Journey Toward Hope

"Cancer."A quiet modern epidemic that intersects almost everyone's life—as the illness of a loved one, a neighbor, a church member, or us. The specific pastoral needs of people fighting cancer—indeed, of most people facing a life-defining health crisis—create powerful moments of conversation, of silent presence, of participating in the suffering of another that can teach us much, whatever our context.

I sat down with Percy McCray and Philip Olson, two men whose pastoral ministry has found a unique home in the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA). In 2013, CTCA released "Our Journey of Hope," a ministry program and curriculum for people fighting cancer.

The unique role of pastoral ministry in CTCA's patient treatment process is innovative—and with crucial takeaways for ministry in other contexts. I caught up with McCray and Olson in the shade of a palm tree in Anaheim, California to learn more.

Paul: Percy, tell us about your work.

McCray: For the last 19 years, I've been director of pastoral care at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Zion, Illinois. I provide pastoral care and spiritual support for patients, caregivers, and others in our clinical environment. That sounds pretty benign. But pastoral care is very important for our organization. Typically, hospital chaplains are basically crisis counselors. But for us, pastoral care is allowed to be part of the entire clinical experience of patients. We're seen as part of holistic medicine for cancer patients.

How did that happen?

McCray: Through a commitment to holistic medicine. Healthcare should mean including spirituality in the process of support. The Cancer Treatment Centers of America have always been cutting-edge in their commitment to that, and pastoral care is actually seen as one of the modalities of healing—a key part of a patient's clinical experience.

Working in a secular healthcare environment, what parameters guide your ministry?

McCray: First off, we are not there to proselytize or evangelize anyone. We cannot tell anyone what to practice or believe, what church they should or shouldn't go to. We are there to support, empower, and align their spirituality within the context of their healthcare clinical experience.

Olson: While we don't proselytize, we have much more freedom than many others in chaplaincy contexts. I have a friend who is a chaplain in one of the biggest hospitals in Philadelphia. She told me the other day that she can't even use the G word at her hospital, unless somebody overtly mentions "God." We get to use the J word. Jesus.

So we have a lot of freedom to minister, but are always sensitive to the patient. If somebody's a Muslim, Jehovah's Witness, atheist or "other," we are sensitive to that. But when we do have the chance to lift up the name of Jesus, we don't have anybody looking over our shoulder wagging their finger. We have great freedom in sharing the gospel with people. It's different than doing that in a congregational setting or in community outreach, but opportunities are very broad.

I'm a cancer survivor. In fact, I was the first patient at Eastern Regional Medical Center, where I now minister, and when I say first, I mean it—my first visit I had to wear a hardhat. They weren't even open yet. Having been a patient I'm able to connect with people in a way that the other chaplains don't. It's not better, but that's my signature thing. I don't have a lot of alphabet soup before and after my name and I don't have the big certificates on the wall in terms of clinical pastoral education, but I have a brass plate on this big tree of patient names down in the lobby, and I get to take people there and I say, "Lift up your hand shoulder high. Point to the middle. There's Philip Olson." And that allows me to connect with people in a really special way.

It's obvious that pastoral care is valued by the organization. Did you have to earn that value? What's the story behind clinical staff having such respect for your team?

McCray: There wasn't a sense of having to earn it as much as being within an organizational culture (in the CTCA) that values innovation and creativity, and was open minded to having faith be part of that.

That's a good transition to talk about the Our Journey of Hope program, which is the largest, most creative and innovative concept that has ever sought to integrate spirituality and modern healthcare. With the program, we did have to earn our stripes—primarily because of the perceived social risk of talking about spirituality and religion.

What do you say in a multi-religious context? The G word? The J word? Or just "whatever"? How do you frame a conversation about faith in a secular setting? How will people interpret your words? How would religious organizations view a chaplain's work? How would nonreligious people? There are so many moving pieces. Religion and spirituality are hotly debated in modern social conversations. Church attendance is down. Many people have lost faith in organized religion. Anybody who's not aware of that has been living under a rock for the last 10 years.

With all that in mind, Our Journey of Hope is not technically a faith-based or "Christian" organization. Anybody and everybody who walks through the door—whatever religious beliefs they have—are honored, encouraged, and supported. But with that said, 80 percent of our patient population lists themselves as evangelical Christian. Any way you slice and dice all of those different identifiers, they find their way to our front door.

So I challenged our organization: "Listen. We should speak to this community more directly." Because we were concerned about the social implications of how far do you go in conversations with people, what terms do you use, G, J, F, E, A, whatever. The conversation grew and became a bit of an internal tension. We were nervous about getting more specific. But we forced our way through, seeing the benefit for patients, and trusting that the juice would be worth the squeeze.

The result has been that we can look people in the eye and support them directly, respectfully, and specifically.

What transferrable principles have you learned working with people who aren't Christians?

McCray: Look for places of commonality. People basically are the same, once you understand what their filters are, how they process life. Once we find places in common—and cancer is a common denominator—we can begin to help people.

I'm not here to proselytize anyone. I'm not here to get anyone saved. It's not my focus at all. My job is to show the love of God to people and by the wooing of the Holy Spirit he will get them saved. No man has ever saved anyone. Ever. Our job is to be a conduit, to allow a manifestation of who God is in us—love and forgiveness, etc.—in a way that will compel people to come to terms with wanting to have that.

So find common places. Build relationship with people. Find out what they want, what they need. Most cancer patients need and want the same things. They want to be heard. They want someone to sit down and spend time with them. If they're Christian, they want to come to terms with the theology of their cancer. Often, they're so busy fighting against themselves that they do not possess the wherewithal to fight against the thing that they need to in order to survive.

What have you learned about ministering to people as holistic beings?

Olson: You need to be kind, you need to be compassionate, and you need to be a deep listener. That last one has proven really hard for me.

People say to me, "You must be exhausted when you come home from work every day. That must be incredibly tiring work." And I say, "Absolutely." But it's not why they think. It's not because I'm around cancer patients and their caregivers—I find their stories inspiring. It invigorates me. My challenge is that I'm not wired to be a deep listener. It's a whole different way of relating.

We're welcomed in by all kinds of people—and not because we're religiously persuasive. We're welcomed because people know they or their spouse are in the battle of their life, and they need to be heard by someone who knows how to listen. These things are true whether you're in a chaplaincy in a hospital, or whether you're in a congregation as a pastoral leader.

Tell me one story when that deep listening made a difference for a patient.

Olson: There was a single woman, around 30 years old. She was Catholic, so I brought along a nun on our chaplaincy staff. Sister Ann and I were meeting with her, and she said—after only about 10 minutes—that she felt like this was a safe environment to share something that she had shared with only a very small circle of people—just her priest and her parents. She asked for permission to share this, and we said sure, not knowing what she was going to say. "I had an abortion" she said. "My priest told me I was going to hell, and my parents kicked me out of the house." Somehow, in only about 10 to 12 minutes, an environment had been created so that she felt that she could share that. We chatted with her. We shared some Scripture with her. We prayed with her. She was scheduled to go home the next day. But we looked through the census and noticed that she was still there. She had developed an infection.

So we go back to her room to follow up. As we talked, she said, "Can you help me with something? I have never read the Bible. What I talked to you about—that happened when I was 15 years old." She said, "I left the church before that. But I never read the Bible. Can you teach me how?" Sister Ann, who's a trained spiritual director—always Jesus centered and Scripture centered—turned to me and said, "Phil, where should we begin?" I said, "Personally I like short. So let's go with the shortest gospel: Mark."

So we turned to Mark 1, and started reading, the baptism of Jesus. After we finish reading that little story Sister Ann says, "Now here's what I want you to do. I'm going to read it again. I want you to visualize yourself on the outskirts of that event. You're in the crowd watching what is going on with Jesus' baptism." So she reread it. "How did you feel? What did you observe?" Okay. "Now imagine that it is you that is being baptized. You are Jesus." The woman physically kind of jumped back. She says, "I can never do that." Sister Ann, woman to woman, Catholic to Catholic, said, "Well, I think that's an okay thing to do."

So Ann read it again, and the woman was just struck by the words "You are my beloved son with whom I am well pleased." And Ann said, "Now I want you to read it, and instead of saying 'son,' say 'daughter.'" And she reads "You are my beloved daughter with whom I am well pleased." And this woman melted.

Now, I was born in a Christian family. I was born on a Monday. The following Sunday I was in church. I've been in church my whole life. I've been involved in pastoral ministry since 1972, ordained since '84. So I've been around a lot of Bible studies. But here was somebody that had never read Scripture, reading Scripture for the first time, seeing how it applied to her life.

This is one of the things I like about chaplain ministries—particularly in our context with cancer—it collapses everything. We don't have a lot of time with people. Some are outpatients, so we might see them for another three, or four, or six months. Other times in the press of what's going on, we only get a little bit of time. But it's amazing how things that sometimes take years for the light bulb to go off for people can happen in minutes because of the setting.

That's what happened with this woman. She saw herself in that setting, hearing those words from her heavenly Father, "You are my beloved child with whom I am well pleased," and I'll tell you what—that carried me for weeks, just thinking back on that. People are very open to spiritual matters, no matter where they are on the spectrum, and especially if they know that people are kind and compassionate and want to dig to listen to them.

McCray: I love that story so much, Phil. I have a powerful one too. I had an HIV patient in our hospital who had lived an alternative lifestyle and now had full blown AIDS. He refused to allow me to speak with him for about three months because of what he thought I represented—and understandably so.

Finally, he was willing to see me. We got to know one another. For about two months, he just wanted to talk about hunting and fishing. I knew nothing about hunting and fishing—I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. So I stumbled my way through conversations to maintain this connection, to let him drive the bus. Over four or five months we spent time together. We developed quite a relationship. Never talked about God, never talked about faith, never read a Scripture, never opened the Bible—not one time. But he trusted me, and he believed that I was there for him, not just to get another notch on my belt of how many people I claim that I got saved.

He came back on his last (and final) trip and had me paged to his room. "I just need you to sit here and talk to me," he said. "Just hold my hand and talk to me. I'm dying." "I know," I said. His family was there in the room, too.

And very quietly, very peacefully I realized that we needed to go somewhere we hadn't yet. "Listen, man. If indeed you're dying today, I need to ask you something." I asked it very simply. "Have you thought about what would happen to you beyond today, if today was your last day on Planet Earth? What would happen to you? Where would you go?

"It's interesting that you would ask that question, Reverend McCray," he said, "Because the last time that we met I went home and sat in my backyard and I just had a conversation with God. I asked him to forgive me of my sins. Then I called my family members, and I reconciled to some of my family members that I had been at odds with. I asked God to forgive me. I asked Jesus into my heart."

I was flabbergasted. It was a day of epiphany that I shall never forget. And just before he slipped away quietly, he said, "But really I just wanted to see if you would sit down and hold my hand without a latex glove."

That's when I understood the power of being a deep listener. Of being able to connect with people, being available, being present, allowing that person to drive the bus, allowing them to kind of take you on a journey of hope. It becomes a shared journey. I didn't preach a message. I didn't quote a Scripture. I just needed to be present and to display the love of God to this man. Somehow God took over from there.

Would you add anything else for pastors unsure about how to relate to cancer patients or medical communities?

McCray: Good care to cancer patients and their caregivers requires time. It requires commitment. It requires presence. It requires having some insight and some understanding of the disease itself, some language, some terms, things that go beyond the scope of what most pastors regularly encounter.

Olson: That's right on. Also—let laypeople run with it. One of the challenges many pastors face is that we feel we're the go-to person—we need to do it all. We don't. Let laypeople do ministry for which they're called. Ephesians 4 is very clear—our job as pastors and teachers is to train up people for the ministry that they've been called to. If a pastor feels like he or she has to be there for every hospital visit or health crisis, it's probably not going to work.

With the almost universal nature of cancer, we know that so many people are going to be touched by that. An individual pastor in a typical church just can't do it. The pastoral staff can't do it. The need is so great. But we've done such a good job of training people to believe that formal pastors are only ones that could do ministry like this, we need to retrain our minds and congregations.

Once in a workshop, I asked people, "How many people here have had cancer?" A couple hands went up. "How many people have a loved one that's had cancer?" Several more hands up. "How many people have some of your extended family or close network of friends?" Now we're almost everybody.

Then I asked, "How many people know someone from work or in your neighborhood that's had cancer?" Everybody's hand went up.

Paul J. Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal.