The Revival of Spiritual Healing in the Church of England 1920–26

Abstract

‘How are your healing groups going?’ the present archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, enquired rhetorically in a charge to service chaplains in 1979. ‘The renewal of the Church’s ministry of healing’ the bishop of Selby has even more recently written, ‘is one hard obstinate fact that future historians will be unable to ignore when examining the Christian scene in the present century.’ The bishop, who is co-chairman of the Churches’ Council for Health and Healing, particularly singled out for praise the pioneers of this renewal: ‘individuals like James Moore Hickson, George Bennett and Dorothy Kerin’ as well as such later contributors as Leslie Weatherhead from the free churches, and more recently Cameron Peddie in Scotland and the American Dominican, Francis MacNutt. The bishop has further argued that ‘these powerful initiatives given to the healing movement by individual leaders were matched by the leadership of the Churches’, an assertion which is backed by citing the discussions devoted to the subject at the Lambeth conferences of 1908, 1920, 1930 and 1958. The first two of these conferences were presided over by archbishop Randall Davidson, who in the bishop of Selby’s book is presented as a crypto-champion of spiritual healing.

Miracles of healing in Anglo-Celtic Northumbria as recorded by the venerable Bede and his contemporaries: a reappraisal in the light of twentieth century experience.

“…33 Those actively working in such healing ministry have produced a number of accounts, mostly anecdotal but with a noteworthy study by a Roman Catholic priest .34 There have been many who have doubted the genuineness of these healings; in 1974, however, its panel of doctrine reported to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, "The Panel concluded that certain extraordinary phenomena do occur, such as speaking in tongues and divine healing. They have to be accepted as facts.…”