Religion: Quiet Healers

A faith healer, as loyal TV watchers know, is likely to be a hot-eyed spellbinder, his eye cocked to the collection plate and his theology about as solidly grounded as his gospel tent. But in Philadelphia a fortnight ago, the suffering who came forward to be healed—a retarded girl of about six, an old man with an ugly facial growth—received a blessing as dignified as the setting: 139-year-old St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. “This is no hocus-pocus,” said St. Stephen’s Rector Alfred Price from the pulpit. “This is a sacrament you are about to receive—the sacrament of healing.”

Episcopalian Price has been holding weekly healing services since 1942. He is warden of the Order of St. Luke the Physician, a group of clergy and laymen, including physicians, who take literally St. James’s injunction: “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him.” The order insists that “spiritual healing” should be included in the ministry of established Protestant churches, traditionally chary of faith cures. Dominated by Episcopalians, the interdenominational Order of St. Luke exudes a well-bred approach that would shock Oral Roberts out of his snap-on microphone. There are no mountains of crutches or grandiose claims to prospective customers. Miracles are rarely mentioned.

The Strength to Live. Although operating with the approval of their bishops. St. Luke ministers usually offer a separate healing service in order to avoid offending regular churchgoers who are “not ready” for the emphasis on healing. They attempt to heal the mind and spirit as well as the body. A minister often considers his prayers answered if the sufferer is given the strength to live with his affliction.

Episcopal faith healers acknowledge the efficacy of modern medicine and recognize that many “cures” are of psychosomatic illnesses. Explains St. Stephen’s Price: “The balance of body, mind and soul is upset, and sickness follows. We can pray, and with God’s help we can restore the proper balance.” Conversely, doctors in the order credit spiritual healing with supplying what medicine often flagrantly omits: compassion and hope. At the order’s recent meeting, Surgeon William Standish Reed spoke scathingly of hospitals that are “empires of stone, science and machinery, where the patient is the last to be considered.”

Steamed Up. The Order of St. Luke was founded in 1947 by Dr. John Gayner Banks of San Diego’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. When Banks died in 1955, his widow took over the editorship of the St. Luke magazine, Sharing, and Price became the order’s warden. According to Ethel Banks, the number of U.S. churches offering healing services has grown steadily, from 14 in 1947 to 460 today (about 95% of them Episcopalian). The order now has 4,200 members in 85 countries.

For all their soft-sell approach, St. Luke ministers get steamed up about the unwillingness of most respectable churchmen to pray for cures. Says Price: “No matter how we may look down our noses at some of those who use God’s power on behalf of healing, we must null that his church would take over this responsibility from them—not abandon it to them.”