Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11102 Therapy and counselling make some Christians uneasy, and I understand why. The suspicion is that a secular discipline will quietly relocate the problem from sin to circumstance, tell you that you are fine as you are, and hand you a vocabulary of self-actualisation instead of repentance. That does happen. It is not the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11101 Should Christians take medication, particularly the sort that works on the mind? I get asked this quietly, often after a service, usually by someone who has already been taking it for months and has never told anyone at church. The secrecy tells you everything about how badly we have handled this subject. My…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has too often made things worse, and I say that as a pastor who has watched it happen. A believer with depression or an anxiety disorder is told to pray harder, to confess the hidden sin, or to stop being so introspective, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent image appears while holding a baby. A believer who loves God finds his mind producing material that horrifies him. The people who ask me about…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 11070. Depression and sin have been tangled together in Christian thinking for a very long time, and a great deal of harm has followed. I have sat with believers who were told that their illness was evidence of unrepented sin, and I have watched what that does to a person who is already at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11069. Fear and anxiety are addressed in Scripture far more often than most people realise, and usually with a good deal more tenderness than the way we quote those verses to one another. The instruction not to be afraid appears again and again, and it is almost always accompanied by a reason rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08097 Asking whether something is demonic or psychological is one of the most delicate questions a pastor gets, and getting it wrong in either direction causes real damage. I have seen unwell people treated as though they were possessed, and I have seen genuine spiritual trouble waved away as a chemical problem. So let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8036. Few questions at the meeting point of theology and pastoral care carry higher stakes than whether demons cause mental illness. Get it wrong in one direction and you tell a person with a treatable condition that they need an exorcism. Get it wrong in the other and you leave someone facing a genuinely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4185. I want to write about the Spirit in depression with great care, because this is a subject where careless words from a pulpit have wounded many sincere believers. Depression is not the same as ordinary sadness that lifts after a good night’s sleep. It is a heavy, often prolonged darkness of mind and…