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Making Your Church a House of Healing

Reviewed by David Faulkner.

With a title like this and a foreword by Keith Miller, who was well known in the earlier days of charismatic renewal, you might be forgiven for expecting a certain style and theme in this book. However, if you read it expecting to find tips on how to train your church’s ministry team in praying for physical healing, you will not find this is quite the book for you.

Michael Gemignani, an Episcopalian priest and spiritual director in Texas, has a different agenda, but no less important. He sees the church as a ‘house of healing’ in terms of the kind of community God’s people should be. Thus a major thrust of this book is a profound meditation on reconciliation with God and with one another. For example, I was attracted to the section from pages 56 to 58 about the damage that ‘troubled troublemakers’ can cause in a church. He has wise observations about what that says about the health of the church and what the r?le of the ordained leader should be. Occasionally (as with that section) he is frustratingly brief, and it will be necessary to follow up on material in footnotes or appendices (although some of these are inevitably US-centric) to explore an area further. That said, there is much to chew on in every chapter, and a church leadership team would gain much from studying this book together.