There is a secret that the people in your church have and they don’t want you to know. They will avoid you at the weekly service so that you won’t guess it, or they will work themselves to the bone in your church in order to prove to you and themselves that they don’t have it.
At the end of the day, they can’t deny that what they are dealing with is real and they need help. The issue I am referring to is Mental Health.
You might be thinking that you have a healthy congregation and I am sure for the most part that is true, but ALL Christian families will deal with a mental health issue at some point in their lives.
These issues could come in the form of depression, anxiety, relationship problems, parenting issues, grief, substance use, or even roadblocks with forgiving someone who has wronged them.
All of us will be impacted either directly or indirectly by mental health, and many will not know what to do about it.
Most people don't grow up in a home where talking about these kinds of issues is common place, and in many cases it can even feel unacceptable.
Our World Today
In the US, 1 in 5 adults have a mental health issue, such as clinical depression and anxiety .
This is not including all the marriages that are struggling with conflict, communication issues, financial difficulties, or even extra-marital affairs.
Almost 1 in 5 teenagers have a mental health issue and 13% of children ages 8-15 have a mental health issue.
Our Church Today
As a pastor, you would hope that the statistics are different for a Christian population, but a study conducted by LifeWay shows the reality of the issue in our churches.
In this study, 79% of pastors said that they knew someone personally who had a diagnosis of depression. When someone is diagnosed with clinical depression, they have to meet specific symptoms, such as not doing things they once loved or sleeping or eating more or less than normal for over a 2 week period.
It was also seen that 76% of these pastors knew someone who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The symptoms of bipolar tend to center around alternating depression symptoms and mania symptoms.
What these statistics tell us is that there are a lot of hurting people in our world and especially in our churches that need a safe place to talk about what they are going through. It would make sense that the most safe place to be would be with the Creator and Sustainer since He is the one that made the person and knew their days before they even were born.
As the church, we are meant to be that bridge from Creator to the created, but mental illness or relational and emotional struggles tend to be a silent terrorist in our Christian communities.
Church members often abide by the unspoken rule that you do not talk about your mental disorder or current struggle. Here are just a few reasons why your flock may be afraid to discuss these real issues:
1. Christians aren’t suppose to have mental illness.
Sometimes it seems that once we become a Christian that all the difficulties in life should change. This is just not the case. We all know that we still struggle with sin, we still struggle with physical health issues, we still struggle with relational issues, and, yes, we still struggle with mental health.
We are all still broken people when we become a Christian, we just now have a “hope and a future.” Also, we do see that people can develop mental health struggles as life goes on.
For example, a person can experience symptoms of anxiety if a person has gone through a break-in or robbery. This person can begin to feel scared at night when the robbery happened or can feel fear when they hear a cup falling out of the cabinet because it can remind the person of the robbery. These are some symptoms of a diagnosis called Post-Truamtic Stress Disorder or PTSD.
2. Mental health issues start in some type of personal sin
There is an assumption that ALL mental health issues are the result of sin. This is just simply not the case. Let’s take that example of someone who experienced a robbery and has fear around thinking that could occur again.
The person that has PTSD did not commit a sin in order to have that fear, but it was someone who did something against them. There are many reasons why a person may have a particular diagnosis, but it doesn’t necessarily come from sin, yet is the result of a fallen world.
There are some mental health issues that are a result of sin, such as alcoholism or substance abuse. These diagnoses often do have an element of repentance that needs to occur and a turning away from past behaviors that have become hurtful habits that affect the person and others.
But even alcoholism is often a persons desire to self medicate or find a coping mechanism to deal with their life in a very unhealthy way. Addicts are not people that should be looked down upon, but instead helped in dealing with a situation that is going to be very hard to overcome.
3. You are not trusting or seeking the Lord enough
Often times, people experience issues that they really don’t know how to handle. They may be praying and seeking God, but as we all know from personal experience, God sometimes is silent or it is not evident to us how God wants us to proceed.
This is why God has given “counselors” to help people think through the issues that they cannot see a way out. Solomon, the son of King David, discusses the importance of “counselors” in a person’s life throughout the book of Proverbs.
He did not say that a person who needs guidance is not trusting or seeking God, he is saying to seek out biblically sound counselors who may be outside of the issue or been through something similar in his or her own life.
4. Mental Health is not a physical problem
Before the actual counseling begins, an assessment is completed that goes through different aspects of a person’s life. One of those components is a person’s physical health. Some physical problems can mimic mental health issues and vice versa. For example, a person who has a deficient thyroid could look like they have clinical depression and a person who looks like one is having a heart attack could be having a panic attack. Many counselors try to rule out a physical problem before working on the counseling issue.
5. The Bible doesn’t talk about Mental Health.
It is a myth that the Bible does not talk about mental health; it just does not name it the disorders as we have become accustomed. For example, if you read the book of Ecclesiates, you will note a great deal of depressive language, such as “Meaningless, meaningless, all this is meaningless.” Fear or anxiety is also talked about much in the Bible and how we should “cast our cares on the Lord for He cares of us.”
6. Psychology/Counseling is from a secular perspective and therefore does not co-inside with the Bible.
It is true that many of the theories of counselor come from what is a called a Humanistic point of view. Humanism focuses on the goodness of man and not that of God. This does not mean that the information that can be seen in counseling and psychology is necessarily wrong, it just means that they have the wrong perspective.
It is very similar to medical science, just because a scientist believes in Evolution does not mean that he or she cannot find the truth that God has allowed anyone to find. For example, would you not take the medicine that an evolutionist prescribes for your Cancer, just because they do not acknowledge your God? Many of the concepts we find in counseling and psychology do align with the Bible, but there are some that do not. We can take what is good and right and we can leave out what is bad and wrong.
There are so many other reasons why your members believe that there is an unspoken rule about not talking about the issues they have that require counseling.
The main point is that these people are hurting people that we could help if we allowed for a safe anonymous place for them to get good information about counseling from a Christian perspective. It is important to have the possibility of getting help in a way that they would feel more comfortable to take the next step in getting help.
