The Deceiving Power of Healing Touch
Nontraditional health-related practices that involve the hands, based on the assumption that people are energy fields, are becoming increasingly popular. One of the most widely used is Healing Touch, a practice rooted in a variety of belief systems, including Theosophy, spiritism, and Buddhism. Nurses and others certified as Healing Touch practitioners are expected to read a wide range of books on occult philosophy and engage in experiential training that includes information on contacting and channeling “angels” or “spiritual guides.” Healing Touch and related practices such as Therapeutic Touch and Reiki are being welcomed into Christian churches uncritically in the guise of Christian healing practices, based on the belief that the healing associated with them is the same form of healing practiced by Jesus and the first-century Christians. These churches appear to be ignoring biblical injunctions that warn the people of God to have nothing to do with aberrant belief systems, mediums, and with any practices associated with divination.
Some of the nurses who are flirting with techniques such as Therapeutic Touch or Healing Touch are Christians. Many of the nurses with experience in this arena are available for presentations, training workshops, and healing seminars in recreation centers, public libraries, workplaces—and even your neighborhood church.
Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry is described in a program brochure as “a continuing education program for parish nurses, ministers in parish ministries, chaplains and nurses in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices, and the lay community seeking to explore a spiritual healing ministry involving the laying-on of hands and other Healing Touch techniques.” A 2004 issue of the Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry Newsletter indicates that the educational focus in ministry settings includes “prayer, energetic healing and anointing with essential oils”; all three are considered forms of “vibrational healing” that “formed a foundational stone and marked the success of the early Christian community.” Continuing education units for workshops throughout the United States are granted through the Colorado Center for Healing Touch; the program is an approved provider of continuing education by the Colorado Nurses’ Association and the California Board of Registered Nursing. The Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry is also approved to grant Continuing Chaplaincy Education units by the Association of Professional Chaplains.
According to their official ministry Web site, the program has “an energy-based therapeutic approach to health and healing that includes the practice of many modern-day Christian healers.” The ministry states that its “deeper roots…go back to the prayer, the laying-on of hands and anointing with oil modeled by Jesus as a major part of his ministry.
A PERSONAL ACCOUNT
Jill Dickson, R.N., described her experience of attending one of Mentgen’s three-day Healing Touch workshops:The second day was as amazing as the first. We learned many more energetic techniques with Janet, including the powerful Lymphatic Drainage sequence—a form of energetic release used to help relieve congestion and pain in the lymph system. I also spent time learning from my Healing Touch colleagues….Several people were repeating this course for the third and even fourth time because of their love of Healing Touch. There were hospital nurses from all disciplines, massage therapists, ministers, and psychologists, even someone who had worked as a high executive with a pharmaceutical industry. We shared stories of how Healing Touch had entered our lives, and how it had profoundly impacted our lives and our practices. We laughed, we cried, and we healed. I slept soundly that night. Janet had taught us how to introduce spirit guides into our work, and as I slept, I felt enveloped by the love of my colleagues and my spirit guides.
Healing Touch, in particular, has been making significant inroads into churches of all denominations in the guise of a “Christian healing modality.” It has been doing so primarily with aggressive promotion by the Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry. Parish nursing also may be a vehicle for incorporating Healing Touch and related therapies into churches, often through the avenue of a church health fair, although the premises, assumptions, and foundations of basic parish nurse training are generally sound and based on a biblical understanding of health and healing.
HEALING TOUCH AND THE CHURCH
The standard teaching of the Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry is that the contemporary Christian church has lost its original focus on healing and needs to reclaim it. There is, it could be argued, some validity to this assessment, though there has been a renewed focus on healing in many Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches since the early 1970s in particular, sparked by books reflecting various denominational perspectives. Healing has long been a focus in churches reflecting Pentecostal or charismatic traditions. There is also a rich historic tradition of books on healing by missionaries and ministers such as Andrew Murray (1828–1917), author of Divine Healing, and Christian and Missionary Alliance founder A. B. Simpson (1843–1919), author of The Gospel of Healing. The parish nurse movement is one of the most visible and recent expressions of a holistic healing focus influencing churches of all denominations.
If this rich historic and contemporary tradition is the case, why, then, does a practice such as Healing Touch appeal to so many within the church? How is it possible that a practice so clearly rooted in Western occultism and esotericism, Eastern metaphysical beliefs, and even spiritism, can be considered compatible with a Christian worldview or even be allowed in a church in the first place?
Some answers to the foregoing questions are found in what Healing Touch claims to offer and what it may deliver to the practitioner; this includes an emotionally satisfying experience couched in the context of an appealing ritual. Healing Touch is highly aesthetic and highly ritualistic, from the initial step of meditative centering, to the patterned series of hand movements believed to assess, unruffle, and modulate or even flick away “negative” energy. The practice seems designed to meet a human need for a sense of order, beauty, and balance. In nursing literature, practices such as Therapeutic and Healing Touch are, in fact, frequently referred to as healing rituals evoking “art, beauty and soul care.”
Rituals are powerful tools, engendering strong emotional responses as well as experiences that may or may not be accurately interpreted as spiritual. The Old and New Testament Scriptures are replete with examples of rituals God commanded His people to engage in, including rituals of healing (see, e.g., 2 Kings 5:13–14 and John 9:7). The primary purpose of these healing rituals, however, invariably led to restoration of physical, emotional, social, mental, and spiritual health. A radical repentance was also foundational to the practice of much healing in Scripture, accompanied by recognition of one’s humanness and total dependence on God as opposed to a belief in one’s innate divinity (see 2 Kings 20; Num. 21; James 5:13–16). The most powerful healing ritual of all for Christians was, in reality, the Roman ritual of crucifixion. Isaiah 53:5 tells us, “With His stripes we are healed” (ESV), we are not merely rebalanced.
True biblical healing on any level really is a “power encounter.” The power encountered is God. In many cases, however, there is a lack of discernment or recognition of other powers or of spiritual realms of existence that are considered “off-limits” to Christians. There is power in these realms too, though power of a different nature. Angels, including fallen ones, really do exist, but are not ours to invoke, conjure, or channel. The consequences for accessing angels, and for attempting to access deceased humans as well, can be quite severe, as Saul found out when he attempted to channel Samuel’s spirit through a medium (see 1 Sam. 28:3–19). God forbids it (see also Lev. 19:31 and Deut. 18:9–14).
Healing practices that appeal to extra-biblical sources of authority appear to have a particularly strong appeal to the senses. A pastor from Sackville, Nova Scotia, Canada, who wrote about introducing Therapeutic Touch in his church immediately after the communion service, noted that some of the congregants who remained at the altar to receive the laying-on of hands experienced “tingling, heat,” and “seeing light.” Physical sensations such as these may be legitimate responses to the traditional Christian experience of the laying-on of hands and prayer, but the focus of true Christian healing is not on feelings and experiences but on God, who bids us to come to Him in our brokenness.
There is another side to many energy-based healing techniques, including dangers accompanying the raising of one’s own or another’s “kundalini energy.” Explanations of these dangers vary greatly. Training on handling “psychospiritual crises” is now included in more advanced Therapeutic Touch workshops. Christians would be wise not to subject themselves to experiences or practices that specifically are designed to awaken or manipulate energy in any form.
Practices such as Healing Touch are also self validating; that is, they fall into the category of subjectively validated as opposed to objectively validated experiences. Whereas the former are evaluated within the context of one’s private network of feelings where the heart blindly approves, the latter are evaluated within the context of a biblical system of thought where the mind carefully appraises, embracing reason rather than escaping reason. An informed and engaged mind should make us more critical rather than less critical about the nature of this world, as well as any spiritual worlds that may not be ours safely to explore.
Healing Touch proponents have attempted to legitimize this practice to the church by promoting the idea that the type of healing Jesus engaged in was energy-based healing, consistent with new discoveries in quantum theory. To support this belief, they use, for example, the healing by Jesus of the woman with the issue of blood. Mark 5:27 describes her touching the garment of Jesus from behind. In response to her touch, power immediately came out of Jesus and the woman was healed, instantly and completely. The source of the power to heal seems clear in this passage; it was from God, given to the Son by the Father, residing in Jesus. To equate this dynamic healing power of a personal God with the subtle and impersonal energies of prana or chi, capable of being manipulated and channeled independently by human intentionality or with the assistance of spirit guides or other-than-human intelligences, implies an equivalence that simply does not exist.
“I don’t believe we can be content with natural abilities and gifts—we have to continuously review and update our studies and methods until Energy and Angel Medicine becomes so dramatically effective and widely accepted that it becomes a natural thing to just have these treatments and readings as required,”wrote Elisabeth Jensen, the nurse mentioned at the beginning of this article who practiced a wide variety of occult and energy-based therapies, including Healing Touch. Her statement should be a wake-up call to Christians to get back to legitimate Christian prayer for healing. True Christian healing should never be considered “natural,” but a supernatural act of grace. Those who are promoting energy-based healing in the church have made healing an autonomous act, relying on human manipulation.
Francis Schaeffer wrote about an autonomous notion of nature “eating up grace.” When this happened historically, Schaeffer noted, philosophy “became increasingly free” and “was separated from revelation.” It “began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures.” The greatest need of the church in relation to a renewed and restored focus on healing is to let our philosophies of healing and our practices of healing be fully informed by the Scriptures and by the God of history who desires to teach us to heal and to be healed only through His power. That is both our heritage and our hope.
From: "Healing Touch: Trouble with Angels" Sharon Fish Mooney.
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