For the past half century, Dr. William Reed, a physician and surgeon, has been devoted to a unique mission: helping to close the gap between the medical world and Christian healing. In his books and numerous lectures around the world, he offers a moving plea for the understanding and fulfillment of the spiritual needs of a patient. Through the Christian Medical Foundation in Tampa, Florida, which he founded in 1962, he brings together thousands of doctors and nurses who want to integrate Christian prayer into their medical practice.

Dr. Reed writes that society desperately needs "a new medicine for the future which has as its central theme a greater orientation of both doctor and patient toward God through Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. ... People must hear the truth that 'Jesus heals today.' ... Christian physicians ... should tell their patients that 'we may appear to be healers, but it is God who makes the sick whole' " (Surgery of the Soul: Healing the Whole Person—Spirit, Mind and Body). ^{Surgery of the Soul (Tampa, Florida: Christian Medical Foundation International, Inc., 1995) .}

In Part one of this interview in last week's Sentinel, Dr. Reed pointed out that traditional medicine is limited because it treats man as only mind and body (psychosomatic); the breakthrough needed, he says, is to treat man as spirit as well as mind and body. He also said that a Christ-impelled transformation of thought is essential to healing, emphasizing that spiritual healing can't take place solely on the level of the human mind. In this half of the interview, Dr. Reed will talk about where he sees this movement of thought going.

Would you like to describe in more detail a spiritual healing that you mentioned having been involved with?

I have a patient who is now probably eighty-four or eighty-five who came to my office to see me with recurrent cancer; she had been receiving treatment by a tumor doctor. She was at that time sixty-two years old. I told her that there was no operation that could cure her, but that her husband and I should go across into the Christian Medical Foundation building where the chapel is, and we would pray and ask Christ to heal her. When I prayed for her I didn't perceive anything happening. But I had her come back about two weeks later, and it was obvious that the tumor was diminishing. She is Austrian and she went over to Austria—I think to say farewell to her people. But she improved so much that one of her relatives who was a doctor took her off the chemotherapy. When she came back, I examined her and the tumor was gone, and it's been gone ever since.

I had a Pentecostal preacher come to me, and I was to amputate his leg because he had a serious infection in his foot. I said, "Before we go to the hospital, let's just pray." After I prayed for him, he said, "You know, I believe that Jesus has healed me." And the pain left—this intractable pain that he'd had in his foot. That was 1976, and he's now eighty-two years old. Recently he's had trouble with his leg, but for nearly twenty years he's been free of pain, and I didn't have to amputate.

How can one doubt this higher power?

How can the blood vessels open up? And how can the cancer cells cease to be lethal? Something happens. It's what St. Paul says of the power of Jesus' resurrection: Oh, "that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection" (Phil. 3:10). Paul says that the power that raised Jesus from the grave will also "quicken"—or give life—to our mortal bodies (Rom. 8:11). There's no way of describing it. It's not my force. It's not my healing ability. But it's Christ's.

Do you ever consider going over entirely into spiritual ministry?

That's largely what I do right now. My medical practice is primarily directed toward the patient who is "medically hopeless." I also conduct weekly Tuesday services at the chapel of the Christian Medical Foundation. First I lecture on understanding the Word of God and the healing of the whole person; then there is an opportunity for healing at the altar, laying on hands and anointing, which are New Testament methods. On an average, one hundred people come, mostly those who are discouraged or broken-hearted. And it makes no difference to us at all what their denomination is. We don't put our tag on them—we don't have one.

Would you call yourselves a movement?

It's more of a move—a move of God. I don't think of Christian Science as a movement either; I think it's the hand of God at work in a time when people are becoming desperate for answers, and they're not getting them in the ordinary channels.

Where do you see this move toward spiritual healing going?

Actually, what happened this past December in Boston at the Harvard symposium on "Spirituality & Healing in Medicine" is a good step in the right direction. The Christian Medical Foundation of Canada, in conjunction with a group called Isaiah 40, a laymen's healing organization in the Quebec area, is trying to determine how we can integrate vital Christianity with the practice of medicine and psychiatry. We've had conferences with doctors across the United States, in Canada, and overseas since about 1960. So we've been trying in our own way, but there is resistance. The psychosomatic man is always going to resist, because the carnal mind is death. And it selects death rather than life.

In the Episcopal and Anglican Church there is a lot more interest in considering the spiritual aspect of healing than ever before. And there's a tremendous amount of activity in the Pentecostal churches. But you really can't categorize denominations today. About the time that you say people don't believe in Christian healing, you find they're looking into it, particularly as a result of the Harvard conference. There's great debate going on today in the minds of a lot of people as to whether we are going to be a people of the Word, or a people of the carnal mind. I see the pendulum swinging in the direction of the spiritual. And I think it's all a sign of—well, we're getting to the year 2000, and something is going to happen.

Why do you say that?

Things go in 2,000-year cycles historically. And I think we're about to enter a cycle in which true spirituality will be the thrust of the new medicine. I don't think it's going to be psychiatrically oriented or drug oriented or even surgically oriented.

When I was in Guatemala on a medical mission up in the mountains, we'd have a whole lineup of Guatemalan people waiting for help. I remember a beautiful Guatemalan woman, probably aged forty to fifty, dressed in this beautiful dress. And she had a cancer. We could have done destructive surgery or radiation or something like that, which wouldn't do much good and it would just add other problems to the one she already had. And so I said to my friend who was translating for me, "Tell her that we cannot do anything surgically, but we will pray, and we will ask God for divine intervention here."

I would say at that moment I discovered a deeper degree of compassion than I'd ever experienced before, because of the impossibility of the situation and because of her childlike faith and her openness and her beauty. It overwhelmed me, really. When we leave a healing mission, we never know what's going to happen. But as the years go on, it's amazing how we hear that people were healed. I wouldn't be surprised if she were healed.

Look at the world. The world is just full of people that are dying on every hand. We don't have enough hospitals, enough mental hospitals, enough prisons. We've got to become spiritual. It will become truly a new age in Christ Jesus, I believe.

Does it seem to you that, along with these progressive developments, other things that clearly are not good are also coming to the surface in the world right now?

In the Bible, Timothy says that evildoers and seducers will wax worse and worse. I think that we're seeing a crescendo of evil, but there's a counterforce of goodness and love and life occurring. The more we turn our backs upon God and good, the more evil we're going to have. But, you know, when we begin to see that there are not enough pills and operations to take care of the illness of man, we're going to start looking in other directions and ask, where can I find peace? You don't find it at the corner bar; that only complicates matters. You've got to find it on the spiritual level. And I see men and women going this way. This may be the true beginning of Christ's second coming.

This spiritual revolution that you're talking about—do you see it happening in medicine?

I wish I could say that I see it happening in medicine. I think that as medicine becomes less and less doctor oriented and more insurance company and government oriented, with managed care and things of that sort, medicine will continue to deteriorate. I see hope in the realm of the individual doctor who can carry his faith to the bedside.

I feel that I've got to work through the medical system because that's where I am. This spring I spoke in Montreal and Toronto on the place of prayer in medicine, and there were many young doctors and nurses at these conferences. But I don't know if the medical kingdom is ever going to be able to be modified or not. There are going to be certain good things happening within it, but the structure is set up in a strictly psychosomatic direction.

If we leave Jesus out and leave out putting a chapel in the hospital where sick people can go, and have only one chaplain to care for six hundred beds, the patient is getting no spiritual help at all. And nurses are even admonished not to proselytize by talking about God.

In the sixties, you ran an experimental Christian hospital in Medford, Oregon, for two years. How would you describe the healing atmosphere that patients need?

It would be a place of beauty, quiet, peace, beautiful music, lovely art, and a loving, caring, praying staff, from the orderly to the medical staff, on all levels. A place with a chapel in the center of its structure and a place where worship and prayer on the part of the patient and staff were encouraged. The hospital in Oregon was such a place, but there was opposition from every possible avenue, all based on denominational misunderstandings, and there was tremendous opposition from the medical power structure. But things are more open in this direction today than they were thirty years ago when we tried this.

I read a poem once which states that healing is a musical phenomenon. Patients simply have to get their hearts in tune and then harmonize—and symphonize—with the Lord, with the Holy Spirit, letting all the anxieties, fears, and negativism evaporate.

When you talk about a healing Church in your book, what are you referring to?

Actually, I think the Church as I define it would be the living, vital body of Christ manifested in human beings across the world, no matter what their denomination. They're one in Him.

Those people who are involved in Christian healing, they're in the "Camps Farthest Out" groups, they're in the Christian-Ashram movement, they're in the Order of St. Luke, a mainly Episcopal healing order of ministers, doctors, nurses, and lay people. These are the areas that I've worked in myself. But all these groups are intermeshing now. They're interdenominational; they're Protestants and Catholics and even Jews, Messianic Jews.

In our Christian Medical Foundation doctor groups, we started out with half a dozen doctors in 1960, and now we have close to five thousand. But there are others, a group out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called In His Image, for example, training general medical practitioners in the Christian sense. More of us are going on missionary endeavors and so forth. I see it more or less as a grass-roots thing. I don't know how it's all going to amalgamate, but it will. It will.

Do you ever see humanity reaching the point where prayer alone would be the way to healing, without the blending that you're working with right now of the medical and prayer?

That would be the ultimate. That's the way it should be. And that's the way it was intended. The kingdom of God. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you"—the healing, the blessing, everything else (Matt. 6:33). We have to seek His kingdom. And when we do, we go back into the garden of Eden where God is preeminent and we're His creatures and He takes care of us. As He does anyhow. But I mean, the time will come, I think, when all of these destructive factors will be eliminated. I don't know how that will happen, but it will.