The intractable stigma of mental illness

Rick Warren was featured yesterday as he tearfully preached for the first time since his mentally ill son committed suicide back in April. Exerpts from ABC News:

Pastor Rick Warren, returning to his Saddleback Church pulpit for the first time since his son's suicide, said today he hoped to be able to remove the stigma that is attached to a person suffering from mental illness.
At the end of the sermon Warren said he wanted to help remove the stigma of suffering from a mental illness. 

"In any other organ of your body breaks down there's no stigma," said Warren. "But if your brain doesn't work, why are you ashamed of that?"

Warren said for the next six weeks he would give sermons about different stages of grief and would talk more about how his faith helped him after his son's death.

He also said the church would offer support groups for people suffering from mental illness. 

I wish him well in his effort to remove the stigma of mental illness and while he may have some success with his own congregation and beyond, I am not optimistic about success in the culture of religious conservatives. My observations over the decades is that it is extremely difficult for conservative clergy to accept that behavior can be driven by phisiological and biochemical factors.

A member of a godly family in one of my churches committed suicide. When I expressed my sympathy to the matriarch of that family, as godly a woman as I have ever known, over the death of her grandson, she said, "We have been expecting this."

When laypeople have related to me stories of how brother pastor so-and-so committed suicide (this has occurred in every community where I have pastored) they don't precisely state it but clearly imply that the ultimate cause was moral failure. Mental illness need not apply. The verdict is in.

Is it any wonder that stigma looms large over depression and that clergy, whom I read experience depression at greater rates than the general population,  are extremely reluctant to seek treatment and unalterably opposed to allowing anyone in their congregations to know about it lest they become damaged goods, lose their church and career.

A sad state indeed.

A few prominent SBC pastors have notably admitted to experiencing depression (though none to being mentally il) and, illustrating the deep divide between the one percent megapastors in the SBC and the rest of us (one notes that Rick Warren had the ability to leave his pulpit for almost four months after his son's suicide, something impossible for most of us unless we resign), these receive sabbaticals, standing ovations, and support.

In an ideal world pastors would be educated about mental illness, preach compassionately, counsel wisely, and encourage appropriate steps to be taken when it is found.

In our real world, pastors and laypeople alike look askance at mental illness.

Perhaps Rick Warren can change this.

Tragic, high profile Baptist suicides

In widely reported news Rick Warren's son committed suicide last month. Because of the high profile of his father, the tragic death of Matthew Warren triggered a considerable discussion among both church and secular observers.

There is a book coming out soon authored by SBC Executive Committee President Frank Page about his daughter's suicide back in 2009.

Nashville reporter Bob Smeitana has an article on the subject that focuses on Frank Page:

Suicides, assaults drive Southern Baptists to focus on mental illness

Page and several other Baptist leaders plan to meet in Dallas, Texas, this spring to address mental illness. The meeting was prompted by the Newtown, Conn., shooting and has gained more urgency since the suicide of Matthew Warren, 27-year-old son of California megachurch pastor the Rev. Rick Warren.

The publicity and action of such a meeting of high profile Baptist leaders can only help an area in which we are relatively weak, and silent. 

Although suicide has touched every church I have ever pastored and every community that I have lived in has a story about a pastor suicide, the subject is somewhat taboo among the brethren.

In the article linked LifeWay's Ed Stetzer is quoted:

In a blog post after learning of Matthew’s suicide, Stetzer wrote about how mental illness has affected his own family. Several of his relatives have taken their lives, as did a parishioner in a church that he served as a young pastor.

“We need to stop hiding mental illness,” Stetzer said.
Stetzer said some evangelical Christians think that if they pray enough or become more spiritual, then their mental illness will go away. But they don’t look at other health issues the same way.

“People who become a Christian and have a broken leg will still have a broken leg,” he said. “We tend to think that Jesus fixes what is in our heads, and medicine fixes what is in our body. Sometimes what is in our heads needs medicine.”

Stetzer is right and the sooner SBC pastors and others understand that, the better off we will be. We tend to believe we (and our families) are bulletproof. We are not.

Frank Page said,“I do not want you to imagine what that is like [to have a child commit suicide],” he said.

I have sons and a daughter and do not want to imagine what this is like.

Housing Allowance: Rick Warren giveth, will Ed Young taketh away?

My last post on the Minister's Housing Allowance, our Sacred Tax Loophole, was probably unwelcome with some of our Southern Baptist colleagues (Nope. You cannot use your housing allowance for a second home) because it shared the bad news that the more affluent clergy among us cannot expect Joe Sixpack to subsidize their second home at the beach or in the mountains.

Let's not get too upset about it because that first home that does qualify can be the Biltmore House and a high-income clergy person can pour as many hundreds of thousands of dollars into that as he can in order to maximize his or her tax break.

Makes sense in the same way that a lot of federal tax policy makes sense.

And, no, Rick Warren didn't originate the housing allowance but he was the catalyst for the federal law passed a decade ago that made it a bit smoother for us.

Ed Young? He has a pretty spiffy house in Houston that is or was on the market for over $2 million and Tom Rich of SBC Jax Watchdog puts a hefty figure on what his housing allowance comes to, a quarter million dollars or so. 

Rick Warren giveth...so how does Ed Young cause it to be taketh away?

Does anyone misunderstand that when clergy claim such exemptions to income by right and tax law that sooner or later folks will pay attention and say that something just isn't right here? Why should the government subsidize a mansion for clergy and not some hourly worker's hovel?

Why indeed?

There is some news here, rumblings on the horizon, because of a new legal challenge to the minister's housing allowance: Challenge to clergy tax break gets green light... My friend and CPA Peter J. Reilly has an interest in such things. The link is to his blog on Forbes. Read and learn.

The suit is being brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Peter Reilly explains it much better than I could.

The FFRF certainly has some material to work with, what with clergy  mansions like the one above, not to mention the clergy who are "qualified" for the housing allowance as ministers of loose basketballs, ministers of maintenance, ministers of fun overseas mission trips and other odd church staff positions.

I'm guessing that the FFRF lawyers know how to hit softballs out of the park.

The average SBC minister in my state has a compensation package (generally salary plus housing allowance, or rental value of a pastorium) of around $71,000 and the housing allowance probably translates into a savings of a thousand dollars annually or so. A thousand dollars is real money to most SBC clergy.

If asked, and I have been asked about this, I cannot say that we clergy deserve this tax break any more or less than any other group with some pull in D.C.

Is it unconstitutional? Guess we may see.

 

SBC Megachurches...

...love them, hate them, or be ambivalent about them. According to Thom Ranier, head of LifeWay there are 177 of them in the SBC. That is, 177 churches that report on the Annual Church Profile an average primary worship attendance of at least 2,000 weekly and who give something to the Cooperative Program. Not all churches reported, so there's probably a few missing from this list. Some that are on the list are probably only nominally SBC.

Some observations on the 177 megachurches:

About 0.4% of SBC churches are megachurches but on an average Lord’s Day of the 6.2 million people that attend worship in an SBC church, about ten percent of these are nestled in a megachurch.

If your worship is in one of the megachurches, you attend church on that given Sunday with about 3,500 other souls. You probably know very few of them and the pastor might but probably doesn't know who you are.

If your worship is in a non-megachurch, you worship with about 120 other people on that Sunday. You probably know most of them, by name. Your pastor almost certainly knows you and calls you by name when you leave church and tell him what a great sermon he preached.

There are as many as or more SBC megachurches in California (9) than in any of these SBC legacy states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, or Kentucky.

Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee have about 60% of all the megas in the SBC. Texas has by far the most but churches there are known to inflate their members just like ranchers there inflate their acreage and cattle. Georgians, however, are scrupulously honest.

You probably don't recognize some of the top ten megachurches:
1. Second Baptist, Houston
2. Saddleback Valley Community Church, CA
3. Woodlands Church, TX
4. Prestonwood Baptist, TX
5. Thomas Road, VA
6. Potential, Ft. Lauderdale
7. NewSpring Church, SC
8. The Fountain of Praise, Houston
9. Lake Pointe Church, TX
10. Saint Matthews Baptist, NJ

I recognize only half of them.

How many pastors of these churches could you name? Well, Ed Young, Sr. I know; Rick Warren, I recognize, and Falwell the Younger can't be missed. But the rest? Plodder may be deeply out of touch but he has never heard of several of the others.

Two of the top ten seem to be black churches.

Notably, only four of the ten feature ‘Baptist’ in their name.

Suppose you were fresh out of seminary, had a few years of a student pastorate under your belt and got a phone call that started,

"Brother Emdiv, this is Fred Smith. I'm chairman of the pastor search committee for Mud Creek Baptist in Hendersonville, NC. We like your resume and would like to talk to you."

I know what you might think.

'Ain't no way I'm taking my wife to any Mud Creek church. They are probably wonderful folks and a wonderful little church, but I'm edumacated, ordained, and seasoned and am ready for a greater challenge.' ('Greater challenge' is, of course, SBC preacher code language for a bigger church, bigger salary, and greater prestige.)

Better hold your tongue there, hotshot. Mud Creek is a megachurch. There are only three SBC churches in NC are larger than good ol' Mud Creek.

Er, I'd be glad to talk to you.

Then again, you might not be ready for a megachurch.

Check with Joel Gregory first.