Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley .
Morris Maddocks The manner in which God calls his servants is not only as varied as their personalities, but is also significant for their future ministry.
Wesley's conversion was no exception. It was total and holistic in that it affected his whole being. His ministry was also to be total and holistic. The salvation by faith he proclaimed was nothing less than the salvation of the whole human being. The Lord he served was his total Redeemer: there was no part unhealed by lying outside salvation. And he was at one with the writer to the Hebrews, 'How shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?' (2.3) In recording his conversion he obviously chose his words with care and accuracy. He felt his 'heart strangely warmed', the seat of the emotions, the centre of one's being that brings light and love and compassion to all other activities. It was this large and compassionate heart that would enfold all he sought to touch for Christ in a desire for their total health and healing, their wholeness and salvation. Again, he felt he did 'trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation'. He felt he did trust. It was not merely a cerebral acceptance of intellectual truth. He entirely resonated with the truth that gripped his whole being — a total salvation/healing in Christ. It was a total experience, not merely a clicking of an intellectual truth into place. For he continues to describe the overwhelming experience of forgiveness, again total and immense:
'an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved (healed) me from the law of sin and death.' Here is the holistic experience of inner healing; the consciousness of one's
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
glaring sins and shortcomings in their vivid colours, overwhelmed and cleansed by an experience of the healing touch of Christ, in which he transforms them into something beautiful, into-an instrument more useful in his service, manifested in an ability to pray fervently for one's persecutors, which Wesley proceeded to do.
The final testimony to the genuineness of his experience was the 'buffeting with temptations' he had to endure on his return home.
In his old life his striving was under the law as well as under grace, and sometimes he was beaten. There was now a changed situation. He was always victor, in the healed state in which he found himself to be, in Christ. Always, from his waking moment each and every day, 'Jesus, Master' was invariably in his heart as well as on his lips. He knew he had to keep his eye firmly fixed on the One he now fully served. Of course there would be setbacks, a soreness in his heart indicating that there were still a few wounds not fully healed, but he knew that even in his life the Kingdom was now breaking in, as it was in the lives of many, for with new powers of listening, he heard of 'the wonderful work which God is beginning to work over all the earth'. How right he was to give
God thanks 'for the mightiness of his Kingdom'.'
The pattern and totality of his conversion launched Wesley into a ministry that was to change the face of his own country and others. Few men or women in the history of humankind have had such a formative influence over their fellow human beings.
Wesley's influence was such because his gospel message, like that of his Master, was total. He not only preached, but he actually ministered healing and salvation. He saw the needs of men and women and met them head on. Like his Master's, Wesley's ministry was to the whole person. Like his Master, Wesley met people at the point of their need. But of all the ways in which he bore the imprint of his Master, the most significant was that he had a great desire for God which issued in a great desire for the salvation/healing of humankind, both of individual souls and of the whole of society. This was the fire that burned within him, the fire that warmed his heart in Aldersgate Street, the fire that burned on until it was extinguished in death, constantly fanned into flame by his single-mindedness in 'keeping my eye fixed upon him and my soul waiting upon him continually'.* This was his secret, as on his 'delightful ride to Keswick, having my mind
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives stayed on God'.3 He had set his heart first on the Kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt. 6.33; Luke 12.31). That was the priority that inspired his whole life and work.
The Kingdom of God was the dynamic symbol used by Jesus to encapsulate his message that his Father wills to reign in every part of his creation. It is the key concept in the thought and message and activity of Jesus. When taken seriously it is bound to be translated into terms of healing and salvation. Qnce grasped by the vision, as Wesley undoubtedly was, he could but follow his
Master in a ministry of compassion to the poor, in a ministry that would reach the whole person, in short, in a ministry of preaching and healing, a proclamation of the gospel by word and deed.
The health and healing of the people to whom he ministered was always as much the purpose of his ministry as the salvation of their souls. In December 1746 Wesley mentioned to the society 'my design of giving physic to the poor. About thirty came to the next day, and in three weeks about three hundred. This we continued for several years, till, the number of patients still increasing, the expense was greater than we could bear. Meantime, through the blessing of God, many who had been ill for months or years were restored to perfect health' (my italics). Physic and prayer for God's blessing of health were the joint prescription of that holy man. And God answered his prayer, for he observed 'the power of the Lord was present to heal them'.* Wesley of course practised what he preached. He would pray equally for God's healing for his own infirmities. Only a month before the above incident, he recorded the following entry in his journal: 'In the evening, at the chapel, my teeth pained me much.
In coming home, Mr Spear gave me an account of the rupture he had had for some years, which was perfectly cured ina moment. I prayed with submission to the will of God. My pain ceased, and returned no more.'
An incident in May 1741, also recorded in the Journal, illustrates even more forcibly Wesley's belief in the healing power of Christ:
I was obliged to lie down most of the day. In the evening my weakness was suspended while I was calling sinners to repentance. But at our love feast which followed, beside the pain in my back and head, and the fever which still continued upon us, I was seized with such a cough that I could hardly speak. At the
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
same time came strongly into my mind "These signs shall follow them that believe.' I called on Jesus aloud to 'increase my faith', and to 'confirm the word of his grace'. While I was speaking, my pain vanished away, my bodily strength returned, and for many weeks I felt neither weakness nor pain. 'Unto thee, O Lord, do I give thanks.'
The word of God is indeed not bound. The Kingdom must be proclaimed. God honours the faith of his servants.
Sometimes Wesley records a case of inner healing. It is worthy of note how many such healings happen in response to a faithful proclamation of the gospel, either in preaching or writing. The word of God is indeed sharper than any two-edged sword, for 'it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart'. (Hebrews 4.12).
The entry in his Journal (21 January 1739) is worth quoting at length:
We were greatly surprised in the evening, while I was expounding in the Minories. A well-dressed, middle-aged woman suddenly cried out as in the agonies of death. She continued to do so for some time. When she was a little recovered, I desired her to call upon me the next day. She told me that about three years before she was under strong convictions of sin, and in such terror of mind that she had no comfort in anything, nor any rest day or night: that she sent for the minister of her parish, and told him the distress she was in: upon which he told her husband she was stark mad, and advised him to send for a physician immediately .
. who ordered her to be blooded, blistered and so on. But this did not heal her wounded spirit. So that she continued much as she was before: till the last night, he whose word she at first found to be 'sharper than any two-edged sword' gave her a faint hope that he would undertake her cause, and heal the soul which had sinned against him.
This entry also underlines Wesley's assiduous pastoral care in making the appointment for the following day and listening to the troubled soul with such prayerful attention. His practice of follow-up was one of the constants of his ministry.° That his ministry was truly a healing ministry was demonstrable by its fruits.
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives Such a person as Wesley, large in heart, large in mind and totally committed to God as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, was inevitably a man of the future in the sense of being a man of vision. He would have agreed with the dictum of Sir Edwyn
Hoskyns, 'Bury your head in a dictionary and rise in the presence of God.' Life for Wesley was a voyage of discovery, a journey of total adventure to be lived to the full glory of God. He was for instance intensely interested in the latest discovery — electricity.
He began to ask such questions as: What use can be made of this for the betterment of humankind, for the good of the sick and the poor? Has this new discovery healing properties? An entry in the Journal for 17 February 1753 shows how Wesley's mind was working:
From Dr Franklin's Letters I learned that electrical fire (or ether) is a species of fire, infinitely finer than any other yet known; that it is diffused, and in nearly equal proportions, through almost all substances...; that if any quantity of it be collected together, whether by art or nature, it then becomes visible in the form of fire, and inexpressibly powerful.
.. What an amazing scene is here opened for after-ages to improve upon!
Wesley must have pursued his interest in electricity and especially in relation to his healing ministry,° because three and a half years later we find the following entry:
Having procurred an apparatus on purpose, I order several persons to be electrified, who were ill of various disorders; some of whom found an immediate, some a gradual cure.'
Wesley also 'prescribed' this treatment with other remedies for his own pains. On his way to the South Coast, his horse shied and fell on his leg. His consequent sickness was relieved 'by a little hartshorn and water'. His soreness was healed by applications of treacle twice a day. His lameness was alleviated and mended slowly by 'being electrified morning and evening'.® Wesley was in his sixty-third year and had commented before the fall, in the October of that year: 'It pleases God that I .
. find no disorder, no weakness, no decay, only that I have fewer teeth and more grey hairs.' But when misfortune, illness or suffering came, Wesley was not above prescribing such a remedy as electrification either for himself or for others, which on one occasion included his brother
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
Charles. 'Let him be electrified, not shocked, but filled with electric fire,' he wrote in a note to the Reverend Samuel Bradburn, shortly before his brother's death in March 1788. Presumably he carried the apparatus with him on his travels and was therefore able to use it regularly. He must also have persuaded some of his colleagues to purchase one.
Wesley's most painstaking work in this field must have been to collect the many remedies handed down from generation to generation, which he published in his small but invaluable volume
Primitive Physic in 1747. The preface unfolds Wesley's theology of healing. Originally there was no need for physic nor for the art of healing. 'The entire creation was at peace with man, so long as man was at peace with his Creator.' But man's rebellion changed all that: 'the seeds of wickedness and pain, of sickness and death, are now lodged in our inmost substance.' Moreover the rest of creation conspires together to punish the human rebels: 'sun and moon shed unwholesome influences from above; the earth exhales poisonous damps from beneath' (modern discoveries about skin cancer show he was not far off the mark). Gan nothing be done?
Yes it can, says Wesley. In the very threat from God, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread', he sees a message of hope.
The power of exercise is able both to preserve and restore health.
Furthermore, from the beginning physic as well as religion probably came down from father to son, so that the art of healing was handed down to each successive generation. Much was learned from mere accident and was then handed down. But complicated theories involving the introduction of astronomy and astrology, and of natural philosophy, tended to obscure the art of healing and eventually to deter men and women from taking more natural remedies to assist the healing of themselves and of their neighbours.
Wesley sought to remedy this state of affairs in his remarkable work, far ahead of his time, listing sometimes two or three remedies for each condition and advising that if the first has no effect, then try the second. He also added a few 'easy rules' for which he was indebted to a Dr Cheyne. Some are still relevant to our lives today and therefore bear repetition: 'The air we breathe is of great consequence to our health.' Tender people need 'sound, sweet and healthy' beings around them. Health is preserved by maintaining cleanliness in the house, in one's clothes and in the
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives furniture. Food should always sit 'light and easy on the stomach'.
Highly-seasoned food is unwholesome. Hard work, abstinence and plain food are recipes for health. Water is the most wholesome of all drinks, quickening the appetite and strengthening the digestion most of all. Alcohol is a certain, yet slow, poison. 'Coffee and tea are extremely hurtful to persons who have weak nerves.'
Tender people should eat light suppers two or three hours before going to bed and should be early to bed and early to rise. 'A due degree of exercise is indispensably necessary to health and long life." Walking is the best exercise. Any weak part of the body can be strengthened by exercise.
For instance, 'the lungs may be strengthened by loud speaking, or walking up an easy ascent'. The studious especially need regular exercise 'at least two or three hours a day', should frequently shave, and wash their feet. Those who read and write much should learn to do it standing. Other admonitions deal with the wearing of fewer clothes by night or day as an aid to hardiness of health; cold bathing as an advantage to health when approached with due caution; the passions which greatly influence health, violent and sudden passions disastrously.
Most of all however, the love of God is the panacea for our diseases and illnesses:
'It effectually prevents all the bodily disorders the passions introduce; by keeping the passions themselves within due bounds; and by the unspeakable joy and perfect calm serenity and tranquility it gives the mind, it becomes the most powerful of all the means of health and long life.'
The book ran to three impressions in the first four years and was regularly revised. Wesley's purpose throughout was 'to set down cheap, safe, and easy medicines; easy to be known, easy to be procured, and easy to be applied by plain unlettered men'. It was indeed a book that aimed to help the poor and for the most part employed natural means and common household substances. In the revision of 1760, however, he strongly advised the use of electricity: 'I cannot but entreat those who are well-wishers to mankind to make full proof of this. Certainly it comes the nearest to a universal medicine of any yet known in the world.' He also repeated a word of advice in two other prefaces to revisions: 'In complicated cases or where life is in immediate danger, let every one apply without delay to a physician that fears God.' Anyone practising the Christian healing ministry today would want to offer the same counsel.
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
As to the whole, it was a work far in advance of its time, and though some of the remedies may now occasion a smile, it is full of common sense and a deep concern for the well-being of God's poor. He himself practised a majority of its remedies, as is shown by the comment 'tried' by many of them, and also by entries in his Journal such as the following on 27 April 1755: 'As I walked by, I saw a good old man bleeding almost to death. I desired him immediately to snuff vinegar up his nose, and apply it to his neck, face and temples. It was done, and the blood entirely stopped in less than two minutes.' It recalls to mind the Good Samaritan pouring in oil and wine to the bleeding wounds. He also advised the kiss of life for three children who had fallen down a well, and as a result two out of the three lives were saved.?
The little volume was an offering from a man of God who not only had a very great devotion and commitment to the Lord he knew himself privileged to serve, but who also had a very great desire for the salvation and healing of the bodies, minds and spirits of those among whom he travelled and ministered.
When he was seventy-two, he looked back on his life and saw as one of the reasons for his health his never travelling less, by sea or land, than four thousand and five hundred miles in a year. On his eighty-fourth birthday he gave two major reasons for the alertness of his faculties and general good health; the first was
'doubtless to the power of God, fitting me to the work to which I am called, as long as he pleases to continue me therein'. The second reason he ascribed 'subordinately to this, to the prayers of his children'. He then gave five 'inferior means', more of which later.."° The first two reasons — the power of God and the prayers of the faithful — are of extreme interest. There is little doubt that health and wholeness are promoted by being in tune with the will of God. Health has been described as a resonance with the music of heaven. An acknowledgement of the power of God in one's life and an ordering of that life to ensure it is attuned to the will of God and to the strong call he has laid upon us to fulfil our destiny according to his will is a recipe to be within the healing process that leads to wholeness and ultimate health. Wesley saw the power of God fitting him to the work to which God had called him, enabling him to be within the will of his heavenly Father, and so ordering his destiny ordained by God. This, as he saw it,
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives was the primary reason for his health and longevity — a healed and wholesome relationship with God.
Linked with this, but subordinate to it, he cited the prayers of his (spiritual) children. I recall one of our church leaders in this country telling me on the day he took office what a wonderful experience it had become for him to be carried on the prayers of others. I also know from my own small experience how essential it is when engaged in the preaching, teaching and\healing work of Christ to be undergirded by the prayers of the faithful. They seem to open one's being more fully to the grace of God which alone enables such a ministry. How Wesley must have experienced this
'amazing grace', made even more vivid to him through the faithful intercession of devoted souls to whom he had ministered. Here was health indeed, a healing for him as he endured the many hardships of his ceaseless travels and constant demands for his ministry. Indeed, how dare any of us engaged in the preaching and healing ministry venture forth in the Lord's name to do his work unless equipped with such a wholesome benefit as the unremitting prayer of the faithful?
It was only after stating these as the two primary reasons for his health which tell us so much about the firm foundations of his great ministry, that Wesley went on to list the 'inferior means'.
The first of these was his 'constant exercise and change of air', which received regular mention when Wesley suggested recipes for health. Dr Fothergill had prescribed this in November 1753.
Urging him not to stay in London a day longer, he added: 'If anything does thee good, it must be the country air, with rest, asses' milk, and riding daily." Wesley would also prescribe exercise for others:
'I found Mr Fletcher a little better, and proposed his taking a journey with me to Cornwall, nothing being so likely to restore his health as a journey of four or five hundred miles.' Unfortunately in this case the physician refused to agree to such a course of action!"" It was in fact not always the panacea
Wesley believed it to be. He tried to save John Cowmeadow, 'another martyr to loud and long preaching', but it was apparently too late: "To save his life, if possible, when he was half dead, I took him to travel with me. But it was too late.''?
Throughout his life, Wesley believed in fresh air and exercise as the elixir for many of life's ills and encouraged others to hold the same view. He was also blessed by being a good sleeper, doubtless
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
helped by his regular hours. He always rose at 4 a.m. and preached at 5 a.m. On his eighty-fourth birthday he gave all these reasons for his longevity and continued active life and ministry.
Retirement at seventy, let alone sixty-five, would have been unthinkable. The people to whom he ministered must have been greatly encouraged by Wesley's vigour in old age.
The sick and poor among whom he travelled were Wesley's first concern. It was they who first had to hear the good news of the Kingdom. The Gospel must first be preached to them. But poor and unlettered people, sick and seriously ill men and women are not in a position to accept a faith that is only cerebral. They need to be touched by the compassion of Christ at every level of their being. They need a whole Gospel that will minister to their needs holistically, to the healing of both mind and body, of soul and spirit. It was these people, in this way, Wesley sought to touch for Christ. "3
The 'poor' included children, and Wesley was keen to lay the foundations of health and wholeness of body, mind and spirit in the young. Learning much about Christian education from the Moravians he founded Kingswood School in Bristol (now in Bath). At the opening of the school on Midsummer Day, 24 June
1748, he preached on the text 'Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.''+ And as if to lay emphasis on the focal point of the education at Kingswood, he and his brother Charles on the same day 'administered the Lord's Supper to many who came from afar'.
The ethos of the school was well set out in an appeal of 1763 'to make Methodists sensible of the excellency of Kingswood School' which contains the following passage:
It is well known that the children want nothing; that they scarce know what sickness means; that they are well instructed in whatever they are capable of learning; that they are carefully
. and tenderly governed; and that the behaviour of all in the house, elder and younger, is as becometh the Gospel of Christ. ">
One of the main reasons for this achievement was because Wesley had laid solid foundations, being most careful about the choice of staff: 'I saw none would answer my intention, but men who were truly devoted to God; who sought nothing on earth, neither pleasure, nor ease, nor profit, nor the praise of men; but
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives simply to glorify God, with their bodies and spirits, in the best manner they were capable of.''° With such astaffit is not surprising that health of body and soul was well catered for and that sickness was a rare occurence, when all was ordered 'as becometh the Gospel of Christ'.
There would be many happenings in today's world and church of which Wesley would disapprove; some developments he might even consider to be disastrous. But there is at leagt one fact that would rejoice his heart, the proclamation of the healing Christ and the practice of his healing ministry in all the churches. He would rejoice as one who sought to bring to his generation a great desire for God, a massive zeal for prayer and a consuming compassion for the sick and suffering, God's poor. Little would surprise him of modern methods where Church and medicine work together: prayer and physic were for Wesley a vital partnership for the wholeness of people and society and for the furtherance of the Gospel of Christ. He would have rejoiced at seeing, as I do from my home in Dorothy Kerin's Foundation, Burrswood, the day-today working out of this partnership in the context of worship and Christian community life. Neither would he be surprised at the sudden outpourings and manifestations of the Holy Spirit in today's Church. Describing the symptoms of people affected by the Spirit during the preaching, in this case of Mr Whitefield, though it frequently happened during his own sermons, Wesley commented: 'From this time, I trust, we shall all suffer God to carry on his own work in the way that pleaseth him.''? Twenty years later he observed that the same symptoms were caused 'not from sorrow or fear, but love and joy','® but also that these happenings usually occurred at 'the beginning of a general work of God'.'9
In many ways, John Wesley was a man who was a century or more ahead of his time. He would have spoken a telling word to our contemporary generation, two hundred and fifty years after his birth. It would have been a word direct from the Lord he loved and served and obeyed so faithfully, for his was no second-hand
Gospel. It would have communicated truth to a generation that is learning afresh the meaning of wholeness and integration as it learns more of the miracle of the human species. Wesley would have welcomed the rediscovery in both Church and medicine of the art of healing, aware as he was of the constant potency of
Health and Healing in the Ministry of John Wesley
Christ's healing power. He would have seen this discovery in the Church as a vital ingredient of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Of all preachers he was a herald of the full salvation/healing
Gospel of Jesus Christ. His God wanted men whole. As for medicine, it was unthinkable that it should be practised other than for the glory of God. He also believed this about his 'electrification' treatment, that it was to God's glory. Medicine has only followed this up for patients with mental distress (ECT), though an 'electric' heat is frequently transmitted during the Christian ministry of the laying on of hands, with beneficial results. For this, as for all John Wesley's ministry of healing, glory should be given to God.