Guiding Your Family toward Emotional Health, episode 2
Have you ever been told that you need to see a counselor? How do you know whether or not that's true? How can you find a counselor that you can actually trust? How can we expand mental health resources available to all of our communities? Those are the questions that I want to address with you today.
Greetings everybody, Pastor John Yoder here. Welcome back to part two of our series, Guiding Your Family Toward Emotional Health. What we want to talk about today is expanding the mental health resources available to you, to your family, possibly to your church. And that is by understanding the difference between what I'm going to call professional counseling and everyday counseling, or we might say the difference between formal and informal counseling.
Last time, we talked about the differences between different countries and different cultures about emotional health. Many countries do not have the kind of mental health resources that we have available in the US and other Western countries.
Now in some of those lands, there's a shortage of electricity, running water, and medical care. And so there are parents who have come to the US from around the world who have faced great trauma.
Others have come to the US from wealthier countries where they don't have that level of trauma. They have electricity, running water, public schools, but they don't address emotional issues because of shame.
Regardless of which one, they see their kids come here, born in America, enroll in American schools. By their standards, those kids have wealth and safety and great education and an amazing lifestyle. But they see those same kids wrestling with anxiety and depression and suicide and they're absolutely baffled because those kids, by contrast, don't face any struggles at all. And they don't know exactly what to do about those issues.
These parents aren't always trustful of counseling resources, and often for very good reasons. Now sometimes it's because they're not used to them in their homeland. Sometimes it's issues of availability and cost. But sometimes it's because of value systems, that many counselors have belief systems and behaviors that run contrary to their Christian values. So what we want to talk about is how to identify resources that are in your community, in your language, that are available to you, but also that you can trust.
Sometimes Americans say to parents like this, “You need to see a counselor”. Their motives are good, and a lot of the time, they're right. But what that does, is it can put a counselor on a pedestal, like they're somebody that went to a special school, they learned skills that nobody else understands, and that you must blindly follow whatever they say, even if they say things that contradict your value system.
So, I want to explain to you about my field, which is pastoral ministry. I want to share with you the difference between formally and informally trained pastors, and how both are really helpful and effective. I want to use that as a template to talk about the difference between formally and informally trained counselors, and how that both of them can be a real asset to your family.
I am a professionally trained and licensed pastor. I have a Master of Divinity degree from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. I'm an ordained minister of the Evangelical Free Church of America, and I meet the criteria in 1 Timothy chapter 3 for being an elder. I've been preaching for years, I've trained and coached ministry leaders, not just in China but in other global settings as well.
Now, I've worked with pastors around the world who do not have the kind of formal education that I have. Now some of them are quite brilliant, they've got PhDs in their relative fields. But a lot of them only have a 6th grade education, some of them are illiterate. And whenever I work with them, regardless of their educational level, I really try to help them understand that their office as a pastor is equivalent to mine.
The majority of pastors around the world are not employed full time by their churches. And the majority of pastors in immigrant churches in the United States are also not employed full time by their churches. I've worshipped in more than 80 of these churches, most of these pastors have a full time job, sometimes two jobs, and they raise their families and they pastor their churches in the evenings and the weekends.
Now, many Americans have their perception of a pastor as somebody with a seminary degree and a full time salary from the church. And when an American meets a pastor like that, they want to put an adjective in front of the word pastor. They want to describe them as a lay pastor, or a volunteer pastor, or a part time pastor, or a itsy bitsy, teeny weeny pastor, but not a real pastor.
But friends, the New Testament never does that. When the New Testament uses the word pastor or elder, there's never an adjective in front of it to differentiate one kind of pastor from another. And it has been my mission traveling throughout the Chinese countryside and other Asian countries talking with pastors with lower levels of education to assure them that their office and their status as a pastor is in every way equivalent to mine.
During my years in China, I was able to spend a week in the Hebei province in the prefecture called Handan. The capital city there is also called Handan. What's unique about Handan is it has one of the highest concentrations of Christians in all of China. So, in this prefecture, there are six ordained pastors of the government sponsored Three Self Church, and those six leaders are responsible for more than a hundred churches across the countryside.
In the week that I was there, we visited a lot of rural churches. Not all were on paved roads. Many did not have electric wiring. Many did not have plumbing. Their toilets were latrine pits, but hundreds of people came on foot or on a bicycle to attend those churches.
Because the Three Self Church is a government sponsored church, those pastors do not have the freedom to ordain as many pastors as they would like to. As a result, you've got six pastors who have to do all the communion, All the baptisms, all the weddings, and all the funerals in those many, many rural churches.
So they spent a lot of their lives in the car, in the motorcycle, going from village to village to do all of those kinds of ministries. As we traveled to those rural churches, I met so many wonderful gifted leaders. Their jobs were farmer and factory worker, but they'd been leading churches for 10, 20, 30 years, faithfully teaching the Word of God, bringing people to faith, starting new churches, but because of government regulations, they could not be recognized as pastors.
I truly believe that if you brought the Apostle Paul to Handan and gave him a motorcycle, that he would be driving up and down the countryside, laying hands on farmers and factory workers, and ordaining them as pastors so that they could do communion, baptism, weddings, funerals, and everything else.
If all of this is true, and if these servants of God in rural China are equal in status to me as a pastor, what does it matter that I have a master's degree or that I'm ordained by a denomination?
Well, it means a lot. For one thing, in seminary I studied Greek and Hebrew, the languages in which the Bible was written, so if a false teacher comes along and says, “This doctrine is not true because the Greek and Hebrew says something”, I can find out whether or not that's true. I usually know more of the Word of God than some of these pastors, and I understand some things about church leadership and administration and entrepreneurship that they don't understand. So when I came in and provided training for them, even though I affirmed their status as high as mine, I have more education and I can be a great blessing to them.
So, there's a great benefit to having formally trained pastors, but there is danger as well. There are pastors out there who are formally trained and licensed, but they do not preach the truth. Some deny that Jesus Christ is God. Some deny that Jesus has risen from the grave. Some of them deny that Jesus walked on the water or performed any miracles. And some are embracing sexual moralities that the Church has rejected unanimously for 19 centuries. In these cases, those pastors not only don't bring good to the body of Christ, but they actually bring harm, and they are toxic to the body of Christ.
So when you meet a pastor for the first time, whether they are professionally trained or whether they're a farmer with 6th grade education, you don't automatically know whether they are helpful or not. Because those pastors might be teachers of truth, but they might be teachers of error. And so, when you meet a pastor, you need to discern whether or not their beliefs line up with yours.
So, I am a professionally trained and licensed pastor, but I am not a trained and licensed counselor. I am not a psychotherapist. What I am is a person who knows a lot about emotional health--the kind of things I hope everybody learns about emotional health. And in the same way that we have professionally trained pastors, and we have pastors who have informal training, we also have people with professional degrees in mental health, and we have a lot of other people who simply know a lot about it because they've learned it as they've gone along.
So when somebody says to you, “You need to see a counselor”, it might be true that you need the services of a trained professional, but it might also be true that you simply need to talk to somebody who knows a lot about emotional health, so that you can become that kind of person as well.
There are some people who will tell you we don't need professionally trained counselors at all, but I want to say to you that that is not true. That many of them have expertise that the rest of us lack.
So I want to tell you a story. During my years in Beijing, I met a young man from the country of Chile in Latin America. Maybe you pronounce it “chili”. He was in his twenties and he had a pretty severe mental illness. So I'd been traveling. I'd been out of the country. And when I came back to Beijing, some of the members of the International Church contacted me and said, “We've met this young man from Chile, and he's got a demon. We've been trying to get deliverance. We've been trying to cast this demon out of him, and it's not working. Would you be willing to meet with him?”
So a few days later, I got together with this young man. He's very bright. He speaks three languages, Spanish, English, and Mandarin. And even though he's a native Latino, he's in Beijing, and he's getting a master's degree in engineering in Mandarin Chinese. So he's a really smart guy.
But when I met with him, he barely moved, he was physically expressionless, and he was struggling to just put together a simple sentence in English. You didn't have the kind of emotional ups and downs that people have. He didn't have facial expressions, he didn't gesture with his hand. He was flat. And as I spoke with him and I was asking him about his story, he said there was a time in the past when he used to hear voices. And he'd seen a doctor. And the doctor had given him medication and the voices stopped, but now he had stopped taking that medication.
I helped this young man set an appointment with a psychiatrist at the Western hospital there in Beijing. With his permission, I accompanied him on that visit. Now, I have no idea whether or not that psychiatrist is a Christian. The idea of religion never came up in the conversation. But as he talked, he learned that that young man had heard voices, that medication had made the voices stop, and after just a few more questions he prescribed for him a medication similar to what he had taken in the past.
A week later, I got together with that young man once again, and he was a totally different person. He had a sparkle in his eye. He was gesturing with his hands. He touched me on the shoulder. He told jokes. I mean, he was thinking clearly in ways that were totally different from one week before.
Now, good, godly Christians, my brothers and sisters in Christ, told me that this young man had a demon. They were wrong. He had a chemical imbalance in his brain that needed to be addressed with medication. And that's just one of many examples where we need the services of a licensed professional. They can do things that none of the rest of us can.
For instance, you might be working with someone who has drug or alcohol addiction. It may not be enough for them to talk to somebody in an office. They might need residential care where they can stay for an extended period to sober up. That can be expensive, but that can be indispensable. There are conditions, like multiple personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and others, that those of us without licensed training are not competent to handle. We need the services of licensed professionals to handle these sorts of things.
Now, I said earlier that there are formally trained pastors, some of whom are helpful and some of whom are harmful, and that is true of formally trained counselors as well. If you look at counseling websites or if you look at curricula in university counseling courses, you'll find concepts that run contrary to our Christian values.
You may find counselors who affirm pornography, or living together outside of marriage, or exploring multiple sex partners or multiple sexual identities. And these things run counter to our Christian beliefs.
So, whether it's a pastor or a counselor, you don't automatically trust them just because they have a license or they have a full-time job. Trust your instincts as a parent. Trust your instincts as a Christian. Vet that pastor, vet that counselor by asking questions to make sure that their beliefs line up with yours.
In the prefecture of Handan, there are six professionally trained pastors and hundreds of volunteers who are leading churches. The majority of Christian ministry Around the world and in the United States isn't just done by professionally trained and salaried pastors, but by volunteers who are doing ministry together.
The same needs to happen in emotional health. We need more people who have professional training and licensing in emotional health, but we need millions of people who understand what emotional health is and how to help their families and friends.
In these first two episodes of this series, you've been patiently listening to me as a solo presenter. But starting next time, you're going to hear interview clips of professional counselors whose backgrounds are Latino, Asian, African, and Russian, because we want you to know that these issues of mental health transcend culture, and we want you to hear voices of people who understand you and where you are coming from.
Some of you may realize that this podcast could be very helpful to some of your friends, but only if it is in their mother language. Right now, we are only resourced to provide this in English, but we're very open to have this in different languages. We're open to working with volunteers, whether individuals or teams. If that is an interest to you, please subscribe to this podcast. You'll get my email address. I would love to hear from you and discuss what it means to make this available in other languages.
If you would like a transcript of this podcast, it is available to you, but it is on our website, not on Apple or Spotify. So if you're listening in on Apple or Spotify, you will find a link to our website. Just go there. You can get the transcript, and when you do, you'll be subscribed, you'll have my email address.
And as you do this, I hope that you're listening to the sister podcast, “Faith. Feelings and my F-150”, and I hope you'll check out our resources for immigrant mental health. It's at www.immigrantministry.com/mentalhealth.
My wish for every one of you is that you and your family and your network would be able to find emotional health and know what it takes to look like to live with joy and peace in our society. And of course, as a pastor, my hope for all of you is that you would come to know Jesus Christ, who is the source of forgiveness and love and joy. Know that you are loved. Know that you are being prayed for. I'll talk to you next time.
