One thing that the 20th-wealthiest county in the United States — a south-central Texas community — and a Boston neighborhood, Roxbury, which is riddled with violence and underemployment and is also the home of the R&B music group New Edition, have in common: both are touched by the epidemic of mental illness.
The Rev. Michelle Scott-Huffman, campus minister of Ekklesia Progressive Campus Ministry at Missouri State University in Springfield, preached for the first time in her career on Psalm 23 during Chapel Service on Wednesday, the first day of Mental Health Month.
Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock, an author and scholar and the senior vice president for moral injury programs at Volunteers of America, continued her discussion on moral injury on Saturday at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., by emphasizing the church’s role in moral injury recovery through ritual.
Wrapping up their three-part series last week on Mental Health, Science and the Church, the Synod of the Covenant and its partner, Science for the Church, offered an hour-long conversation on churches and church leaders who are offering mental health services to congregants and to their communities. Watch the webinar here.
During the second of three webinars offered by the Synod of the Covenant and Science for the Church, this one held last week on the mental health and well-being of clergy and church leaders, Dr. David C. Wang of Fuller Theological Seminary laid out the reasons — many related to Covid — that church leaders are impacted by more mental health challenges than they were just three years ago.
When Jesus assures the woman who’d suffered 12 years from a flow of blood that “your faith has made you well,” he was stating a truth that applies to people of faith today as well, according to the Rev. Drew Rick-Miller.
Rick-Miller, project co-director for Science for the Church, led a webinar last week for the Synod of the Covenant on how faith and faith practices contribute to people’s well-being.
“We never outgrow fear,” John Pavlovitz said in his second plenary at last week’s annual event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education. “As we get older, we just trade in our terror for more age-appropriate models.” Pavlovitz, a pastor, writer and activist from North Carolina, then described the two responses we have at any age to the storms that scare us: “We become frozen or frantic.”
Last week’s Association of Partners in Christian Education annual event included a helpful and important online workshop on the role churches play in mental health. The Rev. Talitha Arnold, pastor of the United Church of Santa Fe, New Mexico, led the workshop attended by about two dozen people.
“Jesus came to give us life to the full. Is life to the full having a secure job and taking care of our families well, or could it be life to the full is that I feel true internal freedom?” said Dr. Jessica ChenFeng, quoting John 10:10 in the opening keynote for the “Pursuit of Asian American Happiness” virtual conference hosted by the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary on Thursday.
Over the weekend and at other times of their choosing, chapters of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) held webinars and in-person gatherings in honor of National Faith Day. On Saturday, the Rev. Brooke A. Scott, pastor of the Church on Main, a worshiping community in Middletown, Delaware, spoke during “Pathways to Hope,” the NAMI Delaware gathering.
