Churches view illness differently

DURHAM -- All religious congregations care for the sick.

Whether it's a church, a synagogue or a mosque, members provide meals, hospital visits and prayers.

Yet each community instills a different understanding of illness and of God's role in healing.

In her new book, "Caring Cultures: How Congregations Respond to the Sick," Susan Dunlap takes a close look at three churches in Durham and the very different ways they cope with the challenges of illness. An adjunct assistant professor of pastoral theology at Duke Divinity School, Dunlap is particularly interested in the culturally bound practices of different Christian traditions.

She asks the question: "What kind of wisdom and insight have emerged in different kinds of communities?" She hopes the answers add another theological resource to the ones already out there.

Though Dunlap doesn't identify the three Durham churches by their real names, Durham residents will easily guess which they are.

Healing Waters Church (Ecclesia House of Prayer): This church on North Alston Avenue is a mostly African-American Pentecostal church. Members here see the devil as the cause of illness and casting him out as the source of healing. People attending worship fight with all of their physical and spiritual powers to banish this otherworldly devil through prayer - anointing with oil, laying on of hands, using prayer cloths on the parts of the body that are sick.

First Downtown Church (First Presbyterian Church): This congregation on the corner of Main and Roxboro streets is much more cautious about attributing illness to any one cause. If the Pentecostal church is focused on a cure, this church is big on care. Its members know how to organize care teams to provide efficient, timely and concrete help to the sick.

Our Lady of Durham (Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church): The influx of Hispanics to this West Chapel Hill Street parish has transformed the community with annual fiestas in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the people of Mexico. A group from the church gathers on Sundays to visit every Hispanic patient at Duke Hospital. Here, illness is seen as an opportunity to draw close to Jesus, who also suffered. Rosary beads, statues and pictures are considered aids.

Dunlap hopes her book might be helpful to hospital chaplains, health care providers and divinity school students. For example, she said, someone reared in a mainline Protestant setting may want to know that some Pentecostals believe the devil caused their illness.

"It would be helpful for a chaplain to know this is a widespread way of viewing illness," she said. "It's not a sign of psychosis or some weird, highly marginal sect. That's just the way some people put together their world."

Insight into Durham

But Dunlap's book may also interest a wider swath of readers, especially people curious about Durham and its mix of ethnicities. In it she explores the history of the three churches and how that history has shaped underlying attitudes.

At the black church, for example, there is much greater confidence in healing than in conventional medicine, partly because access to medical care has been limited, and also because people carry skepticism stemming from historical injustices such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, a 40-year medical research project that allowed black men's venereal disease to go untreated.

In the Hispanic community, providing care for the sick is especially important since many participants are here illegally and cannot go home to get the support and comfort family members would otherwise offer. Providing calling cards and other financial assistance are therefore critical.

In both communities there can be a tendency to overlook some of the personal and social causes of illness. The belief that the devil caused the illness or the belief that suffering brings people closer to God may lead people to ignore poverty or diet.

In the Presbyterian church, by contrast, where people are economically better off, there is the danger that sick people may see themselves as self-sufficient or able to buy all the care they need.

"I try to give a sympathetic reading of those ways of looking at the world," said Dunlap. "I want to invoke not just understanding, but respect for people who hold those beliefs."

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