Worship: a safe place for pain – Graham Fender-Allison

Gillian Straine: Welcome to the Go Health podcast. I’m Gillian Straine, Chief Executive of GoHealth, an organisation with a vision to enable churches and individual Christians to be a healing presence in the world. And on this podcast, we have great conversations to inspire and equip all of us to help connect health and faith in our own lives. And today, my guest is Graham Fender-Allison, who many of you will know. 

Graham’s been part of the core team here at GoHealth for a number of years, working closely alongside me and Wendy Lloyd, helping shape so much of our culture and training. So Graham, welcome to the GoHealth podcast, it’s fun to do this. And I was thinking before, we started recording, one of the things I particularly appreciate about you is the way you approach both training and worship and training. Of course and training includes your online reflective journeys and courses. And in those online courses, what I love about how you do that is you make it really embodied. You make them really relational and really spiritual. And that is it is so much harder than it sounds. Graham, you’ve got a real gift for creating space where people don’t just learn content, they don’t just learn stuff, but genuinely encounter reflection, connection, and transformation. So I’m excited today to chat to you about all of that, and also about some of your journey before you joined us at GoHealth. Graham’s got a background in facilitation, creative worship and work within the Church of Scotland, and like every other human on earth, Graham has a personal journey of faith that’s at the core of his gifting. 

So, Graham, let’s start by…can you tell us a bit about how you came to be a Christian at all in the first place?  

Graham Fender-Allison: Sure. Yeah. And thank you for having me. So when I was probably about 18, like many teenagers, absolute rebel without a clue, didn’t really know what I wanted to do with myself. I was really struggling to find where I fit in in life. I think looking back, there was probably quite a lot of experience of depression and anxiety. I really just was…I was like a wee ship cut adrift. Didn’t really know where my harbour was. I didn’t know how to fix that. And and none of the folks around me really seemed to be feeling the same thing. I think that’s probably quite a lot of teenagers would feel like that. Anyway. I had many good stories in my life. Start with the phrase my mum is awesome. Cause she started good along to this, this church. And in the evenings when we would sit down after work and after school and whatnot, we would have these great conversations and I could see over a really, really short space of time that as she was going, she wasn’t just attending church, she was asking big questions about God, about what her role in life was, who she was. I could see that she was really changing inwardly very quickly, very quickly, and that all the things that would maybe stress her out were a lot less stressful for her. Things that would wind her up not happening so easily. And we began to just share quite deeply about what was going on for her. And I thought, if there’s anything in this, I would quite like a wee look as well. Now, at the same time as that happened I was working in forensic medicine, and I was having a skive afternoon taking some crime scene photographs up to, a department on the other side of the campus. And I went past this street preacher who in Glasgow was known as the Manic Street Preacher 

Gillian: [LAUGHTER] 

From Glasgow. Listeners could probably picture them. He properly had the placard page tied round him, that said something like, God has his own safe sex plan, and on the back it said ‘none of it’.  

Gillian: So that sounds like a person I would cross a road to avoid. But obviously you didn’t. 

Graham:  I crossed the road to talk to him! And, probably thinking this’ll be a bit of fun. What’s going on here? And he was pretty intense, as you can imagine. But he…there was something admirable about that was giving up all his spare time to go and share what he thought was going to be a good way of life for people. 

Now nothing that really about him gripped me and made me want to start going to church. But he gave me this Old Testament tract which had some words from Exodus, a bit of Revelations tacked on at the end. And then a picture of a wee stickman burning in hell because he didn’t believe in Jesus.  

Gillian: Right.  

Graham: And I remember reading it, I couldn’t tell you what those passages in the tract were. But I read it and something happened within me. There was a sense that these words, they were deep, they were wise, they were ancient. There was…it was like, a kind of embodied experience of the words. I like I said, I couldn’t tell you really what the passages where I could probably guess, but I was having an encounter. Theologically, I think what was happening was the Holy Spirit was making God known to me through an encounter with the word. 

You know, that wouldn’t be a wrong thing to say, but I don’t think it quite describes my experience. These words felt like they were inviting me to a deeper life. I wouldn’t have even been able to articulate in that way. 

Gillian: So it sounds like a bit of a double whammy. You had this experience you weren’t expecting on the street, which sounded pretty embodied, as well. And it’s interesting to me that you can’t remember the exact words, but you remember the feeling.  

Graham: Yeah.  

Gillian: And, you know, alongside your, your mother, your close person in your life changing as a result of going to this, this church. Can you say a little bit more about what was going on in that church?  

Graham: I mean, luck or ‘hashtag blessed’. The church that I went to had probably one of the most gorgeous worship programmes that you could ever hope for, particularly as, a new Christian fresh out the box. On your Sunday mornings was fairly standard Church of Scotland affair of hymns, prayers, good preaching, definitely great preaching. But the people there that I got to know were loving and had this real sense of here’s someone with questions, he’s fairly young and we want him to feel included and belonging. What was really interesting about them was they, they weren’t trying to tell me what God was like or control what I thought about God. I think they were saying, you can figure this out for yourself, but not by yourself. So there was a real space of holding all my questions.  

In the evening though, the worship was really quite spectacular. One Sunday of the month we would have maybe a service of healing and prayers for healing. Where the worship leader, there might be laying on of hands or it might be more about prayers for the world. There might be a meditative, reflective kind of thing. Or it might be preaching focused. So that would be one Sunday. The next Sunday, we would invite someone from a World Mission organisation or an international aid agency. Christian Aid, SCIAF, YWAM, Youth for Christ, TearFund, those kind of organisations who would come and lead in their particular style. 

The next Sunday we would have someone from a different denomination: the local Baptist, the local priest, the Methodist, the so on and so on, who would come to our congregation with some of their congregation and lead worship in their style. And then towards the end of the month, the Iona Community’s Wild Goose Resource Group would come and lead spectacular, powerful, transformative worship that involved a lot of symbolic action and movement. That had song specially written for the moment, was really formative for me in understanding what’s possible in any church service.  

Gillian: So it sounds really broad and, holistic and lots of different things going on for young Christians, any Christian, that sounds great. To go and experience all that. But, Graham, I wonder, I want to just go back to this Manic Street Preacher guy and the tract and the stick man burning in hell as well, you know, how do you reconcile those two things in your life and going a bit further on in your story, what happened next? 

Graham: So it took me quite a long time to realise that there were different denominations and, different ways of thinking about God across church. What my initial experience was, there is a diversity here, there are so many different ways you can do this. This is great. I didn’t realise that some of these parts of the church don’t really like each other. And, so I had lots of different people to talk to, some who would say, you know, “don’t worry about all that hell stuff that we sometimes use in the Bible”. And some would say, no, you definitely should be worrying about that. You should really focus on that and work that out. And I think, I had a bit of an anxiety built into my spirituality because of this tract, the hell bit was always there for me.

Gillian: As a tension, as a real tension or as a question or as an anxiety? 

Graham: An emotional experience, a driving question to, I need to answer this, if this is real, I need to figure that out. So I was drawn then to churches that talked about that a lot, and that would offer you a conversion experience that would assure you of salvation. And I think as a result, I got converted and saved in about 47,000 different churches in those early days. I think, I think that question drove me for a time, until I was able to sit down with it and look and say, this is this is not actually a theological issue for me. This is a question about how I feel about myself. This is perhaps an over awareness of sin or have I dealt with things like shame from growing up? Do I feel about myself the way that God feels about me, or am I, kind of projecting those internal feelings onto a theological, pattern here? And actually, this the question wasn’t dealt with by studying theology. The question was dealt with by going on an inner journey and learning to look at myself the way God sees us. 

Gillian: That sounds really profoundly healing. That’s less about which church I’m going to join and more about,  who is God meant me to be. And Graham can you speak a little bit about, you staying with, if it’s okay, staying with some of the words you raised there around pain and shame. What helped in taking you forward in that area? 

Graham: I think it was two things. One would be, if would definitely liturgical moments, moments in worship where I can recall I’m taking part in some kind of, ritual or responsive action or something that was embodied, maybe going forward and lighting a candle or going forward and putting a stone at the foot of a cross or so on and so on. There were, there were moments like that where worship held some of my deepest moments of prayer, and I would have encountered some kind of release. 

I remember someone saying, that in the same way that words can bind us, words can also set us free, and there is a power in the way that we can form a liturgy that let those words really land with us in a way that maybe just a sermon might not. So I can definitely point at some deep moments of of worship where the word set me free. 
 

And the second thing would be the community of people who were around me and conducting that, who would listen to me, who would encourage me, who would pray with me, who would answered my dozens of bizarre, at times, questions, who would put up with my pendulum swinging from, ‘well, this week I am going to embody the very essence of charismatic Pentecostal ecclesiology in one human’ to ‘no today I am practically the leader of the Taize community. I am going to talk like a monk and annoy everybody.’ The kind of big swings that I was going through as I tried to find this brave new world, what what was really calling me, and drawing me forward. 

Gillian: It sounds like there is, there’s a couple, you know, there is, the experience of worship thing going on and the finding out who we are thing going on, and they’re deeply interlinked. And what you’re like, I’ve got this phrase…I can’t remember who it’s from Graham. I bet you remember, God, who made us, sort of the purpose of faith. The purpose of worship is to find out who God made us and meant us to be… 

Graham: That comes from one of our Dennis Duncan lectures, it was Doug Gay’s one. 

Gillian:  That’s right, I thought it was Doug. 

Graham: What I can’t remember is he was quoting someone else. Watch the lecture, folks.  

Gillian: Yeah. So when this going on, how old were you? What stage of life were you at Graham?  

Graham: So that’s probably what we’ve talked about, you know, 18 to 20 years old. So 30 something years ago.  

Gillian: Yeah. And catch us up with what you were doing at that time. And, and your shift from that into work with the Church of Scotland and they’re worship team. I spent probably about two years dotting about, trying to learn a bit about what it meant to be a Christian. This, as I say, this church Renfield St Stephen’s was just glorious for me, and I began to feel a sense of call. This was what I wanted to do with my life. I had this amazing experience one Sunday evening during Lent, where it’s a really quiet, reflective service, and the minister said, I’m going to put around this crown of thorns and invite you when it reaches you to just hold it and think about Christ’s suffering. Think about the suffering of the world, someone you know, or even your own pain, and just pray about it before passing it on. 

I remember when it came round to me because it had been such a quiet service. You’re probably kind of hyper aware of, the sense of touch. And I can still feel it thirty years later in my hands when, when I remember the story, I remember thinking, this is a beautiful experience. I want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to be part of this, helping people get to where I’ve got to in the past couple of years. And I also remember praying saying, ‘God, if you really are there, if you really are listening. That’s what I want to do. And I am aware, God, that last week after partying really hard, drinking loads, smoking loads, that I was more awake and alert and alive to it in this service than I had been the previous week. Where I don’t really remember the service’. I remember saying, ‘I don’t want my life to be about that stuff anymore. I want to do this now. This is what I want to commit do’. And it was a real turning point. And very quickly after that, I studied theology. I went to start working in youth work. I got a job in a congregation doing youth, community work and worship leading there. She was a gorgeous place to be in Edinburgh. From there, I started working with the Church of Scotland national team, so it was looking at National Mission development, National Youth development and working with congregations and a kind of congregational development role, facilitating change management, that kind of stuff. Helping churches think who are they? What’s the place they’re in, and what would it be to be church here? And alongside all of that, that was when I started training and facilitation, spiritual direction and other similar things. After that, working with the guild.  

Gillian: Yep. So I’d really love to shift now the conversation and get, and really focus. You’ve had all this experience in your background of different types of worship, personal experience of healing through worship services, to talk to the person today and, and let’s pick apart what we think we’re doing when we do training and worship within Go Health. 

And what happens to all of us when we, when we worship God. And there’s sort of, a lot of text we use a lot to GoHealth when we’re thinking about worship. And creating worship, is the, the bit in, the Gospels, Jesus’s first question when he’s, with some early followers and he and it’s, he’s the first thing he says is a question, first of all. And the question is, ‘what is it you want?’ 

Graham: Yeah.  

Gillian: So it’s sort of combining the idea you’ve spoken about there. There’s a word, there’s a message, there’s a God waiting, but also there’s a question that we bring with us into these spaces. What is it that you want? Is that what worship is, do you think? 

Graham:  I, I love that passage, it’s possibly one of my favourites. So it’s when they’re with John the Baptist and he says, the Lamb of God, they walk after Jesus and he just spins on them and says, ‘what is it that you’re looking for?’ And their response is ‘master, where dwellest though’. So as for me, that is worship, God asking what are you looking for? And us saying, where are you God? Where do you dwell? They’re saying, our certainly, in many times when I come to worship, that is the, the state that I’m in. That’s the question I’m asking, where are you in all of this, God?  

Gillian: And is that, is that worship? Or what else is going on when we worship?  

Graham: I suppose there are as many things going on in worship as there are worshippers in the history of humanity. There are so, so many different ways that we could we could explore what is actually happening. But for me, I tend to take three quotes into my planning of worship. One is the Jim McManus quote, ‘there’s a word in here and if we hear it, we live.’ The second one, I think is a more direct answer to your question. It’s from Eugene Peterson. He says, he’s a preacher, so he gets to say this. ‘He says preachers think that people come to church to hear a sermon. They don’t. He says people come to church to pray and to learn to pray’. And I think about that before I lead worship. I think of it when I’m planning worship, because ultimately that’s the job. We’re trying to create a space where people can really pray in the broadest sense of that word, not just learn the words of the Lord’s prayer by wrote or anything like that. It’s that they have this encounter with God, where they’re able to say something to God and they’re able to hear something from God. 

Gillian: And should we always, Graham, expect something to happen? I remember a friend of mine, she’s American. And she started worshipping, in Scotland, as it happens. We’re not really, it’s not just the story about Scotland, but she was worshipping in Scotland. I grew up in Aberdeen, so I’m very familiar with, Scottish life. And she said to me, oh Gillian I asked them after, the after the service, I was chatting with all the ladies, and I asked a question and they all just looked at me like a drop from the moon. 

And I asked, well, what did you say? She said, after the the church service. She said, well, where in that, ladies did you experience God? And she could sense, I could tell none of them knew how to answer that question. They hadn’t even thought, should we always expect something to happen? And how do we know if it’s happened? 
 

Graham: Yeah, I think the answer is yes, we always should. But I got myself into real trouble with this in my early days because I became hooked on trying to have spiritual experiences, and I went round every church I could find, that I could get to, desperate for. But they’re they’re having prophecies, how do I get that. Or that person’s been knocked on to the floor. How do I get that? They’re singing in tongues. How do I get that that? That person over there in Taize is having a deeply powerful, experience of meditation and their insights into scripture are amazing? How do I get that experience? And the, the coveting and pursuit of a spiritual encounter with God became more important than anything else to me. It was almost like a kind of addictive, compulsive, I needed a hit kind of thing. Rather than worship first and foremost is about God. Yeah, you know, it’s not therapy. It’s healing is therapeutic.One of the Greek words we get the word therapy from, one of the greek words for healing. So worship is healing, no doubt about it. But it’s not about our healing. It’s about giving God, God’s worth-ship. 

And should we expect something to happen or your friend’s question there. ‘Where did you encounter God? It can feel like a really  accusing question. It can make people feel they’re not enough. So, I would be walking away increasingly desperate for a spiritual experience because other people were having them, asking me when I was having them, which was painful because I wasn’t and I was starting to feel, maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe God doesn’t love me. Or maybe, maybe, maybe. So it was a kind of downward spiral. For me, what I found extremely helpful the Ignatian tradition. I did one of their courses, and we were working with a passage where you kind of imagined yourself as one of the characters at the passage, and this was the story of Jacob, falling asleep and dreaming about the ladder with the angels going up and down. And I remember walking through this passage very, very much with that feeling in myself of ‘I never have spiritual experiences, I’m not good enough’. And in the story, it gets to the point where he awaked having had this dream and vision and he says, ‘surely God was here with me and I just couldn’t see it’. And a really powerful, powerful experience for me. It turned things on its head. It wasn’t about me having the experience of God that would assured me that God was there, and God liked me as much as everybody else. It was, a feeling that God is there always in the midst of our messy lives and the midst of us running away from our responsibilities. Whatever is going on, God is just always there. Now, easy for me to say because that was a powerful experience I had had. What I find helpful now has been I do the Examen, one of the Ignatian practices where you review your day and ask where, where was God today? I don’t try and look for the coincidences or what some people call the God-incidences, where it seems like the hand of God has been active on my day to day. 

What I do is I recall the fruits of the spirit, peace and patience and gentleness and kindness, etc. and where have I seen those things? And those are the evidence of the signs of God being around all of us all the time. And we, it doesn’t take as long when we just, stretch our mind over even the past couple of hours you have seen evidence of those things.  

Joy, I’ve already felt it in this conversation. And that feels to be inclusive rather than I need to wait for an anointed prophet to come and lay their hands on me. Or I need to wait until an institution approves of my status and ordains me for this job. That actually we can, we can, most of us can do that to some extent. Look at our day and say, wait, am I seeing these fruits of the Holy Spirit. 

Gillian: And those moments, Graham, were you talking about reviewing the day, seeing where you can sense God? You call that worship or is that something you’ve learned in worship, or is that worship extending beyond church? 

Graham: I think it’s, it’s kind of flip it round, but worship isn’t what we do on the Sunday morning, worship as what we do with our whole lives. And that flows in to what we do on a Sunday. It’s not the other way about. And that flows out into our day to day. So I think and I really try and keep this in mind all the time. The liturgy is the work of the people and the work for the people. It’s, it’s not the thing that’s on the word that we do in the space of a condensed hour. What we’re trying to do in that hour is gather in all the ways that we experience God, the way that we, we fail or succeed or grow, and then express that together as a community in the kind of hallowed hour, if you will. But yeah, very much the, the things we do outside of that, they’re primary, primarily, our worship of God. 

Gillian: That’s broad, but maybe that’s okay, right. I, I, you know, and I think it’s something about paying attention. I’ve totally had the experience as a, as a preacher. If somebody’s coming up and you preach as well, Graham, somebody say, oh, I love when you said blah. And I’m thinking, I never said that, but and I’ve had that experience as well. I’ve said, God, you really spoke to me, and the person going, ‘I never said that’. That God is active in, in our experiences of the world, not just as we’re there as a reciprocal to have, you know, data pushed into our minds. It’s through our experiences. We, we, we some, we find God, right?  

Graham: Yeah. And, word and art are all multivalent. I think it’s something that the art world can teach worship and liturgy is the, these words and these art pieces are rituals. They don’t have singular meaning. And we layer onto that different things that we are bringing to the party. So, people are actively engaged in the worship. They will be putting their own standing onto that, and drawing different meaning from the person sitting next to them. And that is hugely helpful. That is one of the key things that we need to be alert to, so that our worship can be a healing encounter for as many people as possible.  

Gillian: And if we can just, think a bit about that Graham. About, worship certainly can be healing, but staying within the church worship context. Healing ministry can also sometimes, sadly, do harm to people. Can you speak a little bit around that? I mean, what causes harm in, in healing when it comes to worship? And how do we learn to spot that?  

Graham: Yeah. I suppose quite a lot of the people that we meet through the Guild of Health are coming to say that they have been harmed by a healing ministry. That perhaps they were told in a church that a terminal condition or, a life limiting condition wasn’t healed because they, have sin in their lives. Or because they didn’t have enough faith or they were told, well, God isn’t going to heal you. We don’t know why we need to persevere and keep believing or we just trust that God has a plan for all of this. I’m sorry it’s not for you to be healed, so you have to still be joyful and worship God in the midst of all that. And don’t show any signs of, of your faith cracking under that. And that feels to be to just lump a great big yoke onto people who are already suffering. And I know a lot of churches would have a problem with those kind of ideas. But, but we meet a lot of people who have had these kind of experiences. And I suspect if some people that I knew were practicing that kind of ministry, and that that was their theology, they had had healing experiences. And if they were to look at it differently it might begin to cast doubt on their own experience. I think sometimes you articulate quite a tight theology, which protects your experience of healing, and then you want to kind of export that into other people’s lives. And I think that can be harmful. So you’re coming from a good place, but I think that can do harm.  

Gillian: It can do harm. And how can people spot the signs that the ministry might not be safe?  

Graham: I think the most important thing is to be listening to the people who are coming for healing, who are coming with their pain, and to be checking in with them, what’s going on for you? To start from a, a point that they are the expert in their own healing and recovery, to, to not think at any point we know better because we’ve had the revelation or an insight from God that it will be done this way. So it’s, it’s to journey with people, as a accompaniment rather than begin to see ourselves as a conduit through which God will heal them, in the same way that I might have been healed.  

Gillian: And so there’s lots we could do. And certainly in GoHealth, in our Everyday Healing course, we talk about healing in worship. We talk about the importance of keeping people psychologically and theologically safe by having a broad understanding of healing and not second guessing God. And I think we do that, because we’ve, had experiences or heard about people’s experiences where, the healing is contingent on holiness or some kind of proof of holiness, and that so often I think, and you’ve had experience of this too. That and that comes down to the, the, the self belief of the healer that somehow their ego and their achievements tied up in people getting healed. That so often happens within churches and and keeping people safe, is about having a good and broad theology, and doing it within teams as well. So there’s a team, there’s not just one charismatic leader, as you said. And just, a final question about worship and healing. What have you seen over the years that makes you think this is real? This, this what we’re talking about at GoHealth –  that human flourishing is possible through faith. Yeah. So, so many things. I’m first of all, thinking what, what is it that we mean when we say healing? It’s not just that the sore bit isn’t sore anymore? It’s not just the, the sad, but isn’t sad anymore. Or the bad thing that’s been troubling me is, as away, is so much more… 

What are things that are drawing me into deeper fuller, richer, more joyful life? Where where am I becoming kinder, where am I seeing compassion? And back to that quote from a Doug’s lecture. ‘How am I becoming more and more closely who God made and meant me to be?’ How are we becoming who God made and meant us to be together and there are so many ways that I’ve seen that happen in worship. 

The one that stands out from all of them, I think, very shifted what I thought was possible. A number of years ago, I was part of the Church of Scotland’s National Youth Assembly. We were leading worship for about 250 young people between the ages of 16 and 25. And we we did an evening service that was a pilgrimage around Stirling University campus, which has a big pond right in the middle of it. And we did a fairly familiar symbolic action that’s been done for thousands of years, that of carrying a stone. And we invited people at the beginning to take a stone and to think about the different things they were carrying. Now at that age range, there were some people who were leaving school about to go on to a new apprenticeship. Some people leaving school about to go to college or uni, university students that were possibly coming up to graduation or struggling with their course and thinking maybe they picked the wrong course. It was around the age that  some of them were becoming young parents. Some of them were getting married. So there were all these big transitions, big life moments happening. It was a really safe community over the course of the weekend. So people were quite, safe to talk about their mental health issues, how their identity was shifting in terms of maybe gender or sexuality questions they had been having. There was, it was a wonderful thing, and the emotions were quite near the surface already. So we asked people, think about a burden you’re carrying, or a weighty matter that’s going on. And we wandered around. Occasionally we would stop and tell a bit of a story from the gospel, like when Jesus, heal someone by a pool asking, do you want to be healed? And so on. By the end of it, we come to a big cross installation we had made. And invite people just to lay their partners down. And it was beautiful. It was emotional, but it was contained and held. It wasn’t out of control, oh, no, what have we done?  

And this is the bit that really sticks with me, there had been a young women and man who had experienced a miscarriage, an early term miscarriage. And for the month before this, every time we spent time with them, they, they would sob. They were, they were kind of inconsolable. It was really, really tough for them. It looked really painful. And here in this evening service, they, were both participated. I’d spoken some before and said this could be quite intense. Have a think if you want to definitely come along and they did, they placed their stone down. And there was a lot of emotion. And the next day when I saw them, she came running up to me and, oh, my goodness, she was radiant. Her face was shining, and she she was lighter, you could see it. You could feel it. Smilling from ear to ear as she kind of gushed forth all the things that the evening had meant to her, how she now, because it had been an early term miscarriage, there hadn’t been a funeral, but now she had a place she could come and remember, how she didn’t really consider ourself a strong Christian and her words, but that she had known somewhere safe, that she had committed her pain, and she committed her child. That her husband had cried for the first time, to allow her to feel that he could now start processing this stuff. It was amazing. But but hers wasn’t the only, life that was altered that night. There were so many other people who were saying, that relationship that had come to an end that had been, causing them a lot of sadness and pain. They were able to just let that go, or the big decision about whether to go for this job or that job was much clearer. And it was this amazing communal thing and this one action. And I think this is the important thing, this one action was appropriated by 200 and something people in completely different ways. Some about grieving, some about a joyful move to new country or new job. Or something about consolidating relationships. It was multivalence thing that people were able to use it as an a way to pray to God in completely different ways. 

And because it it’s deeper than words, this stuff. There’s a quote from Martin Luther who said the first rule of prayer is to be honest with God, do not lie to God. Be honest with God. And these actions allow us to access a depth of honesty. They’re sometimes too deep for words, maybe more honest than our own minds know. And we’re able to just really put our bodies into it and pray with a depth that changes and heals us.  

Gillian: I’ve been really struck from that story. Graham, in so many different ways, sort of the embodied nature of it, that it’s multivalent, too deep for words. This feels like a bunch different catchphrases we need to describe worship and the one that really struck me is, this is a safe place for pain.  

Graham: Yeah.  

Gillian: This is a safe place for pain. And that, I mean, that goes right back to the Psalms, you know? You know, it is absolutely the best answer for how to how do we work out? How do we cope with difficult? We go to the Psalms. Cause people have been raging and praising God through all seasons of their life since we could write stuff down. 

Graham: Yeah.  

Gillian: You know, a safe place for pain. That should be on the billboards outside our buildings with pointy spires. You know, that’s that’s what we offer that you can’t get anywhere else, right?  

Graham: You’re absolutely right. I think what was really important about that weekend as well was the it was a safe community around it. So you can’t just kind of export that liturgy from that event, put it somewhere where people haven’t learned how to be tender with one another. It always reminds me of, that kind of liturgy is like when a physiotherapist is helping someone begin to stretch out something really, really painful. You have to go reasonably slow. You have to be tender with their touch. And I think that is something about making sure that the community that is on that kind of liturgical journey has learned to be gentle and gracious and kind with one another, because if you start bringing up stuff in a space that’s not learned that that’s can be painful. As well as being healing, then you start to see the harm could be done if it’s not handled carefully. 

Gillian: And how does this sit long, do you think, the joy that can come out of worship as well? Because it’s not just a place. It’s not just sort of the spiritual equivalent of the GP. Take your pain here. We’re not just going to get fixed, right. There’s, you know, is bigger and broader and deeper, isn’t it? It’s who God made us and meant us to be and connecting into that, how do you, how do you see worship as a place of where both our pain can go, but also our joy can be found? The coming to meet, you know, participation? I’mleading worship for the next two weeks in my own church. I think worship leading was where I first learned to figure out what I thought and figured out how I would say that out loud to art, words, choosing songs and whatnot. 

And, I can honestly say I’m looking forward to the next two services with a deep joy because we’re going to gather as a community, eyes open, looking at one another, including the children, including one another, connecting, talking…Maybe that’s an image of worship and joy for someone who like me is a bit more extroverted. So there is maybe something about, some other services making sure that that’s going to be a place where other people can thrive. But if we’re doing worship in a way where we’re attentive to the people who are actually there. So another question I always ask is who are these people and what is this place? So we’re bringing the real stuff of life, the stuff that matters, the stuff that energises. We’re doing it in a way that the real me can show up without fear of being sent away, questioned, ridiculed, ignored. And we’re, we’re all on a learning edge here, we’re all growing, we’re all healing, we’re all becoming who God made and meant us to be, it’s messy, it’s sometimes one step forward, two steps back. But it’s a real journey. And and if we root our worship in the reality of what it’s like to be an actual human being, how can there not be moments where joy breaks out the joy of a new healing moment, joy of a new person joining, joy of someone’s life changing? It just it supports us to grow in love for one another. 

Gillian: Graham, thank you so much for sharing your story and all your experiences of worship. But more than that, I’m really grateful for, for this profound thread that’s been running through everything you shared today, that worship and healing is not simply about fixing. I don’t know what’s broken or the pain, but for people connecting into a deeper story of a God who made us and meant us to be as we are. And there’s joy in that. And that worship is part of a broader pattern of how to be in the world that we can connect into ourselves and connect into God. And doing that is not only worship, but a joyful way to show, the love of God for all people. And I think what I’ll particularly take from our conversation, is that your reminder that worship and church are not separate from healing? They can be places where people can find out who they are. They can breathe again. They can be released. I think you use that word. And particularly what helps is where communities are honest and spiritually and emotionally intelligent and, and able to meet people where they are. And that really connects. That’s why I’m so grateful to chat to you, on the podcast, because that really connects in with what we’re doing in our GoHealth Community. That together through learning and meeting together and praying together and worshiping well together. Graham does worship so often in our gatherings that we are becoming a healing presence in the world, not because we have all the answers or somehow we’re perfectly healed. We’re not. None of us are. But, but because we believe that human beings can flourish when they’re in relationship with one another and with God. And when we base that relationship on compassion, belonging and hope.  

So if listening today to this conversation has stirred something in you, whether that’s curiosity or longing or even exhaustion or hope, or perhaps you want to explore what it means for you to be a healing presence in your own context. And we would love you to join us in the GoHealth community. We gather once a month, you get a weekly email. There’s lots of reflective journeys, and you’ll get to meet Graham, me and Wendy and the wider team in our gatherings, and you’ll join in with us as we all try to figure out what it means to connect health, faith, and community to make the world a better place. So thank you once again Graham’s always lovely to chat with you, and it’s lovely that you were here on our podcast.  

Graham: Thank you. Been great to be on.  

Gillian: Thank you to Rosie Dawson who produces this podcast, and to Wendy Lloyd for all her work on the podcast and the wider GoHealth community. So thank you for listening so much. Thank you for being here. And until next time, may you know God’s healing presence in your life today and in the world around you.