Sobered by the suicides of the adult children of two of their most prominent leaders — and by other national tragedies linked to mental illness — Southern Baptists this week affirmed the “wise use of medical intervention for mental health concerns when appropriate.”
The endorsement came in a resolution approved at the convention’s annual meeting in Houston on Wednesday. So strong was the affirmation for medical intervention that the convention even rejected a proposed floor amendment that would have reaffirmed “Scripture to be the final authority on all mental health issues.”
Normally a salute to biblical authority would sail through a Southern Baptist meeting, but opponents of the amendment said it would have clouded the issue. They wanted to destigmatize mental illness and make clear that it’s OK, and often necessary, to seek a doctor’s help.
“We certainly want to affirm the sufficiency of Scripture,” said Steve Lemke, chairman of the convention’s resolutions committee and provost at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
“However, we typically don’t go to Scripture to see how to address a heart surgery or build a road or some other things,” Lemke said. “… There are some severe issues that are actually medical issues that need to be dealt with by mental health professionals. Again we affirm that Scripture and prayer are very significant in ministering to these people as well.”
The tone of the resolution contrasted with one the convention passed in 2002, even if the content overlaps. Both trace the origins of mental (and physical) illness to original sin, both affirm Christian counseling and both allow for medical responses.
But the emphasis is very different.
The 2002 resolution acknowledged that mental illness sometimes needs a medical response but urged a skepticism about modern mental-health approaches.
It scorned “the assumptions of the therapeutic culture that offer a pharmacological solution for every human problem” and emphasized a need for “practical biblical wisdom, Christ-centered counseling, and the restorative ministry of the care and cure of souls.”
That resolution helped prompt a shift in 2005 in the counseling program at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville away from its traditional integration of modern psychology.
The revised program, called biblical counseling, no longer was designed to prepare students for certification as counselors at mental-health agencies but was focused on preparing them to work within churches. A seminary statement at the time said the revision was based on the belief that “Scripture is sufficient to answer comprehensively the deepest needs of the human heart.”
The 2013 resolution alludes to recent tragedies, including the suicide earlier this year of Matthew Warren — the adult son of Rick and Kay Warren. Rick Warren is a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor from California, widely known as author of the popular “Purpose Driven Life” and host of a dramatic 2008 presidential candidate’s forum.
Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, recently published a book on his adult daughter, who took her life in 2009, entitled “Melissa, A Father’s Lessons from a Daughter’s Suicide.”
“I began to pray that somehow it might be used to help people who are going through this situation…,” Page said recently of his book. “Also, I began to pray that it might be of help to those who were considering suicide. I want it to point to hope in Christ.”
Page used the book to refute the notion that a person who commits suicide is necessarily going to hell — a fear that often torments the Christian survivors of suicides.
The Southern Baptist resolution echoes that point, stating that “families who have lost a member to suicide deserve great care, concern, and compassion from Christians and their churches, including the assurance that those in Christ cannot be separated from the eternal love of God that is in Christ Jesus.”
The resolution also comes in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., raising a national alarm about violence and mental illness.
In the debate over whether to add a statement on biblical authority, church representative Michael Crisp of Fort Worth, Texas, called mental health a “soul care issue.”
Bob Cleveland of Pelham, Ala., however, said that statement reflected a belief that mental illness is “all emotional and can be dealt with by counsel.”
“It can’t be,” he said. “It is a medical illness issue. We need to recognize that, we need to broadcast that, to take some of the shame out of mental illness. … That’s not in Scripture any more than penicillin is in Scripture.”
The convention did affirm the church’s duty “to proclaim liberty to those who are oppressed by means of godly biblical counsel.”
The resolution laments that those “with mental health concerns are disproportionately represented among the homeless and in our correctional systems.”
It calls on churches to follow the model of Jesus Christ, who “spent time with and healed some of the most marginalized members of the culture of His day.”
Religious groups have struggled to balance traditional beliefs, which often link people’s mental conditions with their spiritual and behavioral choices, with modern research that cites physical and medical causes such conditions.
A 2008 Baylor University study found that of 293 Christians who went to their pastors for help with their own or a loved one’s mental illness, one-third were told by pastors that the problem was spiritual — such as sin, demonic possession or lack of faith. All of the patients in the study had medical diagnoses of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.