Salus Forum December 3, 2025

And let me just tell you one more story. My sister Louise is a pastor at a big downtown church in Denver. They have a homeless shelter in the basement. It’s a shelter for working men who have to get a job. And one of them had graduated from the shelter and was living in an apartment, but he had schizophrenia and is intermittently homeless. And he showed up at church and said: “I was in the emergency room and I’ve been out three nights. I got cold. It was, you know, zero degrees in Denver, and I’m really worried about my feet.” So, she took him back to the hospital. He had been there three days before.

And he was not adequately cared for when he was in the emergency room after cold exposure. In fact, the clinician in the hospital did not take off his shoes in the emergency room of a homeless man in the dead of winter who had chills. So, when she took him back, he ended up, as you can imagine, frostbite. He had to have the three toes amputated. So, she called me and said “What do I do?” And I said: “Well, I think you write a sternly worded letter to the administrators”. And so, she did. And over a couple of weeks of sternly worded letters from the pastor, he was offered outpatient, full outpatient care, wound care, all the things that you would need to recover from an amputation. But it required a pastoral advocate on behalf.

People enter the hospital and they lose Agency. I think we know this from our own constitution. When a president goes into the hospital or under the knife, they transfer power because they lose agency. So, that’s one place, this support for agency. And then all the way to public health, where churches may be giving vaccines. I use the term church. I mean, health, I mean, faith communities. We talked to pastors and imams and rabbis about this. There were similarities throughout. So, when prayer is not enough, there is an additional role for clergy in healthcare.

Jeremy

Jack, what this triggered for me was thinking about community third spaces. I think that’s a generic term given to both private and public spaces where people have a tendency to congregate, churches being one of them. You know the idea around the AED. All these sorts of healthcare elements entering into that zone are probably a good thing. And yet it probably happens in a relatively haphazard way, right? There’s high schools that have those, but not all high schools do. The under-resourced ones don’t.

So, it is an interesting zone of public health needs manifesting without healthcare resources available. So, what you’re describing is what pulls the clergy in to almost a family role of a care advocate with some remarkable success stories that you shared there, but that takes a lot of agency on the part of the clergy.