Be careful who you offer to pray for!
Are you a person who is prepared to witness in your work place? As a retail manager a few years ago I had to go into Leeds to close down a shop. One of the girls was very distraught at the thought of her loosing her job and nonchalantly as anything I offered to pray for her (I meant that I would go home and lift her up to the Lord in prayer) and to my amazement - there and then on the shop floor she closed her eyes expecting me to pray. (Gulp!) I had no choice but to pray. A couple of days later she came running into the shop shouting at the top of her voice - "Neil I've got a new job - your prayer has been answered!"
I mention the above having learned today that a Christian nurse in Somerset has been suspended from duty after offering to pray for an elderly patient in her care (see Ekklesia).
Caroline Petrie who is a Baptist said "I'm not angry and I do understand if people don't believe in the way that I do. But I am upset because I do like this job and this is a very valuable part of the care I give. I saw my patients suffering and I do believe in the power of prayer, I began asking them if they wanted me to pray for them. They are absolutely delighted."
I am convinced if Caroline had offered some off the wall - new age/pagan alternative remedy - she would not have been suspended and would be working today.
All this of course has serious implications for those who wish to witness in their workplace. But witness we must if we want to win people for Christ!
Of course Jesus did warn us about facing oppression - so we should not be surprised.
I mention the above having learned today that a Christian nurse in Somerset has been suspended from duty after offering to pray for an elderly patient in her care (see Ekklesia).
Caroline Petrie who is a Baptist said "I'm not angry and I do understand if people don't believe in the way that I do. But I am upset because I do like this job and this is a very valuable part of the care I give. I saw my patients suffering and I do believe in the power of prayer, I began asking them if they wanted me to pray for them. They are absolutely delighted."
I am convinced if Caroline had offered some off the wall - new age/pagan alternative remedy - she would not have been suspended and would be working today.
All this of course has serious implications for those who wish to witness in their workplace. But witness we must if we want to win people for Christ!
Of course Jesus did warn us about facing oppression - so we should not be surprised.
Comments
yes we should not be surprised that this happened because this woman was faithful.
The day is drawing nearer my friend when Christ shall return!
i was blessed by that testimony.
uhm, can you please pray for me, too? i have a lot of inner struggles, and i hope to overcome them one by one.
God bless you.
Yes I have and will pray for you - for release of your 'inner struggles' - I get the feeling that they are causing you much pain.
Neil
I have also taught the importance of respecting and promoting the religious and spiritual needs of those in receipt of social care; whether that person is a Christian, Jew, Muslim or Scientologist. As a care professional this can be done without the need to ‘pray’ with clients – surely there are plenty of Christians or those of other faiths who can actually do something useful with their time and visit people in care homes? Surely there are churches which have members able to meet this very real need? I know mosques, synagogues, Hindu temples, RC churches and even Kingdom Halls visit members or believers who reside in residential homes. The care professional should ensure these needs are being met, but it is not their place to actually provide them. To do so leaves vulnerable people open to abuse with the potential to become fodder for another’s will –in the guise of religion. What you have to ask yourself is how you would feel if this goodly Baptist was in fact a JW or a Mormon, or Hare Krishna? Would you feel that the person had acted appropriately then and that the person should not have lost their job? You must be honest here, Neil: how would you feel? I suspect you would not be as sympathetic. Hence the need to keep professional care within certain parameters – this woman was paid as a nurse and that in itself is a worthy vocation – if she wanted to minister to elderly people then she could do that in her own time, at another residential home.
The real irony of course is that it is only with the advent of the secular, welfare state, that the social morality demanded in the Old & New Testament of caring for the sick, the widowed and the orphan has occurred in any substantial measure. Sure, church attendance in Victorian England may have been 51% (a lot less then you might think) but the majority of the population lived in terrible conditions; despite the fact that the bulk of the congregations were made up of the middle-classes and plutocrats who were in a position to do something about lot of the poor and the working classes. Sure there was plenty of ‘witnessing’ at this time; yet now, with church attendance at 7%, we enjoy a greater social morality than ever before.
John Millbank (theologian) begins his meandering tome ‘Theology & Social Theory’ (beside me as I type, by a strange coincidence) ‘Once there was no ‘secular’...’; and of course he is correct. The secular only occurred when religion became privatised; when religion – here in the guise of Christianity – had had plenty of time to show its worth in British society and yet had not been able to produce a fair society – indeed Christian England was often not a very nice place! Yet the church did do great things and social welfare was itself part of the church’s witness – though this witness was often piecemeal and severely limited. However, with the emergence of professional social care, access to and the quality of social care improved tremendously. And it must, for reasons I have touch on above, remain secular: given a social care profession works an average of 35 hours a week and sleeps 49 hours a week, this still leaves 84 hours a week to witness as often as he or she likes: what’s your problem?
"What you have to ask yourself is how you would feel if this goodly Baptist was in fact a JW or a Mormon, or Hare Krishna?"
This is a fair point - I would indeed not be sympathetic to such people - the difference is that the nurse was witnessing to the Truth!
"The real irony of course is that it is only with the advent of the secular, welfare state, that the social morality demanded in the Old & New Testament of caring for the sick, the widowed and the orphan has occurred in any substantial measure."
This with all due respect of course is guff! As you later (half)acknowledged, it has always been the church that has led the way to major social change in this country. Christians have led the way in schooling of the masses, abolition of slave trade, improved working conditions, improved medical care, care for the homeless, provision for the poor (no need to look any further than Don Robins here) and more recently "drop the debt campaign" Since mass secularisation of the seventies, we have had your friends Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair to 'improve' matters for those in need - not sure that you would uphold them as part of your wonderful secular model?
Take care.
Neil
Thanks for your reply.
Two things – and this is important:
1) YOU believe the message of Christianity – or should I say a certain version of it – to be TRUTH. No doubt there would be some theological points you would disagree on, even with the goodly Baptist woman mentioned above; you are after all an Anglican. However, that aside, you believe Christianity to be TRUTH.
Yet a JW, or Hare Krishna or even a RC believe their religion or denomination to be TRUTH. Hence there is a problem – as Pilate asked: ‘What is truth?’. Well this is not something I am going to get into here – what I will say is that what is important in the provision of secular, state funded, welfare services is that clients of these services (be they residents in a residential home, users of a day centre etc.) should have staff that are able to provide a service for all users. Witnessing has no place here – yes someone can be a Christian or a Muslim or whatever in the work place and have their religion respected, but it is not their place – in the secular workplace* at least – to involve other people, particularly vulnerable people, in the practice of their religion. (*by ‘secular workplace’ I mean any organisation which receives state funding - many care homes are private establishments, yet their funding (via local authority payments/benefits etc.) is often paid, indirectly, by the tax payer) – even many well-known Christian service providers receive large amounts of money from the state (as my PhD thesis is examining at present!).)
The important thing (and this is something I think you have missed) is that in no way does this manner of professional working detract from or question the truth claim of an individual’s religious convictions. Centrist, secular government – the kind Western democracies have enjoyed for many years – usually ensure an individual’s ‘truth claim’ about their religion is respected and upheld. It is by embracing such a philosophy that religious freedom endures. Theocracies, as history has frequently demonstrated, tend to do the opposite, seeking to promote only a narrow acceptance of what is permitted religious belief. What, Neil, would be the future of Anglo or Roman Catholic Churches, liberal churches, spiritualist churches, mosques, synagogues, Quakers, Hindu Temples, Kingdom Halls, or Mormon temples if the more right wing members of the Evangelical Alliance governed this country? What a chilling thought... Secular government is the best means of protecting religious freedom. There are many people who think theirs is the religion of truth, secular government ensures they can continue to believe that or not believe at all without fear someone will come along with a big club and ‘persuade’ them that they have the truth.
2) As for my little aside about secular society improving social morality being ‘guff’ – I am afraid all you are doing here is showing a clear lack of an understanding of history. In fact, what is rather comical and ironic, is that you prove my point with the points you made! Yes there were Christian voices of protest to slavery and the welfare of the working classes, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries – yet the very fact these protests were necessary says something about the state of these societies, societies that were at the time firmly Christian. Christianity had been the main religion in Britain for well over a millennium at the time of these protests and (before you claim for much of this time it was Catholic Christianity) Protestant Christianity had been around for a good 200 years. If Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow (cf. Heb 13:8) you’d think there would have been some common consensus about the rights and treatment of the individual. But that wasn’t the case: the real decider on how an individual treated was how wealthy they were.
What changed our view of the rights of the individual was in fact not Christianity, but humanist philosophy, which gave rise to the Enlightenment. Yet human belief systems and their actions are rarely hermetically self-contained phenomenon; hence there was a cross fertilisation of ideas between humanist moral philosophy and Christian social theology. Evangelical Christianity can certainly be proven to share part of its development with Enlightenment notions of the self and the rights of the individual.
Clearly, if this argument is followed, it is very difficult to say Christianity provided a greater social morality than that enjoyed by the citizens of secular Western democracies today. If you want an illustration of this why not organise a trip to Styal Mill – it’s only a short trip east on the M62 from where you live; it might be something for a youth group. Have peek at how our antecedents lived only a few centuries ago – when the churches were full and the Bible better known (see: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-quarrybankmillandstyalestate). I think even you may have to admit that I am not talking ‘guff’. I have read enough evidence (and I read an awful lot) to believe this to be the TRUTH. But then what is truth...
Regards:
J-P
I remember a guy named Pilate asking that very same question...
Maybe that was an intential play on words...maybe not.
Nevertheless, Truth stared Pilate in the face and the man reconised it not.
All the brilliant diatribe and logical discussion can never take the place of a life changing experience one has when God reveals Himself to that person and dramatically and unequivocally alters that persons being.
Christianity has been responsible for many social, moral and ethical
developments through history...but, that is not the 'reason' for Christianity.
The only reason Christianity exsists is for the redemption of man back to God. Whether you believe that or not is not even a issue. The real issue is whether or not that is true or not.
For those of us who have been changed...we know the Truth, have the Truth in us and the Truth has freed us from the penalty of our sins.
Please take the good person test and see how you stand before God.
http://www.needgod.com/004.shtml
Dawg
Dawg
I’ve been thinking over your objection to the disciplining of the Baptist nurse and I think it is a good illustration of the popular misconception of social care – that being social care, particularly social work, is synonymous with an atheistic, positivist worldview, usually the preserve of the Marxist or other far-left partisan.
The subject of my MA dissertation was the role of faith based social welfare organisations in a society which already has wide ranging, state provided, social welfare. Since Thatcher’s second term, there has been a political will to hand over more and more social welfare provision to private and voluntary organisations (e.g. the 1990 Community Care Act states that 80% of local government care providers should come from private or voluntary organisations). This has given a new lease of life to many faith based organisations as government contracts have provided a regular income – the downside being these organisations have had to adopt a secular equal opportunities means of operating. That is why St G’s Crypt decided not to accept government money, so that it could continue its own ethos of working.
One conclusion of my dissertation agreed with James Beckford’s findings, that in modern societies, religion is able to prosper when it aligns itself with social movements; another being that religion is also able, on occasion, to define itself as distinct from state provided welfare, but is only able to do this with financial independence (e.g. St G’s Crypt); I was also able to demonstrate that many faith based organisations were not able to initiate the dynamic changes in people’s lives (i.e. in terms of chaotic or addictive behaviour) to the same extent as has been found in religion’s impact in the third world (particularly the charismatic movements in South America, Africa and far east Asia). The reason for this (and there is considerable research to back up my assertion) is that in Western societies, religion, Christianity in particular, has become institutionalised – that is the role played by the faith community has become ‘professionalised’ with paid members of staff and an associated bureaucratic and legislative framework: Western Christians are very supportive of social welfare projects, but this is done ‘symbolically’ in the act of giving money to fund organisations and their work, as opposed to actually doing the work themselves (though this happens also). You, yourself, work for an organisation, you are not a free agent and you receive financial reward for your work (not much I know!– I’ve had friends in Church Army and nearly joined myself after I left St G’s Crypt). This has not occurred as yet in many of the third world churches; hence the immediacy of Christian witness for the urban poor is not diluted by the barrier organisations interpose between a faith community and a church. e.g. those church members helping in the favelas of San Paulo are often the very people who live or lived in the favela and the benefits of Christian belief and practice can be seen by those in need; these churches also provide social welfare by members of the congregation, not, as is often the case in The West, by specialised organisations. In other words, there is no ‘us and them’. Hence it is likely the dynamism of these churches will continue until institutionalisation takes place and then (as with all religiously motivated social movements – Methodism is a good example here) there will be decline, until some new religious movement comes along, which lacks the barriers bureaucratisation and institutionalisation produce.
Lastly I concluded that professional social work, enacted according to its egalitarian ethos, is able to provide culturally appropriate services for those of all religions and those of none. And this is something I am keen to assert, but have to admit that on occasion, workers ill disposed to organised religion have not always been sympathetic to client’s needs. However these are in the minority. Good social workers are to some degree like lawyers who may or may not believe in the cause of their client, but will defend that client’s cause because that is what they are paid and trained to do. I well remember working with an elderly woman who lived in Victoria, in London; she was a conservative Evangelical Christian and was really a bit of a bore for home care workers and myself when we visited, because she would go on about her version of Christianity and the wonders of All Souls’, Langham Place, her own church. However I never showed my boredom of her witnessing, we chatted amicably and as her health improved (I was then a hospital social worker in Westminster and she had just been discharged from hospital after a serious illness) she expressed a desire to attend All Soul’s day centre again. However her mobility was reduced and she would not be able to attend under her own steam. After a bit of a fight I was able to secure funding for her to have transport to this day centre, arguing that it was part of her cultural and spiritual needs. Similarly I fought long and hard to find an appropriate hospice for a JW woman I was working with who was dying of cancer – the local hospice had a connection with a RC convent and my client didn’t really feel comfortable spending her final few weeks in a Catholic environment. In the end I managed to persuade her that her own religious needs could be met, because the hospice was now open to all and there were no real alternatives. This is what social work is about – it is not trying to impose a worldview upon anyone, indeed good social work is about getting people to take charge of their own destiny, taking responsibility for their own actions. Therefore it is important that those who work in social care keep their own beliefs to themselves – or at least are able not to impose them on other people. It is was not my business, as a social worker, whether a person believed in God, Allah, Vishnu or the teachings of the Rev Hubbard, nor was it my business to tell them about my religious beliefs, nor say if I thought they were superior or the truth compared with their own. Some religions are proselytising – such as Islam or Christianity, yet it is not the place of paid, professional in social care to mention their own religious affiliations.
I will conclude with a hypothetical example of what I mean: if I were working with a woman who was deciding whether or not to have an abortion (who had full mental capacity to make decisions for herself). I would see my role as to give the pros and the cons of such an action; at no time would I give my personal feelings on the issue (which for the record, are not particularly pro abortion, except under certain circumstances). If the woman decided to have an abortion I would fully support that decision. The logic behind this way of thinking is actual one of negating conceit: who am I to make decisions for someone who is able to make decisions for herself? She is the person who has to live with the outcome of that decision; just as importantly, she is the one who would have to raise the child if she kept it (how easy it is to say ‘keep the baby’ and then walk away while the mother is left to fend for herself!). It would be patronising and illustrate an arrogance even I am not capable of, to say I know better than the client – inwardly I may think differently, but outwardly I have to acknowledge she has to take responsibility for her own actions.
As a cancer care social worker I worked with many Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus who told me they prayed about their cancer and knew God (or their god?) would heal them. I knew they would die and they all did – often nasty, painful deaths, leaving parents, children and spouses devastated: I saw this again and again but never would I say ‘Well you can try, but everyone else I’ve heard say that, always dies in a few months’ time...’ Thus to return to our praying nurse, for whom was she really doing this? For her faith and her belief? Or for herself and a desire to propagate her own worldview? I know from bitter experience that almost every devout soul who said God would cure them of their cancer usually died of it or a related illness. It was my belief, borne out of experience, that their prayers would not be answered – well at least not in the manner they wanted! Should I have said anything? Should I have said that I believe it to be the truth that praying to get better doesn’t work, because in the hundreds of people I heard say it all were usually dead within a matter of a year? No it was not my place – I could, after all, be wrong, I don’t think I am, but even I don’t have so much conceit as to force my views on someone else, someone I’d never meet, unless they had to meet me because of my role in the hospital and above all, someone who is vulnerable because of their need. I kept silent and did what I was trained and paid to do – anything else would just be a case of thinking I knew best and there is no place in professional, paid social care for such arrogance.
Best wishes:
J-P
Every dawg has its day - I won't trouble myself with bothering to reply to the above missive from Wayne!
Incidently, in Sheffield there is one Christian Doctor's practice that offers Christian prayer and council through a nurse who happens to be a Church Army Officer.
Neil