WINSTON-SALEM — After two decades, the Center for Congregational Health has the young muscles of a 20-year-old adolescent and is well-positioned to take up the heavier loads of mature responsibilities, a top official at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center said Oct. 22.
“There are not many organizations that make it to 20 years and still recognize themselves,” said Gary Gunderson, who became vice president of faith and health ministries at the hospital on July 1. “This organization is a young muscular group ready to risk its life for a cause.”
Gunderson, who oversees four of the medical center’s departments, including the Center, gave a keynote address at a 20th anniversary celebration at First Baptist Church in Winston-Salem. The event was held in conjunction with the Center’s three-day Healthy Church Summit.
Bill Wilson (left), director of the Center for Congregational Health; Brian Foreman (center), a Raleigh consultant for the Center; and Gary Gunderson, vice president of faith and health ministries at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, celebrate the Center's 20th year.
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Bill Wilson, the Center’s director for two years, called his association with the organization’s task a privilege and gift.
“The more I live in this world, the more I feel like one of our primary identity words is steward,” he said. “We are stewards of a great legacy, a great task and a great privilege.”
Since 1992, the Center has provided ministry and training to lay leaders and clergy in hundreds of congregations around the country, aiming to help them attain “health and wholeness.” It has trained thousands of interim ministers and works closely with the Association of Intentional Interim Ministers, a national network.
“Actually the Center’s work cannot be measured,” said Wilson. “No real ministry can. That is because, of course, the real impact of what we do, the most lasting gift we give congregations, cannot be printed on a page or kept on a ledger.”
Wilson, himself a former pastor, called the Center a dispenser of hope.
“Every day we inject large syringes of our antidote to despair into the life blood of congregations and clergy all over this country,” he said. “Sometimes it takes, and sometimes it doesn’t. But we know that, over these 20 years, we have been used providentially in ways we will never fully appreciate this side of eternity.”
In his address, Gunderson said research demonstrates a clear link between individuals’ physical health and connection to a faith community. That makes the task of encouraging healthy congregations essential, he said.
“Over a lifetime, participating in a congregation turns out to be correlated with health in a positive way to almost the same extend that, say, tobacco is in a negative way,” he said. “That’s true whether congregations have a specific health program or not. It’s not correlated with health-specific programs. It just turns out to be a correlation.”
Gunderson, who has explored the links between faith and health since initiating a hunger ministry called Seeds in the basement of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., in 1977, was struck by that correlation while working on a project in Zambia. While developing translations of survey instruments, graduate students there told him, “There is no word in their language for faith that does not imply health. There’s no possible way to ask about health and not include faith. It’s impossible.”
“I realized we were trying to evaluate how these people understood the connections between something which they thought was impossible to separate,” Gunderson said.
Identifying the specific “active ingredients” in the health/faith correlation is difficult, he said, because “the miracle of congregations” is a place of “mystery and complexity.” But he added, “I think it has to do with two things — trust and connections. Those of you who are interim pastors know that those two things are darn near magical.”
Gunderson’s insights inspired his later work with the Carter Center’s Interfaith Health Program and eventually at Methodist LeBonheur Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., where he was senior vice president for faith and health for seven years before joining the staff of the Wake Forest medical center. At Methodist LeBonheur he helped develop the “Memphis Model,” a highly-regarded collaboration of the medical and faith communities — and one he hopes to replicate as the “North Carolina Model.”
Gunderson said the role of faith communities in successful medical care is so profound that “if we didn’t have congregations we would have to invent them.”
“It turns out we don’t have to invent them,” he added. “But the bad news is — the health of our congregations is very much messed up. It’s a very inconvenient symmetry.”
That gives crucial importance to the task of the Center for Congregational Health, Gunderson said.
“The expertise developed by the CCH over the last two decades is more relevant to the larger community than it knows,” he said. And expanding that expertise is “what I believe God wants us to be. I think we are perfectly adapted for that work.”
Wilson acknowledged taking on that task will be the Center’s challenge in the years ahead.
“As we turn this corner into our future, we recognize that our future will probably be very different from our past,” he said. “That is good for us, for we know that any living, growing person or organization is either going to change or is going to die. We don’t want to die. And we don’t just want to survive; we want to thrive. And we will.”
The Center for Congregational Health, which is administered by the medical center, has a 16-member advisory board representing seven denominational groups. The majority of funding comes from fees for services, but both the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina also provide financial support.
Robert Dilday (rdilday@religiousherald.org) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.