Mental health: Are we OK?

Mental health is a big deal for our churches, and our pastors, these days.

Rates of serious psychological distress in New Zealand have more than doubled over the past decade. And younger generations are talking about mental health in ways previous generations rarely did.

What's going on? What does it mean for the church? And how do we as pastors look after our own mental health while also caring for the mental health of our congregations?

In this episode, Vic Francis talks with the Rev Silvia Purdie — Presbyterian minister, counsellor, supervisor, author and mental-health educator. Silvia has spent much of her working life inhabiting two worlds that don't always understand each other particularly well: the church and the mental-health profession.

Welcome, then, to Mental health: Are we OK?

For more information on Vic and Solace, check out our website or search for us on Facebook or Instagram. And if you would like to support this podcast, please become a member at https://www.patreon.com/c/forpastors

And to explore more around the mental health field:

Resources with Silvia Purdie:

https://www.conversationscounselling.nz/equip-series.html

https://www.conversationscounselling.nz/seminars.html

https://www.conversationscounselling.nz/solid-ground.html

Books and poems by Silvia Purdie

https://www.conversations.net.nz/books.html

https://www.conversations.net.nz/traumarecovery.html

Network for mental health and the church:

https://www.conversationscounselling.nz/mental-health-ministry-network.html

NZ and international resources for Christian mental health:

https://www.conversationscounselling.nz/mental-health-links.html

Transcript

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Vic Francis 0:00

Kia ora, I'm Vic Francis, and welcome to this episode of the For Pastors podcast. I'm combining my background as a journalist with decades of pastoring, national church leadership and practising as a supervisor and spiritual director to champion pastors and their holy calling in an uncertain world. Today we're talking mental health, such a big deal for our churches, and our pastors, these days. Rates of serious psychological distress in New Zealand have more than doubled over the past decade, and younger generations are talking about mental health in ways previous generations rarely did. So what's going on? What does it mean for the church? And how do we as pastors look after our own mental health while also caring for the mental health of our congregations? My guest today is the Rev Silvia Purdie, Presbyterian minister, counsellor, supervisor, author and mental health educator. Silvia has spent much of her working life inhabiting two worlds that don't always understand each other particularly well, the church and the mental health profession. Welcome then to For Pastors and Mental Health: Are We OK? Silvia Purdie, welcome to the For Pastors podcast.

Silvia Purdie 1:33

Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here.

Vic Francis 1:35

Lovely to have you here. Maybe just as we start, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Silvia Purdie 1:41

Yeah. Hi. I'm Silvia Purdie. Tena koutou tena tatou katoa. I live these days in Upper Hutt Te Awa Kairangi. And what would I say about myself? What makes me tick is the goodness of God. I love the Lord Jesus, and I seek to live in His Spirit every day. Normally I introduce myself as a counsellor, a supervisor, a minister and a trainer. Those are four words that seem to fit. But at this point in my life, God has given me various projects to work on, so I wear a range of hats.

Vic Francis 2:16

I'm sure you do, and I love that goodness of God idea. What a great way to introduce yourself. You are an ordained minister, Presbyterian minister I believe, and a counsellor. Which came first? And for you, how have those two vocations come together?

Silvia Purdie 2:31

I've been in ministry, Vic, all my adult life in various ways, and a call to ordained ministry has been part of that, but not a very straight line, I must say. Woven in and out, I've done counselling, training, other things. Playcentre, early childhood. Um, I have been a Presbyterian minister for the past uh, 15 years, and also a registered counsellor in private practice for the last five years. My husband is also a Presbyterian minister, actually. He was ordained into military chaplaincy, which has been a fascinating journey for us as a family. Chris is now New Zealand's longest serving army padre. So that means that we've moved around a bit. Flexibility is required.

Vic Francis 3:19

I can feel a For Pastors podcast interview with your husband, and what a fascinating thing to be the longest serving padre. I love that.

Silvia Purdie 3:26

Yeah. He's actually just in the process of publishing a book about military chaplaincy and his own journey.

Vic Francis 3:32

You've got my interest. I think that's wonderful. Um, you know, If we talk about being a minister and being a counsellor I'm wondering how you might move between those roles. So would, for example, being a counsellor make you a different kind of pastor? And has being a pastor made you a different kind of counsellor?

Silvia Purdie 3:47

Yeah, great question. The main thing is that having training in both gives confidence, confidence in dealing with both the things of the Spirit and the things of the heart and mind. And I see a, a lack of confidence in the church. I see people in the church being really nervous when it comes to mental health, and fair enough, I get it, we're afraid of making things worse, and we've been told to stay in our lane. But I'm passionate about encouraging the church to be the church, and that has to include being there with people who are hurting, not just telling them to go see a counsellor. So mainly it's the confidence to stay present. Not get sucked into our own anxieties about am I trained enough, or do I have the right answers to these hard questions, or am I being helpful enough? And it's mainly about putting all that to the side and just being with a person together in the presence of God.

Vic Francis 4:47

I think that's such an important thing, isn't it? And I guess the reason we're doing this podcast is how can we as pastors engage in a way, maybe not go too far, but also not shrink away too much when we come to that sort of subject. 'Cause mental health's big deal and I guess we're more and more aware of it. I note that the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission talks about this trend, which is pretty disturbing, I think, that the rates of what they call high psychological distress have more than doubled over the last decade. So what do you see is going on? Why are we becoming less, if you like, mentally well as society supposedly understands this more, and yet it's almost seems like it's getting worse?

Silvia Purdie 5:28

Yeah. It's a great question. And if we start from how we're made by God, right? 'Cause that hasn't changed. God has made us to feel all these feelings, including the really uncomfortable ones. But God made us to bounce back, to recover, to return to a place of being okay in community. God did not make us to be constantly in a place of threat and challenge. Honestly, I just don't think our minds are designed for what counts as normal in the 21st century.

Vic Francis 6:03

Yes, it's such a different world, and changing even more rapidly it seems.

Silvia Purdie 6:06

As I was reflecting for this, I was thinking back to when I was 12. I just think that people have always been through terrible things, right? And there's plenty in the Bible. But when I was 12, my family moved from Tonga to Lower Hutt. My father had been a missionary teacher in Tonga and I grew up in some interesting Polynesian environments. But when I was 12, we moved to Lower Hutt, and my parents separated. Both my parents became really emotionally and physically unwell, and we had no income to speak of. I was badly bullied at school, and I developed a stutter. It was a really tough time. But for me, back then, in the 20th century, the bullying stopped when I left school. In my own bedroom, I was safe, and I could recover. And I remember I had this little hidey-hole down in the garden, which was my little secret place. But kids this century have no space free from the constant stream of communication. Their lives are filled every waking moment with the opinions of others and the problems of the world. It's like we're living in this massive experiment which is opening us up to vast amounts of information and this incessant pinging of stress. Literally, our devices ping, and that releases stress hormones into our system constantly, and we have very few moments to actually wind down. I don't honestly think the world is more traumatic now than it was in the past. But, we also have a lot less people contact time, a lot less time in the natural world, a lot less physical movement, less shared values, less spiritual habits, and more stress, which we call cortisol soup. Basically we're just on too much, and it just fries our circuitry.

Vic Francis 7:59

Cortisol soup. That's that's something to note, I'm sure. The reference to your 12-year-old self is really interesting and perhaps, of a 12-year-old today not having some of the access, even in those quiet spaces, I guess it is, or the coming away from be it the bullying or the pain that's happening in the household. And it strikes me that our younger people in some ways have a somewhat more healthy understanding of mental health because they're perhaps more willing to face it than older generations. And so, you know, you can't go anywhere without hearing some of those words of trauma and anxiety, and we talk about neurodiversity and triggers and self-care and those sorts of things. On one hand, what are the things that our younger generations are seeing that are helpful? But on the other hand, what are some of the things that are unhelpful for a younger generation?

Silvia Purdie 8:46

Yeah, you're certainly describing some pretty significant social change around this and how people understand themselves. And yeah young people are so fluent in the language of mental health. And I think those of us in older generations are a little puzzled in a way as to why they feel the need to find labels for themselves and to swap labels around. And I think the labels can be good if it widens space for what normal looks like and the language and the labels can help people connect with others that they have something in common with. And it's great if they are happy to access services. It would be great if they saw the church as a place to access mental health services. I really am passionate about that. I see that as what, part of what God's doing in the world of raising up the church again to be somewhere that people look to and go to. But you know, this kind of tendency to label and use these big psych words it's not so great if it keeps our stress levels high. I think people can get into this kind of self-diagnostic loop where I'm constantly checking for what might be wrong with me.

Vic Francis 9:58

Yes.

Silvia Purdie 9:59

And hey, no amount of information on the internet can come anywhere close to the mental health benefits of walking on the beach with your family. It can become a kind of a pseudo thing, right?

Vic Francis 10:11

There's got to be a healthy balance, I imagine, 'cause, maybe if we can differentiate between older generations and younger generations, which is pretty arbitrary, but maybe an older generation, be it stiff upper lip or, tough it out or something like that, and the younger generation much more aware but maybe fall into a little bit of a hole of being hyper-conscious of something like that. So not to avoid, but also to make sure that sort of we don't run down that rabbit hole, is a really important thing.

Silvia Purdie 10:36

The other thing I just did want to pick up on that was it's really important for young people or for anyone in emotional pain to feel heard. We had a session at a church that I'm supporting recently about youth mental health, and we got school counsellors to come. And they'd actually asked young people what did they want adults to know about mental health. And number one thing is that young people said to the school counsellors, "Please don't minimise when I share that I'm in pain." They report how bad they feel if they tell a parent that they're struggling and then the parent says, "Oh, it's not that bad. What have you got to be anxious about?" And they reported feeling like it doesn't actually stop them feeling anxious, and at the same time as feeling anxious, now they're feeling guilty for feeling anxious because their loved adults have told them that they're stupid to feel anxious or that they shouldn't feel anxious. And then they feel lonely because they just can't talk about it at home. So yeah, we might struggle with these kind of labels and the issues that, that younger people have. But please, don't jump too quick to judge, and please take it seriously when people share difficult emotions with you. It doesn't work to minimise. We just need to listen and care and hopefully help them balance it out.

Vic Francis 11:58

Fantastic advice there. I'm wondering, the 12-year-old you, Silvia, if you were in the same situation today, you probably don't have a back garden to go and a sort of a special place. Hopefully have a bedroom and all of that sort of thing. But, for any of us maybe whatever age, where is the modern-day equivalent of that somewhere where I can get away from everything and maybe find some equilibrium in that process?

Silvia Purdie 12:24

Yeah. Well, I do think that sadly young people are just relying on their phones for that. And for myself, I think I rely too much on my own phone for that, like kind of little games and things to just calm down and to like tune out. And there's so few places outside of school and work, sports might be one for those that are sporty, absolutely. But I really do see this vital role for the church, for youth ministry, for us to be intergenerational community.

Vic Francis 13:02

So important, isn't it? Um, so it comes to the church, and this is a For Pastors podcast where we're talking mainly with pastors. and it's important that mental health is a, a factor in their church life. What are the implications of the trend for increasing mental health understanding within the church? What are the things that the church needs to know about?

Silvia Purdie 13:24

Yeah, big questions. I do think that the church has a fundamental calling, a significant place to be disciples of Jesus. And I guess the call for mental health literacy and competence is the call for the church to connect following Jesus with the emotional rollercoaster that most people are in most of the time. So we need to role model our own feelings. We need to, as leaders, be growing in our own capacity to deal with life's setbacks in ways that are authentic and mature and loving. But more important than anything we say or do, we can point to Christ, right? And create spaces where the Holy Spirit can move and touch and heal. In some ways that's our main job, is to get out of the way, let God do what God loves to do.

Vic Francis 14:21

Are there particular areas that you can think of where the church needs to catch up with this whole changing mental health conversation and where might Christianity have something distinctive to contribute to it? 'Cause you would hope that the church would be a leader rather than trailing behind right at the back. What does the church really have to offer and how do we get there?

Silvia Purdie 14:40

There's some really good specific things that we can do. I encourage pastors to bring more of a pastoral approach to their preaching. I think what we're really guilty of in the church is oversimplifying mental health. And it's just, if people in emotional pain come to the church looking for healing, which they do, absolutely, looking for peace, looking for some kindness and affection and community. People do come looking to the church for those things, and it's not good enough for us to have too simple answers. And where the church can make mental health things worse is when people feel like if they try the simple things, like, "Let's just pray for it. Let's just give it all to God and worship." We absolutely do that, and people do that as wholeheartedly as they can. And doesn't always work, right? Mental health, we're dealing into the space of sustained patterns of pain. And the experiences of depression, anxiety, these are deeply unpleasant things. Nobody wants them in their lives. But it is perhaps more complex to genuinely help people through these things than we would like it to be in the church. We kind of wish it was easy. As, Julia Grace says we want to pray away the cray-cray. Which actually isn't enough.

Vic Francis 16:14

Yes, it is a complex thing, and probably at our best we are increasingly realising some of the complexities. Hence the ability for us to perhaps interact with a mental health system or mental health professionals rather than almost try and run a separate course to who and what they are. I think that's probably a good point for us to take a break. And when we return, I'm gonna be asking Silvia more specifically about the mental health of our pastors. So we will be right back. Welcome back to the For Pastors podcast and an episode focusing on mental health with Silvia Purdie. Now Silvia, what is changing in how we understand mental health and in how we treat it?

Silvia Purdie 17:50

Yeah, I think it's important for the church to get a sense of this, that the whole sort of field of psychology is radically changing in our time. A few years ago, the focus was on two things in particular. One was looking for diagnoses and seeing mental illness as all being about chemical imbalance in the brain. There was a lot of effort into what's called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and the whole kind of space of mental health was trying to divvy people up into more and more categories of mental illness. That's still a thing. But also in the mental health kinda treatment space, a lot of the focus was on irrational beliefs and trying to replace wrong thinking with right thinking. The whole space of mental health and psychology had a very cognitive approach and we've seen that come through into the church. A lot of our Christian understanding around mental health is around wanting to overcome the lies that we've picked up along the way with the truth of God, and absolutely we do that. But these days, the whole space of psychology is learning so much more about the connection between the brain and the body and how this impacts on our minds and our hearts. And the research is so interesting now, even about our gut and how our gut is such a big part of our brain and our emotions and how emotions are a real embodied thing. And it's all about trauma these days, you've probably heard uh, there's a lot of language around the impacts of our experiences of being overwhelmed and terrified, how these kind of resets our nervous system to overreact to threat.

Vic Francis 19:40

And what does that greater understanding, how does that affect things in terms of the way we consider mental health and affect the way we sit with mental health?

Silvia Purdie 19:49

One of the real specific implications is that it's brought a more respectful attitude to those that suffer from mental health, rather than seeing them as being mad or crazy. What's called a trauma-informed approach really is coming through right across the board in our community sector. And in New Zealand obviously and around the world there's been lots of reports written investigating old trauma, those aspects of child abuse in our history. This has really brought it to front of mind I think for our society, the long-term impacts of especially damage done to children. And including from the church, and it's become a massive barrier to evangelism, a way that people unfortunately perceive the church as being a perpetrator of trauma. But a trauma-informed approach emphasises people's capacity, emphasises the importance of people having autonomy and making their own decisions, emphasises informed consent. It's a very respectful actually, and when you read about the trauma-informed it actually sounds quite a lot like the fruits of the Spirit that Paul writes about. Gentleness, kindness. These things are more to the fore.

Vic Francis 21:07

Boy, I like that. And it's such a big subject as we're talking about it. We will put in the show notes in this episode various links both to Silvia and to other sources that um, people can look at because it's such a subject, isn't it?

Silvia Purdie 21:20

I've put together a short training course which I've called Solid Ground, and part of that is because this understanding of our body and brain connection, it's a lot more about understanding our own nervous systems. And there's so much in scripture about how God brings us down to a space of peace and calm. And this is absolutely what people are looking for when they are in kind of trauma responses. People are desperate for a lived reality of peace. And it feels like, um, God being my rock and my refuge. And in practice, it's about breathing in and breathing out. And psychology is giving us all this kinda language about regulating our nervous system. But really, it's just what people have been doing in faith traditions for thousands of years.

Vic Francis 22:15

Silvia, we've been talking about mental health in general and somewhat in the church, but what about for the people leading our churches? So Richard Black, who's been on our For Pastors podcast a couple of months ago from Thriving Churches HQ, he, he has research that suggests that pastors' mental health may actually be worse than that of the general population. Why would you think that might be?

Silvia Purdie 22:39

Yeah, it's pretty confronting, isn't it? I've fully committed my life to pastoring in the church. I deeply value my own ordination, and I threw myself into that task, that calling so wholeheartedly. And I think that's a really good thing. I've been a bit of my own dilemma about this, Vic, because those on the psychology side say that we should have more boundaries and be less identity fused with our work. And on the other hand, I'm like, "Let's just go for it. Let's throw ourselves into ministry." And so I'm not sure myself about uh, identity. Uh, Richard's got a beautiful teaching about how we should be keeping our identity in Christ rather than in the work and the role that we do. I do think that many of us are fused with our calling from God is a need to please others. And many of us come into ministry wanting to help, as people do right across the helping professions, of course. And somewhere along the line you realise you probably can't help as much as you would like to and that no matter what you do, people are gonna critique and complain and there'll still be conflict. So, yeah, I loved your your podcast with Karen Kemp about conflict. It's this calling to just be more robust in our own sense of self and in just wholeheartedly giving ourselves away for God but perhaps being less tied into the opinions of others. It's not easy though, right?

Vic Francis 24:21

Yeah, it's not easy at all. And, both as a minister for yourself, and I know you're a supervisor and counsellor of course, are there particular pressures on pastors that people outside ministry don't really realise?

Silvia Purdie 24:34

Look, do you think I could throw this back on you, Vic? You've been in this space more than me. What do you see? How would you answer your own question there? What are the particular pressures on pastors?

Vic Francis 24:46

I would reflect and say perhaps we're the victims of our own, I'm gonna say hyperbole, but I want it to be more positive than that. But it's God loves you, come to God and He will take care of you. And we get called into ministry, it seems to me, with a similar sense of, if the God of creation has called us into ministry, then surely he wants us to make a big difference in the world. That's our expectation and our desire when we go into ministry. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it 'cause it is too hard or too searching. And then there is a lot of disappointment in ministry. We are disappointed people, we are disappointed with maybe ourselves, with the results, so to speak. And to be honest, we're disappointed with God sometimes, and probably because we're stuck behind the microphone at the front, and we have to present week by week, a good God and a relationship with God that seems to be functional. And so it can be very demoralising perhaps or very difficult year after year to span those two things that might be happening in our own lives personally, and yet what we see is important for the need for the congregation. I would perhaps say that we're in better shape now than we were when I started, which is, kinda 1993, simply of what you're very much talking about, is actually we're allowed to talk about it now. If there were podcasts 30 years ago, maybe we wouldn't be talking about mental health 'cause it's surely we don't have mental health problems because we're pastors and we've got Jesus and all of this sort of things. Whereas now we're perhaps more balanced in the sense that we do know that some of these things do come part and parcel.

Silvia Purdie 26:23

Yeah. In, in my own ministry journey, I've just found the power of coming back to Christ, being as grounded as possible in God and in His truth. And just trying to push past all the other stuff. There's a lot of stuff that accumulates and these days, it's just getting harder with compliance things and admin things. And I think it's partly this extraordinary diversity of skills that are required and high expectations of ourselves, and others, that we'll won't stuff up too many times. But to just be kind of deepening and deepening our relationship with God through the years is the powerhouse of ministry, surely. I love my youthful kind of enthusiasm that I brought to ministry, and I also really appreciate the harrowing of the years, the hollowing of the years and what I can bring now. Perhaps I'm a bit less trying as trying hard across as many different categories. I don't know. It's complex, isn't it?

Vic Francis 27:32

I love that balance that you're saying, is you can still identify a youthful expectation that you bring into that ministry, but recognising that's been tempered and moderated, and that's actually not a bad thing, and makes you seasoned and wiser and more effective, is what you can be. What are the warning signs that you see among those in Christian ministry? So obviously we have some busy seasons, it might be Christmas or it might be a campaign or something like that, or series or whatever we're doing. But what would be warning signs as pastors and leaders that should bring to our attention that this is not just a busy season, but actually something fundamentally needs to be, addressed?

Silvia Purdie 28:11

Yeah. All the pastors I know are so hardworking, so diligent, and we just love to go the extra mile and be there for others. The warning signs are about who's paying the price. And actually, it might be those closest to us who are paying the price for our hard work. And it might be our bodies. You can push through the tiredness for a while, but after a while, it strips away your ability to care. Warning signs is anything which doesn't feel like you, right? It's when you find yourself snapping at things or losing caring or feeling that God's not really, that God is distant.

Vic Francis 28:49

I wonder why it's so hard for us to be the ones who put their hands up and say, "I need help." We're people who care for others, but, I think it can be difficult for us to say, "Actually, I'm not doing very well."

Silvia Purdie 28:59

Oh my gosh, yes, it is so humbling. Oh my goodness. We believe in humility. We preach humility and vulnerability, but actually being humbled is really awful. It's downright embarrassing, actually. I was quite sure that I had the personal and spiritual resilience to cope with anything. So when I went through a period for myself of feeling some chronic anxiety, I just hardly recognised myself. Oh, gosh. And pastors actually, it can be quite difficult to get help as pastors. We generally need to pay for it and it generally needs to be very confidential and contained. We don't wanna put our pain onto anyone. I certainly didn't want to share my pain with my kids. My husband got bored with it. But especially when our pain is related to the church, because we represent the church. We represent God, and yet we can also be really struggling with feeling attacked and abused in the church.

Vic Francis 30:00

So who do we go to then? And you are a counsellor, a supervisor. I think of spiritual direction. There are coaches, So who do we go to, and what can we personally do to guard our hearts, guard our minds, guard our energy levels?

Silvia Purdie 30:14

Yeah. Yeah, I do think that for those in ministry, we have a very strong commitment to contain our pain. We can't just let it slip out or leach out. It can cause all manner of trouble for the church, especially if our pain shows itself in anger or being passive-aggressive even. It's a balance. On one hand, yes, we should be authentic and real and vulnerable, not shiny all the time. But on the other hand, we do have this strong commitment to deal with our pain ourselves. We have to take full responsibility for ourselves and not expect anyone else to fix it. And as I said, that does involve paying people we trust. And we better know who to call before we need it. That's why we need monthly supervision, why the church needs to be paying for monthly supervision. And as well as that, I really advocate that pastors need to have occasional counselling or spiritual direction, even when you don't feel like you're desperate for it, so that support network's in place. Because when you are desperate for it, you actually need it to already be there ready for you.

Vic Francis 31:26

So important, and in my supervision practice, I always say to pastors when I see them, "Is your church going to be paying for this?" Because it needs to be paying for this. And fortunately I think in all cases the church does pay for it, but there's lots of pastors out there who don't receive supervision or don't receive any of those things because they're too busy or they can't afford it or whatever.

Silvia Purdie 31:48

I also think that as well as the normal flow of spiritual direction or supervision, I think that also pastors need to be aware that some things are extra tough. If there are things which deeply impact on us emotionally. Maybe a sudden death, a traumatic death, too many deaths, or a complaint or conflict or an illness. There are those moments in church life which just things take more time to recover, and if we don't attend to those well, then actually that can really diminish our capacity going forward. So I think that we've got a normal kind of flow of our own wellbeing supports, and then you need this extra capacity built in for when you need it.

Vic Francis 32:33

Very important, isn't it? So to have some margin so that we're not running, just running on empty all of the time.

Silvia Purdie 32:39

In the secular world businesses have EAP counselling as part of their employment contracts. People can get special leave often in workplaces. And the church isn't always that good at just giving extra leave or extra supervision. There's always someone on the eldership that kind of looks down their nose if the pastor's being given too much time off. You know those conversations.

Vic Francis 33:06

Silvia, as we come to the end of this part of our podcast, a question to go out on, what do you wish every pastor understood about their own mental health?

Silvia Purdie 33:16

Number one, Vic, is the importance of rest. We just can't be mentally healthy if we're not getting enough rest. This is part of that brain-body connection that I was talking about. So absolutely learn to rest more. Number two would just be growing in our own self-awareness, our own, what's called emotional intelligence. It's the only way to have a sustainable ministry.

Vic Francis 33:41

Fantastic advice. Thank you, Silvia, for your clarity and your insight on this important subject of mental health, both for our congregations and for us as pastors. We are heading for a break and in our final segment, Silvia and I are gonna be chatting about how to work towards a mentally healthier church. So we'll be right back. Welcome back, Silvia Purdie, to our exploration of things mental health. Silvia, if psychological distress is becoming significantly more common, what would you like pastors and churches to do differently?

Silvia Purdie 34:49

I would love pastors to preach mental health more. And that's a bit of a challenge for us because it has to involve a deeper vulnerability on our part. It's not enough to find a couple of simple answers online about this or that diagnosis. Emotional pain is complex and we need to be speaking assuming that some people in our audience are actually in pain as they sit there. And so pastoral preaching kind of takes it down a level with this emotional maturity that we're all growing in, to hold uncomfortable feelings and to let God's Spirit minister with gentleness and kindness, raising up joy and hope. So moving beyond the simple answers to a reality of this journey that we're all on.

Vic Francis 35:38

Wow, that's super challenging and super important, I'm sure. Yeah.

Silvia Purdie 35:42

And the second one would be, the whole model of pastoral care has changed radically in the church since I was a young thing. So we used to have pastoral visitors, and the Presbyterian Church would have the elders who would go round dishing out, if you were good enough, your chit for communion back in the day. But these days pastoral care is mostly done in home group settings which is wonderful, and these can be beautiful healing recovery spaces for mental wellbeing. But I would really love for home group leaders to be growing in their understandings and skills, particularly around mental health. So, we are running a Equip series, we're calling it, of evening trainings once a month. We've done five already, and there's a body of video resources available.

Vic Francis 36:26

Thank you for that. I think both of those suggestions, both in the church, a Sunday, if you like, because of the preaching that you're talking about, and in the home groups, as you say. So a challenge for us as pastors both to have really great home groups and then to do some training of our home group leaders, 'cause they're gonna encounter mental health because they're sitting with those people every week or every fortnight or whatever. So pastors, coming back to pastors or being aware of pastors, regularly find themselves sitting with people who are experiencing anxiety, those words that we've talked about, depression, trauma, distress. So what can a pastor offer that, say, for example, a mental health professional can't offer? And when do we need to recognise that actually we can't offer everything, and we need to bring in some professional help?

Silvia Purdie 37:10

Oh, two questions at once, Vic. Ooh. First pastors don't need to be counsellors, and several pastors have told me that they're not pastoral, by which they mean that they have little patience for old models of kind of hand-holding pastoral care. But this is, to me, in my ministry and experience, this is the moment of just deep substance in Christian ministry are these heart-to-heart conversations where we open up our lives in the presence of the Holy Spirit. In this place, people are uniquely open to God, and faith is formed in suffering, right? So these spaces that we get, which are beautiful and, and deep that God creates in our ministries and we can pray with people. God shows up and is real. So to me they've been, like, the highest honour to sit with someone and have a solid conversation. And I do think that pastors need to be growing in their understandings so that we can understand the words that people are using and have good questions to ask. But on the other hand, as I said before, it's also about getting out of the road and letting God minister in a really explicitly Christian space. And I honestly believe that people are increasingly coming to the church for this.

Vic Francis 38:38

Yeah. And, extrapolating out for when I know I'm out of my depth, what are the signs to know that I need to refer on?

Silvia Purdie 38:48

I think that we need to be managing our anxieties. I do encourage people to stay with it longer than you think perhaps you're comfortable with. So it is a growing skill of just not freaking out. But as we would encourage people to perhaps use a budgeting service or go to a physiotherapist, we need to know good counsellors, and we need to know how our people can access professional mental health services. Partly it's a time thing and is a different kind of contract involved with professional services. So getting people engaged with a counsellor is perhaps a kind of a real commitment that can be made in a way that we can't so much in pastoral ministry. We just don't have the time. And also there are some people who are, especially when we're dealing with really hard stuff of psychosis and addiction and and there are really professional, specialist skills that are required to really help people.

Vic Francis 39:51

Yeah. So important. We're doing them a, a great disservice, I'm sure, at that level when we're trying to handle it on our own. I love your balance and I love that advice to actually go deeper and longer than perhaps we might have thought, before referring them on. And of course, pastoral care is something that is always gonna be our responsibility as opposed to the professionals who are working with them. So even then I imagine we're still working with them or we're still loving them and encouraging them while they go through their professional help. Thank you for that, Silvia. Now, you have resources. We mentioned Solid Ground before, which on your website you talk about being a Bible-based approach to faith-based mental health first aid. I'm wondering, what are the basic mental health skills that you wish that every pastor, maybe every Christian, but what are those basic skills that you wish that we had?

Silvia Purdie 40:39

Yeah. At its most basic is simply being present and listening with all of ourselves, including listening with our spirits. I honestly think all Christians can do that. Absolutely. But to do that, to stay present, we have to avoid going either on one side into wanting to give advice. "Oh my gosh, I really want to solve this. I'm sure if they just did dot, then they'd be better." I think that's the self-control, that's one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to just keep that locked down. I'm not gonna step in. I'm not gonna try and fix it and give advice. I'm just going to listen, and really listen to understand, to just be with this person. And on the other hand, the other thing that we need self-control about, and perhaps that emotional maturity, is to be just watching ourselves for our own need to be the centre of attention. Some of us just love talking, and we just actually need to not kind of bounce and go, "Oh, yeah, that happened to me," or "This has happened to so-and-so." And uh, it's the space of focused attention and calm, confident listening, which is the heart of pastoral care.

Vic Francis 42:00

And without being simplistic I feel like in that answer you've simplified it. It's like my insecurity, it's like I don't know what to do, I don't know what to say, can be overcome by my heart, is that I have a genuine love and caring for what you're going through, and I can be here, and God is here.

Silvia Purdie 42:18

And you asked before about the, the benefit of training. The benefit of the training actually reinforces the power of that. In the moment, you feel like it's not enough. It's just not enough to just be listening. But the research, the psychology is showing that it's the most extraordinary experience for someone to truly feel heard. It's the single most powerful thing that brings down our stress response. The experience of feeling like someone else has got me. God has so hardwired us for relationship, for community, and it's this particular experience out of all the others. When you're offering it, it feels not enough, but actually it is enough. It is deeply powerful and impactful. It's a gift. It's a powerful gift to offer someone true listening.

Vic Francis 43:08

Yeah. What do you think a mentally healthy church might actually look like? And conversely, are there things in church cultures or even our theologies that can unintentionally make people's mental health journey more difficult?

Silvia Purdie 43:23

A mentally healthy church is actually loving, not just polite. Loving, not just polite. Oh my gosh. Yeah, every church thinks that they're really friendly but really, do they actually love? A mentally healthy church has full confidence that no matter what you are feeling or going through, God is with you and in it, and alive and at work. Nowhere is outside the love of God. So we do not need to be anxious or stressed about mental health. We don't need to have the answers. We don't need to be fixing it. We know that God is in it with us.

Vic Francis 44:06

And a church like that, even if you're a pastor struggling with your mental health, will still be a safe space, won't it?

Silvia Purdie 44:12

Yeah, safe space. True that. Okay, so how can we make it worse? We can make it worse, absolutely. It's interesting, we've started a national network of church leaders and Christian mental health professionals around this topic, and we've had a few meetings this year and we're running these series. And we asked each other, "How can the church make it worse?" And everybody answered, yeah by adding guilt and failure on top of human suffering. We just really hope it's gonna just be quick, and easy, and simple. I don't know where we got that idea from. We did not get that idea from the Bible. I think it's a sin in the heart of our Christian church that we just want to fix things quickly. And so we simplify human pain, and we try to impose formulas that we think should work, and then when it doesn't, people feel like it was their fault. Oh, my gosh, that is not helpful. God is training us instead for our perseverance. That's a biblical idea, right? Not quick results. It's stubborn love.

Vic Francis 45:17

Love some of those quotes. The stubborn love idea is challenging in its own right. You mentioned a biblical basis for some of this. What do you see in scripture that resonates strongly with what we know about good mental health? What does the Bible have to offer us?

Silvia Purdie 45:31

It's all there, isn't it? It's all there scripture. There's nothing new under the sun. That's Shakespeare. All the emotions, all of the crises about being human, our physical pain, our emotional pain, it's all there in scripture. Oh my gosh. And scripture is also the story of God over and over pouring himself into human lives, both individually and collectively. And this work of God that we see over and over in scripture that calms people, that also energises people, lifting people up, raising. It's all there. It's all there in the touch of Jesus, in the eyes of Christ. It's all there.

Vic Francis 46:12

If we come to Jesus, what do you notice about Jesus in responding to people who are distressed or overwhelmed? How do you see Jesus in relation to these deep problems that we might carry in life?

Silvia Purdie 46:23

Oof, yeah. well it is just showing up and encountering all kinds of people in whatever state they're in. I was brought up in the days when you had a church dress, and you presented your best self at church, and children were on their best behaviour. But hey, Christendom is over. Yay for that. And this, this conversation we're having around mental health is one of the signs of the end of Christendom, this culture of public face and presenting our kind of goodness on the outside, being well-behaved. It's this whole new era of church life where we are more like Jesus. Hallelujah. We're more rough around the edges. We're more real.

Vic Francis 47:08

Oh, I love that. I love that permission. What a wonderful thing. Final question on mental health, and then I'm gonna just take you into a couple of things that we always do at the end of the podcast. But come back to pastors, 'cause it's the For Pastors podcast, and we're championing pastors and their holy callings in an uncertain world. What would you say to the pastor listening who knows deep down that they're actually not doing particularly well at the moment?

Silvia Purdie 47:34

Aw. I'd say ka aroha. It's just from the heart. My heart goes out to you. This wave of compassion, it's God's heart for us as individuals. When we are professional Christians, we are just being that for everyone else, and it's just to receive the love of God for ourselves. When we're feeling fragile, what we need is kindness. And I do reinforce that we have to pay for our own professional wellbeing support. It's a tough challenge, but I haven't found many other options myself. And also, friends are good. Friends out of town are good. Go away for a weekend. Stay with someone out of town.

Vic Francis 48:22

Miss a Sunday. Yeah.

Silvia Purdie 48:24

totally there for you. And as I said prioritising rest and yeah.

Vic Francis 48:31

Yeah, that's great. And important that we're heard, and I think every pastor would recognise themselves both in that question a little and in the answer. So what gives you hope, Silvia? I ask every person who comes on the podcast, but for you, what gives you hope?

Silvia Purdie 48:46

My hope is in Jesus. It's in who He is and what He's doing. I'm interested in the latest counselling techniques for treating trauma, but I don't place much hope in them. The best we can offer with our training and our skills, understanding or lack of it, the best we can hope for is to partner with Christ in the places where people are hurting. Not because we hope in our own ability to save them. Hallelujah, we're not the saviour. We are in those places because we know that God loves us and that Jesus is drawn to those places of vulnerability, that Jesus is the light. He just loves to shine.

Vic Francis 49:29

Absolutely. Thank you for that. I also ask the guests on our podcast to pray for our pastors for the very reasons that we're talking about as we need to pray for our pastors. But Silvia, you too have written some poetry around the subject of mental health, and I wonder if I could ask you to read a couple of your poems perhaps, and then to pray for our pastors in New Zealand and overseas.

Silvia Purdie 49:51

Okay. Yeah, this was interesting looking back at some stuff I'd written a few years ago. I will just read a couple of poems here on the theme of trauma and recovery. Trauma is static, crackle, hiss in the background, assaulting concentration, constantly interrupting, pain as noise, noise as pain. Recovery is silence, growing grass and bird call. As stress splutters and fades and rest, beautiful rest, comes sweet and welcome. A different slant. Trauma is unmentionable. Look on the bright side, change the subject, don't bring it up, don't mention the war. The elephant in the room glowers and grumbles at being ignored. Recovery is telling my story, my truth. Courageous honesty looks the growling memories in the eye, stare them down until they shine back with strength, brave and true.

Vic Francis 51:09

Wow. Thank you.

Silvia Purdie 51:14

I would love to pray for the pastors on this call. Thank you for anyone listening to this podcast. Thank you to you, Vic, for this amazing ministry that you are doing, and all the very best as you plan another year. Woo.

Vic Francis 51:28

Thank you.

Silvia Purdie 51:30

Go you. Loving God, thank you for this conversation around mental health and ministry. Thank you that you are at work, that we can trust you and rely on you. We offer ourselves somewhat sensitively, somewhat courageously to be there for people in pain. This is a tough gig but we're up for it. We can only work in partnership with your Holy Spirit, Lord God. So bring us the people that you have for us to care for, and you, Lord God, minister to them as only you can. And we pray for each other, for all those who minister in your name, Lord Jesus, that you will continue to lead us on a path of growing maturity in Christ, knowing ourselves blessed and loved and rested in your mighty presence. Amen.

Vic Francis 52:48

Amen. Thank you, Silvia. Thank you for joining me today on the podcast. Thank you also for your long commitment both to ministry and to understanding the complexities of mental health. For taking that knowledge and wisdom to pastors and churches through your many resources, seminars and projects. For caring, for advocating, for campaigning for those who are struggling in this sometimes overwhelming area. And so we champion you too in your holy calling in this uncertain world. God bless you. It's been a great pleasure.

Silvia Purdie 53:27

Thank you. Thank you. God bless you also. It's been fascinating to talk and yeah, well done.

Vic Francis 53:35

Glad you joined us. God bless. Thank you for listening to this episode of the For Pastors podcast. Before you leave, how about liking or rating this podcast and passing it on to a pastor you know who may benefit? And I'll be back soon with more podcasts which champion pastors and their holy callings in an uncertain world. I hope you'll join me. God bless.