When Wellness Comes to Church
But what kind of health are we talking about?
We talk about church growth, church health, and a lack of toxicity — all these words and phrases presume we understand what is healthy (and unhealthy) and how we might get there. But what do we mean by health, wellness, and toxicity?
We’re really not sure.
Add to that, we have a wellness culture forming us on our screens and in the grocery store and carpool lines that emphasizes health in terms of the new products of the moment. If we just had the right probiotic our issues with emotional health, relational discord, and middle-age malaise would dissipate. We’ve made health an industry deeply connected to late modern capitalism.
The Christian scriptures take a different tack. If you have no money, come, buy and drink (Isaiah 55:1). Grace is free, undeserved, outside of a market economy. And in the same way that we tend to show up with flowers or wine when someone asks us to dinner at their home, we think we need at least of little of something to deserve the gift of God’s grace and the welcome into membership.1
It’s easy for our churches to fold themselves into the wellness culture vibe. Essential oils. The Daniel Plan. A sense that the right probiotic will really make my body a temple of the Holy Spirit. Then there’s the focus on birth order, attachment, windows of tolerance, Enneagram and emotional regulation which are important and vital tools that can help us live well in community. But these are not the point of the church community.
If wellness has been co-opted by late modern capitalism to be something available only to the few (and something attainable directly in relation to one’s purchasing power), we must differentiate the story story of grace from the story of wellness.
Essentially the math works out that if we mean faith = wellness and wellness increases or decreases based on expendable income, we’ve made faith only available to a few. Faith has turned into a luxury brand.
In the wellness economy, grace isn’t free. And sin is something solvable by a life hack.
In the wellness economy, grace isn’t free. And sin is something solvable by a life hack.
Myles Werntz writes on his Substack (and links to Brad East’s): “When churches devolve into places obsessed with life and health and goodness--into therapeutic bubbles--they treat sin as a the bug in the system, a mistake or a blip, as opposed to an intractable question for any account of church life. And it is here, then, that all harms become subsumed into the category of the potentially trauma-inducing, and in the end, as abuse waiting to happen.”
So there are two kinds of wellness (probably more): one is something to be bought and sold, something to earn, available only to a few (either through purchasing power or ‘enlightenment’); the other is one that is freely given, lavish and offensive to those of us used to earning our keep.
Which form of health does the church offer today?
Jesus Asks the Wellness Question
In John 5 Jesus asks the man at the pool at Bethesda, “Do you want to be made well?” I want to reiterate it isn’t that we should be unconcerned with wellness, but that we wellness needs to be seen in terms of wholeness — mind, body, soul, spirit, community.
Jesus simply asks if he wants to be made well. Sometimes people don’t want to be well; we prefer quick comfort and numbing to being well. (Frankly much of what is real wellness doesn’t look so comfortable; it is often painful processes that make us well).
While there is much more that could be said about the man’s desire to be/or not be well and his rhetorical shift to the others who are quicker to the pool, I want to draw our attention to the effect of Jesus’ healing:
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
The man’s unwellness and wellness was never separate from the state of his soul. Sin was not something a convenient lifehack could bypass. And the wellness that Jesus offered restored the man to community — and, it looks like this restoration to community wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
Wellness in terms of the church cannot be determined by one’s bank account. Wellness, too, cannot be an individual pursuit. True wellness is always about being restored to the community.
Part of the horror of the man by the pool in Bethesda was that he was ostracized from community so that leprosy wouldn’t spread. His unwellness prevented community; his wellness — the healing by the Christ — would restore his body, yes, but also restore him to community. Both are necessary for wholeness, what the bible calls ‘shalom.’
We dehumanize ourselves when we imagine wellness something to be bought. We also dehumanize ourselves when we imagine that “getting well” (or healthy, or any other adjective) is something we do on our own (or with the internet as our guide). These are counterfeit wellness offerings, bought and sold, full of cheap grace and quick tricks and they promise not growth but ease.
Wholeness always happens through the word of God — as we see when the Word made flesh speaks and heals the man — and always ends in community. Wholeness is always the free gift of God.
If we make wellness simply an issue of one’s own choices and one’s own bank account then we collectively are actively and functionally resisting the story of grace. When wellness is something we can achieve, we aren’t doing it right.
Perhaps the question to bring with us is: To whom is grace available? And: Is the grace we hold out really good news? Does it restore rather than rend relationship?
I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments or by email.
Other parts of this series on the therapeutic age are below:
On The Cartographers Podcast, we’ve recently dug into issues of the “culture wars” and its alternatives for leaders who feel stuck in the middle. Catch up here:
The Burning House of American Evangelicalism: Brandon Washington | LISTEN
Beauty as an Antidote to the Culture Wars: Susannah Black Roberts | LISTEN
When your Work is Culture Wars: Peter Wehner | LISTEN
Agent of Grace or Culture War Victim?: Dan Darling | LISTEN
A Culture War Alternative: Mark Labberton | LISTEN
We’d love it if you rated or reviewed the podcast!
Remember you can find out more about my books, speaking, and coaching/producing work at aahales.com.
I wrote in my previous article, Wellness Culture, this: “The language of stewarding the self within places of institutional belonging (the family, the town, the nation, the church) and focusing on maturity as membership into a community seems a way out from wellness culture.” You can read the whole thing here.
Thank you for writing this, Ashley. You’re completely right that the wellness industry is something offered to only the few; I remember when I first got married, I got sucked into believing those wellness influencers who were trying to sell their expensive supplements and meal plans, and as a newly wed with very little income, I often felt the guilt that I couldn’t afford to care my family’s health and that I was slowly killing them with toxins.
I also appreciated what you said about how sin becomes an issue that’s solvable by a life hack. Rather, sin is something deeply woven into our hearts that requires the cleansing of Christ and the careful work of the Holy Spirit. We must rely on God to be sanctified. But in the wellness world, it’s all about fixing ourselves by ourselves.
I’ve wrestled so much with this - having chronic illness that is managed but not healed. I spend far more than I’d like on supplements and medication that thankfully do help me to function well most days. I often feel that I’m the limiting reactant in our family’s fun, but also how much worse could it be if I wasn’t able to do those things? But when I flare I still struggle with the sense of despair and failure. And I get so frustrated with the suggestions of quick fixes (even though I’m tempted to offer them myself? Such a weird paradox. I think you’re right. We just want it to be within our control). Our pastor preached on the healing at Capernaum a while ago and the point about Jesus forgiving the sins first being a direct affront to the idea that the sins caused the physical malady was so healing. So it’s both - they are so interconnected, but just as physical healing doesn’t negate the need to deal with our spiritual selves, the lack of healing is not a sign that we haven’t allowed God to deal with our sin. So much of my healing process was intricately connected to dealing with my trauma, but now I’m trying to disentangle it enough to not feel that I’m a failure for every symptom.
It’s bad enough to deal with chronic illness without constantly feeling that I’m responsible for it (and yet I don’t want to feel that I’ve lost all agency in the things I can change). Being an embodied person in a broken world is so freaking complicated.