For 8 years, I worked in a residential treatment facility for kids with emotional disorders. I started the job after working as a Youth Pastor for several years. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started the job, but over the years, I learned a great deal about mental illness and its treatment. After just a few months I was a better youth minister and I understood more about working with people than I did in the previous 5 years of church work. The experience also prompted me to earn a masters degree in Pastoral Counseling while I was earning my MDIV and certifications for addictions treatment. I’m now finishing my fourth year as a small church pastor. Im not an expert by any stretch, but the mixture of my experiences and my educational background has taught me a great deal about how the church ought to respond to mental illness in our communities. The biggest challenges related to these efforts are a product of folks not understanding the nature of the problem and misunderstanding the need.
- Mental illness is actually illness. It’s common for Christians to assume that folks who suffer from mental illnesses are faking it, that they just need to have more faith, or that they just need to toughen up. This just isn’t true. The reality is far more complicated. Mental illness is often the result of chemical imbalances, past trauma, conditioning, etc. The suffering folks experience is real. Orthodox Christians would never say that polio or arthritis are merely a matter of weak faith. The fact that mental illness takes place in the parts of a person that we cannot look at doesn’t make it less real or less an actual illness.
- It’s not a product of weak faith. We would never tell someone that their physical pain is a product of weak faith or not trusting God. However, there are Christians who would describe anxiety, depression, addiction, or PTSD with those same terms. God gives us the tools to treat physical ailments and we do not decry those who suffer or seek treatment as not trusting God. Struggles with emotional issues brought about by trauma or brain chemistry are just as uncontrollable and breed just as much misery. There is no weakness in seeking help.
- People with mental illnesses suffer. No one would suffer from severe anxiety, clinical depression, addiction, or PTSD if they could just make it stop on their own. It is miserable. I have yet to meet anyone who suffers in these ways who wants it to keep going or thinks it’s no big deal. It is often utterly unbearable, driving them to suicide or self-medication. Their suffering is real and profound.
- Mental illness comes with significant stigma and shame. Many people hear “mental illness” and they get uncomfortable quickly. Our culture tends to look at sufferers with a degree of suspicion. This results in a great deal of shame and fear of judgement. They often don’t seek help or talk to family and friends about their struggles because they are afraid of how they will be perceived.
- Treating mental health problems involves actual medical procedures. It’s sometimes assumed that mental health treatment is just talking or that it’s coddling. However, therapeutic approaches, medications, and the other tools/techniques utilized by mental health practitioners are studied, tested, reviewed, and evaluated for effectiveness. Like any other medical procedures, mental health treatment is medicine. In addition, this means that, with help, sufferers can get better. They can overcome their issues.
- The church has a responsibility. One of the most reassuring aspects of Jesus’ life and ministry was his willingness to engage with folks who were sick, ashamed, and outcasts. For two millennia, the church has led the way in caring for the suffering of this world. Mental illness is a vast, under-addressed area for the church to serve. There are uncounted multitudes of our brothers, sisters, children, friends, and neighbors suffering in silence because they are ashamed or afraid. We have a responsibility to talk about these matters and work toward taking the stigma away from seeking help. Further, churches are uniquely positioned to provide care and comfort to folks who suffer. We need to invite folks in be prepared to help them when they arrive.
One of my favorite stories to read my daughter at bedtime is from The Adventures of Frog and Toad. In the story, Toad bakes a batch of cookies. He and Frog discover that they cannot stop eating the cookies because they are too delicious. They begin to devise ways to prevent themselves from eating the cookies by making it more difficult to give in to temptation. Frog called it: “Building up willpower.” They quickly discovered that if they wanted to eat the cookies badly enough they would find a way around obstacles. Eventually, Frog throws away all the cookies and proclaims: “we have lots and lots of willpower.” To which Toad responds: “You may keep it all, Frog, I am going home now to bake a cake.” It’s a funny story with an interesting point. The problem wasn’t the cookies, the problem was that they wanted the cookies more than they wanted to not eat them. The book of James touches on this idea when it addresses the things that are in our lives that cause temptation. It’s easy to blame God for giving us such temptations. However, temptation starts in us and are a product of our fallenness. In Romans Paul describes how the sin living in us seizes upon the law of God as a standard to rebel against. Sin drives us to do things we hate. He describes sin and the ensuing temptation as powerful and ruling over our bodies. As a result of this powerful force within us, even if the things we want are not in front of us, if we want them badly enough, we will go looking for them. Mind you, it is not the case that desire itself is bad. Desire is natural. Desire for food, pleasure, leisure, security, relationships, being right, or anything else are simply a part of how people are designed. Desire becomes destructive when it loses all checks and begins to cause damage. It can be seen in decisions made simply based on a desire with no concern for inevitable consequences and what is right or wrong. A common example is carelessly spoken words that are regretted the moment they are spoken. Other examples include extramarital affairs, the seemingly iron grip that pornography seems to have over the lives of many men, addictions, eating disorders, spending problems, etc. These typically involve normally healthy desires that become distorted and get out of control. James describes this as being dragged away by our own lusts. Ultimately, it’s important to recognize that the source of the problem is within us.
In general, emotions are a difficult topic for men. This difficulty spans a broad spectrum, from emotionless stoicism on one end, to the uncontrolled passions of aggression, anger, lust, and ambition that have earned the male gender a reputation for acting as the bull in the china shop of their relationships. One of the hallmarks of a mature man is his ability to manage his emotions. This is not full repression of feeling and passionless existence. The stoic philosophers succeeded in producing incomplete men by attempting to avoid one of the fundamental strengths of man. God designed passion into men, that we might reflect his character. You cannot read the scriptures and miss God’s love, joy, sorrow, rage, and jealousy. In short, we were made in the image of a passionate God. Jesus was often angry. He loved folks passionately. He wept at the death of Lazarus, and he mourned over Jerusalem’s ongoing rebellion. It is important to understand that God’s passions are restrained by His will and holiness. Further, it is important to understand that these are qualities of God, they are not God himself.
The topic of manhood is complicated and will take more than one post to properly explore. In the short term, it’s important to establish a basic concept of manhood from which to work. I’d suggest that the place to start is with the source of manhood identity that is built into our world: Boys learn to be men by watching their fathers. This is because parents stand in God’s place in the lives of their children for the first several years of their lives. They provide life, food, shelter, moral guidance, correction, etc. Children’s conception of God is often shaped by their perception of their dads. Genesis tells us that when God created man, He created them in His own image. Fathers (and all men for that matter) are supposed to be copies of God in many respects. We are to share His heart, passions, loves, understanding of family, and work. When dads fail to model this lifestyle and teach their boys to do the same, they create problems. Fortunately, God provides us a more clarified example of manhood in the person of Jesus, who is God made flesh. A boy without a good fatherly model to follow can see ideal manhood in Jesus. When we choose to follow Jesus, our job is to learn to be like him through a lifetime of training, which is discipleship. This is why Christ’s self-sacrificing love and attitude of humble service is the example for husbands. He demonstrates the ideal manner of intimate relationship through his relationship with the church.
It’s easy to picture Jesus as a pollyanna-type figure or as the feathered haired guy in a bathrobe that we all encountered on flannel graphs in Sunday School as kids. Fortunately, the tame version of the Son of God is far from accurate. C.S. Lewis captured Jesus’ identity best when he wrote: “He’s not safe! But, he’s good.” Jesus’ integrity, passion, penchant for action, grace, wisdom, willingness to speak openly (even offensively if necessary), self-sacrificing service, and lifetime focus on making the world better are just a few of the qualities that make Jesus is the ideal standard of manhood. He is the ideal mold from which men were meant to be cast. It is from Him that we learn how God desires us to be. Once we know, our job is to enter training to become like him.
Patching Cracks 
