"Here I am, Lord! Heal me!"

A while back I posted these words:

You hear it all the time. Jesus loves you, and he wants to save your marriage, heal your back, treat your depression, etc. He's God, so he can do it. And as I said, he loves you. So if you want him to save your marriage, heal your back ("I'm getting the word 'back pain'"), get relief from depression, etc., just come forward and let us pray for you. Isn't God incredible!

There, that's what they call "the gospel" these days. But of course it is not the Gospel. Clearly, you don't have to be preaching the "prosperity gospel" to be preaching a "me-centered" message.

This kind of thing has been a veritable drumbeat around here of course. And it's a matter I take personally, sort of, because I find myself needing to explain why I'm not entirely down with the way we "do church" at my particular branch of the body of Christ.

Yesterday was a case in point. Like many services at our church, it ended with a call for members of the congregation to come forward and receive healing prayer. A whole host of possible maladies are ticked off ("if you're suffering from backpain, headaches, depression," etc.), and the more people that respond by going forward for prayer, the more the service is thought to be a success.

I'm wondering if this is not the sort of thing that "kingdom theology" tends to decay toward over time. Healing prayer is said to be a power-encounter, to coin a phrase first used, I think, by John Wimber. This represents the kingdom now aspect of the the kingdom of God, and these demonstrations of the power of the kingdom are to be expected among God's kingdom people.

An yet, how different this all seems than the New Testament emphasis, which is so thoroughly cross-focused. I heard Gary Parrett of Gordon-Conwell say something at the conference I attended yesterday evening. I paraphrase:

Perhaps a worship service in the church should leave every member of the congregation with the words of Isaiah on his or her lips: "Here I am, Lord. Send me."

Ah, but that, you see, would be a truly missional church. Each Sunday morning the believers would re-gather from the mission field (with all its difficulties, compromises, disappointments, and perhaps negligible victories), to receive encouragement and equipping for their return to the mission field, which is of course their own communities, the places they work and shop and play.

Well, perhaps you can tell a lot about a church by how the service ends. That is, by where the focus seems to be as the people file out. Are we thinking and praying, "Here I am, Lord. Send me!" Or is it, "Here I am, Lord. Heal me!"

Do you see the difference? The former has the mission and ministry of God, the call laid upon every believer, as its focus. The latter has me and my need as its ultimate focus. And to get me to that point, the pastor must essentially address me as one who is primarily identifiable by my need. My painful back, my tricksy knee, my depression, my anger, my addictions. But that is never how Jesus addresses his disciples. Have you ever noticed that? He heals plenty of folks, of course, but his disciples he simply teaches.

And haven't you known, haven't we all known, believers who were truly overcomers because they kept on answering the call of God in their lives--kept on "following Jesus"--despite many hardships, suffering, etc. To use a characteristic New Testament word, they persevered!

Here's the thing. In a mission-minded church, the focus will be on God and what he has done for us; and as far as we are concerned, it will call forth the response of gratitude and service. Healing, I do not deny, will sometimes be a part of that picture. But am I really saying something so terrible when I remind people that back aches we will always have with us, and head aches too, yes, and cancer, and MS, etc. We live in a very fallen tainted and sin-burdened world. It is a great victory of the Kingdom when people respond to the call of God on their lives by laying aside even such dire self-concerns as these in favor of God's kingdom call. Such was Paul's attitude, after all:

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

And to help us toward that ideal is, it seems to me, a keep aspect of the teaching-ministry of the church.