HEALTHCARE & HEALING

– healing practice and creation design - new ways to understand God's purposes for the creation sphere of health.

conveners Joanna Barker and Chris Hayes

Joanna Barker (nee Harnett) holds a MHSc and BHSc in complementary medicine. By way of introduction she writes: ‘My work as a holistic healthcare practitioner has evolved over the last twenty years. I began with a somewhat naïve and idealistic understanding of God and man in the healing process. At this point in my journey, as a woman who desires to see people healed and made whole, my heart aspiration is to see patients receive revelation, growth and maturity in every facet of their life in God; including the afflictions they journey through. To my mind this is true healing, from which all other healing arises.’ Joanna is now commencing a PhD.

Chris Hayes is a medical doctor, who oversees the Hunter Valley Pain Management Service. For many years Chris has sought to align his Christian faith with every facet of his work. In particular he has grappled with the nature and meaning of pain, endeavouring to integrate his knowledge of God and of the creation with this challenging aspect of human existence. Chris has sought to focus on pain as a ‘reality sign’; a sign given by God to enable us to receive revelation about our lives with a view to both change and maturity.

Chris has also sought to empower both his immediate team and other health workers that are involved with the many hundreds of people who at any one time are utilising his service. In this he has looked into the nature of power and authority and, drawing from Scripture, has been able to substantially re-design and develop his pain management service.

preamble: The Western and Christian mindset, under the influence of the worldview of Plato and Aristotle, has had a long and strong history of putting the material and relational creation in the background of our experience, whilst placing concepts and laws (mathematical and/or scientific) in the foreground.

This mindset, which gave rise to the scientific revolution and to medical science, has achieved many good things. Its use of reductionist, atomistic and analytical tools have given us tremendous insight into the world in which we live. However, in line with the well-known saying, ‘your strength will also be your weakness’, the ability of western medicine to understand the nature and scope of the relationships between things, events and observations is limited.

The medical model tends to treat a person’s illness as something distinct from much of the rest of their life in creation. This lack of ability to correlate what is observed and measured with the larger universe around these observations is now becoming medicine’s greatest weakness.

Many Christians believe that this medical model is biblical; but it is not. It is in part true, but as a whole of life approach it falters and if left to its own it will ultimately fail.

Such a statement can be made on the basis of what is revealed to us in the Scriptures; in particular what is taught there about the nature and design of the creation itself. When seen from an hebraic standpoint the creation looks very different to that posited by Plato and his followers.

The Hebrew people were taught by God to see his heaven over their earth – in space and in time. For them, all of creation held and expressed the presence and power of God (Rom. 1:20). When Adam sinned and walked away from his created purpose, the creation was not, as many believe, written off by God. Rather, the creation was redesigned by God to communicate to the race of Adam the reality of the place they now occupied. The thorns, the sweat, the decay and the death were not brought in by Satan; they were given by God to reveal to us in an ongoing way the reality of our place in life and in God.

It may come as a surprise, but it was God who first used disease to reveal to Israel the reality of their movement away from life in God towards death. Disease was not an instrument designed by the devil; it has a much larger divine purpose than that.

When seen from an hebraic standpoint, the entire fallen creation can be seen as one incredible healing or remedial space, designed by God to bring us to maturity and fullness of life.