After choir practice Thursday evenings, Gail Wild goes straight to yoga class. It's not a big transition. The class at her congregation is scheduled so choir members can attend. "You feel so good singing," says Wild, "and then you go and feel even better. It's a wonderful experience."
Westminster United in Whitby, Ont., is highly interested in bodies that feel better. Monday volleyball, Thursday fitness classes, yoga for the hard-working choir, and lots of attention to good nutrition and health education.
They're on to something. Many Canadians don't exercise enough or eat well. Fewer than half of us get the equivalent of a half-hour walk a day (which means we are inactive); almost half of us are either overweight (33 percent) or obese (15 percent). It is "absolutely a problem," says Dr. Peter Newbery, who directs post-graduate programs in Family Medicine at the University of British Columbia.
But here and there, churches like Westminster are becoming part of the solution.
In fact, congregations can play a remarkable role in well-being. In addition to the crucial ways they care for the community around them, members enhance each others' health, says Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada's chief medical officer of health and an active United Church member. Butler-Jones says children who know they are loved "are more likely to take care of themselves." Churches often do that well. More than self-esteem, they offer the knowledge that you are "part of something bigger." And when you know you are "an important part of the world," he says, you look after yourself and others.
Newbery, a United Church minister and former head of United Church Health Services, agrees. "The body is the temple of the Spirit," "he says. "In effect we have our bodies on loan." So self-care, and care for those around us, is "a highly important part of our responsibility as people of faith."
Which means seriously getting off the couch. When we're overweight, for example, we run a higher risk of diabetes, which also increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes, neurological problems, numb hands and feet and diabetic ulcers.
One in 20 Canadians has been diagnosed with diabetes. In fact, the prevalence of diabetes among those 45 and older has increased from 6.6 percent only 10 years ago to 8.2 percent in 2004. Interestingly, says Newbery, there's evidence that "even if you don't lose weight, you can stave off type-2 diabetes with regular exercise."
That's where the church comes in. As Wild says, "I'm not one to sign up for extreme fitness." But she slips out of choir and into the church gym happily because "this is our community. I know the faces.
This is in my comfort zone." And she clearly admires Jean Reuter Ottenbrite, the instructor, who "donates her time and talent and expertise, sharing her faith as a members of the church."
Churches are sometimes blessed with such volunteers, and -- especially when there is a parish nurse -- an emphasis on preventive health care.
Which may mean more than exercise. For example, when a health care survey by Westminster's parish nurse, Gail Brimbecom, placed "education about healthy eating" at the top of their wish list, she organized a screening of Super Size Me. It's a prize-winning documentary whose hero spends a month on a steady diet from McDonald's, to the detriment of his liver and waistline.
Discussion about fast food resonated through the congregation. A few weeks after the well-publicized showing of the film (church members were encouraged to bring their neighbours) two food advisers were invited to explain how to read labels and offer realistic suggestions about quick meals for busy families.
None of this is new here. Three years ago, for instance, Brimbecom invited a naturopath to talk about healing foods, recorded what he had to say, and made the CD available afterwards. The minister, Rev. Christopher White, as part of a "celebrity chef" series, offered healthy food suggestions for Christmas entertaining. The parish nurse bulletin board is jammed with nutrition suggestions. "We are responsible for keeping our bodies healthy," says Brimbecom. "The body is a stewardship issue." Christians are to serve others, and "if we don't stay well, we can't fulfil our purpose."
"I know you," said a member of Port Nelson United in Burlington, Ont., to Ruth McQuirter Scott one day at church. "You're Ruth's sister, aren't you?" Over the space of about 18 months, McQuirter Scott had embarked on an intense spiritual journey and lost 120 of her more than 300 pounds.
She had a complicated mixture of helpers: a Reiki practitioner, a skilled group counsellor, a Metis elder and shaman (who is also a Christian minister) and a very supportive congregation. "People would come to me and say, I can't begin to tell you how great you look'."
McQuirter Scott never felt excluded from congregational events that involved food. When sweets were provided at one event, fruit and nuts were quietly made available as well. When McQuirter Scott produced her own food at another, "they had it out to the kitchen, heated up, and on a plate back to me." And when a group that met at members' houses served treats, "one-upping each previous meeting," one woman finally declared, "We don't need the food. Let's just have tea and coffee."
She reaches for words to describe the spiritual quality of this transformation. "From a Christian context, I know God put the supports in place, when I was ready to use them -- and that God will continue to do that." People, not necessarily Christian, came into her life at the right time, and led her to a new appreciation of the mind/body/spirit connection. "Before, I had looked at my body as a casing, one I didn't particularly like, but I was happy with the mind and spirit."
Now, happily sprinting up stairs she used to avoid, and serving up lentil soups and vegetarian dishes to friends who are "amazed" at her new cooking skills, she has learned "to respect that body. It is part of God's gift. It is being out of balance with the universe, if I knowingly poison that gift."
Not only did they encourage and include her, Port Nelson coped beautifully with the apparently exotic dimensions of her journey.
With a new structure that includes small-group ministries, they made her chair of the adult spirituality committee -- which welcomed (among other things) Aboriginal spirituality courses, Tibetan yoga (with an instructor trained under the Dalai Lama) and a Lenten series that emphasized healing.
It all adds to what McQuirter Scott, like Butler-Jones, describes as a sense of one's genuine and legitimate importance. She is loved, and worthy of it: "It's not the God out there glaring at me, judging me, saying, "You obese person'," she says. "And it is because of that sense of love that I have to treat my body lovingly."
Love and grace and transformation are what we are about, as church, and often, we do this very well. When we don't, we can go spectacularly wrong. Take, for instance, one highly-skilled, beloved United Church minister in Western Canada. Isobel (not her real name) whose doctor was muttering about her blood pressure, recently took off 50 pounds, only to gain almost all of it back again when both job and life jolted into a period of high stress. "I have an unhealthy relationship with food," she says. "That's not an excuse. It's a self- understanding. I turn to food for the wrong reasons. It makes me feel better to pack in the chocolate."
Isobel is a woman of shining gifts, but over her adult life she has lost and regained "about 150 pounds" and congregational life has not helped. After 10 years in the same church, no picture of her much-loved partner graces her office. She still can't talk about their lesbian relationship "with anyone in my congregation. Not one person." The secret hurts her integrity and "touches at the core of my being."
And it points to the unhealthy chasm that can appear between who we are, what we profess, and what we do. "We have a table in the middle of our space," Isobel says. "It is an invitation into grace and acceptance, an invitation to be whole and welcome and grace-filled, and then go out and be bread to the world."
While her congregation of excellent cooks does that "very well at some tables," it's "not so good in other places. Our table is central in our worship space," she concludes quietly. "How genuine is it?"
Given that being church doesn't always make us right, or even grace- filled, it is especially important to encourage healthy bodies without conveying the idea that God loves us better if we are thin and muscular. As R. Marie Griffith points out in her just-released study of Christian diet programs and fitness culture, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (University of California Press) "millions of American Christians have made a religious duty out of diet," trying to strictly control their bodies, literally "making a devotion" out of thinness.
Griffith draws on her careful study of American history, and her equally close look at contemporary culture, to describe the way "body type... has come to seem a virtually infallible touchstone of the worth of persons about whom one knows nothing else...."
That is precisely the opposite of the grace we claim as Christians.
And in any case, says Rev. Gailand MacQueen, who teaches psychology of religion at Huntington University in Sudbury, Ont., what constitutes the right weight and shape can be an entirely trendy statement: "Think about the many cultures where brides are treasured by their weight, and seen as healthy," he says -- "often cultures where there are food shortages."
Confronted with strict diets, he suggests that what is needed instead is discernment. "Stay away from foods that are preserved in chemicals, eat less and get exercise."
Butler-Jones, too, says that one size does not fit all. "Some people are genetically bigger than others." Clearly, it's very important to avoid the extra weight that (in addition to heightening the diabetes risk) "puts extra strain on the heart, and joints"; and the high-fat diet that means "greater risk of bowel cancer and breast cancer." At the same time, good sense and moderation are important. "In study after study, balance is key. Do the best you can, but don't get yourself in a knot."
That's what the church can offer: balance. Compassion. No knots, no guilt trips. Because at our best, we know that God loves us deeply, even if we're not size six. And we know that God calls us to include even those who can't afford Spandex, fancy running shoes, or tomatoes all year round. "I think of all the things I'd like to change about myself and can't," says Butler-Jones, "and I have all the assets. What about the poor, the unemployed, the ones with no family to support them?"
Churches have remarkable assets. Church camps, for example -- all those children, swimming, running, playing, exuberantly relating to the natural world in ways that will stand the test of time. In addition to shaping "an important part of their faith" with the access to out-of-doors they offer, says Butler-Jones, camps also provide everyday activities that may survive into adulthood -- keeping us well and fit long after we can no longer do highly organized sports.
And often churches have spacious halls and gyms, where informal games could offer a welcome antidote to the pressures of a changed world.
"When I was a kid," says Butler-Jones, "my parents were comfortable with my taking off after breakfast and showing up again after dark.
Now everything is more organized. Everyone is more concerned. And more people are playing in the house than in the park."
For those of any age on a low income, why not "basic equipment" in a church hall, suggests Newbery, with a fitness instructor or volunteer from the congregation? Seniors can use the church hall for "regular light weight-bearing exercise," he says. And why not "incorporate exercise into many of the weekly activities of the congregation?"
Back to Gail Wild, in Whitby, working out after choir practice every week. She's the non-athletic one in her family, she says, never very flexible. But now, "it's wonderful" how she and others, from the church and outside it, "are keeping our bodies as active as we can.
This church looks at total health," Wild concludes. "They're looking at all of you. That's healing the mind, and soul and body."
