The Church’s Steps Toward Recovery
Question: What does the Church have to offer the Mental Health field?
Today we continue asking questions that need answered in order for the Church to make steps towards it own recovery in mental health?
Answer: Most often, the Church has opposed the Mental Health field rather than support it, but on the other hand the Church is use to majoring in opposition with in its own ranks bringing division and ineffectiveness. How can I expect the Church to be effective in the world with their support organizations and systems if it cannot even be effective supporting one another under its own umbrella? Those are hard questions the Church needs to answer and to which I do not have answers that are not controversial.
I have been taught as a child that “Jesus is the answer”. Andre Crouch use to sing “Jesus is the answer for the world today. Above Him there’s no other; Jesus is the way (the truth and the life).” If Jesus is the answer, and Jesus exemplifies himself through his body, the Church, then the Church must come up with answers on how to minister to the mentally ill and those effected by the dreaded disease if they are to offer “Jesus” to the hurting, the confused, those in darkness who cannot comprehend the light at the moment.
Offering Jesus sounds so simplistic. Is it? Or is it complex? The Church majors in the complexity of simplicity; nothing ever seems to be “simple”. We talk about the “simple truth of the gospel”, but when defining it, it becomes rather complex. What is that “simple truth”? What does the Church have to offer the field of mental health that secular social, governmental, and private organizations don’t? Apparently something, since the mental health field is beginning to be open to a “faith base” influence to mental health. They are willing to explore the possibility of allowing “faith base” to be part of the solution. Is the Church willing to be open to work with the secular, scientific, and medical field in an effort to be part of the solution, or will the Church continue to be elitist, aloof, not understanding or sympathetic and uncooperative due to religious beliefs, theology, or even dogma? Some more hard questions for the Church to address!
The Church has the following to offer the mental health field: faith, hope, love, compassion, mercy, grace, a helping hand to the hurting, the poor, the homeless, healing, deliverance, and understanding self esteem on knowing who you are. More questions arise in how the Church is not only to be the “professor” of the faith and these offerings, but doers of them. How does the Church release this faith, not only spiritually, but practically in the ever day lives of people facing and fighting mental illness. Those are the hard questions we have to face as the Church.