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The Recovery of Healing in the Church and Therapeutic Touch

This article appeared in the November 1996 issue of In Touch: The Newsletter of the Ontario Theraputic Network

Preach the good news, baptise, care for the poor, lay your hands on the sick.... these are the vows clergy take when ordained into most Christian traditions. As a Lutheran pastor, I also took those vows, but never realised what the last one would entail were I to take it seriously. Through Therapeutic Touch, this aspect of ministry is now a regular part of our congregation's worship.

The practice of laying-on-of-hands is not unique to Christianity. Stories of God's power to heal can be found in all religious traditions, as gifted people of faith have allowed their lives to be conduits of God's Love. Within Christianity, healing too often has been associated only with charismatic TV evangelists or relegated to ancient stories of the early church. That perspective is changing as interest in spirituality rises in our society . More are open to the understanding so common to our ancestors: that we are not just physical entities, but beings of energy and spirit. There is more to us than meets the eye. The scientists and writers of our day have climbed the mountain to sit with the church mystics and behold the view of what it is to be human. They come to remind the us of the splendour of that view, and open our eyes again to the marvel of what we are through God in language which is finally intelligent and of the people.

It was through one of these contemporary authors that I began to look again at my vow to lay hands on the sick. Tom Harper was being interviewed about his journey and new book, The Uncommon Touch. He spoke of Therapeutic Touch and its roots in Christian healing. In the context of quantum physics and supported by a growing body of medical evidence, Christian healing could finally be understood as a very natural aspect of what we are, and what we are designed to be. Immediately, I bought the book, and many others. I located a Recognised TT Practitioner and support group. I began my training and returned to what I had promised to do: lay my hands on the sick. Looking at how we could incorporate this into the ministry of the church, a prayer and healing circle was formed. Hundreds of medical studies and articles were collected. We began to explore. And we began to ask: How could we incorporate this into our worship? After receiving communion, people now may remain at the altar to receive the laying-on-of-hands, actually a brief TT moment. Some speak of experiencing tingling, heat, seeing light,... all speak of being touched in a profound and gentle way. Appointments are made for individual treatments, and a growing number are discovering through the prayer circle the gift within each of us to heal, to help, to be so much more than flesh and blood.

At the core of effective treatments is the practitioner's ability to centre. With this as the focus, our prayer circle has adopted the meditative practices of the early church, learned through World Community of Christian Meditators. Prayer is re-understood not as something you do, but a way of being, a communing with the God who is always within. Recovering the practice of prayer and healing has meant recovering ourselves as expressions of God's love, through whom God continues to flow.

This type of renewal is not uncommon. It does take many forms, from television charismatic expressions to renewal movements in Roman Catholic Church and the Anglicans Alpha Program here in Canada. What we must be wary of is the judgment so often placed upon these expressions by 'outsiders', and the judgment those 'in' the church place upon TT. Both do inevitably manifest unhealthy and narrow components. At Peace, we are all too aware of the importance of maintaining integrity with Christian practice, but we do so without allowing our understanding of doctrine to limit how God's healing can be manifest. Therapeutic Touch has provided this church with not only the ministry of healing, but the opportunity to explore intelligently our faith, our hope, and our calling.