Today on the Evangelist Podcast, we talk about preaching the gospel in dark places.
SPEAKER_03The Evangelists Podcast. Encouragement to speak life to a needy world. With Glenn Scrivener and Andy Brinkley.
SPEAKER_04You're listening to the Evangelist Podcast, the show where we discuss all things regarding telling the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm Andy Brinkley and I'm joined by Glenn Scrivener.
SPEAKER_02You are? Here I am. Hello, Glenn. Or am I joined by you? Are you joined by me? We join each other.
SPEAKER_04That's right. Glenn, we're doing uh a talk this time uh sort of covering mental health issues.
SPEAKER_01Hmm.
SPEAKER_04And uh we were gonna do this last week, but we we had to change it to get the um so that we could have this one as it as it is uh available online now. The title of this one is Preaching the Gospel in Dark Places.
SPEAKER_02Dark dark places uh uh yes, a reference to sort of mental health issues and that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. That's quite a lot of that about a lot of dark places that people are going through.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I mean you know, you could say almost every evangelistic preaching is preaching into dark areas of people's lives.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean every time you look out at a group of people, there will be a significant proportion who are dealing with anxiety, depression, eating disorder, self-harm, OCD, all sorts of issues. Um in fact th there's some stati statistics that I that I read quite recently that says a quarter of the UK population will have to struggle with some kind of mental health illness or issue um in any calendar year, which is extraordinary. Only only uh a quarter of those people actually seek uh professional help um for what they're going through. But uh when people are asked, have you struggled with depression, anxiety? And those are the two main ones that people um deal with, but depression, anxiety, self-harm, uh eating disorders, uh obsessive-compulsive disorder, um, all those sorts of things. People people um in very large numbers say yes, yes, they are uh dealing with those sorts of things. And and so um all of us will go through something, um, probably, um, at some stage in our lives, um, and all of us will be called on to care for others who are going through hard times. So we need to know how to pastor one another, whether they're Christians or non-Christians. We need to be able to pastor them with the gospel. And another way of talking about pastoring with the gospel is to say evangelizing, uh, because that's really what evangelism is. If you ask me, of evangelism is just pastoring non-Christians. Um and pastoral care is just evangelizing Christians. That that's it's really the same thing. Um but I've just got a real um I've seen so clearly in the sort of ministry that I've done that when you start talking about depression and despair and anxiety and uh all these various issues, when you start talking about them, people start opening up because it gets in touch with our human weakness. Relates to them. It really relates to people, and and and if you share something from your own experience and an experience of your own weakness, other people start sharing their experiences of weakness, and all of a sudden you're in an encounter where you're talking about help that comes to you from beyond, which is a different kind of evangelistic encounter from um sit down and let me tell you the fifteen reasons why Jesus rose from the dead, and and you know, that's that's a different kind of evangelism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02When you start talking about the the dark places that people go to, uh people uh have a real hunger to hear about the help that Jesus brings.
SPEAKER_04I guess there's quite a bit of unhelpful things that we can say at times. Yes. And uh we can say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That and that happens a lot, you know. Look at look at the book of Job. You've got chapter after chapter of people saying the wrong thing to Job in the middle of his suffering, and quite a big part of the book of Job is actually just people saying the wrong thing to him, and and people even saying the right thing to him in the wrong way, and from the wrong motives. And and even that turns a pastoral encounter into torment, as Job calls it. So um so there's definitely a lot of wisdom to be learnt by all of us in how to deal with people in in their dark times. And uh so I j I just think it's it's just something that all of us need to be thinking about all the time. We need to be thinking about how do we pastor ourselves through the dark times, how do we pastor others through the dark times, and what are the evangelistic opportunities. Uh now this particular opportunity um in the talk that I give uh came from uh St. James Clarkenwell, a church in central London that uh is very evangelistic, and uh I used to work for them uh many years ago, and um they they do these uh things called School of Faith, in which over three evenings they uh they go through the basics of the Christian life, um, and then as a lead up to the school of faith, they put on these one-off events, and this was a one-off event that I did at the end of April, in which uh I just wanted to speak about mental health and the gospel. And because it was advertised like that, and you know, we said we're gonna talk about the the the dark times, many, many non-Christians came along who I don't think would come to a talk that's sit down and let me tell you the fifteen reasons why Jesus rose from the dead. People people came to this topic and they came with a mentality and a and a vulnerability and a sensitivity and an openness that is rare in in evangelism. Um everyone who came wanted help. Um they didn't want to pick a fight, they didn't want to argue back, they they wanted help. And so I just I just saw this as an incredible opportunity, and um and I just urge people as we think about this this issue and as you hear a little extract from my talk, um maybe this is something you can do in your own context. Um are there ways that you can talk about these dark times um as an evangelistic opportunity, uh as an opportunity to to unfold the good news of Jesus?
SPEAKER_04Okay, so um just set the scene for us. What are we gonna hear?
SPEAKER_02So I start I started my talk by talking about the prevalence of mental health issues both in the UK and globally. I talked a little bit about um my own experience and uh Emma's experience, my wife who's struggled with uh s significant mental health issues in her life. And uh and then what we did was we broke up into groups and and got people to talk to one another about um uh bad experiences of people pastoring you and and and the wrong thing to say. Um and so people sort of had uh chats about that. And then we watched a video by Stephen Fry, uh just a little five-minute thing, in which he talks about um what has helped him in his struggles with depression. Um he was famously diagnosed with um bipolar disorder, um, but I've since heard him say that perhaps a a different kind of diagnosis would be appropriate for him. But but whatever the diagnosis, he he struggled with mental health issues and depression in in quite serious ways. And in this video, he talks about three things that help, which I think uh are actually really good to think through. The three things that help, he says, are um there's the fact of the feelings, you just need to acknowledge the fact of it. It's like rain. You know, you there's no use in shaking your fist at the rain and wishing it away, you'll just get wet. Um depression comes and the storm clouds break, and you're in it, and there's no use denying that you're not in it, and there's no use in saying it's just in your head. No, it's real, and these feelings are real. And so we need to acknowledge the fact of the feelings, and then we need to acknowledge um uh we need to have a friend in suffering, and he he talks about um just how important it is to talk it out with somebody else and have somebody else reflect back to you what you're saying, whether that's in a professional setting in counselling or just with with friends. So you need the fact of the feelings, number one, number two, you need a a friend, and number three, you need a sense of future. Um and it's just just fascinating to to think through those three things as three things that the Bible speaks about in spades. There is the fact of the feelings, um yeah, people are in dark places all throughout the Bible. There's a friend, what a friend we have in Jesus, and there's a future, and actually, when you actually go into the Bible, you see that the Bible has resources that Stephen Fry doesn't have. Stephen Fry doesn't have a friend like this friend, and he certainly doesn't have a future like the future that we've got in the Bible. So just using those three points and going into the Bible hopefully is i are ways of talking about depression and mental health struggles that are accessible for non-Christians, but also going the extra mile and saying, Ah, but wouldn't it be amazing if the Bible was true? Because then you could really start to, you know, have these resources for your own life in mental health struggles. So that's that's where the talk is going.
SPEAKER_04Okay, well uh let's have a listen then.
SPEAKER_02Some very evocative uh phrases that uh Frye used. Uh a futureless future. Um that's a pretty bleak prospect. Uh and then this this concept of uh the weather, the storm that blows in, that you can do nothing about. Um I found that a very interesting uh image that Fry returns to many, many times as he speaks about his own mental health struggles. Um I think some of his suggested solutions uh are very, very helpful. In fact, um for the rest of the time of my talk, I'm just gonna kind of unpack three things that I think uh Stephen Fry said, which I think are absolutely true, about how we address mental health struggles. And I want to suggest that from within a Christian framework, uh, those three things actually make a heck of a lot of sense. Um the first thing is the fact of your feelings. So that idea of uh depression being like the weather. You cannot do anything about the weather. The weather just closes in and you can shake your fist at the clouds, but it does you no good. You just get wet. And just making your peace with the facts of your feelings is very, very important. Uh and yet, as we'll see, uh if you're looking to care for somebody, it's it's so common for people to try to uh massage away the fact of the depression and to say, snap out of it, it's not that bad, it's only feelings, it's all in your head. Um so I think that first acknowledgement that there is a fact to deal with. There are there is a depression that you need to wrestle with and not just wish away. I think that's absolutely vital if we're gonna deal with this issue. The second thing he he pointed to, um, he spoke of it in in a more professional setting, in terms of a talking therapy or a listening therapy, words that are said, uh, being in a space in which you are able to share your heart. Um, and it is just very interesting. If you let someone talk for long enough, they will share their heart. Um so often we don't feel heard and we don't feel listened to because we cram everything we have to say into 140 characters and get it out there. Uh and yet if you give someone two hours, three hours, four hours to share their heart, it is uh astonishing. You you might not need a PhD in psychiatry uh in order to diagnose various problems if we allow one another to share themselves with words. And I I think um the power of friendship, the power of someone coming alongside and and and sharing life and uh and sharing those words is incredibly powerful. And then the third thing uh is a future, that sense of future, um, absolutely vital. And I guess I want to finish our time in a second by thinking um, can Stephen Fry give us a sense of future? Or is there, are there resources within the Christian faith uh for giving us not only an acknowledgement of the fact of the despair, of the darkness of the valley, uh not only uh true friendship in the midst of despair, but also a future that can make sense of this valley as a temporary thing, a shadow that will pass, and we have good reason for thinking it will pass. So let's just think about those uh those three things. And first of all, the the fact of the feelings. Um The Bible is very, very upfront with the fact of the dark night of the soul, uh the fact of the valley of the shadow of death. And uh you might know that in the middle of the Bible uh there is a book called the Book of Psalms, which is literally 150 worship songs that were sung by the Israelites, written from about a thousand BC forwards. Um, but of those a hundred and fifty songs, the word psalms means praises, and yet the number one genre of psalms is a psalm of lament, a psalm of despair. Uh a psalm where you say, by the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion, as Boni M. sang. But that it began life as a psalm. And uh this book of songs, this book of praises, is a book that is incredibly realistic about the dark night of the soul. And I thought I'd just uh highlight one of the Psalms, uh, Psalm 88. It is perhaps the bleakest of them all. And uh and in Psalm 88, we get these three images of the dark night of the soul. The f the first image is this image of being uh buried alive. Um does that resonate, this this feeling of just life getting on top of you so much, the the claustrophobia of your troubles that close in. Um here is how Psalm 88, verse 3 puts it. I am overwhelmed with troubles, and my life draws near to death. I am counted among those who go down to the pit. I am like one without strength, I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, who are cut off from your care. He's addressing all this to God. This is a bold prayer, don't you think? Whom you remember no more, God, who are cut off from your care. You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. So here's this image of being buried alive. And it is extraordinary. You go through the religious texts of the world, and you will find sometimes prayers that are this bleak, that are this accusatory, shaking their fists at God, but usually those prayers are put on the lips of the enemies of God. Um here within the Bible, you've got believers who are able to get very, very real with God and are able to shake their fist. Um in the Bible, despair can be praise. Even despair can be praise as it is prayed, as it is articulated. So here's this first image of being buried alive. The second image in the psalm is this image of drowning. Just sometimes the psalmist talks about the waters have come up to my neck, and it's this idea of do you get that sense of life just filling up and filling up and filling up, and you get on your tiptoes, but it's not enough, and then it goes over your head. And this is how the psalmist puts it. All day long your terrors surround me like a flood. They have completely engulfed me. That resonates with me. I don't know if it resonates with you, these images of being buried alive, drowning. Well, how about this image? An image of being abandoned. Um depression. A very lonely place. And here the psalmist, we're not sure of the uh circumstances in which this happens, and yet the psalmist prays, You gods, you have taken from me friend and neighbor. Darkness is my closest friend. That's actually the last line of the prayer. What a prayer, hey. Darkness is my closest friend. Amen. Could this really be in the Bible? Actually, there are about 50 of such prayers in the Bible by people who are engaging with this dark night of the soul. Uh, depression is not merely a modern concern. Here is a prayer 3,000 years old that is dealing with exactly these kinds of realities, being buried alive, being drowned, feeling abandoned. And then I think in the history of the church, the the person who has um explained the Psalms better than anyone else uh was an old preacher in the 19th century called Charles Spurgeon. And uh he wrote a book called The Treasury of David that unpacks the Psalms with uh a real depth, a real profundity. And uh it's no coincidence that he's a man who struggled with depression all throughout his life, very, very seriously. And he was able to engage with these songs of lament. And I just want you to listen to some of the things that he says about this particular psalm, and just remember that he's writing in the mid-19th century before Freud, before psychotherapy, modern psychotherapy, um, he says this the one writing this psalm felt as if he were as utterly forgotten as those whose carcasses are left to rot on the battlefield. As when a soldier mortally wounded bleeds unheeded amid the heaps of slain, and remains to his last expiring groan, unpitied and unsuccored. So did this psalmist sigh. He sighed out his soul in loneliest sorrow, feeling as if even God Himself had forgotten him. How low the spirits of good and brave men will sometimes sink. Under the influence of certain disorders, everything will wear a sombre aspect, and the heart will dive into the profoundest deeps of misery. I love this bit. He says, It is all very well for those who are in robust health and full of spirits to blame those whose lives are sicklied over with the pale cast of melancholy. But the evil is as real as a gaping wound, and all the more hard to bear because it lies so much in the region of the soul that to the inexperienced it appears to be a mere matter of fancy and diseased imagination. Then he writes this sentence Reader, never ridicule the depressed. Their pain is real. Though much of the evil lies in the imagination, it is not imaginary. So again, here's this man writing 150 years ago, before the birth of modern psychotherapy, and just acknowledging the fact of our feelings. It is like rain, and you can't shake your fist at it, it is real. Depression is real. And in fact, uh, he goes on to say that the mind can descend far lower than the body. For the mind, there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways and die over and over again each hour. Isn't that interesting? If you have a physical wound, so often, if you're depressed, you feel like, well, I I I have no right to feel so low. It's not as though I've got a gangrenous leg, it's not as though I've got cancer, there's nothing physically wrong with me. And Spurgeon is saying, you know what? Actually, if you had a physical malady, there's only so uh so so much badness that you could actually cope with. If you bleed, you're going to bleed out, and then it's over. But the soul can bleed to death a thousand times a day. Um really putting words to the fact of our feelings. But then secondly, uh Stephen Fry uh thought about uh another help in the midst of our struggles, not just the fact of our feelings, but friendship. Uh being in relationships where we can share our uh our struggles. Uh the oldest book in the Bible, the book that was written down earliest, is the book of Job. Uh it's this epic poem that really engages with this issue of suffering. And you might know that Job, at a single stroke, he loses his family, his wealth, his health. Uh and if that's not bad enough, people come along to try to fix him. There are those who try to care for him and bring comfort and consolation, but they turn out to be miserable comforters. Perhaps you've heard the saying, miserable comforters or Job's comforters. He has these three friends who come and try to give him helpful advice and try to fix him. But by the end he calls them absolute tormentors. I'll give you a flavor of some of the things that these miserable comforters say. One of them says in chapter 4, verse 7, Job, consider now who being innocent has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? What's his life philosophy? His life philosophy is good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. Bad things are happening to you, Job. What does that mean? You've done wrong, clearly. And actually, it's because of their understanding of the way the world works. They they want to help, but because of their misunderstanding of the world, all their help ends up tormenting Job. Because they cannot cope with the thought of righteous suffering, innocent suffering. And they must look for solutions because Job must be doing something wrong in his depression. Do you ever find that? Um, so often with our friends, they have a problem and we want to help them, and we're really compassionate for the first day or two or three days. Or it might stretch to a week. But if they're still not sorted out, we just we we start to clip out, you know, articles from the newspaper, and we go online and we find out that, you know, goji berries are a superfood, and if you would just try this diet, and if you just go to this person or try a bit of exercise, we we want to fix them and fix them and fix them, and in the end we start blaming them for their own problems. And all of a sudden we've become a Job's comforter, a miserable comforter. Here's what one of the other uh comforters say. Chapter 8. Bildad the Shuhite. He replied, How long will you say such things, Job? Your words are a blustering wind. Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right? When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin. Man, with friends like these, who needs friends, right? But if you will seek God earnestly and plead with the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, even now he will rouse himself on your behalf and restore you to your prosperous state. Your beginnings will seem humble, so prosperous will your future be. And again, it's this understanding that good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. If you are going through a prolonged period of badness, you must be bad, Job. And if you have that view of the world that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, all your comfort will turn to torment. It will. But I'd I'd love to um uh uh skip on to uh a video from Brene Brown, uh who uh she is a psychologist and and uh she um she speaks at TED Talks. Do you know TED Talks? It's kind of like church for secular people, that's that's how I think of TED Talks. Um people get up and they give um sermons, if you like, uh on areas of uh of their own research and boiling it down, and and she speaks about how you can comfort people in all their own afflictions, and she makes a really helpful diagnosis of uh the difference between sympathy and empathy. She says, sympathy is looking down into the pit and saying they're there. Empathy is diving down into the pit, being alongside people and saying, It's tough, isn't it? Me too. Um let's have a look at her uh description of how to how to provide true comfort in the midst of suffering.
SPEAKER_00So, what is empathy and why is it very different than sympathy? Empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy, it's very interesting. Teresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions, where empathy is relevant and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth, staying out of judgment, not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do. Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that. Empathy is feeling with people. And to me, I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space when someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck, it's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then we look and we say, Hey, climb down. I know what it's like down here. And you're not alone. Sympathy is ooh, it's bad, uh-huh. Uh no. You want a sandwich? Empathy is a choice, and it's a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin with at least. I had a yeah. And we do it all the time. Because you know what? Someone just shared something with us that's incredibly painful, and we're trying to silver lining it. I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver lining around it. So I had a miscarriage. Oh, at least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage. John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an A student. But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that's very difficult, I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now, I'm just so glad you told me. Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.
SPEAKER_02So two ways of handling people struggling in the dark. You could look down from on high and say, at least, at least, at least, and silverline things. Or you climb down next to the person and you say, Me too. Me too. And that is true comfort. But as we think about the book of Job, Job knows a true friend. In chapter 16, he says to his miserable friends, he says, I've heard many things like these. You are miserable comforters, all of you. Then at the end of the chapter, he says, though, even now my witness is in heaven, my advocate is on high, my intercessor is my friend, as my eyes pour out tears to God. On behalf of a man, he pleads with God as one pleads for a friend. There is a friend in heaven, and Job calls him a witness, he sees what's going on, an advocate, he speaks up for me, an intercessor, he prays for me, and he is my friend in the midst of suffering. And as we come through into the New Testament, we see this one, this friend, who came in the flesh, Jesus Christ. And as he lived his life, he prayed the prayers of the Psalms. He prayed all those laments. The night before he died, he went into the Garden of Gethsemane, and he literally prays Psalm 88, that psalm that we began with. He says, My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Not just that he was worried about dying in the morning. He was saying his own sorrow felt like it could kill him. And there our friend in heaven takes on himself the despair and the darkness. He climbs down into the midst of the pit and he says, Me too. The Christian God is not one who looks down from on high and says, At least. He is the one who climbs down into the pit, comes alongside and says, Me too. Me too. And on the cross endures the darkness, the terror. On the cross, he prays this psalm, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he articulates the feeling of God-forsakenness that all of us have. In suffering, so many of us ask the question, where is God? But before God answers that question, he asks that question. There is one, Jesus Christ, who comes in to our darkness and articulates that very same question with us and for us. We truly have a friend who has descended to the depths. And just finally, let's think about the future. Stephen Fry, it's interesting. On that first video, when Stephen Fry was thinking about the future, he said, you have to have a sense of future. And then he said, even though you know, um even though you know that it's not going to work out, his sense of future ultimately, um, as an atheist, his sense of future ultimately is that the sun will explode and the universe will fling out into heat death and death wins and all that sort of stuff. And so the hope that the sun will come out tomorrow is only a very temporary truth. And yet I would suggest to you that within Christianity you have the most astonishing hope for a future. At the end of the book of Job, it says that the Lord restored Job's fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before. All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him. It's a picture of the future where all things will be restored and redeemed. This is the Christian vision that Jesus went through that cross, but he came out into a resurrection, and he promises to pull reality through that same path through the darkness, not avoiding it, through the darkness and out into the light. Which is why the Christian, J. R. R. Tolkien, put these words on the mouth of Sam Wides Gange. In the midst of the darkness, he says to Frodo, it's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, like the Bible. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out all the clearer. So those are the three things that I suggest to you we need. To acknowledge the fact of the feelings of depression, they are real. To know a friend in the midst of suffering, and to know a future beyond it.
SPEAKER_04So that was uh part of your talk, Glenn. Um if folks want to hear the whole of the talk, where can they go?
SPEAKER_02So we'll put it on the show notes and uh the actual website is scholoffaith.london. School of faith.
SPEAKER_04Okay, and uh we'll have a link directly to the to the talk. And if someone wanted to sort of put on a talk like that um they could turn to us perhaps for more resources.
SPEAKER_02Get in touch, get in touch with uh if you've put on something like this, we'd love to hear your wisdom on it. And uh if you want to put on something like this in your own uh setting, I'd really recommend you doing it. I I think it could be a a very, very useful um yeah, a very useful way of reaching out with the good news of Jesus. So uh do get in touch and uh and let's help one another um in this area. Good.
SPEAKER_04Okay, well just uh a couple of things to to say before we go. Firstly, are you interested perhaps joining our um union hub here in Eastbourne? Um we have a number of students that come down and and do sort of a it's a postgraduate and uh a degree level and beyond.
SPEAKER_02It's degree level, yeah. So it it is for people who already have a a a first degree.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um but it's a graduate diploma in theology, and we meet on Mondays, and uh between September and May um you can start earning your graduate diploma, and it could add up to a BA or an MA uh as well. So yeah, so we've got spaces for students to start with us, and uh we would also consider taking on an apprentice uh if you want to join with us, do some of the study, but also uh join us here at Speak Life and and uh get hands-on training of evangelism. Um yeah, do get in touch.
SPEAKER_04Okay. And also we'd uh greatly value if you could give us a rating and review on iTunes and Stitcher m stitcher maybe or or whatever uh platform you use. I've made a simple address for you to go to. If you would like to do that for us, it's speaklife.org.uk slash I love te p. Okay. That will forward to a page where it you can you can uh share the love.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You don't have a page that says I hate TEP, do you? No, not that you know of. There's always anonymous haters. Haters gonna hate. Good. Okay, well, what are we gonna do next time, Glenn? That's a good question. Wait and see till next one. Wait and see. Surprise! See ya. Bye.