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Healing in the Church

On May 27, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

CHURCH AS PERMACULTURE
 ¢â‚¬Å“Permaculture ¢â‚¬  ventures tend to be energetically frugal.    ¢â‚¬Å“How can things be done with the least amount of manufactured energy? ¢â‚¬    Permaculture people have made a real art form of simplicity.   They are fascinated by doing as much as possible with as little artificial energy as possible.   Energetically frugal, technologically frugal, intellectually and creatively imaginative, they don ¢â‚¬â„¢t seek a new piece of land to conquer and make it productive; instead they seek to regenerate what they already have.   Sort of obvious, isn’t it?   If it sounds like healing, I think it is.

All Jesus practically does in his short ministry is preach and heal.   When Francis McNutt revived the healing ministry in the 1970s, he was a priest from the Order of Preachers or Dominicans.   He said we do an awful lot of preaching in our church and very little healing.   He actually received letters from Catholics upset at the title of his book,  Healing, because they thought it was a Protestant word!    ¢â‚¬Å“We Catholics are not into healing, ¢â‚¬  some actually said to him, not realizing their accurate but Freudian slip.    Healing takes love and caring more than ordination or major education.   The act of healing takes time, caring, and long-term investment in a person or a situation.   We could learn a lot about this from the whole newly-discovered field of earth care.   The fact that it is so  newly discovered reveals the very problem.

Adapted from  Emerging Church Conference, Swannick, England, 2010(unpublished)

Richard Rohr

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