Uniting the Church and mental health
We have previously talked about improving communication in your marriage and given several worksheets you and your spouse could go through to help develop empathy and conversations. This article is a fun version of that which bore out of a previous article on 10 Tips To Improve Your Marriage where point 8 says “Be Interested In Your Spouse.” So below are 25 marriage conversation starters to help reconnect with your relationship with your spouse.
Download Youth Ministry is a website run by . Last year, they released a whole training series through a part of their store called DYMUniversity to help train up staff and volunteers. One of those episodes is an 18-minute video called Suicide Detection and Prevention which they made available for free.
It’s put on by Craig Lomax and Josh Griffin with a foreword by Kay Warren. I honestly hope that you go check it out. The church I volunteer at is going to be putting together a luncheon for our youth ministry team, show the video, and then our campus pastor and myself as a licensed professional counselor will be on-site to have a conversation and Q&A afterward.
We have a fun announcement for everyone that we’d love for you to come to see. I will be speaking at the Inclusion Fusion Live event on April 24, 2020. This will be a time for churches and families who have someone with a disability to come and hear about ways their family or ministry can help serve people with mental health, developmental disabilities, and the families and communities who support them.
We have talked about mental health during the holidays several times on this website, including what the holiday blues are, how addiction is impacted on mental health, and how loved ones can help those with mental illness during this season. But we wanted to identify in this article 9 ways Christians can manage mental health over the holidays to help you and your family during this winter season.
Created more than a decade ago, Hank Green, one part of the vlog brothers, created a channel called Crash Course as an experiment to use YouTube as a way to offer educational resources including everything from history, engineering, biology, and literature. In 2014, they decided to take on the topic of Pscyhology which dedicated a sizeable chunk towards the specific disorders within mental illness from the DSM.
Sometimes you come along another ministry or individual that is doing what you want to do eventually so well that you need to stop and point everyone else at what they are doing. Amanda Porter is one of those people who has really shown to have some amazing work and her latest project Dear Anxiety, Let’s Break Up shows just that.
One of the hardest connection points of talking about mental illness with people who may only have brief encounters is understanding the severity of it. Further, with Christians, we not only need to connect to the heartstrings of the individual but also how this impacts the story of God. Sparks of Redemptive Grace and it’s companion book 31 Days, 31 Ways 2 Pray 4 Families are written for this very reason.
We are currently going through a huge epidemic with substance use in America. I wrote an article recently for Key Ministry on updated statistics with regards to mental health and substance in America and one stat that was super concerning was that 89.8% of people with a substance use diagnosis (i.e. it is causing them mild to severe impairment in their life) is not engaged in any kind of treatment. That includes hospitalization, rehab, outpatient, ER services, self-help groups, or having a primary care physician.
The question is, are we looking at addiction wrong?
Pastors are gifted individuals who have spent many years of their lives, sometimes decades, learning about how to guide their church. They have received many classes beyond Greek, church history, and worship coordination to include spiritual formation, pastoral care, leadership, communication, and possibly even types of Biblical counseling.
Recently, Barna released a study they have been doing on the millennial generation which they are calling The Connected Generation. To clarify, that is the title of the survey, but also what they are calling people who in 2019 are in the age range of 18-35. In the study, they found three important distinctions for this generation which they have tied to the faith perspective. Within this article, we will only be focusing on the first of how millennials are more anxious than previous generations.