Category: mental health

Why Do Christians Find It So Hard To Be Human?

The headline is a thought I keep having in light of the ongoing empathy wars. Currently, many theologically minded social media denizens are debating whether or not empathy toward others is a sin. If you have missed it, catch up here, here, and here.

I am triggered to write again about empathy by this Gospel Coalition article by Kevin DeYoung and a video conversation involving two Columbia International University professors. Let me briefly describe each influence.

Weep But Within Limits

For his part, DeYoung acknowledges that Christians should “comfort the sad” but he wants to make sure we don’t take it too far.  He says, “But our sympathy is not untethered to all other considerations.” DeYoung is very worried that weeping with those who weep could be a license to weep about some naughtiness.

I think I understand what DeYoung is worried about, but I can’t help but ask: Do Christians have a reputation for caring too much about people we disagree with? If anything, the stereotype of Christians is loud angry judgment. Do we need articles pulling us back from the edge of loving and caring too much or do we need something else? I mean we are debating whether or not the very human trait of empathy is a sin. Why are Christians finding it so hard to just be human?

Empathy is Human

And empathy is human, after all, as professors Steve Johnson and Seth Scott of Columbia International University remind us in this video. They tell us that empathy is based in our neurology (via mirror neurons) and a very human response to the plight of others. When normal humans see suffering in others, their brains activate similar feelings. We can share another person’s perspective, but that doesn’t mean that we lose our objectivity or ability to reason.

Having said that, Johnson and Scott correctly note that it is possible to lose perspective. Within counseling and psychology, this is termed codependence or enmeshment, not empathy. These words are more descriptive of what actually happens.

Humans without empathy are at great risk for narcissism and a limited emotional life. Johnson points out that psychopaths are deficient in their ability to feel what others feel. Below is the video which I recommend.

Empathy is built in to most of us and leads to lots of good in the world. So go ahead, weep with those who weep. You don’t have to evaluate everything first. Maybe you don’t agree with the one you are weeping with, and you can tell them that in due time; but first they will know you are a redeemed human who cares. That could make all the difference.

Postcards from Phoenix: When Church Divides a Family

This is the second Postcard from Phoenix and it comes from former The Trinity Church worship staff member Luke Chase. Young Mr. Chase describes a difficult situation where he felt he had to choose between loyalty to his family and loyalty to The Trinity Church.

When a child is torn between loyalty to a pastor and loyalty to parents, the psychological dissonance is incredibly intense and disruptive. The pastor claims to speak for God, while your parents are, of course, your only parents. It is simply wrong for a pastor to usurp these relationships. If anything, church should attempt to build and rebuild family relationships.  It should be noted that Luke’s brother Landon is married to Mark Driscoll’s daughter, Ashley.

The other disturbing feature of Luke’s postcard is his description of how he felt he had to demonstrate loyalty to the church over his friends. He said his associations and friendships were monitored with angry confrontations from leaders when he associated with non-approved people. This is quite troubling and something that I am hearing from others at The Trinity Church. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this in another postcard or two.

 

Dear Warren:

I recently learned the reason why my family no longer attends The Trinity Church. As you now know, The Trinity Church is, until just recently, where I worked as a worship assistant, and acted as the interim worship director, and where my brother Landon is a pastor. My parents did not tell me the reasons they stopped attending in order to allow me to stay at the church so I could, as they said, “walk in my gifting.”

I had no idea why they stopped coming to church with us about 18 months ago. If something had happened they surely would have told me, right? I mean they never talked about the church, and for the most part I stopped talking to them about my work life. At the same time they went silent, I did too. I couldn’t tell them they had been deemed as “toxic” by the leadership, could I? Also, my 50+ hours work weeks resulted in us not having real conversations for far too long.

While I learned a lot and did have some buffer of protection from Pastor Dustin Blatnik who was my mentor and I consider to be a friend, my time on staff had its challenges. This problem was amplified once Pastor Dustin was let go and I was discouraged by the other pastors from continuing to associate with him.

The church leaders dictated who I was allowed to be friends with. There were some employees I was allowed to spend time with outside of work, probably because of their trust rating. Other employees I was told would be fired soon, and that if I were to hang out with them I might also be fired. Ironically a friend who respected my decision when I ultimately decided to resign and allowed me time to process on my schedule paid a price for being seen with me. He was seen hanging out with me the next week, and he was promptly fired and told that he was not a good fit.

On several occasions I was pulled into private rooms for disciplinary conversations. The infractions ranged from parking in the wrong lot to not being active with other workers when I had more important tasks to do. My supervisors Tyler Johnson, Galen Balenski, and even the campus Pastor Brandon Anderson resorted to cursing and intimidating me. Surprisingly enough, those motivational talks didn’t earn my trust or motivate me to please them more.

During my parent’s absence I had to listen to staff repeatedly tell me that my mom and dad were toxic. It struck me as odd since this is what is said of the other in-laws of the Driscoll kids and even of Pastor Brandon Anderson’s in-laws. In fact, their continued presence in my life was viewed as such a threat to my development as a REAL MAN that I was offered a pay raise simply for moving out of that “toxic” environment by Pastor Eden, Pastor Landon, and John Welnick. It was even implied that if I didn’t move out soon enough I could be fired. As a result I had to pretend like I agreed in order to save my job but in reality I would just day dream about getting out of the church.

An important note here is that my parents adopted me at 9 months old and have loved, parented and invested in me well to this day. They have led large growing integrity filled ministries in Seattle and Arizona for more than 15 years and clearly are not toxic people – I mean google their names and you will not find a bunch of dead bodies behind their bus! They love their kids and were willing to suffer in order to avoid causing any further division between them.

When I finally did ask them what happened I was angered to learn that Pastor Mark Driscoll yelled at and wounded my mom emotionally. My dad had tried to restore the relationship, but Pastor Mark did not feel like he had done anything wrong. It was after this incident that they were declared toxic in an attempt to explain why the church was no longer in fellowship with them.

That is when I resigned. When it became clear that the abuse I had experienced wasn’t an isolated thing that was normal in the workplace, but a pattern of behavior that I keep discovering goes far beyond what I first knew. While I love my brother and am sorry that I don’t get to see him as much now that we are not working together, I just couldn’t continue to work for an organization that required its employees to live in fear of being fired and was actively speaking poorly of my parents.

With sadness from Phoenix,

Luke Chase

 

Read all of the Postcards from Phoenix

For more on The Trinity Church, click here

For a summary of recent controversies surrounding The Trinity Church, click here

Christians, Pastors, and Mental Health Treatment

Desiring God, the ministry of John Piper, continues to receive negative reaction to a Twitter message about mental health posted on Tuesday (2/6/18).


Many readers, including me, felt the tweet implied that the cause of mental illness is a lack of faith. However, many believers experience emotional distress and many non-believers don’t. The tweet and later effort to put it in the context of a 2007 article fell flat. Adding insult to injury, Desiring God had nothing else to say, leaving the tweet in place and offering no apology. As Phoenix Preacher Michael Newnham wrote, “Being a Christian Celebrity Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry…”

Being a Christian Celebrity Doesn’t Mean You Are an Expert at Everything

Some of them think they are. And their fans often put them in that role. I rather like what Newnham has to say about his approach as a pastor to mental health concerns.

As a pastor my “expertise” is limited and I’m as broken and fallible as you are.
In some ways, maybe more so.
I don’t know how to fix your sex life, raise your kids, manage your finances, or treat your ills.
I’m not even that good at what I’m trained to do.
My job is to help you grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus, just as I am growing as well.
My job is to be present when you need me, to the best of my ability.
My job is to pray with and for you, that God will give you wisdom about the problems that are beyond my scope of expertise…which are most of them.
Sometimes, my job is to give you a referral to someone I trust can help you.

This is really good. Keep all of the Desiring God ministries and give me men and women like this in community churches everywhere.

Therapy Helps

The Desiring God tweeter should meet some Christians who found help from psychotherapy. I am the first to acknowledge (and call out) the shoddy and quack therapists, but I also know that therapy can be a lifeline to people when everything else (including the church) has failed them. Read the response of this Christian blogger with who responded to a challenge about therapy.

Last night I read a disturbing sentiment on someone’s blog. In effect, she said she doesn’t support therapy because there is nothing therapy can provide that can’t be provided through a relationship with God. This disturbs me because so many Christians feel this way or similar, and it is essentially a way of saying that all mental illness or emotional issues are a result of a broken relationship with God or a failure of faith. I can’t tell you how hard it is to hear this; I lost many friends who made this conclusion out of ignorance or arrogance.

In response, she wrote:

The first thing to be said here is that yes, God can and does have the ability to heal anything. Read this blog if you doubt that. Yes, my hard work and new variations of meds and finding the right (and strange) combination of meds matters, along with many other things like vitamins and diet and sunshine, but that I’m in remission (partial or otherwise) is nothing less than a miracle.
However, I firmly believe that God uses tools to heal. For those with mental illness, one of those tools can be therapy. I don’t know a single therapist (even the really bad ones I’ve had and there were several of those) who have claimed to be a cure for anything just by themselves. Instead, therapy provides support while you do what needs done, just like a cast supports a fractured arm.
Bipolar illness damages my relationship with God. I am not good at connecting with anyone and I need help to do so. That’s one place therapy comes into play. I also need help with things that should be basic. Reading the Bible and understanding it is one of them. I can’t follow a “real” Bible. I use a children’s version when I can, but truthfully that’s not a lot. I just have a lot of emotions surrounding the inability to handle the real Bible that make it hard to stomach my watered down one. Maybe a better person wouldn’t struggle with the anger that I can’t be an adult in all things, but I do. It’s a side effect of an illness that took away so much of what I wanted in life.

This person didn’t get sick by staring in a mirror, nor was the remission due to looking away from it. The Desiring God-style advice yielded frustration and as she said, condemnation from Christians. I urge pastors to put aside fear and reach out to local experts in mental health for referrals when someone in your congregation needs help. Not all encounters will go well but begin seeking referral sources now as you would sources for other medical and health specialties.
A Christian organization which may provide assistance is Christian Association for Psychological Studies.

Desiring God and Mental Health: Name It Claim It for Your Brain (UPDATED)

Update at the end of the post…
Last week, I wrote about Kenneth and Gloria Copeland who think you can speak cures for PTSD and the flu. Today, I present a different form of name it claim it – John Piper’s Desiring God and anti-mirror therapy for mental health. Earlier today, Desiring God tweeted:


Repeat after me: Mental health is health. Mental illness is illness. Brain is body.
I suspect John Piper would cringe to think he has something in common with the Copelands but turning mental health into a spiritual fruit is in that ballpark.
Copeland says soldiers can get rid of their PTSD with a dose of Scripture. Desiring God prescribes a spiritual refocus as if those who are mentally healthy are spiritually sound.
Perhaps I am sensitive to this message due to my clinical experience with Christians. I have seen the damaging effects of messages like this and know how Christians with mental health diagnoses hear this.
Tweets like the one from Desiring God reinforce the misconception that mental health conditions can be overcome by willpower or positive thinking. Those who struggle have to deal with their illness and the stigma from those in the church who spiritualize their illness. Although beyond the scope of this post, an important issue is that, generally speaking, evangelicals have not grappled with the reality of brain as body. Consciousness arises from brain and does not reside in a spiritual substance independent of body. Like it or not, if you don’t deal with this, I don’t think you understand who we are as human beings. Knock out certain parts of our brain and we become different people. I don’t think I have ever heard a sermon or Sunday school series on the religious significance of our brains.
Some people using the Tweet advice will find comfort because they have positive associations in their brains to images of God which might take their minds off a negative personal preoccupation. However, someone else with different brain chemistry and history may not make the same associations. They may try to work their brains in the same way, but due to something out of their conscious control, their feelings do not respond in the same way. They do not and cannot find mental health no matter how long they stop staring in the mirror.
When those who don’t succeed with anti-mirror therapy go to church, they feel even worse because their faith is questioned. They are told, even if subtly or indirectly, that they don’t have enough faith. If they just believed harder or put God first, or dealt with the sin in their lives, then the advice would work.
Last year, a friend of mine wrote about the frustration of depression:

Occasionally, bouts of depression are triggered by obvious catalysts, like losing a job or loved one or some kind of overt trauma. Often, though, nothing is “wrong”. We’re not upset or sad or angry or stressed about anything particular, but our body is deploying hormones as though we’re being attacked.
It is these episodes that are most frustrating to the friends and family of people who have depression; they don’t know what to do to help because there’s seemingly nothing wrong. The victims of those moments find it doubly frustrating, as a silent, crushing dread slowly bears down on our souls, challenging us to find a name for it.

This frustration is compounded by Christians conflating mental health with spiritual status. If the Desiring God tweet had said enlightenment or satisfaction or something other than mental health would come from staring at God’s beauty, that would be fine. I hope John Piper and his crew will pull that tweet and clarify that they are not the Copelands.
 
UPDATE (2/6/18): Not long after I published this article, Desiring God posted the following Tweet:


The link is to a 2007 tribute by John Piper to Clyde Kilby. This follow up tweet is confusing because the original tweet which aroused so much reaction isn’t found in the 2007 article. The closest statement to it is this statement attributed to Kilby by Piper:

Stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, and start drinking in the remedies of God in nature.

This isn’t at all what Desiring God originally tweeted. The “remedies of God in nature” could easily refer to medication or therapy or an experience in nature. Since Piper quoted it approvingly I don’t really know what Kilby meant. In any case, I am less concerned with the Kilby article and more concerned with the spin engaged in by whoever is running the Twitter account at Desiring God.

Kenneth Copeland Issues Confusing New Statement About PTSD

Yesterday afternoon, The State (SC) newspaper ran a story with this headline:

PTSD patients with weak faith should visit doctor, televangelist tells Fort Jackson

The televangelist in the title is Kenneth Copeland who, at the last minute before his controversial scheduled speech to troops at Fort Jackson, Columbia, SC, issued a new confusing statement about post-traumatic stress disorder.  The full statement is provided at that article; I think the title of the news article is accurate.
You’ll recall that Kenneth Copeland, along with self-styled historian David Barton, told soldiers suffering with PTSD to get rid of PTSD by reading Bible verses and rebuking Satan. That advice brought condemnations from a variety of Christian and other groups, including those who advocate for veterans.
In his new statement, Copeland denigrates the faith of people who seek medical help while appearing to give his blessing to treatment.  He says:

From our perspective, a Christian should ask the Lord what steps of recovery should be taken to receive natural help for the disorder. Many Christian organizations exist to give Bible-based help to those that suffer from PTSD.
Our first priority as Christians should always be to find scriptures that offer hope for healing and deliverance from the maladies that we are confronted with. Prayer, application of God’s Word, and ministry from professionals will bring the lasting help that those suffering need.

Brother Copeland would be the first to tell you the doctor is your best friend if you are sick and your healing has not yet fully shown up. It takes time for your faith to develop. For that reason, it is perfectly all right to pursue medical attention as well. In fact, to refuse to consult a doctor or perhaps stop taking medication (prescription or over-the-counter) before faith is fully developed for healing is potentially dangerous. That would be considered ‘presumptuous’ faith.

This is double talk. On his broadcast in 2013, he told PTSD sufferers

Any of you suffering from PTSD right now, you listen to me. You get rid of that right now. You don’t take drugs to get rid of it. It doesn’t take psychology. That promise right there will get rid of it.

In this command, Copeland addressed anyone suffering from PTSD. Now he wants people to think he qualifies his advice. He didn’t apologize or say he was wrong before. He simply pretended he didn’t say it. The answer is still the same. Develop your faith, get rid of that. You don’t need drugs or psychology when you have faith. Copeland’s new statement continues:

God is not competing with doctors or medicine. Like any loving father, He will use any avenue available that you allow Him to work through to help you get well. Getting you well is His desire. Any good doctor will tell you he does not do the healing. He only assists your body to work the way it was created and designed to function by God.

This new moderate sounding Copeland emerged the day before his scheduled visit to Fort Jackson. However, he doesn’t explain what changed in his beliefs, if anything. He doesn’t say he was wrong before nor does he express any regret for his previous bad advice.
As far as I can determine, Copeland’s appearance went as scheduled today.