Introduction-May 2011

Happy summer!  June brings us to another issue of Soul & Spirit.  With each issue, as I read through the articles as they appear in my inbox, I am challenged and encouraged by the wisdom of our contributors.  Each writer seems to honestly wrestle with humanity and the implications of soul care as a Christian. 

In this issue, there are again a variety of topics, though the thread of suffering seems to run underneath most of them.  Shannon Wolf wrote about the normative experience of suffering in the Christian life, which is also the topic of Dana Wicker’s piece, where she describes a way to help others “cling to truth.”  Serena Woods encourages us to move beyond behavior modification to focusing upon our redeemer and becoming again like little children in the midst of suffering.  I share my reflections on loving those who are hard to love.  Andrew Michel looks at Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as an essential text for Christian psychology, identifying the themes that run through the story of Middle Earth and how they mirror human experience.  Jeff White shares pastoral wisdom in the dual roles of the church as an army and as a hospital.  The nature of change is the focus of Rick Sholette’s article, where he asks the question who is responsible for our change.  Finally, Warren Kinghorn shared his thoughts on malingering as a pelagian concept. 

I hope that the breadth and depth of the articles is refreshing, challenging, and encouraging.  As always, I am open to feedback or thoughts. 

Blessings,

Jason Kanz, Ph.D.

Marshfield Clinic

Save the Child

“…unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” - Matthew 18:3 ESV

Becoming like a child is an abstract idea that typically ends up being translated in whatever form the message recipient deems comfortable. The fact is a person’s childhood can be so riddled with pain that returning to those memories is not something they will ever do on their own. What often ends up happening is that a person takes the offer of a clean slate to mean that their childhood can be buried with the dead. They start over as though they were like children again.

A Journey Through Suffering

Suffering is part of being human. It’s inevitable. Depending on the degree of pain experienced, our entire lives can be impacted. Suffering can consume our thoughts, affect our relationships – even our relationship with God – and leave no part of our lives untouched. Watching someone suffer is also difficult. As a counselor, I want to ease the emotional pain quickly; however, swift relief may not be the best course of treatment.

Just world view

Those who have a relationship with Christ normally turn to Him during times of distress. When the anguish continues and relief is nowhere in sight, suffering can be confusing.  A common assumption among believers is that painful and traumatic events do not happen to the righteous. This belief, known as the Just World View, refers to the degree that people believe that the world is a fair and just place (Fetchenhauer et. al., 2005). The idea allows people to view God as predictable. Further, the church body often interprets events in a manner that supports a belief that the sufferer has a lesson to learn or that the presence of more faith would relieve the suffering. Verses such as John 10:10 are often quoted to support the idea that God protects those who are faithful and removes His protection from those who are not. 

Is the Church Supposed to be an Army or a Hospital?

I have considered this question many times while pondering the nature of the church and its ministries. This is of particular importance as I think about developing a counseling ministry in my church and as I continue to think about what shape that ministry will take.

The church is an army in the sense that we have been given a mission, which is to make disciples, and that we have been given sufficient resources in order to pursue that mission. For example, we have been given the Scriptures, which are absolutely essential to any mission that involves making true disciples of Christ.  Paul tells us in Romans that, “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.”  The Lord gives us the powerful resource of the Word.  I could not imagine doing ministry without the Scriptures; doing so would be like entering a battlefield without weapons or resources.  I would be wasting my time. However, God has not called us to waste our time.  He calls us to a mission, and not just that, He calls us to glorify Him throughout the process of our undertakings.  I find it most troubling when we as a church fail to glorify God in our pursuit of the mission.  As a result, I am committed to help the church remember that God’s sovereignty and rule are not limited to simply ministry results or successes, but also extend to the means that we employ in obtaining such results.  When I reflect upon ways that I have spoken to others in the context of ministry, I remember the easy tendency to dim my gaze toward the process and instead focus tightly on the goal.  Though God has called us to a goal, He has also called us to a process. We must not sacrifice one for the other.

From a different perspective, the church is also a hospital.  In this light, I remember Matthew 9, which states, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”  What do sick people need?  They need a doctor.  There will be times when the Chief Physician will call upon you to be the instrument of His care, mercy, and truth by responding to the needs of others in the church.  There will also be times when you may need to receive the care and mercy of others that God has placed in your midst.  Some will experience more difficulty giving help, and others will experience difficulty in receiving help.  Regardless, care and mercy flow both ways, and you may be called to both the giving and the receiving in your life.

Because the church functions as both an army and a hospital, she should look to provide care to those who are in pain as well as to train others to be effective instruments of God’s mercy, grace, and truth.  This dual function provides the rationale towards the continued development of a Christian psychology that can serve the church in her ministries, while at the same time striving to present the gospel within the context of psychology, thereby demonstrating the power of the gospel as a meta-theory through which all of our other theories can make sense and become fully operationalized.

Rev. Jeffrey White

Pastor of Counseling

Park Cities Presbyterian Church

Dallas, Texas

How God Contributes to our Therapeutic Change

We’ve all heard the old counselor “light bulb” joke: Q: “How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Just one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.” But have you heard this one? Q: “How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. God either has or has not ordained the light bulb’s change.” I think the joke is funny even though it is a bit unfair to Presbyterians. It does, nevertheless, raise an interesting question about God’s role in people’s therapeutic change (in contrast to other changes, such as growing up, growing out, and growing old). Christian psychology cares about this question, as do dedicated Christian counselors. Here is one brief, introductory answer.

Christian Psychology in light of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

One of the great strengths of a Christian approach to psychology is that it is less prone to be constrained to the discourse of the modern psychological sciences, which lean toward the reductive and sterile, or as is fittingly named—the clinical.  It’s not that the modern discourse of the psychological sciences is wholly bad or unhelpful, but simply that it is limited and incomplete on its own.  As Christian psychologists, we need to be turning toward the plethora of wisdom made available to us—the ancient and the modern, the philosophical and the theological, the scientific and the literary.  Perhaps one of the most overlooked treasures for a robust Christian psychology is the good novel—one that stirs the imagination.  As persons invested in the psychological sciences, we fear fiction because it is not scientific, and as Christians we fear it because it often engages the non-rational aspects of who we are—sides of ourselves that we have grown suspicious of, especially following the Age of Reason. 

Is "Malingering" a Pelagian concept?

As a psychiatrist at a university-affiliated teaching hospital, I spend part of my week in my hospital’s emergency department supervising psychiatry residents and evaluating patients who present in psychiatric crisis.  It is unpredictable and sometimes difficult work:  patients who present to a psychiatric emergency service are representative neither of the general population nor of those who seek outpatient mental health treatment.  We see people who are not doing well:  many are intoxicated with and/or withdrawing from alcohol and other drugs; many have no relationship either with a mental health clinician or with any other significant community of support; many are off any prescribed medications; some are agitated, belligerent, and even assaultive.  I try, though not always with success, to keep my trainees from becoming bitter and cynical about “frequent flyers” who present repeatedly in crisis. 

Loving the Difficult Ones

There are people in my life who are a chore for me to be around. I feel exhausted when I speak with them.  At times, I avoid interacting with them. I screen my calls.  I intentionally cut conversations short. The unspoken prayer my actions suggest would seem to be, "God, send me to a foreign land, but please don't make me spend any more time with that person."

God doesn't treat us this way; quite the opposite. Ezekiel 34:11 reads, "For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out." He pursues people who others might overlook, ignore or avoid.