Let's get started with two questions. First: How is your mental health? Especially in recent times, we all have had extra stress on our plates - let's take stock of where we are and how we're adapting. Second: How well is the church approaching our state of mental health and integrating us into community?

For many of us, we grew up having church as a tangential extension of our individual selves. I heard it described as “tanking up” once a week with godly teaching, and the stresses and sins of the week would deplete that supply. Church was that power-up we had to grab periodically to get further in the game level and win more points.

But church is not an individual achievement - rather, it’s a community. So, the fuel tank image breaks down, since it’s not that simple. Maybe we can extend the metaphor a bit to grasp the difficulty:

• Everyone’s tank is a different size.

• Some of us have tanks that are harder to fill.

• Fuel tanks can have holes, making them impossible to fill, and the leaked fluid can ignite.

Statistically, in 2019, at least 1 out of 5 adults in the US experienced mental illness. If that’s not you, that’s great - next time you’re in church, look at four people around you. One of them likely deals with something they’d rather not talk about very directly.

That much is plain from statistics. Mental health is a continuum, though, and we know that the psyche has many layers. Some people are quite healthy in some areas of life but profoundly dysfunctional in others. Some of us exist in the margin between clear health and overt mental illness. If we are in that margin, we are likely functional in our daily lives (for the most part) but also aware that something is wrong.

That margin is wider than many of us have thought. In that margin dwell the Functional Hurting.

What does that mean for the church? Well, the church is filled with men and women who have experienced issues related to clarity of thought, emotion, and behavior. And that ought to have a profound impact on the way we seek to minister to people in general.

That starts with the question, how are the people with these various maladies experiencing the church? Or the Bible? Or God? Depending on the kind of issue involved, someone may tend not to talk about these experiences - especially if they are negative. People will go along with the flow, either a) hoping it gets better, or b) eventually giving up.

Let’s stir the pot a little: many churches have segmented off some categories of mental health issues and labeled them as sin instead. A parishioner was not simply having a hard time, then - sins were being committed against almighty God and had best be confessed and repented for atonement. Of course there are situations where mental health and spiritual issues overlap. But in those cases, the church ought to be aware of and interested in both, not one against the other.

We can’t just push people to reveal their darkest secrets, though, can we? So we must put greater responsibility on church leaders. They need to think through how various church programs would be received and experienced by those in the margins. They need to teach and preach while knowing that half their listeners are struggling with these things.

We in the church don’t have the excuse that we don’t understand depression, or anxiety, or other concerns. We don’t get to plead “just knowing the Bible.” If we really know our Bible, we will understand there is wisdom to applying one verse over another in specific situations. If we just show off our Bible knowledge and don’t deal gently with those who are hurting, we’re wrong.

Our God is a God who understands weakness. We have entire sectors of Christendom who do not. We need to start a conversation where it becomes normal to discuss how we think of Christian life and maturity as it relates to mental health.

Reference:

1.“IMGP0255 - fuel gauge” by RaeAllen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0