Latest / Mental Health and the Mission of the Church / Mental Health & the Misson of the Church

Transcript

Mental Health & the Misson of the Church · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Chip Judd here.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited about the new adventure we're starting.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to relaunch our podcast YouTube website, and uh we're kind of narrowing our focus, you might say, and adjusting my activities, my priorities, what I give my time and energy to.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh there's some very specific reasons, some we'll get into later, but the biggest one is I feel like God, uh as a result of the journey that He's had me on for 40 years, 40 plus years, almost 50, um, I feel like there's been a convergence of topics, two particular topics that I put together in a phrase that I mean and hope has some tension built into it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: What do I mean by that?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I want there to be a sense of um, you know, um incrimination.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I want there to be a sense of, are you implying that we're not doing all that we could do in these areas?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and my answer is yes, I am.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh the phrase that I want to build around is mental health and the mission of the church, mental health and the mission of the church.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I believe it's possibly the most important partnership uh being discussed, worked on, and wrestled with in the church today.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I believe it's potentially the most important thing happening in the church today.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I believe that?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because our ultimate challenge, what you might call the mission of the church, is to make disciples, to bring together uh a strategy and people with varying gifts and abilities that together uh reach people, bring them into a dynamic, love-filled relationship with God that slowly but surely uh redeems and restores them to God's intended purpose and condition for them, spirit, soul, and body.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, God wants to uh fix us.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh probably not the best choice of words, but God wants to heal us from the inside out.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I believe the church has the mission kind of uh, you know, on the table.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I believe the mental health community has the methods.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The I would put it this way, in my estimation right now, the church is stewarding the why, the why of what we do, focusing on God's ultimate intention.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying everybody's got it right, but I do believe in general the church is focused on the why.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I believe the mental health community is a steward and is responsible and could be way, way more helpful with the how.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what do I mean?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: The church is trying to reach people and help them, you know, grow in their faith, find their purpose, make a difference, all the cool stuff that a lot of us espouse is our vision and values.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I would have to say that um I'm not sure we get high grades on how well we're doing.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you look at our culture right now, um we have Christians on both sides of every issue and aisle that my issues for the moment, my issue is not content, like what what what you believe or what you're willing to fight for.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: My issue is more um the spirit in which you do it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow we've disengaged our our passion and purpose from our priority of representing Jesus and making him look as kind and gentle and honest and true and and and sacrificial.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, he said I came to serve not to be served.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh I just not sure we're representing Jesus well in all the four corners of the earth right now.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say that falls on um us, the church, the mental health community.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna put us all in there together.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: What do I mean?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we're pooling our resources, I don't think we're working together very well.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think both ends of that dynamic tension, mental health and the mission of the church, I think both of us have an kind of a bias toward our posture.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we, you know, we we we defend what we're doing, we defend why we think the way we think, why we do what we do.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think bias creates blind spots.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we all have them.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if we don't think that we do, then that's our first blind spot.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And um I just want to help create a conversation that's uncomfortable.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if it isn't uncomfortable, we're wasting our time.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm old enough now that I'm tired of conversations that are superficial and safe.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I want to be a part of conversations that make all of us uncomfortable because all of us are being challenged to identify our blind spots and biases, and we're being challenged to consider new perspectives and new um possible ways of handling things.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Just to give you a little history on myself, um, I've been in ministry for uh over 40 years, somewhere around 44 years.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I've been a pastor all that time, but I've also been a mental health professional, uh counselor, coach, consultant, etc.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trained at a master's level from the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I've done 12,000, 13,000 hours of eyeball to eyeball in what I call the guts and glory of people's lives.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I tell you that?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've learned some awesome stuff about how God designed this thing to work.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think we need to come up, we we we need to have a philosophy, we need to have a plan for how to deal with how God designed this to work, uh, what goes wrong, what breaks, and how to fix it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think between the church and the mental health community, we have the potential to partner in such a way that we focus on the right why, the mission, but we also focus on the how.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: How to help people change deeply.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it should concern us how rare it is to find people who experience real freedom and lasting change, who who are touched, ministered to, and changed, healed deeply in their soul, in their subconscious, to such a degree that they don't have to fight that behavior for the rest of their life because something has shifted and they're different.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that's what being set free means.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I believe you shall know the truth, and the truth will set free.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: No progress, no growth can happen until the truth of the situation is exposed, owned, and adjusted to.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say that again.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: No real progress can be made, no problems can be truly solved until the truth, the reality of what's happening, what my part is, what your part is, how we can make adjustments, until it is revealed, exposed, owned, and adjusted to?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how do you expose truth that's hidden?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: How do you expose problematic behavior, habits, routines that uh, you know, the old insanity definition, doing the same thing, expecting different results?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do you expose the patterns the church is stuck in that aren't working, but we keep doing them?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: How do you expose the patterns that the mental health community is stuck in that aren't really achieving the desired result, and yet we keep doing them?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I believe one of the keys, obviously God can intervene and rock our boat, but I believe one of his chosen ways to do that is conversation, um, discussion, robust dialogue.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I want to move us toward.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want, by the grace of God, I want to pull together in different ways, different formats, different times, different settings.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: People from both worlds, the church world, the mental health world, and I want us to challenge one another.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I want us to challenge one another to learning from each other, growing, and incorporating a deeper sense of partnership in what we're trying to do.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I believe the church has a pretty good handle in general, not everybody, on the why of our mission.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: I believe the mental health community has a better handle on the how to bring about lasting life change in people's souls.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I like to talk about what I call sanctified psychology.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what do I mean by that?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, psychology gets beat up pretty good in church circles, and some of it's appropriate because there's some weird stuff out there.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: But this is my perspective of psychology.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Psychology starts wrong and it ends wrong.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what do I mean by that?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Psychology starts wrong because they don't believe in a creator, they don't believe in a narrative that God has initiated and is following, you might say, that includes the fallenness, the lostness of man, the fact that we are separated from God, and yet we were created to function at our best in relationship with God.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no deeper, more powerful, more impactful reality than that, and no more life-changing um force than coming into a biblically sound, psychologically healthy uh relationship with God.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And psychology doesn't always start there, and then because they don't believe in the lostness of man and our separation from God or even in God, uh, they don't believe we need a savior, they don't believe we have a savior, and therefore um we need to come up with our own solutions, and we are and we have, and they work to some degree, but they don't work to the degree that we need them to.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so, my issue with psychology is it starts wrong and it ends wrong, but in between, wow, they've learned some really cool stuff.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, when I went back to school and studied and all the reading that I've done, um it's amazing uh some of the cool stuff that's learned and being taught.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh now the brain and all we're understanding about the brain and the impact that it has on our efforts to help people get healed and restored and function uh more in the way that God intended them to.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and all of that comes into the picture.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um we've got to kind of quit kind of having a chip on our shoulder and throwing rocks at each other and let's talk, let's think together, let's let's see what we can do to come up with ways for the mental health community and the church to focus on the right mission and the right methods to produce the healthiest, most vibrant, exciting, slowly but surely incrementally healed people the world's ever seen.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I believe Jesus died to bring us life and that life more abundantly.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do I believe that means we're all gonna have a peachy ride and you know our our jobs to make sure nobody has a problem?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely not.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I do believe life can and should get better, better's relative.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe there's ways to do it that we're not accessing and utilizing.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to see the church and the mental health community learn to talk better and come to the table and work out some stuff.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So hang in there with us, man.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is our first kind of stab at uh launching this new podcast, new YouTube channel.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe to both, get on our email list.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's no telling what we're gonna be doing in the next few months, but uh we we're gonna experiment, we're gonna make mistakes, but we're gonna do our best to create a non-superficial, unsafe conversation.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Don't have time for superficial, but bored to tears with safe conversations.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let's rock the boat, man, and and see if we can't make some progress um at the mission God's called us to.