It speaks to us as members of Christ’s body in local congregations. It’s not about how I as an individual can have my own pastoral care ministry as a lone ranger helping our most deeply troubled people, but about how whole church fellowships can work together. This is real love in action in true community in a way that nothing else matches. Anywhere.

There are at least three reasons it’s worth reading this new book on helping people with mental health struggles.

1. Mental Health and Your Church is written for ‘ordinary church members.’ It contextualises the intensely practical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. It takes seriously the biblical teaching on mutual care for each other in all sorts of challenging life circumstances, applying it wisely to the complexities of 21^st century churches. These complexities include an apparent increase in mental health disorders and the relatively recent rise of a growing, predominately secular, mental health system that operates in areas that overlap the traditional concerns of Christian growth and ministry. And there are historical weaknesses in training pastors to equip themselves and their people in all that biblical pastoral care entails. We do need to know how to do more than listening, prayer, and referral—as important as those things are![1]

2. Authors Helen Thorne and Steve Midgley write from a UK context. It seems to me that Brits and Aussies have some things in common that we don’t always share with the various American sub-cultures that influence our pastoral care models. So, it’s just nice to see some different ways to do things that resonate with my feel for what church life is like in Australia—or what it could be.

3. Before going into pastoral ministry, ending up as rector of Christ Church, Midgley was a Cambridge-educated medical doctor who trained in psychiatry. He clearly retains a good appreciation of the value of his former profession—along with some of its limitations. This ‘insiders’ view is so important. As such, this is not a book aiming to take over or replace psychiatry. It is positively written to help equip our churches do all they can do to help in addition to what professional mental health services can offer.

What’s in it?

It’s a small book of around 180 pages divided roughly equally into three main sections:

Section 1 on understanding mental illness carefully explains what mental illnesses are. It considers mental health issues, talking therapies, and medications from a Christian worldview perspective that I found, as a Christian counsellor and medical practitioner, to be balanced.

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