The house of God, the gate of heaven: 

was Jesus more like a mental health chaplain than a vicar?

I walked on to one of our hospital wards, and a young adult male patient called out to me in a friendly way, “How’s your church?” – to which I responded, “This is my church.”

He looked rather puzzled.  I explained that I worked full-time for the hospital and not separately for a parish church or similar.  And I added that in any case the church was not a building, but simply anywhere that the Lord’s people would meet together: the very word church simply came from the Greek word for Lord.  So this patient and me meeting together was ‘church’ – as real and relevant on a Tuesday afternoon in a bare and slightly malodorous hospital ward as scores of people meeting together in a fine church building on a Sunday.  He completely grasped the point.

Last Christmas a number of the adolescent patients I work with expressed real surprise that I was going to come and see them on Christmas Day.  I asked them what Jesus would do, if he was in Northampton for a few hours on Christmas morning – attend a service at a town centre church with lots of nicely dressed people, or come along to visit one of our wards.  “He’d come and see us,” they said without any hesitation, and I think complete accuracy.

It is very easy for local church leaders and members to be focused primarily, possibly exclusively, on what happens in their building mid Sunday morning.  A moment’s thought of course tells us that God fills the earth, and most ministry and mission is out there, as we go.

In Genesis 28 Jacob settles down for the night in a remote spot, taking a single stone for his pillow.  He has his famous dream of angels ascending and descending between earth and heaven, and he awakens to declare that he had not known that God was there: “How awesome is this place, it is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven.”  It is the house of God, not because of a building (there was only one stone lying around) but simply because of his manifest presence.

I find the manifest presence of God holding a patient’s hand as we pray through a seclusion door, sitting on a bare floor sharing holy communion, or listening to Godfrey Birtill’s song ‘Do you believe what I believe about you?’ with a young person who has always believed the worst about themselves.

At a church leaders’ conference earlier this year the host said to me that it was a problem that mine was such a niche ministry.  My turn to look rather puzzled!  Ministering to the marginalised and forgotten, speaking freedom to those literally captive, offering words of healing to the sick and oppressed: I do think the New Testament picture of Jesus’s ministry and that of his followers was out in the community, and especially in the darker and more difficult places, rather than primarily in the gathered place of worship.  Indeed Ezekiel’s prophetic picture in his chapter 47 is that the flow of God’s river of healing is greater the further away it gets from the temple.