Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me to speak today.

As a member of the upper sixth of a large Wolverhampton comprehensive school in 1970 I did this sort of thing on a regular basis but have not done anything like it since. I can tell you that it becomes even more terrifying with age! On balance, Sarah, I think I’ll stick to my day job!

Perhaps a bit of background on me may help set the scene a little. I have always been part of the Church of England into which I was confirmed at around 11 years old. However, my teens were rather ecumenical. At 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning I went to a bible class called Crusaders in which I eventually had the opportunity of teaching, at 11 o’clock I went up to the local Congregational (United Reformed) church where I was a member of the choir and, for a short time, on Saturday evenings went to a Methodist Church Youth Club called Questors. I would like to say that my connection with the Methodist Church was solely due to the fact that my uncle was a Methodist Missionary in South Africa but I think it was more to do with the opportunity to chat up a girl I was particularly interested in at the time.

Like many people I believe I have a close relationship with God and I try to understand this through looking at what Jesus said and did.
 
Lent is a time for reflection and for making the odd sacrifice. Communion is an opportunity to be refreshed spiritually ready for a new beginning. I hope, in the next 10 minutes or so, to provoke some thoughts and stimulate some ways in which we as medical and church communities can all work together.

Sarah and I share so much in our jobs. Sarah has a Benefice of 4 churches and serves a concentrated population around those churches. My (let us call it) “Medical Parish” is more dilute but over a larger area: some 7,000 people with at least 30 Anglican churches on the patch. There is a great variety of people within my “parish” and this makes my life particularly interesting. One minute I may be seeing a multimillionaire businessman and the next patient could be a single mum coping with heroin addiction and a new baby in a dingy bedsit.

Nothing escapes us in our medical parish. We see the many chronic diseases and cancers but also get involved with work stresses, relationship and family difficulties, divorce and grandparents struggling to cope with their new role in childcare.

Many of the problems faced by the communities Sarah and I serve are a result of the confusion by us all between what we want versus what we need; between wanting to have rather than concentrating on being ourselves. Some have likened this to a global infection, a virus and have called it Affluenza. Its sufferers are dissatisfied with themselves and want to live idealised lives they have seen portrayed in the media or lives designed for them by their parents in order to please their parents and prove their worth. Sufferers of this condition adopt the values of others rather than trying to discover the truth about themselves. This mismatch of values creates psychological illness such as eating disorders, alcohol dependence, drug addiction, anxiety and depression.

Jesus had so much to say about developing the different strands within ourselves that make up our values, such as our emotional and moral intelligence, and much to say about achieving higher levels of spiritual awareness and peace within ourselves. The frustration is that if only we could help ourselves and others to achieve these values and this inner peace so many of our own and society’s problems would be solved and Sarah and I would be redundant!

The trouble is that neither we as a medical profession nor the church are particularly helpful in achieving this.

We as a medical profession often collude in maintaining these damaging values. We counsel and support people in order to allow them to continue the behaviour that is hurting them and others such as continuing to overwork so that they can have that second holiday or bigger house or make it OK to continue having that affair with the office secretary. We use drugs to make our patients feel temporarily better without encouraging the changes that need to be made.

The Church is not much better! It is prone to making rules and creating exclusivity rather than the inclusiveness demonstrated by Jesus. This exclusivity creates barriers. Many a time I have been at a service and only heard half my sick patients prayed for. The other half, the non-churchgoers, only get a prayer from me! My sick churchgoing patients get people dropping in all the time. The non-churchgoers have to put up with the odd district nurse or healthcare assistant. 

Some in the Church use coercion by creating fear of the consequences of not living in a prescribed way rather than celebrating the very positive benefits of embarking on a journey to find out what Jesus was really trying to say. This message can be buried in lots of pomp and ceremony, what some call religiosity, and substituted by institutional navel gazing and political wrangling. We’ve seen a bit of it this week. The only sin the poor chap committed was not realising that we are not all as clever as him! I often wonder what Jesus would say about it all…..

The barrier set between religiosity and the message of Jesus was starkly demonstrated to me some years ago. It was a Sunday morning and I was enjoying a day off, playing on the floor with my sons and wearing an old pair of jeans with holes in the knees….genuine holes, not designer ones! There was a knock on the door and I opened it to a very smart chap with tie and overcoat. He told me that there was a service occurring in the local church and that a lady in her 80s had collapsed. He quickly departed and I gathered my black bag and drove up to the church, holey jeans and all!  I walked in to find the service continuing with lots of singing and praying and my patient lying on her own behind the assembled congregation on a pew. I did my medical bit and then suggested she go home to bed. I helped her up and out of the church into my car while every single member of the congregation continued to pray and sing! I took her home. She had been incontinent so I cleaned her up, gave her a bath and put her to bed. I popped in to see her later and, as far as I’m aware, not one of her fellow members of the congregation had been to see how she was! It was not this parish and I’m sure it would never happen now!
 
One thing both Health Service and Church are guilty of is fragmentation. The Health service seems determined to destroy continuity of care and personal relationships between professionals and patients by adopting a call centre, supermarket and production line approach to medicine. This fragments care with the inevitable consequence of reducing patients to a collection of organs.

Fragmentation of the Church is equally catastrophic. If anyone wanted to reduce the power and effectiveness of a Christian community he would design a system in which there were multiple churches run by one vicar and ensure that neighbouring parishes and Benefices were divided by ancient boundaries with separate bishops resulting in very little contact. Sounds familiar! As I mentioned earlier, in my Medical parish there are around 30 churches. Imagine the power and impact of all of those people regularly coming together!

We can’t force changes in values through laws and fear. The best way is to do as Jesus did. Live the values you wish to see adopted. I recently went to India and in the arrivals hall of a very impressive Bombay domestic airport is a large sign quoting Mahatma Ghandi: “You have to be the change you wish to see”.

The good news is that there is a huge appetite for change, for finding someone to follow and for finding a spiritual home. There is a spiritual vacuum to fill and an appetite for something more than what is superficially on offer. Unfortunately, many of the people I see feel disenfranchised by the Church. They either find it unappealing or feel hypocritical about reaching out to the Church and God at a time of crisis and need. This is particularly sad at the end of life. So many people would like to talk about their genuine beliefs and faith and their concerns about death but, as non-churchgoers, feel unable to ask for help.

This is where you as a Christian community can help. I mentioned the way in which as a result of the historical multiplicity of churches and parishes those literally singing from the same hymn sheet are divided up. This causes fragmentation of those within the same community who believe that the message and values expressed by Jesus are just as relevant today as ever, if not more than ever, and the power of such a potentially influential group of people is therefore lost. Even if such a group of like-minded people was gathered together I suspect that it would perform the usual trick of having large gatherings praising the Lord and imploring others to come and join this happy band. They would have created another exclusive sect and in my opinion done things the wrong way round. It would be like playing a piece of music you find particularly uplifting and spiritual to someone and telling them how they will feel. 

Would it not be better if that united group of people who are all on a journey to find out the true nature of God simply became the change they wished to see. Such a group could use their entrepreneurial skills to organise, innovate and provide practical help to those in a crisis such as pregnant teenage girls, those with work stress, those suffering as a result of family breakdown, single parents, those with depression and drug addiction, those struggling to help a relative die at home. Sometimes all that people need in this situation is a baby sitter or night sitter, someone to do the shopping or collect the prescriptions or someone to simply drive them to the doctor’s. This is being the change we wish to see. In other words, not playing them the music that gives us an insight into that spiritual level but exposing them to lots of different music and hoping that the spiritual uplift will follow.

There is a tendency for us to pay our taxes and feel our job is done. Appoint a vicar and leave it all up to her! The trouble is Governments don’t have the same values as those who are trying to create a better society. They are often more interested in control and getting elected next time! I suspect that similar politics exist within the Church of England. If we want to change things we have to do it ourselves so why don’t we unite and innovate. Surely that is what Jesus would have wanted.