Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by John Parke.
The Rev. John Parke was an Episcopal priest and healing minister who led the International Order of St. Luke the Physician for about ten years. He was born in the old Dickinson house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Emily Dickinson had written many of her poems, and his father’s healing from tuberculosis set the course of his ministry. He spoke at camps of the Camps Farthest Out in California beginning in the late 1950s and later at camps in Wisconsin and Indiana.
In 1916 John’s father, the Rev. Hervey Parke, rector of Grace Church in Amherst, bought the old Dickinson house. John was the fourth of his children, born there that October. “We’d hardly moved into that home and I decided this was a good place to be born. And so I was born right there in the house.” John and his brother shared a corner bedroom that had once belonged to Emily Dickinson. “It was the room that used to belong to Emily Dickinson where she wrote a great many of her poems.”
He took piano lessons there, which eventually led to his becoming an organist. But one of his most vivid childhood memories came when he was about five. He walked in on his father kneeling in prayer before an open window. “Quietly I backed out rather embarrassed but deeply moved to know that my father’s religion was no hypocrisy.”
That faith was tested when his father came down with tuberculosis. A doctor privately gave him about three months to live. Hervey Parke resigned his parish and went alone to a cabin in the hills near San Diego, where the Rev. John Gaynor Banks laid hands on him and anointed him.
In 1924 the bishop of Los Angeles called Hervey Parke to the Church of the Angels in Pasadena, and the family crossed the country by train. The following spring, on Easter morning, something happened that John never forgot. “As he gave out that Easter text for the first time in years his voice came out clear. No huskiness at all. My father knew that he had his sign.”
X-rays later showed only healed scars. His father did not die within three months. He lived another twenty-seven years and had a fruitful ministry. Along with Banks, he helped found the Order of St. Luke, the healing ministry that would later become central to John’s own life.
John attended Kent School and Princeton, graduating in 1938, and then went to the General Theological Seminary in New York. He was ordained at Grace Church in Amherst in 1942 and married Joan Lee Cole of Dublin. During World War II he served as an Army chaplain with the 65th Infantry Division in Europe. He later served Episcopal parishes in Massachusetts, Newport Beach, California, Scottsdale, Arizona, and Falls Church, Virginia. John and Joan raised four children, Richard, David, Robert, and Emily.
But it was at the Camps Farthest Out that John learned to talk to God in a new way. “I didn’t really learn anything about this until I came to the camps farthest out. I didn’t really know how to talk to God in an informal way.” Coming from the Episcopal Church, he had been accustomed to more formal prayer. “So much of our praying, and particularly in the Episcopal Church, is rather stilted.”
He became an active part of the camps. In 1958 he taught at the California healing camp with Ethel Banks, widow of John Gaynor Banks. In 1959 he gave the opening talk at Redlands and led the rhythms.
In July 1960 he gave four talks at the California Sierra Family camp, bringing his children along. He loved the physical freedom of the rhythms. “I love to dance. Perhaps that shocks you. But I love to dance.” “You get your body limbered up, and then your spirit begins to limber up, too.”
John also understood that CFO was not primarily about having impressive leaders. He valued the ordinary person who came with an open heart. “The greatest people in the camps farthest out aren’t necessarily the leaders at all.” “A humble person is a good appreciator.”
For about ten years John led the International Order of St. Luke the Physician in America. He conducted healing missions across North America and spent six weeks speaking in Australia in 1975. When he returned to CFO, he continued to connect healing with the life of Christian community. In 1977 he opened the Wisconsin camp by telling the story of his life and his father’s healing. “Isn’t it perhaps the reason why Dr. Glenn Clark founded the camps farthest out? He knew the value of Christian family living.”
The next year he came to Indiana, where Tommy Tyson welcomed him. “And he’s used, like Peter, to cast a healing shadow everywhere he goes. John, I love you. I’m glad you’re here.”
John’s approach to healing prayer was simple. He described it in four pairs of actions: “to lift and love, to see and send, to touch and to tell, to relax and to release or relinquish.” But for him, the method was never the important part. Love was. “If you don’t have any love in your prayers they’re not going to carry any power.”
He taught that healing prayer was not primarily a matter of asking God to heal someone, but of affirming what God was doing. “It’s not so much an asking prayer when you’re praying for healing, but it’s an affirming prayer, a believing prayer, a telling prayer.” The person praying was not the healer. “He’s the healer. You’ve simply been the channel, and you’re now going to release them with thanksgiving.”
After Joan’s death, John married Eleanor Anderson in 1982. In retirement he became a canon of Christ Church Cathedral in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he began weekly healing prayers during Sunday services. He also taught that prayer shapes the inner life and therefore the direction of a person’s life. “You can choose your heaven or your hell today by the level of your thoughts and your spirituality.” “Prayer is the highest kind of thinking there is.”
John Parke died on March 15, 2017, at the age of one hundred. The healing ministry that began with his father’s remarkable recovery from tuberculosis had become his own life’s work, carried through parish ministry, military chaplaincy, the Camps Farthest Out, and decades of prayer for the sick.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.