Finding struggle, hope on health care road trip
Crossing onto the bluffs of Memphis is milepost 2,225 on our road trip from the fires of California to the flooded sand plains of Wilmington, N.C.
On the trip, sponsored by Stakeholder Health, we are looking at how people are finding ways to collaborate to do the heavy lifting in health care at the community level.
Stakeholder was born in a January Memphis blizzard in 2010 as officials from the Obama White House were amazed to find well over 400 congregations working with hospitals, public health and our huge clinics for the poor.
Several White House conferences (none lately) and impressive publications ensued. But life is way more interesting on real streets, so we we got in a Winnebago and hit the road (#see2see, if you’re on Twitter).
Memphis knows an endless stream of projects that never quite deliver mercy, much less justice. Given the city’s wealth of good hospitals, a medical school, and all sorts of clinics, its people should be healthier. But its actual health status remains locked near the bottom of any comparable region.
For what can we give thanks? That nobody has given up.
On the trip, we’ve seen that the health of any city rests on bold tenacity, especially among those who choose to grow old in the city of their youth, who love a city they cannot quit.
Rev. Larry James of City Square in Dallas knows everything about the intractable nature of urban squalor soaked in race. Why not look away and do something easier? “I’d rather die in despair than as a happy hypocrite,” he told us.
We met Pastor Charles Dorsey, who grew up in Helena, Ark., on the streets of San Diego. We were there to see the stunningly successful cardiovascular prevention program the hospitals and American Heart Association were proud of.
We saw older pastors mentoring younger ones about how to speak life and craft mercy in a hard-hearted time. As we talked hearts, the pastors checked their phones to see how their massive anti-violence street fair was going a mile away. Another interrupted to say they had 47 frozen turkeys to give away.
The health of the city is less about the surgical robots all the hospitals have these days and more like the street work of public health and churches.
In Lubbock, Texas, city fathers decided to abolish the public health department; even bulldozed the building to make way for a new fire house for their massive new fire engine.
Then they thought of Zika and STD’s. They hired a Texas-tough mom to build back what the city needs. “And what my daughters will need, too,” said Katherine Wells. “We plan to grow up here.”
You have to do the right things right. But it takes way more than programs and technology; love is what works in hard-hearted times.
“If I speak in the voice of powerful people or spirits but do not have loving kindness, I am only a distracting noise,” the Apostle Paul might tell us today. “If I have predictive data and interdisciplinary analytics that give me confidence to move mountains of poverty, but am not kind, I am nothing. If I proudly commit to radical levels of community benefit and take on huge obligations for the health of the public, but am not humbled by love, I do nothing.”
There are still dirt roads in the black part of Lubbock. They need the opposite of religious abstraction; they need love tough enough to grow in hard soil.
Welcome the hospitals when they cross their sidewalks into the hard parts of town. But don’t mistake their programs for the big current of hope. Love hopes for more and for longer than episodic grants.
Rev. Dr. Gary Gunderson, former senior VP at Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare, is secretary of Stakeholder Health and VP for FaithHealth at Wake Forest (N.C.) Baptist Health.