News and commentary on topics related to mental health, medicine and ministry for faithful Christians, especially those serving in positions of leadership in the church from the physician and child psychiatrist who founded Key Ministry.
I’m posting this week’s edition from the Amplify Conference at Wheaton College. Prayers appreciated that the presentation I’m doing with Thomas Boehm from Wheaton will inspire the pastors and church leaders to consider individuals and families impacted by disability as agents and recipients of evangelism and outreach.
Depression rates among teens rose sharply during COVID - and the majority of teens with depression received no treatment
Approximately one in five teens experienced symptoms sufficient for a diagnosis of major depression in 2021. For comparison, rates of adolescent depression were reported to be approximately 8% in 2009, and 16% in 2019. Latino and white teens were most likely to experience depression, while mixed-race and Latino adolescents were the least likely to receive any treatment. The study authors point out historic disparities in access to care among teens from minority groups. Two factors that likely contributed to the disparities - kids in many urban areas access much of their mental health care through school-based services, which largely became unavailable when schools in those areas closed. Another observation - the public mental health agencies in our area that provide the preponderance of services to families insured under Medicaid were MUCH more slow in making use of telemedicine.
Should we welcome sex offenders into our churches?
Christianity Today featured an article from a pastor at a church where a previously incarcerated attendee regularly invites others with similar experiences to worship services. One Sunday, the church ushers discovered a first-time visitor was a registered sex offender. The author, a bi-vocational pastor who also works as a pediatrician, points out that the vast majority of pastors and church leaders support the idea of sex offenders attending worship services with proper supervision and under the right conditions, but relatively few churches have processes in place to enable them to attend safely.
My takes on the article…
There’s a good possibility your church has had sex offenders at worship. There are approximately 750,000 sex offenders in the U.S. - those numbers are likely a gross underestimate since the majority of offenses are never reported.
A good child protection policy is absolutely essential. GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) is a parachurch organization that helps resource churches in matters related to sexual abuse prevention.
We get too hung up on thinking about “church” as attendance at large group worship services on a weekend or a Wednesday night. Borrowing from education terminology, large group worship might not always be the “least restrictive, most appropriate” environment for them to experience church. For example, our team has been presented with situations in which children have exhibited such severe aggression that we recommended churches hire trained child care staff to go into the home so that parents could attend worship. With the advent of online church options, there’s no reason why anyone can’t experience worship in the physical presence of other Christians.
The next frontier for the disability ministry movement - conditions related to aging
How do we value, minister with and include our “senior saints” when they experience memory loss and other conditions that impact their independence and ability to maintain their engagement with the church? This article in Evangelical magazine prompts the church to consider ministry with persons experiencing dementia and their caregivers.
These Machines Save the Sickest Patients. When to Turn Them Off Is Tricky.
ECMO machines provide oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the blood in patients with severe cardiopulmonary disease and are considered a form of life support. The longer a person is on the machine, the greater the risk of serious complications, including internal bleeding and strokes. But unlike other well-publicized cases in the past, some patients on ECMO can talk with family or their doctors and participate in some rehabilitation exercises. So why are some “medical ethicists” talking about turning off the machines? This Wall Street Journal story provides a closer look at another pro-life issue.
The most insightful piece I’ve yet encountered for leaders seeking to reverse the exodus from the church
Stiven Peter is a student at Reformed Theological Seminary in New York. His writing is being featured on prominent websites, including First Things. This piece featured at Mere Orthodoxy is spot on in identifying the underpinnings of the hostility progressive culture displays for the church, and offers a response rooted in Scripture to the rampant individualism and social isolation fueling the exodus from the church and record high rates of anxiety and depression. Here’s a sample…
The Church’s task, then, is not to simply integrate itself with modern American life, marketing itself as one lifestyle choice among many. Nor is it to retreat from the world. The Church’s call is to repair the remains of modern life. The U.S. is aching for a different way of life. Only the Church can offer that alternative. The Church must engage in a grand political project. She must reform a people accustomed to consumption. The Church must see itself as the source and center of cultural renewal. She must take responsibility for resolving the atomization we all experience because no one else will. Consequently, the Church should think of cultural engagement less through cognitive, propositional, and “winsome” terms, and more towards an approach that prioritizes making Church essential to communal life. The Church that hosts community fairs and car shows is doing cultural repair. The Church that models strong, healthy families, which encourage women to pour into each other, for men to sharpen one another, and for both to have more children than they can afford is waging a culture war. The Church that has its families cheerfully open their homes cultivates commitment to one another through thick and thin is conducting a cultural insurgency.
These practices, emblematic of classic Christian hospitality and morality, threaten the regime of modern life. The Church is in a culture war, but it must wage it not through incendiary or even winsome rhetoric but at the level of embodied practice. To be sure, the Church wages this war first with the ordinary means of grace: the preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments. These means, then, cultivate a renewed and abundant life, turning us outward to be builders and defenders of the common good. The Church’s call to discipleship in a crumbling America means modeling, by example, a comprehensive alternative way of living.
Recommended Resource: How American Parents Can Help Kids Cope with War News
Here’s a piece I was interviewed for on CBN News, along with the noted psychiatrist Daniel Amen for parents and caregivers on the images of the recent violence in Israel kids are seeing on television and through social media.
