Gary Gunderson is Sr. Vice President for Faith and Health Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare, Memphis, Tenn. He is the author of Leading Causes of Life and Deeply Woven Roots.

Hope and Healing: How does the core of your first book, “Deeply Woven Roots” translate into what you are doing now?

Gary Gunderson: This book reflects my basic perspective that the smallest unit of faith that you can engage over time is not an individual’s head or even heart. It is the congregation, the social unit that congregates. The most important link between faith and health is the social location that we live our lives in. A lot of the documentation around faith and health focuses on the individual faith of the person, but I am interested in the faith that forms congregations.

HH: What are you doing now at Methodist Healthcare?

GG: Part of my role here is the strategic leadership of this large organization. How does this faith asset play its role here? How do we do that well? Most of the spiritual care at Methodist Hospital is provided by our 4,000 nurses – they are the ones who are with our patients. They are the ones who express that faith every day to our patients. We do have some people whose sole job is to counsel and provide spiritual care.

One of the novelties of Methodist is that we have aligned with hundreds of congregations throughout the community. This is a direct expression of the strengths I talk about in Deeply Woven Roots. We call this the Congregational Health Network – it is a crystallized, institutional, functional unit that expresses an academic idea of a congregation.

I also direct the Center of Excellence in Faith and Health. We believe and think of Memphis as a large field of practice. Our hospital is a large field of practice where we can practice our ideas. The Center of Excellence in Faith and Health is designed to think with the very best minds about different ideas so that we never waste the time of our own staff or our clergy with ideas that will not work. That boils down to discussions and policy work, and while it is work and it is intellectual, it would not be meaningful it it was not tied to directly to this field of practice.

HH: What have you learned in the transition from that academic model at the Carter Center to the more field work model at Methodist?

GG: I learned that the ideas were real, good ideas, but in public health they don’t work on a tiny scale. These ideas need the public. This is a large hospital system with a large, definable community so it is possible for these ideas to take root here. Memphis is a deeply shattered and broken community. You need models of leadership that don’t mind brokenness and can work in it. These are all theological models we developed at the Carter Center. These ideas and models work under the great leadership and partners here.

HH: Tell us about the history and the future of the Congregational Health Network (CHN).

GG: About seventy percent of the people who come to the Emergency Room in Memphis say they have been in a house of worship within 30 days of being in the ER. The most significant social structures that have touched our patients before they arrive are some kind of faith community. We know that there is a direct connection between participation and long-term health outcomes. We don’t know why – but who cares? The CHN is an attempt to connect the healing institution (the hospital) to the health institution (the congregation).

We think of people as being on a journey. The key is that we want to design the CHN so there is a covenant relationship between two institutions that are likely to be part of that journey over the lifespan. At Methodist Healthcare, we birth 4,000 babies each year and we also have the largest Hospice in town. We provide points of care literally from birth to death and everything in between. The other institution that has the same expansive, comprehensive, multi-faceted concern for the people in the life journey is the congregation. So we create and develop a relationship between these two institutions. We train these congregations to care for their members and neighbors.

We have 150 congregations in this program and we also register individual members of congregations. We have about 3,500 people registered, so if one of these church members shows at a hospital, we at the hospital can connect their congregation to their care. We have assumed a new standard at Methodist – when someone shows up at the front door, we want them at the right door, at the right time, preferably early in their disease and we want them to be ready for treatment (we don’t want them scared to death). We do not want them to be alone. We want a competent person at their side. Right now, this is not the case for most patients. It takes time. But these congregations are here for the long haul and the hospital is here for the long haul – and we hope these two institutions will come into alignment. You can not create a relationship any faster than trust can grow. Many of these congregations have a mistrust of the professional health care environment, so we know it takes time to move into a new relationship.

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