Chaplain’s column
Pentecost led the apostles to heal the sick in the early days of the church. Can we still expect people to get healed today?
‘Preach the Gospel, heal the sick…’(Matthew 10 v 8)
About two months before I was ordained deacon in September 1973, my vicar to be sent me two brochures. The first was an appeal for £25,000 to raise money to restore the church. (It actually cost £150,000 and ten years!) The other brochure was about a healing service that was to be held in the parish church some four weeks before I turned my collar around.
I was intrigued by the notice of the healing service, because although I had been to a healing rally as a student some years before this was the first time that I ever heard of a healing service taking place in a Church of England Parish Church. The Rally I had been to was a special event in London. I had been urged to go by some student friends, and it was led by an evangelist called Peter Scothern. The hall in Victoria Street London was packed. There was lots of lively singing and the evangelist preached in a loud voice. At first it all seemed a little frightening, but I warmed to the preacher who seemed very sincere. After a gospel message which culminated in a Billy Graham style of appeal, he moved on to invite the sick and suffering and all who wanted Christ to heal them to come forward for prayer. I watched with alacrity. I thought to myself: ‘I wonder if anyone will go up’. A queue formed! I actually saw people leave throwing away their crutches. I heard clapping as deaf people appeared to be able to hear again. I even heard demons cry out. I left that hall in a state of wonderment that such things could happen today. Was Jesus ministry in Galilee just like this, I wondered?
So you can understand my intrigue when I attended the service in the church which was to be the one where I was to serve my apprenticeship. The service was led by the Revd. George Bennett, warden of Crowhurst Healing Mission in Sussex. He preached a long and I thought fairly gentle sermon about how Christ loved everyone and wanted to heal them. After further prayers, George prayed for four clergy colleagues dressed in surplices and stoles kneeling at the communion rails. Then immediately they gathered around him and prayed for him. There then followed a period of almost half an hour when the vast majority of the 400 congregation went and knelt at the communion rails for healing prayer. Hymns were sung during and there were know histrionics, but it was all so lovely, peaceful and in a quiet way powerful. I sensed the presence of the Lord there.
But what intrigued me was speaking to one of the clergy afterwards. ‘Is this the first time you have been involved in anything like this?’ ‘Yes’, he replied. ‘What preparation did George give you?’ I asked. ‘Just be obedient, and be a channel for the Lord to reach the person you are praying for’, he replied. I didn’t see any crutches being thrown away, but it left me with an excited question: would I be involved in this ministry? Surely one has to have a special calling or gift? After my ordination my vicar directed me to James 5 v 14 (Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the Name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.) I well remember being called out late one night to the local hospital where a man was in a coma. I prayed a prayer with him, held his hand and then went home. I thought it would be the last I would see of him. Quite a few days later I rang the hospital to see how he was. ‘Oh he’s sitting up in bed!’ So I went to visit him and the gentleman remembered me coming and praying. Guess what?…my faith rose. Thus began my own ventures into the healing ministry.
The last thirty nine years have seen me involved from time to time, not only visiting the sick but praying for them, sometimes anointing with oil. Some of them have died; which is another way of healing if we believe in the resurrection on the last day, but I have always felt that I must be obedient where Christ commands and expect something to happen. A survey conducted a few years ago showed about a quarter of Anglican churches had some form of ministry of healing. Many had separate healing services but the majority included prayers at the Eucharist. I have always felt it important for a person to actually ask for particular prayer. That way their faith connects with and ‘gees up’ mine. There have been many occasions where my faith has been flickering but someone has come along and asked for prayer. Consequently, it’s my faith that gets boosted. I could go on telling of things I have seen over the years, but space does not permit. However of one thing I am sure, if we sincerely reach out in faith and ask our Lord to extend his healing hand towards us, he usually does!
Clifford Recycled! (This article was first published in 2008)
Me and the Media: some personal encounters.
‘Curate says church spire unsafe’ was my first serious encounter with the local press. It was Stowmarket Parish Church in the middle of Suffolk and we had recently had our architect’s quinquennial inspection on the fabric. He had decided that considerable repairs ought to be made to the rotting structural timbers of the distinctive 18th century copper clad spire. Somehow or other the news had leaked out that the 100 foot spire was about to plummet to earth and injure or kill innocent people in the street. My vicar was on holiday and I was rung up by a Bury St. Edmunds newspaper. It was a keen young reporter out to earn his spurs: ‘Would you say that there is a danger with the spire, sir? What repairs would be needed to make it safe?’ …and so on. When he asked if there was a chance that the spire might have to be removed, I innocently said: ‘well it could be in an extreme case’ Next week the Bury Newspaper carried a photograph of the church with its spire removed and my headline above it! My vicar eventually returned from holiday and was not amused at what I had been up to during his summer absence. As it so happened the spire did get removed two years later and it was twenty years before a helicopter gently edged a new replica spire back on top of the tower!
But it raised in my mind the whole question of church and media: what to say, when to say it, how to say it. When I moved to a new housing estate in Hampshire, I was rung up every week by a local lady reporter for the front page of our edition of the Farnham Herald. ‘Have you anything for me this week Mr. Owen?’ ‘Only the usual on the services’ Our local Mrs. X had written a newspaper clip every week for years, which was written rather like a report for the Darby and Joan Club: ‘ Mr. Bloggs read the lesson, Mrs. Harding took the collection etc. They never added that we averaged a massive thirteen people each week! However the Herald graciously supported the efforts of the church to gain a profile on a difficult estate, and printed it just as Mrs. X had written it. It functioned as a community newspaper rather than a scandal rag.
In 1980 I attended a most useful two day course on journalism at Church House Westminster. These courses were arranged to introduce clergy to the world of the media. They covered the basics: what is news? Why do people read newspapers? Who is the most important person for the newspaper? (answer: the reader!) We were tutored by an experienced local newspaper editor from Brighton. We did exercises on prioritizing stories, selecting photographs, what should go into a Press Release and so on. But we had it hammered into us that the reader buys the newspaper, and if he can’t find anything to read by page 5, you’ve lost it. He is likely to flip through the next day’s paper on the news-stand, and, again, if there’s nothing in it hor him, he may not buy it again for a while. But the effect of the course was to leave me bitten with the world of journalism. I confess that I found it exciting.
So in 1983 for my 10 year in-service training modules, I chose the media for study, especially journalism and local radio. I was tutored by the Revd. Geoff Curtis, the media officer for Guildford Diocese, who was an ex-BBC Children’s Program Producer and a total enthusiast. Thank God for total enthusiasts. The world would be much the poorer without them. Geoff taught me many of the basics about the difference between radio and TV. Again: ‘What was news?’ I did radio interviews, learned to edit taped recordings and so on. I was sent on a week’s intensive course at a radio training establishment for ministers, and frankly found it hard work. My biggest thrill was being sent out to do two interviews for use on the local radio station: County Sound, Guildford. The first one was with a converted ‘ex-rocker’, who had been involved in a gang fight with guns some years before, but was now a Christian. I had to prepare all the obvious questions like: ‘have you given up guns?’ ‘did you have a blinding light conversion?’ and so on. I had to remember to forget that I was a Christian minister and simply be the reporter. My second interview was with a visiting Christian rock band when they came to play at a local comprehensive school. My recording of their music wasn’t brilliant but the interview was ok. Both pieces were edited and broadcast by County Sound.
But I had to confess that of the two I preferred the written word and when the Guildford Herald was launched I was used as an occasional feature writer and interviewer. I had the honour of doing the front page article for the first edition (It was on the Church’s Urban Fund) I managed to get a couple of controversial ‘scoops’, but the biggest comeback was when I had to go as a reporter the annual Masonic Service in Guildford Cathedral . Not being a mason myself, and being aware that at that time freemasonry was a hot issue in the church, I was charged with the difficult task of writing a report on the service. My resulting article created something of an earthquake, with correspondence raining in for several issues afterwards.
But although I enjoyed learning about the media, I discovered that it is difficult to be neutral in matters when one is already involved a pastoral ministry. Shortly afterwards I moved on to the receiving end. In 1986 some of us launched a baptismal reform group in the church, and I was interviewed on Radio 4 Breakfast program. That was exciting in itself. But I soon learned with the BBC that you have to have an opponent who tears into you from another studio down a pair of headphones!
When I moved to Worcester in 1989, I did no more local radio or newspapers, apart from a couple of obituaries and a book review for the Church Times. But in 1999 I had the joy of working on an exercise which brought local radio and church together. I wrote the course book Baggage and Treasures for BBC Radio Stoke Ecumenical Lent course. I made a number of recordings which were edited and made into professional programs by Sue Booth (she was in earlier years on Woman’s’ Hour) In Holy Week the radio audiences from all across Staffordshire (my birthplace) came together at St. Peter’s Stoke-on-Trent for a special service of Thanksgiving, with me having to filed their questions.
You can probably tell that I enjoyed most of this but it was not entirely painless. By far the biggest and most painful experience I had with church and media, happened in 1996. It was also my first experience of what happens when a story ‘runs’. I will not elaborate on the details of the incident here, but suffice it to say that in one of my previous churches a choirmaster refused to invite a certain lady to the Passiontide Oratorio Choir, because she ran a ‘new age’ shop. The decision had been kept from me but had been leaked to BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester, who broadcast it on their 1700 news bulletin, giving me a mere 45 minutes warning. I made a statement one hour later. By 1900 my phone was ringing! The next day I was phoned by a ‘stringer’ (I was taught in the journalism course that this species existed) who interviewed me by telephone. The next day the story was carried in all the national dailies. The bishop rang. The dean of Worcester Cathedral wrote a feature in the Worcester Evening News saying what a ‘rum lot’ we were in that parish! But the most painful aspect of all was the division in church and village. People in my idyllically rural, half-timbered village were annoyed that their church and village should be put into the limelight. Guess whom they blamed! I appeared on Midlands Today and it went on for days. In fact the story ran for six weeks. It was my first and only experience of what happens when the media sense blood and there is nowhere to hide.
It was the Daily Mail who did me the most harm. When I tried to ask them to correct certain things in their report, they went silent as they set off in search of more ‘news’. But there was a ‘funny’. I had a phone call from Sydney, from a presenter of an Australian tv program who wanted to interview me for his program. I thought at first he was having me on and someone was doing an impersonation. It turned out to be genuine! Sadly that wasn’t quite the end, as 6 months later a BBC Midlands tv program featured our village crisis on a program called Right or Wrong .I had the galling experience of watching myself being publicly criticized on tv. But there was one last funny which perhaps helped to confirm why what I had been involved in was ‘news’. The game ‘Trivial Pursuits’ included a question on one of its cards ‘what was singer x banned from because she ran a new age shop?’!
Well perhaps the good Lord thought that I needed a few years exile in Corfu to be left alone from the media; but in 2007 we were in the media again. The deaths of two small children from carbon monoxide poisoning on an autumn half term holiday break, caused the TV channels to descend on us once more. It was ‘news’ because the ‘hotel gassing’, as it became known, went to law and to my knowledge hasn’t yet come to a final verdict.
The media are still very much interested in churchy stories. Scandal and trouble sells newspapers. To get ‘good news’ to be published seems much more difficult. However I think overall I tend to agree with what a churchwarden once told me, in the midst of another church and media issue: ‘Clifford, there is no such thing as bad publicity!’
Clifford