Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning, and group discussion
 How do you heal a broken life? |
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Healing in Worship: Hospitality that welcomes everyone as they are
Though you might associate “heal” with “cure,” healing in worship is broader. Whether through prayer, hospitality, communion, or laying on hands, it helps people become more whole.
Unexpectedly homeless in his late 50s, Joe Crosby ended up in a city-run shelter in the basement of Lake View Lutheran Church in Chicago. One wintry day, he got busy with some donated yarn and knitting needles—with no clue that he would become knit into a community through worship.
Elna Siebring went to a conference so she could help heal others’ painful memories. She never could have predicted the healing that followed.
Pastor Mary Halvorson has learned to meet Christ in strangers.
Stories of healing in worship are as different as the people who tell them. But they include common threads of hospitality that any church can offer—prayer, presence, silence, meals, and sharing from the heart.
 at Lake View Lutheran Church. Photo courtesy of Roberto Amaya. |
Genuine welcome
Crosby recalls that Pastor Liala Beukema stopped to chat about knitting. “I’d learned in college as an art major. She knew how but asked for a few pointers.
“On Ash Wednesday, Liala came downstairs at lunch and said we were all welcome to attend. It was cold and drizzly outside, so I went in to get warm. I felt like I was at home—which, I thought to myself, was ridiculous. After all, I had nothing to give back,” Crosby says.
Still, he went back on Sunday. The church secretary urged him to introduce himself in worship and to stay for coffee.
“About six people told me how glad they were to see me. I was like, ‘Wait a minute! You did hear me. I am homeless.’ They didn’t care. They bent over backward to be welcoming. So after that, I never went anywhere else,” he says.
“These people upstairs sort of adopted me. It’s a small congregation, with people from age 3 to a couple in their 80s who met here as children in Sunday school. Everyone does a little something. At Advent, Liala asked me to help decorate the sanctuary. Now I’m the art team of one.
“They elected me to fill a church council vacancy so I could give insight on helping people at the homeless shelter downstairs,” Crosby says.
Meanwhile, he was struggling to overcome depression and find housing. When a hoped-for move fell through due to bureaucratic ineptness, Beukema asked Crosby whether she could share his story in a sermon and pray for him.
“So after the sermon, she asked me to come up front, like we’d planned. Then she said, ‘Now everybody come up and lay hands on Joe and we’ll pray together.’
“It was totally overwhelming. I’d been ready to pack a bag and sleep on a park bench. That prayer gave me hope to go on. I didn’t know the whole church would come up. It felt like getting a whole new family. Those people had no obligation to do that. From then on, I never had any doubt that I belong,” he says.
 Strangers often drop by during the day to talk or pray at Grace University Lutheran Church. Photo courtesy of Grace University Lutheran Church. |
Praying and sharing stories
Welcoming people new to them has become as natural as breathing to members of Grace University Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. “We are a little church right in the middle of a huge academic and medical complex. Every day of the school year, 7000 people walk past our church,” says Mary Halvorson, co-pastor.
“The hospital has a great chaplaincy staff, but folks from there stop by our church to pray or talk. Our Neo-Gothic building is 100 years old. With the candles, the colorful banners and symbols of the church year, our sanctuary is warm and inviting. It embraces you. This is a place that quiets and calms. You can’t get that in a waiting room,” she says.
Grace University Lutheran’s thoughtful hospitality is tangible. People relax in its healing courtyard garden. Inside the church, they find devotionals, written prayers, note cards, and Kleenex. Church members knit prayer shawls for visitors to take back to the hospital.
“We feel hospitality helps us welcome Christ in strangers. For us, hospitality and being a place of healing are one and the same. It’s a ministry of presence,” Halvorson explains.
Three years ago the church began a monthly healing service called GRACEsprings. People meet for a free meal of locally grown, organic foods. Table hosts ask questions to help conversation flow. There’s an open prayer book where people can write prayer requests, anonymous or not.
“We go upstairs for a prayer service of healing. There’s lots of silence, simple prayer, a fountain of running water. We ask someone to share scripture and a 10-minute story of when grace sprang forth.
“We’ve learned the power of sharing one’s story. There is no us and them. We’re all wounded healers. From nurses and social workers we’ve learned that we’re all in need. When you give and give in hard situations, you need to be replenished,” she says. People are invited to kneel, have hands laid on them, and receive prayer.
As worship leaders read prayer requests, a pianist plays lightly under the words. After each petition, everyone sings the refrain “The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words to express” (#180 in service music of Evangelical Lutheran Worship; bottom of page 9 here).
“Something about that refrain slows us down. We use it in Sunday worship too. Healing isn’t about cure. It’s about being heard, being held, deepening relationships in community,” Halvorson says.
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Eating together
Halvorson explains why GRACEsprings begins with a meal. “Having broken bread together, we are prepared for prayer in a deepened way.”
Celebrating communion functions the same way at Lake View Lutheran. “Most folks here have experienced some kind of alienation, especially from the institutional church. Here, we proclaim the wholeness and inclusiveness of the faith family and kingdom of God. God loves all of us—gay, straight, rich, poor, male, and female.
“We commune every Sunday. It’s a very powerful moment for people who have been estranged from the church and who have felt estranged from God. Grace, grace, grace…that’s what it’s all about,” Liala Beukema says.
Joe Crosby agrees. “I always love the Bible stories about people being healed. It makes life not seem so hopeless. And I love the communion sacrament. It’s open communion. That means it’s for everybody. Everybody is welcome to partake. It feels like sharing a feast.”
The story continues ... Healing Worship for People in Recovery
 How does your worship best communicate that Christ suffers with us...or meets us in strangers? |
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
Don’t miss the bonus story on sharing stories of healing in worship.
Gather people from your hospitality or worship committee or small group. Listen to and discuss one or more of these audio interview excerpts, all from fall 2007:
- Joe Crosby on finding Lake View Lutheran and becoming homeless, 5:51
- Whole interview with Joe Crosby, 38:24
- Rik Stevenson on following the Spirit’s leading to do healing prayer, 1:56
- Rik Stevenson on helping people feel free and get involved, 2:45
- Rik Stevenson on how God’s word heals, 1:20
Grace University Lutheran Church used Iona Community healing resources to plan GRACEsprings, such as Iona Abbey Worship Book and Praying for the Dawn. Build on the GraceSprings model by using or adapting their guidelines for being a greeter or table host, inviting people for laying on of hands, and offering hospitality. Here is sample bulletin cover, order of worship, and meditation.
Read more about City Hope Ministries and Celebrating All Nations Fellowship and James Lee’s work with urban youth. Check out New Community’s Community Recovery service, which is customized from the Celebrate Recovery® model developed by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.
Want to get musically inspired and help homeless people heal in Halifax? Buy a Shining Lights CD. Get ideas on how to help people leave prostitution.
Learn more about healing in worship at the 2008 Calvin Symposium on Worship. Topics include healing rituals, dealing with disasters, preaching and pastoral care, and others’ pain.
When your whole congregation is in crisis, transition, or conflict, turn to Stilling the Storm: Worship and Congregational Leadership in Difficult Times by Kathleen S. Smith. Church leaders in Blacksburg, Virginia had to plan worship for a community in shock after people 33 died by gunshot at Virginia Tech University. They advise gathering healing resources for worship before you think you need them.
Practicing Our Faith has wonderful ideas for teaching about and including healing in worship. Reformed Worship articles on healing and hospitality include this simple yet profound idea on creating a healing tree during Lent. Graham Standish tells how to use healing prayer in worship.
Start a book club to learn more about healing:
- Dwelling Places by Vinita Hampton Wright is a novel about how losing farms traumatizes families and towns.
- Pearl by Mary Gordon is a novel about how to heal from wounds that loved ones unwittingly inflict on each other.
- Stories from Below the Poverty Line by George Beukema puts you in the shoes of low-income people.
- The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen will help you understand how “with his stripes we are healed.”
Browse related stories about communion, peace and justice as hospitality, and worship language.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, hospitality, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about planning a healing service or incorporating healing elements in worship:
- When have you found worship especially healing? What was it about that congregation or service that helped you?
- Describe an experience when you found yourself connecting with someone you had previously thought of as “lesser than” yourself.
- What are the pros and cons of spontaneously asking for testimonies or prayer requests during worship?
- Which are the largest subgroups of people in your church or community who need healing? What first steps could you take toward offering worship that would help heal them?
What is the best way you’ve found to encourage hospitality and healing in worship? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you ask nurses, doctors, social workers, or other healthcare providers for ideas on how to help ill people and replenish those who serve them?
- Have you come up with a way to connect with an often-forgotten set of people in your midst, perhaps older adults and their caretakers, or homeless people, or refugees?
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This story was originally posted on February 1, 2008. External links were operative at the time the story was posted, but may have expired since then.
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/