How is your spiritual health?

Monday Ministerial Musings

By Rev. Mark William Ennis

2026 Blog #19

June 8, 2026

How is your spiritual health?

This past year I have had several medical issues and multitudes of treatments. I thank God, my multiple medical teams, and the Christian Support of members of the Community Church of Glen Rock, and especially my family for getting me through these crises and back to a healthy life. During the time of illness, I was constantly sent for tests. The doctors needed these to determine what my condition was and how to treat it. One doctor told me, “First we test and then we treat.” This seems like very good advice. How can we treat without testing and diagnosing?

Several of us at the Community Church agree with that protocol and wished to expand it to include spiritual health as well. How can we assist our neighbors in achieving spiritual health if we don’t know what potential issues these folks are facing? How does one evaluate a person’s spiritual health?

My friend, Dr. Chris Doran suggested that such evaluations are possible. While doing his PhD research, (he is a PhD nurse, not a medical doctor), he used spiritual inventory to evaluate a patient’s spiritual condition. One might ask, why a nurse would wish to know this, but he had an answer. He told me that in his work as a nurse, people who score high on the spiritual inventory have faster recovery times and need pain killing medications less frequently than those who score lower on this inventory.

Whether we like it or not, our spirituality is linked to our health, both emotional and physical. Even as many of our religious congregations have declined, many of our neighbors are suffering from spiritual un-health. Perhaps, this is an opportunity to encounter and build bridges to the secular spiritual seekers in our towns.

Yesterday, Dr. Chris and Dr. Pamela Pater-Ennis, led a team of people at the Pride in the Park event in Gen Rock. This team introduced neighbors to the Hudson River Care and Counseling Center, and the Community Church of Glen Rock. This team asked members of the Pride Community and Allies of that community, to take spiritual inventories. We didn’t know if anyone would participate in taking this survey. The people were willing. Almost fifty people participated and willingly took the survey. I am anxious to see the results. My hunch is that this tool will give us insight into the needs of our neighbors and help us to better reach out to them and meet them where they live.

I thank those volunteers who helped us in this work. I appreciate those people who participated in this study. I pray that God will bless our work and will use this as a tool to reach more people in Jesus’ name. I’m anxious to see the results of this study. Perhaps in the future I will have a blog describing those results.

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