By Bob Allen
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is re-launching The Center for Congregational Health, shut down a year ago in a philosophy shift away from church consulting toward a new priority of involving congregations in community health care.
“We found that our churches need us just as much now as they ever did,” Gary Gunderson, vice president of FaithHealth at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, said in a press release March 17.
“Re-launching The Center for Congregational Health means we are there to keep our congregations financially, spiritually and physically healthy,” said Gunderson who came to Wake Forest in mid-2012.
In 2013 Wake Forest announced launch of a new free-standing group called the Center for Healthy Churches to carry on congregational and clergy consulting begun in partnership with the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina in 1992. The old Center for Congregational Health was renamed FaithHealth.
The concept was to utilize the existing network of churches to build support for a new faith-based community-oriented program connecting congregations with health care providers in 11 North Carolina counties.
Gunderson — who co-edited the anti-hunger magazine Seeds in the 1980s before getting involved in health care work in the 1990s on staff at the Carter Center — pioneered a similar program during seven years as senior vice president of the Faith and Health Division of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis, Tenn., that became widely known as “the Memphis model.
The Center for Congregational Health retained some church services, including training and coordinating interim ministers, while referring requests for consulting and coaching to a new “sister ministry operating as a separate entity” being started by the center’s former director.
In the re-launch, Gunderson said, the center “is returning to its roots and recommitting to comprehensive church consulting.” Services include conflict resolution, strategic planning and spiritual discernment, leadership and staff development, intentional interim ministry and training and professional coaching.