Mental Health & The Church
Two terms not often combined together (not on good terms at least). The church has, for too long, been resistant to the reality and the treatment of mental health.
I hesitate to use the word thankfully, but…thankfully, Covid shed much needed light on this issue. Not just church members, but our neighbors, our community, our families were increasingly lonely, anxious, and fearful. Covid highlighted the necessity for a larger focus on treating mental health; and the church finally began to recognize it and implement it into ministry.
[As a side note: I don’t think Covid was the only thing affecting, and drawing attention to, mental health. But I think it’s fair to say that mental health awareness, knowledge, and treatment in the last 4 years has far surpassed what it was pre-covid.]
The church still has quite a ways to go to learn about mental health and to treat it equal to physical or spiritual health; but they’re making progress.
As we think about this topic of mental heath and the church, I want to cover 2 things:
What the church has done wrong
How do we respond?
What the Church Has Done Wrong
Ancient humanity and the early church believed just about everything was supernatural. If they couldn’t explain it, it was from God (or the gods)!
The book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes explains this for us.
“Natural things are things we understand. Supernatural things are things we don’t yet understand. Lightning was once considered miraculous (supernatural). The major resistance to Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod came from clergy, who objected that it removed one of the instruments of divine justice. Once we understood something about how lightning works we stopped considering it supernatural.”
We always joke about God striking someone down with lightning for doing something bad, but before we understood the science of lightning it was really believed that lightning was an act of divine justice. How silly does that sound to us now?!
[On second thought, central Florida is the lightning capital of the country. And we’re all too familiar with those “Florida man” headlines. So maybe some lightning strikes are still justifiable divine punishment 😆]
But it wasn’t just nature that we misunderstood for so long, it was the mind too.
Before PTSD was discovered in the 1900’s, it was believed that a person’s PTSD symptoms were due to poor moral character. Combat veterans came back from war, traumatized by what they experienced, and we chalked it up to immorality or, yet again, divine justice.
This is the mode of thinking the church has operated under for so many years. It has applied spiritual solutions to perceived spiritual problems.
Someone is depressed? “Oh, well they just don’t have enough faith.” Someone struggles with suicidal ideations? “They clearly don’t have the love and joy of Jesus in their heart.” Someone experienced complex trauma? “If they only prayed, they could be healed.”
This is where the church has failed. It has failed the people who needed hope in their most desperate times.
How Do We Respond?
The previous section challenges the church to take responsibility for how it has mishandled mental health. Now this section challenges us to take responsibility for how we respond to that information.
Let me first say, if you’ve sought asylum in a church and were hurt by it, the most important thing for you to do first is to seek healing from that. Neither you, nor the church, will benefit from forced, continued relationship until there is healing and reconciliation. It may take a season of separation, it may take a move to another church, it may take some hashing out of conflict with the church leadership. But you need to process and prioritize your healing before moving on to this next recommended response.
Our response to the church should be one of mercy, accountability, and willingness to help.
In giving the church mercy we recognize that, for centuries, they really didn’t know any better in some regards. They saw through the same lens and knowledge that the generations before them saw: lightning was always an act of God’s justice, PTSD symptoms were a character issue, etc.
Though the church incorrectly assumed mental health to be spiritual-related issues, they at least tried to help resolve those issues. (Excluding the one’s who weren’t genuinely helping but, rather, acting from a place of judgment or harsh criticism.)
The method of help may have been wrong, but the heart to help was there nonetheless. The true church, the body of Christ, always seeks to love and care for others. Sometimes they just need better guidance on how to do that.
In holding the church accountable, we call them to do better than they’ve done in the past.
We ask pastors with zero counseling education to refer people to licensed counselors instead of simply handing people a list of Bible verses. We encourage church leaders to invest some time into educating themselves more on mental health. We petition for the church to bring in speakers or group counselors who are experts in this field. We ask that mental health be addressed from the pulpit so that awareness grows and stigmas decrease.
Lastly, we must have a willingness to help. The church needs help! Pastors have not been taught mental health in seminary school; most church leaders are volunteers and just as uninformed as most of the members.
The church is a beautifully diverse body of members. It needs teachers, doctors, mechanics, lawyers, artists, landscapers, and yes, it absolutely needs those educated in mental health.
If a church truly loves others and wants to help, they will be open and willing to do more for mental health. But they need the help and guidance of others who know the healthiest, safest ways to go about it.
How can the church do better if we are not willing to help them do better? Not just for our sake, but for the sake of future generations.
-Stephanie Lauren Auman
