Some Ways to Show Your Support
Some Ways to Show Your Support
- ▪ Regularly include appropriate prayers for mental health issues within worship.
- ▪ Send cards and flowers to those who are in a psychiatric hospital, or are unwell at home.
- ▪ Ensure that your church resources are up-to-date, and they do not portray mental illness as being a sign of moral weakness or spiritual failure.
- ▪ Regularly include items on mental health issues and events in your bulletins and websites.
- ▪ Actively participate in mental health related community awareness events:
• Display the promotional posters available for most of these events.
• Distribute mental health factsheets, and flyers from community based mental health support groups [eg.
• Arafmi, GROW, Mental Illness Fellowship].
• Host a public workshop or seminar on a mental health topic.
- ▪ Display the contact details for groups such as Lifeline, beyondblue, Kids Helpline, Transcultural Mental Health, and Suicide Call Back Service on your noticeboards, in the pew bulletins, and on the church website.
- ▪ Be a safe space where mental health issues can be discussed openly.
- ▪ Link up with local mental health outreaches; offer your help and friendship.
- ▪ Be involved in Mental Health Advocacy.
“Get up off of your knees. Come out of your churches, your mosques, your temples. God can hear your prayers for peace, justice, and hope in this broken world just fine while you're out creating peace, working for justice, and giving hope to this broken world. When are we finally going to realize that humanity is the solution to inhumanity? When will we finally understand that we are all drops of the same ocean, hurting together, healing together, hoping together?
Don't just pray for hands to heal the hurting. Pray with hands that are healing the hurting. Don't just pray for arms to help the helpless. Pray with arms that are helping the helpless. Don't just pray for feet to respond to need. Pray on feet that are responding to need. Don't just pray for someone to do something. Be someone who does something. Don't just pray for answers. Be the answer.”
~ L.R. Knost
‘Grassroots network fills the gaps’ 08/04/2014
https://journeyonline.com.au/local-church-news/grassroots-network-fills-gaps/
“A branch of the support organisation A Nouwen Network now meets regularly at a local café. Information and resources are readily available to the congregation and the community, and the church craft group makes “comfort cushions” for network members to distribute.
The church care team and network members hosted an information evening in March which brought together 40 people, a third from outside the congregation, to learn more about anxiety and depression.
“These are common issues in society but are often not recognised early enough for adequate help to be sought,” says Jeannie. “We are keen to educate people that recovery from anxiety and depression does not simply involve ‘pulling one’s self together’!”
Health professionals from the congregation provided a range of perspectives about mental health issues at the event, and many attendees shared their own stories. …The organisers hope to follow up the information session with an initiative aimed at carers.”
…”In the Jewish tradition, the separation between prayer and action is slight. We’re mindful of the admonition in Isaiah where God says, “I don’t want your fast and your sacrifice. I want you to deal your bread to the hungry, tear apart the chains of the oppressed.” And Leviticus 19 tells us that to be holy in the way God is holy means to set aside a corner of our fields for the poor and homeless, to pay the laborer a timely and fair wage, and to remove stumbling blocks. These are religious activities just as much as prayer is. They are all woven together.
After participating in the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of this century’s great religious figures and a close colleague of Martin Luther King, said, “It felt like my feet were praying.” Prayer is not just the communication we have with God; it is also the work we do to make God’s values real to the world. I think God listens to both kinds of prayer with equal joy.”
- Rabbi David Saperstein in ‘Birkat Shalom/Peace’,
Participation in Mental Health Week
“Mental illness is a justice issue involving such basic human rights as access to medical care, stable and supportive housing, and job training.
"Henri Nouwen was an advocate for the poor and the marginalized, he taught that authentic spirituality and social justice are inextricably linked."
"A church should work "like a miner under a landslide" to eliminate the social causes of mental illness and to create a growth-enhancing society in which positive mental health will bloom like a rose."
"The church needs leaders who will take God's values into politics and bring change for those who can’t argue for themselves. We have to be willing to take on those social, political and business structures whose systems aren’t just. Desmond Tutu said: “As Christians, we need to not just be pulling the drowning bodies out of the river.We need to be going upstream to find out who is pushing them in.”
Patrick Regan, Liza Hoeksma in 'No Ceiling To Hope: Stories of Grace from the World's Most Dangerous Places.'
“Honest, direct confrontation is a true expression of compassion.
As Christians, we are in the world without being of it.
It is precisely this position that renders confrontation
both possible and necessary.
The illusion of power must be unmasked, idolatry must be undone,
oppression and exploitation must be fought,
and all who participate in these evils must be confronted.
This is compassion.
We cannot suffer with the poor when we are unwilling to confront
those persons and systems that cause poverty.
We cannot set the captives free when we do not want to confront
those who carry the keys.
We cannot profess our solidarity with those who are oppressed
when we are unwilling to confront the oppressor.
Compassion without confrontation fades quickly into
fruitless sentimental commiseration.”
Henri J. M. Nouwen in ’Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life' p. 124