Barry Hutchinson, Director of St Cuthbert's Centre on Holy Island, reflects on an ecumenical event he and colleagues shared in at Ushaw College.
It’s many years since I spent a full day with teaching about Christian healing so it was interesting to attend this event on February 28th 2007 as part of EM3 [continuing ministerial education] – all expenses paid, not that there were many of them! Proportionally the URC was very well represented – does this mean that we’re more aware of our own need of healing?
I shan’t bore you with a synopsis of what happened, some of which I found helpful and some not; but there were some aspects of the day I did find intriguing and very helpful:
1. Much of the teaching I heard, from Fr Jim McManus, was very similar to much of the teaching I had received some twenty years ago. In the interim it seems that research has been done which affirms the human need for spirituality and for a spiritual component to emotional and psychological well being and healing. But what particularly struck me was that I first heard all this in an conservative evangelical-charismatic context and now it was being taught by a Roman Catholic priest in a thoroughly ecumenical and not particularly charismatic context! Make of that what you will.
2. In the URC we are very good at focussing attention on the need to promote and work for justice as a corporate activity. The nature of this aspect of healing is individualistic and thus, I believe, acts to balance the emphasis on the corporate church mission, as proper and valuable as that is. It is individuals who make up the church and as individuals walk down paths to wholeness they become more able to express that wholeness in the world, and this expression is the active, corporate aspect of our mission.
3. As I prayed in a small group with an Anglican woman priest, a Roman Catholic priest and a Methodist minister, there developed in the silence a common felt sense of our union in Christ. This was put into a spoken prayer by one of us. Sharing this unexpected experience afterwards we each expressed our belief that we are each in our respective denominations not because we think we are right and others are wrong but because this is where God has somehow guided us and has found a home for us. We are thus free to celebrate our own denomination’s gifts and the gifts of other churches, which is surely one of the foundations of a growing, real and fruitful unity. But it took the common felt-experience of being ‘in’ Jesus Christ to make it an actuality for us.
4. Finally, an elderly Roman Catholic couple shared their experience of leadership in the healing ministry over many years. They had initially been through a discernment process within their diocese and had then been officially commissioned and recognised. What a model for ecumenical training and recognition at regional level! I hope that the many regional church leaders who were there take up the torch.