What type of church welcomes people with depression?

What type of church welcomes people with depression?

Recently I was shocked to hear the news of another young man, a pastor, who had taken his own life, leaving behind a beautiful wife and three beautiful children. It's heartbreaking to say the least.

This article could go in many different directions. But I choose the direction that seems most obvious to me. The world needs a church where the sick are welcome and where even high-ranking leaders are allowed to be sick even during their scheduled duty hours.

Why? Because it happens.

The church system must be able to deal with this, especially since the church is a hospital for the sick.

What I'm talking about here is not a physical illness, but the mental, emotional and spiritual illnesses that have haunted so many of us. I've had three major bouts of depression, I've had panic attacks, and I've endured enough grief to understand and accept that suffering is endemic in life.

So why is there a perception that people with depression are not welcome in church?

Why shouldn't there be the appropriate support and advice and training programs to help sick people? Well, sometimes there are resource limitations.

One reason for this may be that our modern world is so focused on sophisticated and efficient operations and pastoral leaders feel driven to replicate this in the church.

This perfectionism that can never be satisfied has become part of modern church culture.

So many young and not-so-young men and women in the church today are under enormous pressure to serve well enough to please the people they serve and the church leaders they work for.

The church must be a place where we can be rewarded for our honesty about our weaknesses.

After all, it is a biblical idea that we receive the strength of Christ when we admit our weakness. The problem is that we live in a day that has forgotten biblical tradition and bought the lie that a successful church must be competitive and that a successful ministry must be both effective and grounded in excellence. The church is run like a business, competing for its members with its sales and marketing strategies rather than simply committing to living the gospel.

There are many reasons why churches may not embrace the concept of strength in weakness in their ministries. Many forces collide. Part of the problem is the intrusion of wealth, name-it-claim-it, doctrine.

It seems to me that if we want to improve acceptance of mental health issues like depression in our churches, we need to embrace it across the board. What would Jesus have us do? Deny reality? Absolutely not!

I can't think of a better way to do this than for one of the pastors or key leaders to be completely transparent about a current struggle. Oh, I know that used to be a no-no. As a pastor, you wouldn't share anything unless you got over it. But pastors must also lead the way in vulnerability that shows humility.

Pastors must show courage, ironically in their weakness, by being vulnerable to encourage others in their weakness.

One such example of weakness begins with the pastor!

But churches don't seem to like their pastors being weak.

This is because we have fallen in love with the lie that leaders are strong.

However, in many things in life, “overcoming” is fanciful, as if we can click our fingers and overcome depression. Anyone who is depressed knows this is nonsense. We have no such control over this black dog. And that is completely biblical. The Bible would take us to the lamenting Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the book of Job, the prophetic writings and in the New Testament to Second Corinthians and especially the thorn in Paul's side. The idea of ​​suffering is central to the Bible. Moses, David, Jonah, Elijah, Jeremiah, the list goes on and on. Can’t the Suffering Servant Jesus of Isaiah 45-55 understand our depression, especially in the light of the cross?

Why do pastors have to project the image that they have it all together? None of us do...

Your heroes in the Bible didn't.

There seems to be a development system for pastors that doesn't give them much room for real and sustained struggles. This kind of weakness counts against them or counts them out. However, this tradition forgets some of the best pastors who suffered, like Spurgeon. I know from a writing perspective that I am more deeply connected to God in the words I write when I struggle. There is a deeper kind of service that we can use in our depression, as long as we don't feel overwhelmed by it and as long as a deeper kind of service would be allowed. Acceptance is a powerful economy.

Pastors with depression need to be embraced even more! Pastors who have suffered from depression are even better equipped for ministry. And churches need to think more about how effectively they support people in darkness. Smoke machines, brewed coffee and secret efficiency mock the principles of the church with its own book about suffering.

Churches are complex environments for those who work in them, whether paid or voluntary. Those who are paid always put in many more hours than they are paid, and those who are volunteers give hundreds of hours a year for the love of it.

It would be fine if it was a satisfying job, but often it's not worth the conflict or the constant failure to meet the high standards that many churches set, and I don't mean standards of holiness, but standards of effectiveness. The work environment in churches can be more toxic than the comparative work environment in secular workplaces. The feelings of inadequacy, the conflicts that won't go away, the pressure from leaders and members, the pressure to lead, and the spiritual warfare that is part of the environment all contribute to the chaos that breeds within a pastor or ministry leader that threatens to burn them out in a spirit of despair.

Certainly we could understand that there are a variety of precursors that cause people in the church to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders.

I suggest that the kind of church that accepts and even embraces people with depression, especially those in the ranks of its pastors, is the Church of Christ.

Surely it must grieve the Spirit of God that so many pastors and everyone else are suffering alone, not to mention those who are dying!

Here are some things the church provided me when I was suffering from depression in ministry:

1. I was accepted into the leadership all the more because the leadership understood that I needed the support of the community. When we feel weak, we need a lot of encouragement, and the best encouragement comes from those who are most mature in their faith. Leaders who suffer from depression need to be with leaders who are compassionate and wise.

2. There was a culture that embraced both weakness and honesty. Both are needed. We are only strong until we become weak, and it is only a matter of time. When we are weak, we must be honest, and the church must build a culture that demands honesty and provides security for all that is revealed.

3. There was a commitment to prayer, which is another way of saying that the healing ministry is God's business; that those within the Church have understood that clichés and advice have only limited or even harmful effects.

4. When I shared my burden and my inability, I was still allowed to do what I felt was necessary, but other leaders took on the more burdensome tasks. This often meant delegating individual tasks to others, which was an opportunity to develop them further. What encouraged me most was that these other leaders would not blame me. They just got it. Churches must cultivate a culture that exemplifies empathy and compassion.

Inspired by Steve Wickham