to the presence of God throughout the world at the community level. The vicarious work of ministers of reconciliation, in whom Christ continues his healing work, and through whom God is making his appeal, are wounded (and healed) healers—co-regents in the reconciliation of all of creation. Let the healing of the nations begin.