Healing Service

The Ministry of Healing

We offer prayer for healing as an important part of our pastoral and sacramental ministry. This can take place by arrangement with one of the clergy but also at one of our monthly healing services at All Saints.

These are due to take place at 7pm in All Saints Church on the following Thursdays:

15th June, 27th July, 28th September, 26th October.

The timings are these:

7pm quiet prayer and stillness before the Blessed Sacrament. 7.30pm Healing Service begins.

Fr Chris will usually be available to offer the Sacrament of Reconciliation ('hear confessions') from 6.45pm (not in July or September).

The service consists of prayer and stillness before God in his sacramental form of the Blessed Sacrament, along with laying on of hands with prayer and anointing with Holy Oil.

It's important that the ministry of healing is understood within a proper context of the faith and the life of the church and also medical supervision where appropriate. Fr Trevor Thurston-Smith SMMS has written a very helpful summary of how this might be understood

We believe that God loves us and wants the very best for each of us; but we also know that suffering of various kinds and ultimately death are an unavoidable part of our human condition. In the person of Jesus, God shared in these experiences, and we believe that he draws close to us in times of suffering.

Jesus’ resurrection from the dead gives us hope that we might have a foretaste of God’s Kingdom here and now, and that through the Church’s ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit, we might experience his healing touch.

What form this healing might take, we do not know. We may simply feel a greater sense of God’s love, enabling us to cope better with our physical pain or emotional heartache. We may experience a slight improvement in some medical condition. More rarely, we may even experience a quite sudden and dramatic change in our physical or emotional health for which we immediately want to thank God.

It is important, however, to remember that healing is not principally about being physically ‘cured’, but is more about finding a greater sense of ‘wellbeing’ and a renewed trust in God’s unfailing love. 

Jesus told his apostles to ‘preach the Gospel……..and heal the sick’. In services such as this, the Church continues the ministry of Jesus Christ. In doing so, we recognise that we all need healing – the healing of ourselves, and of our relationships with God and with one another and with our environment.  

Finally, we seek to work in co-operation with the medical profession. The church’s healing ministry should be seen as complementing medical treatment and certainly not as an alternative to it.