While modern medicine has advanced in many areas, serious chronic illness is on the rise. For many, the gift of life continues amid affliction, including chronic pain, fatigue, and other forms of physical and mental distress.

Most Christians rightly seek healing through prayer and medical interventions. We pray and long for a bodily cure. But what happens when illness persists?

Christians today usually live within a narrow set of storylines about how God works in relation to illness. The chronically ill and their communities often assume God's calling -- to bear witness to God's love -- is paused while they are ill, that a life of discipleship can only resume once they are "healed."

Thankfully, Scripture and church history offer more compelling visions of God’s ongoing calling and work. We need these pathways, which have been forgotten or obscured, to revitalize the modern Christian imagination.

For this reason, the Girod Chair is launching the Faith and Illness Initiative (FII), a think-tank-like set of gatherings with a lofty goal: