Diagnosing to Death

As part of my pastor-type duties, I often get to sidle up next to medical science and technology real cozy-like.  I am in emergency rooms, intensive care units and hospital rooms on a pretty regular basis, and I care for people with a wide range of ailments and malfunctions.  Sometimes I can even help translate the medical jargon for someone who is a little too scared or intimidated to ask questions of the medical staff, or just doesn't think fast enough to ask the doctor when they flutter in during rounds.  I joke about the old commercial, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV."
It's actually pretty easy to explain most medical procedures, many of them amount to little more than some basic plumbing repairs.  Once you've talked to four or five people who are having a given procedure, you're pretty clear about what's going on.  I always try to be clear about where my expertise ends though, I do not dispense medical care or advice, and I never make diagnoses.
Of all the things in medicine, diagnosis can be the trickiest part.  There are so many things about how our bodies work that we don't really fully understand, and oftentimes things happen that have no obvious cause.  The process a hospital is really a thing to behold.  In the ER they stabilize, treat obvious trauma and try to alleviate as much pain as possible, then they pass you on to an intensive care unit or a regular care unit, where attending physicians start to try and really figure out for sure what's wrong.
In the ER you are a piece of meat, and their job is to keep you breathing until someone can figure out what to really do with you.  The ER burns through doctors and nurses who aren't cut out for it in a big hurry, because not everyone can deal with everything being an emergency all the time.  They want quick, obvious answers and have no time for the nuances of medicine, if you have chest pain, they're going to assume you're having a heart attack until they can prove otherwise, it's just the way it works.  A lot of the time, the diagnosis is obvious and the ER folks are all over it, sometimes it takes longer.
That's what the rest of the hospital is all about.  Things get a lot slower in the rest of the hospital, nurses care for patients and doctors make their rounds, tests are ordered and performed, impressive amounts of data are collected on each patient, and here diagnoses are more carefully guarded.  Here nurses know better than to try and tell you what's wrong before the doc is on the scene, even if they know.  Here protocols begin to rule the day and here things get much more frustrating.  Here you just have to lay there and wait for things to happen, and no one seems quite as upset about you being sick as you are.
There is a lot of diagnosing of the church going on these days.  Everybody is pretty sure there's something wrong: we're shrinking, we're struggling, we're arguing and fighting among ourselves, we're not what we used to be.  But the diagnoses are all over the place: we're too liberal, we're too conservative, we play stodgy old music, we play shallow happy-clappy music, we're not relevant, we're trying too hard to be relevant, we're stuck in the past, we have forgotten our roots, we're not welcoming of outsiders, we're too clingy and desperate whenever new people pop their heads in the door, we get it wrong about women, homosexuals, abortion, economic policy, politics, worship style, heaven, hell, salvation...
Breathe.
I've been through it a thousand times (not hyperbole) in the past ten years.  I will read a book, an article, a blog, about what is wrong.  I will say to myself: "Wow, that really does describe our dysfunction and malfunction pretty well!"  Then I'll keep reading, and the hope and relief that you can sometimes feel when you finally know what's wrong, begins to fade with each sentence.  The good, smart and faithful doctors that have made the diagnosis have no idea what to do about it.  What's worse, sometimes they think they have an idea, but you begin to see a pattern.
The prescriptions are one of two things. The first group of prescriptions are all forms of: Try Harder.  These, while they may be clever, and might even produce some short term gains, are truly doomed.  Most of the time, we pastor-types are beguiled by them, because we feel like we NEED to do something.  We are ER docs at heart, crises can stroke our ego, and make us feel needed and even kind of godlike in our quick diagnoses and responses.  We love a new program, a new ministry, some kind of flashy "technological" fix, something that promises to get the church "on the right track."
Second, and probably more biblical, is to take care of the little things, one factor at a time, trying to achieve healthy equilibrium in key systems.  It's frustrating, but often there is nothing to but wait, and maybe just re-evaluate your attitude, learn to trust God with all this out of control stuff.  This is pretty good advice, and it may alleviate some of the anxiety, and it may actually treat the underlying disease (which is, I think, an obsession with worldly success), but it feels too slow and not commensurate with the severity of the crisis.  It can feel like you're giving up, like you're just calling in hospice and going for palliative care, maybe sometimes that's what it is.  But at it's best it is simply the only way to take the deliberate steps to treat a very persistent and often mysterious condition called being human.