Religion: The Healing Ministry

Winding up their eight-day meeting in Pittsburgh last week, the 1,200 delegates to the first General Assembly of the brand-new United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (TIME, June 9) heard these notable recommendations: <| From 2,000 to 2,500 additional ministers should be recruited by 1970, seminary capacity must be doubled, and $25 million must be spent on new churches and seminaries within the next ten years. EUR| More proselyting energy should be expended on Jews. “We would remind our people,” said a commission report, “since most Jews are such in name only, that in a spirit of true repentance for our own mistreatment of the Jew we should take seriously our responsibility for winning them to Christ, and . . . should be prepared to surround the converted Jew with the community of Christian love.” <J The subject of faith healing should be carefully studied. A special committee (six clergymen, two theologians and five medical men) noted in a preliminary report that “there is the danger in the tense emotional atmosphere of large healing missions of a concentration on the individual healer rather than on God as the source of wholeness . . . Nevertheless, we believe that however many or grave the dangers in the practice of a ministry of healing, there is the greater danger of our limiting the power of God by our fear and timidity, and of our failing to fulfill our Lord’s own concern for the well-being and harmony of the whole personality …”

Another plea for the healing ministry came from the annual meeting of the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston last week. Notable agenda item: the trustees’ report on the two Christian Science sanatoria in the U.S.—at Chestnut Hill, Mass. and in San Francisco. These establishments resemble hospitals except that patients go there to be healed by prayer and not by medicine. They also provide training for Christian Science nurses, who learn their techniques of prayer and care in three-year courses (regular registered nurses need only a one-year Christian Science course). Enrollments, according to the report, are “at the highest point in many years.” Said Leonard Tillotson Carney, newly elected President of the Mother Church (he was converted to Christian Science from the Congregational Church when his infant son was healed by a practitioner): “It is yielding to materiality that blocks our progress.”