PODCAST 118: The Church, Mindy Caliguire, and Mental Health

Hey, we're going to get you to that podcast in one second, but before we get there, I,

Jeff Reed, the Church Digital, Stadia Church Planning, I wanted to have a conversation with

you, churches that are out there. One of the greatest things I arguably think that I've done

in my life, other than married and kids, okay, that aside, one of the greatest ministry things

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of it. For more information, check out stadiacurchplanning.org slash digital. Stadiachurchplanning.org

slash digital. P-H-Y-G-I-T-A-L. All right. Hey, that's it. We're going to get you back to that episode

right now. All right, church. Here's what I need. We're going to check the whole tech aspects. We're

going to leave that at the door. We're not thinking with that aspects of our brain. We're going to turn

on. We're going to turn on our brains, and we're going to focus a little bit here on our souls.

Hey, it's Jeff with the Church of Digital, powered by Stadia Church Planting. I'm excited about this

conversation. We've talked a lot about mental health through the podcast, blogs, podcast, web streams.

Early, mid-2020 in the COVID season, there was a lot of attention driven towards mental health.

But what's interesting here in 2021, January, February, honestly, I had a couple side conversations

with people. Hey, what's the church's role in mental health? How do we do this whole mental health

thing in context of even broadcasting services, church online? Are we damaging people? What are

the issues that people are going to have coming out of this season because we're doing so much

church online, because they're in isolation? As a church, as a pastor, is it our role to tend to

all of these people with their mental health, to the people who follow us, the people who are engaged in

our church? Are we tending entirely to their mental health? At what point do we hand it over to someone

who's more clinically trained? And it's funny, the more that these questions came up, the more that I'm

like, I have no idea. I've never really had these conversations. I don't know what that looks like.

And so here's honestly, I was like, hey, let's do a podcast on it. Yeah, we're a church online. We're a

digital church, technical, digital discipleship. That's normally our realm. We're going to pause

a lot of that. We'll come back to some of it. But the heart of this really is the church and its response,

how it handles mental health situations. So to be honest, I brought in and actually one of,

I looked at this lady, Adrienne Feldman from North, she's a digital pastor at Northeast Christian

Church up in Kentucky. I looked at Adrienne, who was one of the pastors who was asking a lot of

questions. And I said, congratulations, you're now a co-host, at least for this episode. And I've

been excited to let Adrienne kind of dig in here and ask questions because she's wrestling with a lot of

these questions in context at Northeastern, Northeast, excuse me. And we're interviewing

Mindy Caliguari. Now, Mindy's no stranger here to the podcast, longtime supporter of the church,

digital, had her on a podcast talking about mental health in context of church online and individuals

a while back again, and really wanted to do a deeper dive with Mindy, giving Adrienne, a digital

pastor on the front lines of ministry, really an opportunity to dig in and ask questions. So we

got Mindy Caliguari with soulcare.com, Adrienne Feldman from Northeast Christian Church, Ray

D'Armis, a digital pastor, you know, regular co-host here from Christ Fellowship Miami, and

myself, Jeff, with the church digital and stadia church planning in a conversation that I'm simply

calling the church and mental health. Okay, everybody, here you go.

So our story with mental health at Northeast goes back, gosh, probably two and a half years,

we started having real solid conversations about mental health and about what the church's role in

mental health really looks like. And at the time, it was really uncharted territory in a lot of

churches, especially here locally. We were not finding a lot of those resources. I was not yet on staff.

I was shoulder tapped to be part of a focus group that started putting together sermon series around

mental health because of my own personal experiences with mental health. So that's where I kind of enter

the process. But we did a sermon series on mental health in the fall of 2018. And we centered that

really around people who are experiencing mental health challenges of any kind. We took on a whole

spectrum of issues from anxiety to suicide to substance misuse, all of those kinds of things.

And then about six months later, we realized we hadn't gotten all the way there to where we wanted

to be. So fast forward six months, I'm now on staff, we put together a second sermon series and really

focused in on caregivers and people who love people who are experiencing mental health challenges.

So we did those two sermon series and the response was huge. I mean, we saw people coming into our

church from other churches because they hadn't found a place that had been working to kind of

destigmatize mental health challenges. And also we saw a couple of people make the decision to give

their life to Jesus because they finally felt like they were safe someplace, that it was okay to struggle

with their mental health and still have a relationship with God. So we saw a really positive response from

that. And then the train wreck of 2020 hit and we realized that we probably needed to keep responding

to mental health, not as a one-off sermon series, but as something that was a part of our culture,

a part of our DNA, something that we really do and we do well.

So during the initial stages of the COVID crisis, we started having Zoom conversations where we would

talk about mental health with our people over Facebook. We'd have a chat, they could send in

questions, we'd bring in some professionals and have those conversations. And people were just

hungry for resources, hungry for spiritual comfort, but also connection with real technical resources,

physical resources and plug them into counseling and all of those kinds of things. So we came through 2020

only having done just a handful of those conversations and right now are hitting 2021 with this idea that

we need to lead that charge and we need to be the church in our community that says,

we see you, we recognize the challenges that you're experiencing, and we want to stand in that gap

that is between the purely spiritual and the purely medical side of mental health. So we're trying to

figure out where our role is and where we need to stay in our lane and where we need to be connecting

people with professional resources.

That's awesome, which is really brought into this place where you're starting to now ask more questions.

How can we lead out? What is the church's role? And so you were in a Facebook group asking some

questions that I was in. And this is a really interesting topic. And so I started to explore

with you on Messenger some of these questions and you just blew up the thread of all of these

different things that you're wrestling with. And of course, I'm like, well, dang, I don't have any of

these answers. Who do I know? And of course, Mindy Caliguire, who's been on the podcast before,

you know, a friend of the show, a friend of mine, the Church Digital, very involved in Stadia. It's

like, hey, we want to bring in Mindy, soul care into this conversation because this is a whole bunch

of stuff I don't know. And maybe Mindy does or maybe doesn't, but maybe she's at least more

educated in this conversation and can point us in the right direction. So definitely glad to have

Mindy on. And this is the great part. Ray and I are like, gonna step back. And so we want to learn

from this conversation. Adrian, like I'm excited for Adrian to take over the podcast, call this an

interview for future podcasts that may be down the road. But let's start to, you know, give you the

opportunity to just dig in here, ask some questions of Mindy, and we'll see where we get here in the

podcast. Okay. Yeah, I love it. You're ready to be in the hot seat, Mindy? I'll try. Yeah, I just,

well, and I will say, you know, this is the reason I'm glad you thought of me, Jeff. I'm very honored.

I do get into a lot of these conversations, not as a, like, I'm not a licensed clinical therapist.

I'm not a PhD from anywhere. But with the work I do with soul care, and then the work I do with a lot

of different churches and leaders, and especially, as you said, Adrian, this last year,

this has become a massive topic that I've been privileged to be part of a lot of conversations

about it. So sometimes I'll be saying things I've just learned from others and others, you know,

things that I've observed over many, many years of a lot of different kinds of ministry contexts. But

it's an honor to be with you. And Jeff, kudos for throwing this topic out there in such a pronounced

way. And Adrian, way to go. Like, you are leading the charge on the future of where the church can go

in this. So, like, way to go on that. That's impressive. Everything you've just described is

amazing. Well, we're really excited to be a part of it. I know that we have seen such a response,

and we have seen people in the church say, we need this. We need help, and we don't know where to go,

and we don't know what to do. And we've been told for our entire lives that it's a sin to struggle.

So, let me start there, because it's a question we always get asked.

Go for the jugular, girl!

Is it a sin to struggle, Mindy?

Oh, my gosh. As I was anticipating some of these questions, I was thinking, like, what is the

church's role? And I think part of the challenge is we've had a mentality that, you know, there's an

answer for everything in the Bible, and the thought is that, yeah, it's a sin to struggle. Like, I hadn't

heard that phrase, and it just makes me achy and a little twingy inside to hear you say that.

Man, mental health, a part of what I think the church can do, and what I think you're seeing in

your church is we can start to normalize a topic and set some definitions and parameters around it that

has been largely either ignored or, worse, misrepresented or miscast in many Christian contexts and to many

people's great harm, I think. And we've missed a massive opportunity to serve. A friend of mine,

I don't even remember which one it was, would talk about how, like, mental health is, you know,

the brain is an organ in your body, right? Just like your liver is and your kidneys are and your

lungs are and your skin is. And it has the ability to have illness just like any one of those other

organs in our bodies. And we wouldn't think it was sin to be sick with lung cancer, right? You would

never, or unless you said you shouldn't smoke cigarettes, but I mean, like, seriously, we would

never have that callous and unkind and sort of judging way of treating almost any other illness.

We understand the body has various, um, domains of health or sickness. And when, when part of the body

is sick, you don't, you don't judge it because you have eczema. You don't judge it because you have,

you need corrective lenses for your eyes. Like that's not, that's not, that's not a thing.

But with mental health, um, especially because it's so invisible and it can show up with symptoms that

we don't know what to do with or how to make any sense of, um, I, I, maybe I can understand a little

bit. I mean, the whole culture at large hasn't really known what to do with mental health. So the

church is just a subset of that. But as more and more information is coming out, I would love to

believe that the church could be literally at the vanguard of helping research, helping understand,

helping diagnose, helping provide treatment, helping provide care for the caregivers and

those who are suffering. Like we should be in that place of leading this conversation,

not resisting it. Anyway, that was probably more than you were asking for, but that's,

that's how I see it. I wish, I wish the church could help normalize this conversation.

Well, so what was, I want to know more about how we can do that because Adrian, to me,

your church has gone already above and beyond what I hear most churches doing in terms of mental health,

by even addressing it. Um, and, and even going as far as bringing in experts, right? Because

so many churches try to say, well, the Bible is more than enough, man. So here is your handbook and

here's your guide to mental health. Just open up the Psalm, whatever. And I can already see Mindy

rolling her eyes and you're right to, because before God called me into ministry, he called me into

medicine. I was pre-med. And so when I, when I started to look at brain science and take a look

at some of this stuff, and then I went off to seminary and I even appreciated that even at

seminaries, they were even talking about medication and how far a pastor can take somebody in our

limitations. The churches, for whatever reason, don't like hearing that. And so Mindy, where's a good

place for churches and even for a pastor to get started with helping our congregation?

Well, I think the first place to start is studying, like learning. Like there's a lot of people who are

writing good things about brain science. There's accessible content out there about mental health

that any pastor, I mean, we should see this as a dimension of our responsibility in shepherding in

the same way that you would think, I should probably know a bit about relational dynamics. If I'm going to

advise people or teach people about what the Bible says about that, or just how life is and how to,

how to navigate relational, you know, situations, well, wouldn't we also hold the same goal to

love God with our mind? Go learn, go learn about this stuff. I was, I was looking up, a friend of mine

does a lot with mental health in her church, and maybe we'll talk about this later on in the call,

but they have a lot of things right at the top. Oh, wait, maybe I didn't write it in my notes.

I'll have to go find it. But there's a whole Institute for Mental Health, right? There's very

accessible resources that are things that, you know, it's on us to do the work of integration,

okay? If this is how the brain has been created by God, and if this is what can go wrong or how it

heals, and those things are coming from sources outside of seminary, we go and learn, and we

discern, and we say, how do I digest this? How do I metabolize these truths and bring them out to my

people? Like a sermon series is a great way to do it. I was just on a call yesterday. I don't know if

you guys are familiar with this whole resilient church leaders or resilient church leadership effort

that's going on through the Billy Graham Center and came out of some things that Ed Stetzer had pulled

together a gathering around mental health in December of 19. And then, and that's got a whole ton of great

content around that. And so as an offshoot from some of those efforts, we were doing this resilient

church leadership and there's clinical therapists that are part of that, et cetera. But this idea came

up in yesterday's conversation as we were talking about journaling of all things of like, how do you,

how do you handle different emotions and what's the value of journaling? And one of the,

women on the call, she's an organizational psychologist, she used to be the provost at

Wheaton. And she, she talks about the feeling wheel, right? That's a, that's a whole like

feeling wheel. I can send you the link if you're interested. That helps people name different

emotions, right? And the, the, another guy on the call is the, was the chair of the marriage and

family therapy department at Wheaton is now at DePaul has been a pastor. And he said, you know,

one of the things I recommend is for pastors to actually preach through the feeling wheel.

Like that is an example of normalize things. Not like this is the range of human emotion. Here's some

names that we put to these things. Here's how they come out in healthy ways. Here's how they

can be misfiring and what that might look like in your life. Like we have a phenomenal opportunity as

pastors to put a content agenda in front of our people that can really bring a lot of help that

those are some of the places I would recommend beginning is like, learn, start learning, start

having conversations, learn how to have a conversation with somebody who's depressed and is

following Jesus and is still depressed and still struggling with depression three years in.

And there were no easy answers. And how, how, how are you as a representative of God into the life of

this congregant, how are you going to talk to them? And if you just never talk to anybody that's in

that place and you don't have the empathy necessary to start addressing these issues. Anyway, I'm rambling

on, but those are some of the things that occurred, occur to me that I would recommend before you stand up

and try to do anything in your church before you try to teach a sermon series, before you try to set up a

counseling center or whatever is your right, like correct level of addressing this topic, become a

student. Yeah, I love that. So for me, one of the things that I struggle with, and I don't know if

other churches are having this struggle, but I assume that they are. You're talking about preaching

through a feeling wheel or learning how to have these conversations with people, but how do you

delineate what is the church's responsibility and what is absolutely not? How do you make that call?

How do you, how do you decide how to approach these situations?

Well, that would be part of what you want to be learning as you're on this learning journey,

because, and it's not like, just like most things in life, you're not going to like

be walking down this path and all of a sudden see this big red line on the ground that says like,

go no further. It won't be that obvious. And, but there are really important resources for

understanding where someone can come alongside someone who's struggling and where you should

know when to refer. It's like one of the most important things is to know what you know,

know what you don't know and know when to refer. And so building up as you're studying, building up a

list of who are the professionals in your area that can be referred out to with confidence

is a really important piece of the learning as well. Because when we try to take on more than we

should, I mean, you were in medical school, you, you know, like that's just, that's some sacred

territory. And one thing that I've always felt is that churches, Christians, pastors, disciplers,

any, any of us can in very well-meaning ways misdiagnose what people are dealing with.

And then we make our little recommendations that amounts to almost like a spiritual malpractice

when you are misdiagnosing and, and advising people in a direction that

at best may not help them. And at worst may cause harm. It's important to know where that line is

and to, and to seek to know when you're getting close to it and what you'll do once you encounter

that line. And not, not just, I think the thing is we all want to run away. It's like, I don't want

to go anywhere near that line. So I'll never talk about it. I don't want to go there near that line

because I don't want to give someone a bad recommendation. I don't want to. And it's like,

okay, we, we can't just like put our head in the sand and pretend this doesn't exist. Like we've

got to get to where that line is and then figure out how to help people.

Maybe that, that line right there, spiritual malpractice. Oh boy, that'll preach. I mean,

I got like a thousand sermons off the top of my head. Many of them involving John chapter nine,

right. Where the disciples are coming up to Jesus and they're saying, Hey, this man's been blind since

birth. Was it because of something his parents did? Was it because of something he did? And I think

often we make the same mistake. I've been guilty of making the same mistake of approaching an issue

in somebody's life and saying, well, man, it's there, there's, there's something that you did here. How can

pastors avoid that problem moving forward and make that adjustment in terms of their counseling with

individuals? I mean, that, that is a, that is a deep issue that you're raising. Um, I think we have an

affection for easy, simplistic answers. And I think we, um, have shied away from the more nuanced,

uh, realities of the integrated and often quite broken interior life of us as humans and

dealing with brokenness, dealing with, be it, you know, volitional, like the soul, the soul is a pretty

complex thing, right? Soul care, you know, Dallas Willard had this beautiful way of describing all the

dimensions of the soul, which is basically all the dimensions of our personhood, right? There's a mind

and our emotions and our thoughts and our relational context, even dimensions of the physical body, which

we don't normally think of as peace of the soul, but in his way of understanding biblically, the soul is what

integrates all these different dimensions of personhood. And when the soul is diminished, those pieces of who we

are start to fail and fall apart. And those are his exact words. And so when we start giving, you know, in my

view, sometimes three cent answers to million dollar questions, that's where that spiritual

malpractice can kick in. And I, I've, I don't know if anyone on this call, it's been an interesting, um,

touch point in my life, but I, if you've ever been misdiagnosed medically, um, I was so angry at this,

this doctor and we were living in Massachusetts at the time. Uh, my kids had a rash. It was really

terrible. It wasn't getting better. And then I would notice that like, if it was on this part of their

arm, then like the part that would be in contact when they were playing or certain, then it would

show up here. And I, and then it was transferring to the other kids and my husband and I started and

it was like all these things. And I go into this doctor, sorry to be vetting my thing, um, or venting.

And they, um, this, this doctor is looking at me and going, I'm telling him all the reasons. He's

like, well, it's obviously contact dermatitis. You have, you have poison ivy or poison oak or it's,

you know, one of these things. And I was like, okay, but I don't think it's that because of this

and this and this and this. And I listed off all the reasons why having studied those things,

I didn't think it was it. And he kind of looked at me and goes, well, what else could it be?

And I bit my tongue so hard. I was like, you're the one with the MD, buddy. I'm paying to talk to

you. Don't you ask me what else it could be. That's your job. I mean, I was, I had small children.

I'm sure I had had not a night's sleep in years. So I, hopefully I didn't actually say what was

going through my head, but I feel like that's that. And, and, and all the things he told us to do,

none of it helped. And when we finally got to one doctor who pieced together the stuff,

they figured out this very atypical, wouldn't have expected it thing was gone in a matter of days.

And like that has a nice turnaround story. Some of the stuff with mental health doesn't have a nice,

oh, we finally solved it. And now it's all better and better. But nonetheless, the, the pain and the

hardship we cause by giving three cent answers to million dollar questions about why is this happening?

What, what, like just, it doesn't usually take but two or three levels in of, of inquiry to realize

that most things are not as black and white or as easy as we'd like for them to be. And I mean,

I hope that's not terribly shocking news to any of your listeners, Jeff. But, but we, we must think

wisely and well about why people do what they do. And when we try to slap a Bible verse

on, and I used to do this, so I get it. But I mean, it's like, I've talked about this metaphor as well,

but like when somebody comes into your small group or into your church, your counseling office,

and they're just bleeding all over the place, right? They're, it's just, they've got a non-physical

wound, but it's bleeding everywhere, right? And I think the reaction most of us have is like,

oh my gosh, you're bleeding. It's going to get blood all over my office. That's, can't be good for you.

It's not going to be good for anybody. How do I slap a tourniquet on that thing?

And a lot of times we use Bible verses as tourniquets on wounds, expecting that it's going to stop the

bleeding. And it doesn't. I don't think that's how Jesus intended for his precious living word to be

used. And so integrating what does scripture say that could help, that could bring healing,

that could bring help is a, is a very important question, but man, we cannot give three saint

answers to million dollar questions.

So you're telling me that Philippians 4.13 is not the answer to everybody's problem.

Might be the answer to all your problems, but not anybody I've known.

I don't know. I've heard it a lot. People have given me that so many times and I'm doing great.

Every time I wear the t-shirt, like it's awesome. My life is great. As long as I'm wearing the t-shirt.

I've also seen shirts where people hit home runs.

So I just want to make sure.

One of the reasons I care about this so much is while we were in Boston in those years,

Jeff knows this story and I won't, I won't go into it in detail, but my husband and I had planted a

church and he was a total golden boy. We met when we were at Cornell, he went to Dallas Seminary,

we interned at Willow Creek, we church planted, we involved with Campus Crusade, like all of the

brand name, you know, things. He was a, you know, football player, Sigma Chi fraternity boy.

Like, I mean, he was just this golden boy, had never failed really in his entire life.

And we go off to Boston, which is a kind of a hard place to do a kind of a hard thing with church

planting. And we did it in the most difficult way possible, which is to do a parachute drop

into the city, not knowing anybody with no financial resources or oversight or anything.

So not that shockingly, we quickly came to the end of ourselves, but didn't know that.

And Jeff, he's written about this, you know, and talks about it quite openly, but he was probably

in a full on, started maybe as a situational depression, but it just kept getting worse and

worse and worse and probably converted within weeks to a chemical depression, which was probably

lasted 10 years. Because we didn't have any language for that. We didn't, I mean, what do you

mean? Like we didn't even have a imagination that such a thing could happen. All I knew

is he was angry all the time, couldn't get out of bed in the morning, like things that

now we might know to pay attention to. But at that point we just didn't. It was like, come

on, buck up little camper, like get going, you know, cry me a river. Like it's hard.

Great. Just totally not, not sympathetic at all. And that, that, um, ache of watching someone

you love suffer so tremendously. But then after a while, this is the caregiver challenge. Like

you just get tired of trying to hold them up and then you're exhausted. And then you're trying

to hold the family together and keep the support coming in. And I mean, it was just really, really

hard. And so I, I, I think that what I've learned from medical professionals is if you're in a

situational depression, like things are hard. You've been knocked around a bit. It's like,

oh gosh, it's hard to keep your energy up for as little as three weeks. And I thought this

was so ridiculous that I have confirmed it every time I'm around like clinical people and they have

confirmed every, when you're in a place that's that hard for as little as three weeks, your brain's

chemistry goes, all right, here's the new normal. And your body will actually start reinforcing

your depressed state, even though it maybe wasn't your like forever and ever always state, but it is

now. And that's usually when I talk about that phrase, um, spiritual malpractice, because in

dealing with soul care, I'm often challenging leaders and anyone myself to, to stay connected with God.

What are the spiritual practices that help with all that? And those things matter and they are good.

But if you're dealing with somebody who's in a true chemical depression, you've, you've now got to

address that on, on both levels or more holistically, I guess is the right way to say it. And

yeah, it's just important. I don't know. There's a lot to be said there.

What I love is that you, I mean, first of all, thank you for sharing your story and what you guys went

through. I, it raises a really important question and one that I think that we're going to hear a lot,

especially in 2021, as we hopefully start to emerge from the pandemic. Um, what are pastors

looking for who are starting to experience genuine mental health crisis? What red flags are we,

are we looking for as church leaders? I know we've, in my own circles, I feel like I see maybe once a

week, maybe more, um, pastors who are stepping down from ministry because they are so burnt out that

they can't take it anymore. Um, and that, that's a real thing that's happening. So what are we looking

out for?

Yeah. I mean, those symptoms from, of burnout are, are pretty kind of telltale and they're very

similar to symptoms of depression and things that, you know, 2020 has foisted upon us in a whole new

way. And what pastors and anyone, uh, would be, would be looking for. So they looking at their own

lives or looking at their spouse or looking at key leaders within their team, et cetera,

it's that fatigue that isn't going away with sleep. It's a tendency to start isolating,

um, which we're all isolated now anyway. Right. So that it's just compounded with so many things,

the sort of, they call it COVID brain, right? Like the, just the decision fatigue that has become,

you know, it's pivot and then pivot again. And then we go back in person, but we have to have

our fallback thing. And then is everybody six feet apart? And what does the state say this week?

And what does the government say that? I mean, it is exhausting. Um, other, yeah, just sort of this,

like, can't think straight, can't solve a problem. Can't, doesn't find enjoyment. Even things that used

to bring a lot of joy, like hobbies, there's falling flat, spending time with your kids just not

resonating. Like any of those things could be true on a, a rough day. You had a hard day. Of course,

you don't feel like hanging out with anybody, but when it's been like a long time and you just feel

like, I just don't even want to go out. I don't want to walk in my street because I don't want to

say hi to anybody. When you feel those kinds of pulling away from your life, when you're

feeling panic from the minute you wake up in the morning, right? It's just tightening in the chest.

So those kinds of feelings, first of all, let's say good news is there might be ways to help that.

And maybe it doesn't have to stay that way. One of the things I'm encouraged about Adrian is actually,

I'm, while it's sad that so many are leaving pastoral ministry right now, and I have heard my

share of those. I'm glad that people are making what I hope are life-saving decisions, life-changing

decisions at the right time. And I hope they're finding the support they need. I wish they could

enter into the recovery they need, possibly where they're at, but that may not be possible or available

to them. And I, I, the headlines that break my heart are the ones that end with a far worse

result. And we're having too many of those as well. So that, that's the stuff that I look at pictures

and I go, that could have been, that could have been us. Mindy, I resonate with that. I went through

everything that you're describing, not this past year, actually years ago when we had launched a

location and expectations. And really what it came from was expectations weren't met. Expectations

were then raised by overseers. And really what it came down to was we were kind of, we were an unhealthy

staff to begin with. We were kind of an unhealthy place. Part of my worry is yes, I'm concerned for

pastors, but I'm also concerned for, because unhealthy leaders means unhealthy team too. And an unhealthy

leader can't help an unhealthy team get to a place of health. Right. And so it just trickled. It's the

whole hurt people, hurt people down the way. And so how can some folks maybe lead up in terms of

recognizing that their leader is hurt. All right, I need to give him some space, but he's coming down on the

rest of the group and we're already dealing with enough. Yeah. Well, you know, I can't give you a

three cent answer to that. That's a big, that is a big and very real question. But here's what I will

say. Henry Cloud has said this a lot. And I, and I find it a good way to thinking, to think about

problems that start to feel so sort of contained, like they're, they're just in a container right now

and there's no outside input. And so as a, as all that toxicity stays in the container,

it can't get better. And so one of the keys that's needed in a, in a contained system is to open the

system up and opening a system up will introduce change. It will probably be resisted. There's any

number of ways that that can be resisted. But what I would say, if somebody is in a, serving on a team

where that leader's coming in hard and they're, you know, this person's going like, you're not well,

but I'm guessing that conversation isn't going to go well. So like, maybe there's a different

conversation that needs to be had, but how does this person find some support outside of that system?

How do they find a therapist, a spiritual director, a coach? Now I'm, I'm blurring lines that,

um, that when you open yourself up to some other person and you're in a closed system,

that person can also sometimes help you get the right help. Like I've met with spiritual directors

before who listen, process with me, were helping me in my own journey with God. But when it came to a

couple of things I needed to process, they wisely said, Oh, there's that line. There's that line.

And here's who I want to refer you to. Do you see what I mean? But if I had stayed in my contained

system, I would not have known that that other resource is what I needed, nor would have I had

access to it. So sometimes you just got to reach for what, what it could just be a ministry peer

that's unrelated to your context, but where are you starting to give voice to what's not working

in a nonjudgmental place. You might have to start writing in your journal, like back to yesterday's

conversations, but you got to write in your journal, like this is actually really bad right now. And

here's what's bad about it and not cross it off and go, God works all things together for good for

those who love him. Like, don't cross it off. Let that thing surface, look at it and go, all right,

who can I talk to about this? Is it a friend who's in another state? Is it a spiritual director? Is

somebody at soul care or Jimmy Dodd's organization or any, any others? There's so many amazing caregivers

out there, but if we stay silent, you know, I learned a lot from people in 12 step communities

they have this great phrase. We're only as sick as our secrets. Wow. That's good. Wow. And there's

so much power in the diffusing ability to diffuse really toxic stuff. Cause like in that scenario

describing, you know, there's a team, there's me, there's other team members, and there's our senior

leader, like going back to our topic of mental health, that could be operational in all of these

people to some degree. Right. And you're never going to be able to diagnose it in like, in its pure form.

Although sometimes we feel like we're making progress when we sit around an armchair, armchair

diagnose ourselves and others, but that's not really going to bring us progress. What we need is to start

opening the system up to help. Yeah. Cause, and this was just my experience, you know, but you know,

many of you were kind enough to tell us your story. Uh, my experience was exactly what you described,

the panic attacks, the whole thing, just kind of dealing with some of that. And as I talked to more

and more pastors, I know by God's grace, I got with a licensed Christian counselor. She helped us work

out a whole lot of stuff. There were a whole lot of issues that I, that I dealt with in the past that

weren't completely unearthed that combined with all the stuff that I was going with currently that I had to

let go of. Uh, things as simple as Ray, who builds the church? Is it Jesus for you? What does the Bible

say? Don't tell me what your leadership books say. Tell me what the Bible says. And that kind of thing

right there too, for a lot of church leaders, for some reason it does, you know, we talk about like

practical theology for some reason it doesn't resonate. We, we buy into the whole cultural thing of, but

what I do matters most. I build the church. That's pressure. That's not what God has given us.

And we will crumble under the weight of it. Let me, I want to pull a thread, maybe not in that

direction, but it's in the same vein a little bit. And, and I'm, I'm speaking in generalization. I

don't want to come, come across judgy and I'm not speaking of any, any one organization. When I ask

this question, is it wise to spin off a counseling center attached to a church and have specialists

work towards that? Or is that a cop-out where we, the pastors, we, we need to be training ourselves,

our, our staff and our people to address those things specifically. I literally could make either

argument right now. And so I'm, I'm curious at what level are we, you know, um, business offloading,

you know, crowdsourcing to somebody else instead of taking care of our own responsibility, or is there

wisdom and understanding, Hey, here's the line of what I'm really capable of. Let, let someone who's a

professional take care of that. How, how are we as a church supposed to respond? Like, like what,

what do we do here? Oh, I got so many thoughts. Um, our church had a counseling center. Um, it was

on our property, this little, actually it's funny. It was this little like house that sat in the corner

of our property and it was okay. Um, but what we learned was that we were spiritual professionals,

not mental health professionals. And so ultimately what we decided to do was close down the counseling

center and build a strong partnership with a, with a counseling practice that is in our city.

And so we have warm, close relationships with counselors in our city, but it is not a part

of our church. Now it wasn't in the name of saying like we were, we were just passing people off to

mental health professionals because we didn't want to handle it, but it was a way of kind of creating

a real hard line. Like these are the things that we're going to keep in house. We are here

to provide for you spiritually and love you and care for you and be here for you.

But sometimes we are going to find that line and we're going to need to cross it and we need to

hand off. And now what we're trying to do right now is learn how to identify that line. So one of

the things that we're doing is, um, a couple of us have done the mental health first aid training

through the organization called mental health first aid. And what we plan on doing is actually,

um, I am hoping to be certified as an instructor for mental health first aid. Another one of our

pastors on staff will also be certified and we're going to train our entire staff on mental health

first aid. And what it does is it teaches you how to identify crisis situations and hand them off in an

appropriate way while also providing encouragement and support and love for people within what is

safe for us to do. So counseling centers, I'm not a huge fan, but I think it's really great to have

close, close relationships with mental health professionals in your area.

I would, yeah, I would agree. I think if you have the capacity as a church and you feel called to it,

like, I don't think every church should do always the same thing. Like each church has a different set

of giftings and, and, and sort of, uh, assignments from God in their particular community. But I would

say that if you have a counseling center, make sure you have like trained actual counselors there and

don't, don't mistake putting somebody who can listen well and think of Bible verses that relate to that

and don't call that true clinical care. Um, so I, I think that's, that, that's, that's what I would

say. I found the name of the other organization. Can I, there's a church, um, a friend of mine,

uh, is one of the co-pastors that, um, I think it's called St. John's downtown. It's in Houston,

um, and a really, you know, predominantly African-American church. And they've done a ton over the years

in more like, um, homelessness and, and feeding the hungry and all this kind of stuff because of their

location and where they're at in downtown Houston. But she was the first person who I remember probably

13, 15 years ago, we were at an event together and just building a friendship. And she was telling me

their church's story, but that they were starting to realize that most of the homelessness that they

were encountering had its roots in mental health. And that was the first time I had ever heard anybody

make those connections. And so what does that mean for them to truly serve the community if they're

not getting after the, the deeper core issues? And, and you can't even know that that will, that help

will help, but you could at least start to more, um, circumspectly be addressing the problem.

And so there's a North, a national Alliance on mental illness, NAMI. Are you familiar with that?

Right? So they have a partnership with this church now where they're training facilitators and in

partnership with the church, they were working with, it's just right on their, on their website,

but it says, are you interested in serving as a support group facilitator in 2021? Do you want to

be part of a national movement helping people who live with mental illness? Do you want to contribute

to real change in the mental health system? Join us for training provided by this organization.

And so I think that's another example of these pastors, mental health isn't their domain knowledge,

but they're partnering with somebody that can help them learn and then help their church think about

how to address their unique community strategically, but with great wisdom. And, and I, I just,

I thought of them and, and just thought I could mention that as an example, but so your church is

partnering with, you know, an organization and a counseling clinic in your community. And I know

of churches that have done a lot of those different things. Most of them that I'm aware of, smaller

churches will have a list of licensed clinical therapists in their area. And I think that's, I don't see

that, Jeff, back to your original question as like offloading responsibility. I think it really is part of a,

a comprehensive, like imagine a church is teaching through, here's what can go wrong in the world.

You know, here's, here's all the things that can go wrong. And here's, here's the things that were

really well-suited to help you with. And we will walk with you on this other stuff. That's a key thing.

I've had in, in small groups, women that were like, okay, they were going into counseling for some

reason or beginning medication for depression or another, you know, whatever it was. And it's,

it's not like they were like shunned out of our small group. Cause now, now you got your therapist.

You don't need us anymore. It was like, no, all the more like, Hey, bring what you're learning.

How can we support you in this? How do we, how do we walk with you in this? It wasn't a,

a removal from community or an absence of our, I think still important role as the church in their

life. We just, we're helping them find the next right thing, but not abandoning the relationship.

I would love to jump in there for a second and just endorse a couple of the things you just said.

Um, we have done some work with NAMI here in Louisville and they're an outstanding resource.

So, um, for anybody who's listening out there, um, I am confident you can find a chapter of NAMI

that is local to you and they have, we've been able to partner with them and have them come in

and help us do groups on site. Um, they came and did a panel with us with our, um, I think our second

mental health series back in 2019. They're an outstanding organization, but also, um, speaking to,

to going and getting counseling and stepping outside of just the pastoral counseling, the,

the counseling that I've done in my own life with my own therapist has absolutely been life-saving.

I'm a person who has repeatedly been in a dangerous mental health crisis. I am a multiple suicide

attempt survivor. Um, and because of that, one of the things that my community that knows me and

loves me needed was for me to have professional help because not only did I have someone I could

go to who could safely guide me through that healing process, they also got a resource that they could

reach out to. So when I'm in crisis, my husband doesn't have to wonder who do I call? What do I

do? Am I going to take her to the emergency room? He can start with my counselor, someone who knows me

and my mental health history, but also who is a professional. So I just want to endorse that kind of

across the board going to counseling can be so effective. And if the, the pastors who were walking

alongside me hadn't said, you need professional help. I can't tell you that I would have made that

decision.

Adrian, um, Mindy can, I just want to ask, cause we, you know, on the show, we deal a lot with search

online with digital. Um, so often, uh, especially as an online pastor, you know, for a church,

because we're not in the same city. How can I help refer people who maybe are in a completely

different state to help get them the help that they need? If I don't know their area, I don't know the

complete situation. Um, what are, what are some of the tools that I can do first and foremost,

if they're suicidal, but then second, in terms of, uh, uh, for those who need long-term care or,

or just that next step beyond this pastoral counseling stuff.

Huge questions. Adrian, you must live with this cause you are pastoring an online community as well.

What, what is your, what are your, what's your pastoral care look like when somebody raises their

hand with something really hard?

Yeah. So it's not a thing that happens frequently for us, but when it does happen,

my first go-to is always going to be that national suicide helpline. Um, no matter where you are in

the country, when you call that number, they can route you to people who are close by, who can talk

to you and help you get through that crisis moment, help you make the right call in that time. Um, but then

beyond that, it's not unusual to be able to do a quick Google search to locate very local resources,

but you can also always call 911. And I, I hate to, to jump right to 911, but it is an option. Um,

but that suicide helpline, it's a national phone number. Um, it might be a good thing to put in the,

the notes for the episode. That's, um, 800-273-8255. As a pastor, it's a good idea to store

that in your phone, log it as a, as a phone number that is in your contacts. So it is always there.

You can text it to somebody. You've got really easy access to it. I also keep numbers in my phone

for, um, for local mental health resources, but also mental health resources that are local to people

who are in pockets where we got a lot of people. So here in Louisville, if I've got a lot of people in

Cincinnati, I want to keep those Cincinnati numbers really close for me.

Yeah. We're going to put all these links. Sorry, Mindy, real quick. We're going to put all, there's so

many resources that have been dropped. I haven't said it, but we'll put all that in the show notes,

including that, that, that number. So thank you. Go ahead, Mindy.

That's good. You know, sometimes a phrase or a word can be really helpful to learn. And for me in

walking with a lot of different people, um, some of whom were, uh, close enough to, they weren't quite

suicidal, but they were close enough that they just said, Hey, I, I need you to know I'm not doing well

kind of thing. And, uh, which is really hard to be on the other end of a call like that. And so that's

the scenario you guys are talking about. Um, one of the things I, I, I will offer, um, just because

I remember it seeming to be valuable then, and I'm sure I had some basis for it, maybe from having

done some research around suicide at that time, but it always seemed helpful to me to always thank

someone for choosing to talk about it. And it's like, when you're like, your toes are like

cringing in your shoes and you're trying to do everything you can to stay composed and not freak

out. But like, you can always say, I'm so glad you're talking and I'm so glad. And to try to keep a

conversation going rather than because it's so uncomfortable, be like, ah, okay. Uh, like I, I,

I confess my own immaturity, um, at times, like I would rather bail out of a hard conversation and,

and then, you know, send somebody else in and to really just enter into that moment. If they're

willing to talk to you to keep them on the line while you look up other phone numbers and while

you do other things, but just to validate, Hey, I'm so glad you're talking about this. You don't,

I would imagine I'm not a professional, maybe Adrian can say more, but like, there's probably

terrible things that you shouldn't say in those moments. Um, but I, I've always felt that when,

when you can encourage someone to keep validate their, what they're saying and, and then keep them

talking is really important. I mean, there's more coaching that comes around suicide, um,

not threats, but the right word of like somebody starting to say things like that. And there's

more like asking really specific, like, do you have a plan? And you know, all, all these kinds of

things, but I'm not, I'm not an expert on all that stuff. But what I can say is I have found it so

helpful, useful at times to just pause and be able to thank someone for talking.

I think, um, along with those questions that you were talking about just then Mindy, um,

it's when you've got somebody who you think might be suicidal, this is like really counterintuitive,

but to literally ask them, are you feeling suicidal right now? Um, people think that that might put

ideas in their heads or, or, or kind of steer them down a wrong path. That's actually not true.

It's actually better for them. And this is like a scientific fact to ask that question.

Are you thinking about taking your life? Do you have a plan to do some harm to yourself?

It's okay to ask those questions. In fact, in times in my life, when people have asked those

questions have been the times we've been able to get me really, truly the help that I needed.

So authentic, thanks for sharing all that.

Well, let me, let me ask this question. I mean, typically this has been a topic for us,

uh, off topic a little bit off brand, the church digital, we usually talk church online.

I think mental health is important. Um, but maybe let's try to bridge it here.

So, I mean, a couple of questions I wouldn't want to ask maybe, maybe first off here in this,

in this COVID season, obviously there's been a radical shift towards church online,

something like 10% to 70% of churches are now broadcasting as a result. So hundreds of thousands

of churches are moving. Don't even know what the numbers are, but millions upon millions of people

are now engaging in digital space, um, where maybe they were physical, if, if anything before.

What is this doing to our mental states? Like, and, and, and we can unpack this and I don't want

like the hour long answer, but more of, of like, you know, I don't want to like be here for all

another hour, but, or maybe we do that as another show, but, but like, seriously, just what do we as

digital pastors and specifically me as the guy who's consulting with churches and helping hundreds

of churches figure out how to do this? Like, what are we doing to these people? Are we doing anything

to these people by doing church digitally, by having them do church in their home? What do we need

to be on the lookout for? Um, the tendency in online church is to stream, like just broadcast rather than

to try to build community around church. That is the knee jerk. That is what a lot of churches who are

doing online church for the very first time are doing. It's all about getting that stream up with

the weekend service. Don't worry about the rest of it. Just, just make sure that the service is online,

that people are seeing what is happening in the room. But one of the things that is, um, catastrophic to

someone who is experiencing any sort of mental health challenge is that isolation from community. So

whenever we kind of miss the mark on building community through church online, we lose those

opportunities to really love people and experience community with them. I mean, there's no question about

whether or not we can experience community online. We're doing it right now. Um, people have been

doing it over the course of the last year. My kids are like upstairs right now playing, uh, Minecraft on

their computers while on a zoom call on another device. Like community can still happen online. Even our

youngest kids are learning that and it's not ideal. It is not the best way to do community, but it is a way to

do community. And so when we lose our focus about what the church is meant to be, a group of believers

worshiping together and, um, and we're just broadcasting those services, we're gonna, we're gonna not be a

part of the solution. I wouldn't say we're hurting people with just watching church on a screen, but I

would say we're not part of the solution unless we're building community around church online.

Love it. Love it. Love it. She said that. Well, but you know, Jeff, that's why I have been such a huge fan

of your body of work and thought leadership in this area because you've never been an advocate

of, um, using online technologies just to broadcast. And I know that's never been your passion. You

have seen the move to digital as an opportunity to move people actually out of just consuming church,

even if they're physically in person and actually become an engaged participant in a community,

which is what you're describing, Adrian. And I, I, that you, you won me over. So hook,

line and sinker with that. Uh, yes, you totally did because I began to realize that perhaps the

opportunities for discipleship and true relational context for growth could actually be

catapulted forward because of digital environments that are just never going to happen when you've got

800 people in a room, all looking one direction at each other's back of each other's heads. And

I feel like the opportunity in the body of Christ has not been like this for 500 years to figure out

out a different, a different, a different, like categorically different way of being that has

relationships at the center with authenticity at the center with actual challenges that I am going through

today in this house, under this roof with these relationships. And where is God meeting me? And how is my

church helping me with that? I want us to be figuring out how the church gets smaller, not bigger, how

relationships get fewer, not more, how they get more authentic, not more pretense. We've all had enough

of that. Um, but the one other thing I would add to what Adrian said, and I just loved everything she

had to say, um, is I, I feel like because of the mental health, um, dangers, like let's just call it

out. Let's say, Hey, you might be in engaging in our church, in your living room, and you haven't been

out of your house in two months. I've talked to coworkers in another context that I work in that have not

been out of their homes in months. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. I, but we all have different

sort of thresholds of, of what we feel safe with and whatever. And they've just not, they've not gone

anywhere. And I'm like, wow. But how does that become part of the messaging that's putting, put out

on that stream? Hey guys, you might have this. And if you felt this, this, or this in the last week,

we are here for it. We are here for you. Here's a big fat button on your phone. Go hit it, go text this,

put a QR code up there. Gives us a, you know, like, let's just be real about it. Let's talk

about it. Let's leverage these amazing communication platforms we have and use them to get people on the

right path. And without judgment, without all that, you know, well, if you really can't hold your life

together and Jesus isn't enough for you, then we have this counseling center. Like, no, first order

a business. And especially when pastors are able to say, Hey, this has helped me and my family.

I've heard of some pastors who are being very, very vocal about their own journey. Guys, that is,

that is gold. Not that you would ever misuse that or mistreat your own story or feel like

you owe it to your church to be more authentic than you feel comfortable with. Like that's a really,

like have a spiritual director or a coach or a therapist guide you through what to bring forward

and how, but that's part of this idea of normalizing. Like how, how do we gain a collective vocabulary

about what this all is and what soul care, the cure of like, historically the term soul care was like

the care of souls and the cure of souls. And it was the domain of the church. People, we need cure.

We need care. That's not wrong. It's not bad. That's what we're here for.

That's, that's deep. That, that, that, that was really good. Thank, thank you for that. But by the way,

that's the best opportunity in 500 years, we can't, we got to, we got to steward this well, right? Like

we can't, can't blow this opportunity. Tell me this, and I want to land the plane on, on this.

Sticking with this whole church online thing, what specific symptoms? So I'm a digital pastor.

I'm trying to pull people in isolation. I noticed a guy's not, not in small group. Is, is he really

busy or is, is there something else? We're utilizing, you know, tools like Zoom, tools like Facebook

groups may, may or may not be hard, hard to read. How do I, you know, there's a lot of digital pastors

out there. How, what, what are they looking for to start to read? Because maybe they're used to

reading in physical space, but we can't anymore. So how are we reading this digital? What are some of

the telltale signs maybe that we should be seeing through some of these digital tools?

Jeff, I actually don't know that. I'd love to explore that. I'd love to have maybe some of

your digital pastors come back and tell us what does reading a room digitally look like? What does,

what does subtle or significant disengagement look like? I, I, I don't actually know. I wish I had a

really good answer to that, but I, I don't know, but I think because it's so new, there's probably

some in your audience who are, who are experimenting with, with that. Maybe there's a, you know, if

somebody hasn't, this is a cool stuff, you know, being with glue, I, you know, the superpowers of what

you can do with tech. Like you can have automated things kick out if somebody hasn't done a certain

thing in a certain amount of time. Now they may ignore it. It doesn't mean they're going to see

it or respond, but there might be cool things you can do that no matter how somebody reads a room or

thinks they're reading a room, they're not.

Adrian, do you have any, any thoughts, experience vibes? I mean, I'm perfectly willing to say

we need to do that on another conversation with, with the podcast here to try to figure out how to

read the room and dig into that. But just what, what's been your brief experience as you've been

doing this for a couple of years?

Well, so one of the things that I have seen over and over and over again, both in mental health and

in digital spaces is that it's really hard to get a read on how someone is for real. If you don't

have a relationship with them, I have thought so many times about, it must've been the first

conversation I had with Tyler Sansom at church anywhere when he was talking about how important

it was to know the names of the people in their church online, because building relationships with

people helps you know when something's different or off. I think in ministry, we get really used to

people just dropping off and disappearing. That's a thing that happens. Somebody just decides I'm out

and they stop coming to church or they're just not part of it anymore. So we expect that sometimes.

But if you know that person, you have a relationship with that person, you're still going to ask that

question, even if it's probably just that they decided they didn't feel like doing small group

anymore because you were getting on their nerves or whatever it was, you know, but making sure that

you are building relationships is going to help you start to identify those things. So of course,

if somebody just falls off the face of the earth, all of a sudden, you want to start asking that

question, hey, I missed you. Because when you say that you're saying, I care about you and I want

you to be here and be a part of this. But also, and you may not be able to tell this online, sometimes

you can, sometimes you can't. But when somebody suddenly starts acting very differently from how

they have always acted and the way that you know them to behave, that is a sign that something's just

not right. And whether it is a medical or like a biological mental health challenge, or just a

weird day, like they still need you to reach out and, and be Jesus to them. So I would always err on

the side of showing up and asking if they're okay, even if I am not totally sure if what I'm seeing is

a sign that something's wrong.

Yeah, have that relationship and have it be strong enough to have those awkward conversations,

even if you're not sure. Love that. Man, I have learned so much in this podcast. I've never heard

of the mental health first aid training. I'm literally googling that. And I will be checking.

I didn't even know that existed. Something like that existed. And then so definitely we'll be at

least starting with that. Hey, we're gonna land. This has been an incredible conversation. Thank you

for this. Maybe just even as we're landing the plane. Ray, any closing thoughts on your side?

I really felt like that, like Adrian, Mindy, you guys did such a wonderful job helping break this

down for, for everyday pastors like Jeff and myself. And, and really for so many people out

there that are ministering to their congregations, um, because I get it. We're all afraid because we

don't understand it. Right. Like that's that we, we have to start there. We, you, you may even be like

me where you're struggling with some of your own issues that you're afraid to kind of dive into the issues

of others because well, I'm a leader and we're supposed to brave it through, you know, we kind of buy into

some of that ourselves. And so this is where we really need to take a step, step back and step back

into our humanity and admit first what we don't know and then humble ourselves enough to do exactly

what Mindy and Adrian have talked about and learn. And so thank you so much. I look forward to more

conversations about this moving forward because this directly impacts church, but for sure church and

digital spaces, I can't tell you both how many times I've dealt with congregants and people who are

beyond the scope of the care that I can provide. But even then they're, they're, they're looking and

they're hungry and they want to know that God loves them and that God sees their brokenness and sees

their broken situation and acknowledges it for what it is. And so thank you guys. Thank you so much for

sharing this today.

Uh, Adrian, you've done a great job hosting today. Thanks for filling in with that.

Um, Landon, the plane, any closing thoughts on your side? She's done. She's shaking her head.

She's not even unmuting the mic. She's out of gas.

I talked a lot more than I meant to. Um, no, I'm just really excited that we got to have this

conversation. Um, like I said before, as a suicide attempt survivor, this is something that will always

be near and dear to my heart. I care so much about making sure that people have access to mental

health resources. And I know that it is only Jesus, right? Like Jesus is the reason I'm here, but that

doesn't mean I didn't also need a super counselor and a lot of great people around me. So, um, starting

this conversation, having these conversations, I think it's important. I just want to encourage any of

you who are starting to have those conversations for the first time, don't give up. You're going to feel

like you're hitting a lot of roadblocks, but there are people out there who want to walk this path with

you. I want to help you start bringing Jesus into the mental health conversation. It matters.

Mindy, thank you once again for coming and jumping on the show. It's always, it's always great when

you come in and you bring such a breadth of knowledge and wisdom on mental health. And so very much

appreciate you coming in, um, landing the plane. Any closing thoughts?

Just that, um, I'm thinking back to what Ray was saying earlier about the virtual environments that

we're in. And I think a lot of the caregivers that exist out there are exploring being available in

virtual ways as never before. And so I don't know whether it would be helpful, the stuff that we're

doing with soulcare.com or if anybody needs like another place they can go to try to get help, um,

you know, visit our website, reach out to me or any of the ones on our team. And then there's a lot of

other organizations that are equally, um, sort of gearing up to provide, um, really safe places,

even in a digital way, um, to address these things. So, you know, a lot of pastors are like,

I don't have time to go find a counselor in my city. I don't know who to talk to, all that kind

of stuff. Well, there's ways, there's resources that, um, might actually be better suited to the

complexity of being a pastor going for counseling in a local context. So the digital stuff is really

important. Spiritual direction, coaching, counseling, all those things can be really helpful.

So anyway, I can help. That's what I wanted to say.

I'll, I mean, I'll give testimony to that. I've, I've done counseling through soulcare,

soulcare.com, uh, worked with the people there and, uh, was awesome. Uh, in, in a digital,

I'm a digital guy. Okay. So maybe I'm a little slanted, but having those conversations, working

through that stuff in digital space, um, without the, the risk of going in local and, and, and I'm

okay with local. I wasn't an issue, but I didn't have to worry about that. It wasn't, it wasn't

awkward. It was just, Hey, let me, let me jump on this and have that conversation. It was so good.

And so many, I just, I've seen so many things go South and people were like, Oh, I just didn't know

where to turn because they were embarrassed by something in the local space or even with their

own church. And, uh, you know, honestly, I think that the line to close it off was, uh, Mindy,

I think you said, it's like the, um, uh, the, the powerful of the secrets. What was the line?

Oh, we're only as sick as our secrets or only as sick as our, as our secrets. I like that might

be tattoo worthy. It's been a while since I've had a tattoo worthy quote dropped here on the podcast,

but that right there, um, I'm not going to give Mindy Caliguire credit for saying it because I

think she heard it from somewhere else, but that's a very common, no, no, no, no, no, very common

phrase in 12 step communities. All right. If you want Jeff to get that tattoo, please donate to

Stadia. I will definitely donate for that one. Put your Venmo out there. We'll all support it.

I tell you what, I'll, I'll put my link to, to donate towards Stadia for Jeffrey to help Jeffrey

continue to do a ministry and church planning efforts through Stadia. And if, if we saw some

traction there, I may or may not get that, get that tattoo. Assuming my wife will have to do

marital counseling. If I get the tattoo, I'll just say it that way. And, uh, and we're going to wrap

the plane on that with the idea of Jeffrey getting a tattoo. So, Hey, for Ray, for Adrian, for Mindy,

this is Jeff with the church digital podcast and Stadia church planning. Um, thanks for joining

here on the pod and we'll see you next time here at the show. Y'all have a good day.