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Holistic concerns: United Methodists continue Wesley’s emphasis on health Bill Fentum, Oct 16, 2009
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FLORIDA CONFERENCE
Nurses Bonnie Falk (left) and Sharon Smith care for a patient while serving on a Florida Conference medical mission to Haiti.
By Bill Fentum Staff Writer
The Rev. Ken Carter touted health-care reform several weeks ago from his pulpit at Providence United Methodist Church in Charlotte, N.C.
He knew his sermon might upset some members of the congregation. But the national debate, he told them, had focused mostly on politics or how much a public option would cost taxpayers.
That approach, he felt, ignored the plight of uninsured Americans and denied human suffering—like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
“If Christians are to participate meaningfully in the conversation,” he said, “we will rediscover the fullness of God’s gift of salvation for all people, even the beaten man on the side of the road.”
Some at the church didn’t respond kindly to his words.
Others gathered afterward to review the United Methodist Book of Discipline’s resolutions on heath care. They discussed statements such as “health care is a basic human right” and that it is a “governmental responsibility to provide all citizens with health care” (Social Principles, Paragraph 162.V).
“We didn’t all agree, but we had a civil dialogue,” Dr. Carter said in an interview. “Health care isn’t just the province of TV news and talk radio. It’s also the business of the church.
“Jesus was a preacher, teacher and healer—caring holistically for the spirit, mind and body. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of that.”
Wesleyan model
Missions of healing in the Methodist movement date back to 1746, when founder John Wesley opened a free medical clinic in London and published Primitive Physick, a collection of then-popular remedies.
“[I was] in pain for many of the poor that were sick,” he wrote in A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists. “At length I thought of a kind of desperate expedient. I would give them physic myself.”
Wesley closed the clinic a year later due to limited funds, but Primitive Physick remained in print for 140 years, and was distributed across England and the United States at little or no cost. It was “primitive” indeed: The book prescribed cold baths and electric shock for dozens of ailments, but it also urged daily exercise and dietary plans.
“Wesley cultivated wellness as part of the call to a holy life,” said the Rev. Randy Maddox, a professor of theology and Methodist studies at Duke Divinity School. “Some traditions pit science against religion, where you seek medical care or pray for healing. Wesley believed both means were blessed by God.”
In 1747, the Royal College of Physicians sought to tighten their control of medical practice in England, and urged Wesley to end his health ministries. He refused, and warned in a sermon against “Surgeons, Apothecaries, or Physicians, who play with the lives or health of men, to enlarge their own gain.”
He continued, however, to speak respectfully of several doctors including his personal physician, John Whitehead. “Wesley saw the professionalization of medicine not as a bad thing in itself,” said Dr. Maddox, “but as pushing out those in need who didn’t live in larger cities or lacked financial means.”
Hospitals
Methodists in the U.S. continued the legacy of caring for health concerns, building more than 70 hospitals during the social-gospel period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over time, rising costs forced some of the hospitals to close, while others were sold to private ownership.
“If Wesley saw that, he would weep,” said the Rev. Gary Gunderson, an ordained United Methodist deacon and a vice president at Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare in Memphis, Tenn. “He thought he had so linked holiness, health and care for the poor that it could never be undone.”
Methodist LeBonheur—a system of seven hospitals still owned by the denomination’s Memphis, Arkansas and Mississippi conferences—hopes to restore the ties through the Congregational Health Network (CHN), an interfaith effort launched in 2007.
Staff liaisons work with hospital visitors from local faith communities to help patients through all stages of treatment. If the visitors can’t answer a patient’s questions, they find someone who can.
The network operates in Shelby County, Tenn., an area that Dr. Gunderson describes as a “poverty crescent” with high rates of violent crime and disease. “It’s almost pointless to ask what’s wrong,” he said. “Everything is wrong, and it’s all deeply interconnected.”
Dr. Gunderson based CHN on a model he had seen in action while teaching at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He mapped out 11 parishes in Shelby County and listed their “community health assets,” ranging from church choirs to support groups and leadership training programs. Then he called local faith leaders to enlist their support.
The network recently helped a woman who suffered from a chronic condition that cost $200 a month in pharmacy bills. She had lost her medical insurance, and thought her only choice was to check into a hospital for a 30-day supply.
“We helped her find a much more affordable option,” said Dr. Gunderson. “It saved her a lot of heartache and saved the hospital thousands of dollars from an unneeded admission.”
The network’s strategy works, according to CHN organizers, because it links professionals to a circle of “natural caregivers,” church members or neighbors who keep in touch with patients after they go home.
“Even if patients aren’t active in a congregation,” Dr. Gunderson said, “houses of worship carry a level of credibility that’s crucial. It’s a level of trust that doesn’t really exist anywhere else.” Teaching clinic
No matter their take on health care reform bills, United Methodists are finding ways to live out Wesley’s holistic vision of meeting needs.
The North Texas Conference, for instance, supports a teaching clinic for graduate physicians through a covenant relationship with Methodist Dallas Medical Center. The Golden Cross Academic Clinic treats uninsured patients, mostly low-income residents of South Dallas.
“These are people who fall through the cracks,” said Cecelia “Sam” Ruffing, the clinic’s administrative director. “They make too much, by a few hundred dollars, to qualify for other aid.”
The South Dallas area suffers from a high rate of premature births, especially among African Americans. The clinic’s prenatal program struggles to reverse the trend, gathering mothers in support groups with resident obstetricians.
Women ask questions and learn from one another, Ms. Ruffing said. The pre-term birth rate among participants has dropped from 20 percent to just 3.5 percent.
“We’re encouraged by that,” Ms. Ruffing said.
Medical missions
Health professionals across the country are also helping to maintain the denomination’s heritage of caring for body, mind and soul as they participate in the United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM) program, traveling with medical teams to underserved regions of the world.
Nancy Forrest, a registered nurse in the Virginia Conference, caught the mission “bug” in the late 1980s, while serving through the General Board of Global Ministries in Sierra Leone.
After returning to the U.S., she joined trips to Liberia, Zimbabwe, Mexico and Brazil. Now she leads surgical teams each year to assist doctors at a rural Methodist hospital in Chicuque, Mozambique.
Most of the medical team members, Mr. Forrest says, can’t wait to return the next year. “We gain so much from the experience,” she said. “The relationships—the connections we make with the people there—are life-changing for most of us.
“That’s our goal, which I think resonates with United Methodist theology.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FLORIDA CONFERENCE
Wesleyan model 
