Introduction
One night, near the end of our class time, the professor had a pastor speak to us about bereavement and end of life care. After she signed off, the class discussed the roles of mental health counselors in conjunctions with and opposed to pastors in providing care.
My classmate remarked that the church is becoming more aware of the limits of its abilities and is now more open to the fact that some situations require a mental health professional. Here, I agree. I think the church and society as a whole is becoming more aware of the benefit which can be provided by clinically trained counselors.
Yet it seems much of the mental health field is of the persuasion that the church treats one kind of problem, the spiritual one, while the therapist treats another sort of problem, a psychological one. I am at least very open to the idea that we are all working at the same problems, though we see, understand, and label them differently. It wasn’t very long ago that church folks went solely to pastors with the problems they needed to talk about. Today, it seems that’s changing and that a gap is has emerged.
The Gap
I think the present and growing need for the psychotherapist may fill the gap in a society where the religion has lost its healing power. When Evangelicalism has become a business model and a right wing voting block, the gap starts to widen. When the thrust is on converting people to avoid hell and the markers of who‘s in and who’s out are a matter of dressing a certain way, then identity becomes about who we’re not, where we won’t spend eternity, and who isn’t one of us. I think this produces a culture of anxiety and fear, and the sort of leaders who emerge and whom we choose have very little ability to sit with people in a healing manner. If those leaders perpetuate a culture of anxiety and fear, teach a theology of anxiety and fear, and serve a people of anxiety and fear, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll also be very helpful to folks trying to heal from the wounds they’ve gathered. It is perhaps only a therapist who will provide the care the person needs to heal.
If you have a disturbed client and give me a really good therapist and a really good pastor (assuming the client is of faith), I think in many cases the person might be genuinely helped be either. However, I think there is a gap created by theologies which promote fear and anxiety and which render the church powerless, and this is what I’d like to explore here in three examples.
Example 1: Parsing Greek
A few weeks ago, I was tabling for GCU at a missions conference. I met a somewhat well-known evangelical writer and theologian. He was interesting to speak with, and so we talked for quite a while. He mentioned that only in the last few years had he become an egalitarian, and I asked what had prompted the change.
For him, he said, the whole thing – whether or not half the population (women) could serve in church leadership – came down to one word in one verse in Paul’s letter to Timothy. The translation of that verse was what everything hinged on. I asked him if he was at all bothered by that, that such huge implications hinged on one Greek infinitive only accessible to PhD scholars. He said that he was not, and that he expected it would have to be that way. For him, this issue was decidedly based on rendering one word in one ancient letter. It didn’t have anything to do with contemporary discernment or the outcomes produced by one position or the other. Simply put, if he could be convinced intellectually that something was scriptural, then he would support it. A few days later he Tweeted the post below:
Example 2: We Won’t Be Formed By Feelings
About a year prior to the mission conference, I’m on a church music team, and we’re playing songs at a jam session. We played “Christ Be Magnified” which is a beautiful song except for one line in the bridge.
“I won’t be formed by feelings, I’ll hold fast to what is true.”
I made a comment in the session about loving the song except for this line and said that I don’t even know what it would mean to “not be formed by feelings.” How would one just annihilate the primary means which God has given us to interact with our environment? My fellow music team mostly disagreed with me and spoke in defense of the lyric which pits “truth” and “feelings” against each other. It’s a bit like asking a pilot to fly a plane using only a flight manual and none of the aircraft’s instruments instruments which take readings on altitude, direction, pressure, time, and speed. These are the primary means of knowing what’s happening – feelings are condensed information gathered from a person’s environment. Why would you not want that to be a key part of your formation and orientation?
There’s a great word for the state of being where you are not formed by feelings: numbness. And not coincidentally, this sort of posture, ignoring feelings and simply following ideology, produces exactly that: numbness. Years of burying emotion produces a disconnection from feeling and even bodily sensation to the point where authentic connection becomes almost impossible.
Example 3: Incongruent Theologies
Before Aleisha and I became part of the church community where we worship now, we visited several churches. There was one which was pretty great, but every Sunday I was there the sermon seemed to have the same theme – you are a vile, wretched sinner who deserves death and destruction. And God was so angry about how bad you are that he decided to kill Jesus instead of you, so you can live with him forever. Ta da! It wasn’t really good news, and that isn’t really the kind of God I’d like to spend eternity with. It’s a good example of incongruent theology which I think produces a ton of anxiety in those who come to believe it. It paints God as angry and out of control and people as vile and awful – yet somehow it still tries to teach that God is love and that people are in God’s image and made very good. It’s not the sort of mixed messaging I want my daughter growing up with, or myself.
Some theologies which I find incongruent are:
Preaching that each person is created in God’s image, with infinite value from conception > while also teaching that everyone is born a corrupted sinner who is wretched and depraved.
Telling women they are valuable, capable, and more than just warm bodies > while also telling them they may never teach a man since they are less trustworthy and that their place is at home.
Speaking of Christ’s passion as a beautiful love story > while also teaching that God was so angry with humankind that he needed to kill someone to calm himself down and that he killed Jesus to satisfy his wrath.
Telling each person that they are fearfully and wonderfully made > and then condemning gay people for the way they are made and ostracizing them from our communities.
This list could go on.
I give these examples, they guy at the conference, the jam session, and incongruent theologies as instances of the paradigm I’m seeing. There are not an abundance of people, leadership included, who know how to sit with someone and help them heal. Instead, so much pastoral guidance is far removed from promoting awareness in the person, awareness of their feelings, emotions, bodily sensation, pain, stress, and distress. When the focus is on intellectual understanding of Greek infinitives as the final word, on pursuing “truth” at the cost of honoring the body’s intended function, and on teaching theology which claims to speak about God’s love but which is fundamentally anxiety producing, there is an almost total inability to help a hurting person and to be with them in a compassionate way.
And so here is the wide wide space which the psychotherapist is being asked to fill. And they are, and many being are being greatly helped. But my point is the work of therapists is not (or should not be) so different from the work of pastors. What I think our religious cultural moment cries out for is clergy and lay servants who are able to sit with people and help them reconnect, explore, release, and heal. It is a great spiritual task, and it’s one that will continue to be outsourced to clinicians and psychologists so long as the church remains dogmatic about issues such as keeping women subordinated, keeping feelings at odd with their conception of truth, and keeping incongruent theology flowing from the pulpit. Those who speak from these orientations may speak about love and healing, but they hold to their antithesis in posture and practice.
I suspect my generation and the ones coming after (who are leaving the church en masse) have been and will continue to key in on this theme. The church is slowly realizing we cannot inhabit a theology of oppression and come through unscathed. The science is crystal clear on this – living under stress and anxiety and burying rage and uncertainty will kill you, quite literally. And it presents in all manner of unexplained symptoms, pain, stomach and gut issues, ringing in the ears, depression, chronic illness, etc.
I think the mantra of this generation is “I may not be able to read Greek or do incredible exegetical work, but I can feel pain in my body.” Perhaps unlike previous generations, we no longer fear hell enough to tolerate outcomes of oppressive theologies – outcomes which will make us numb if we endure them long enough.
I’m really thankful to attend a church where I don’t have to stifle the anxiety of these sort of incongruent messages. And I am hopeful about some of the recent changes I’m seeing. Yet for many people these sorts of incongruencies (hearing one thing and living in a reality where it’s untrue) are everyday life. When and where this is true, it will be only the psychotherapist, who is trained to withhold judgement and give unconditional positive regard, rather than the pastor, who will be ready to facilitate healing and able to meet the great spiritual task described by Jung which is now as present as ever.
javen.bear. 