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When I was eighteen, on the verge of moving to the “Big Smoke” for university, a well-meaning older member of my congregation cautioned me against the program I intended to undertake—psychology. In her experience, it didn’t gel with theology. Actually,  it was more than that. She was wary of psychology’s antagonistic attitude toward faith and its potential to derail my own. What was a young woman to do? 

At the time, I couldn’t articulate what I now suspect, which is that beneath this woman’s warning were assumptions about what it is to be a human being which skewed her understanding of mental health. She understood the importance of our spiritual life but had little need for an understanding of our body and mind. Therefore, psychology offered little benefit to the Christian faith. I’ve heard her theology echoed in different iterations of “Mental health challenges only need a spiritual remedy. Therefore if I’m struggling with my mental health, there’s something wrong with me and my faith.” 

Hearing such a belief is heartbreaking for me because I’ve seen it negatively impact people’s relationship with themselves, others, and God. When our understanding of mental health is thin we tend to shame ourselves for not trying hard enough, we pull away from other Christians who don’t understand, and we sense God’s disappointment and absence. But when it is thick, we receive God’s overflowing compassion and grace for us, we are held up by the faith and support of others, we experience comfort from the God who draws near to the brokenhearted, and we find hope that the darkness can’t extinguish.  It’s for this reason I’m so glad I went on to study psychology, counselling, and theology. Integrating these fields has thickened my theological anthropology and this in turn has breathed life into God’s people in the midst of mental health challenges.

One of the ways I’ve seen this is through developing The Sanctuary Youth Series. I’d like to explain some of the theology and reasoning behind it to show how our theology can flow out into life. 

My theology program at Regent included an internship which I was grateful to do with Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries. My internship eventually turned into a full-time role and my time at Sanctuary was largely devoted to The Sanctuary Youth Series. My internship was the initial phase of development in which I conducted an international survey asking young Christians about mental health and faith. By far, the responses I treasured most came from this prompt: “If you could ask God one question about mental health challenges, what would it be?” Here’s a small sample of responses:

• What does God think about mental health?

• Could you please help me find a way back to you, God?

• Prayer doesn’t feel like enough to help sometimes, what else can we do to feel better?

• Who can help me?

• How do I care for others if I can’t even care for myself? 

• Why can’t you just help everyone and stop them from struggling? 

• What is the best way to deal with mental health issues as a Christian?

There is such pain and confusion in these responses. I was so honoured to read them. I was also so moved because they remind me of how important it is to understand this topic from a variety of perspectives and to integrate that in our teaching. Young people communicated to me again and again that they want to make sense of mental health and mental illness in light of their faith and The Sanctuary Youth Series helps them do that. 

In the series, you will never hear the phrase “theological anthropology” but the content communicates a Hebraic understanding of a human being, of a nephesh, a psychospiritual unity in which you cannot separate body, mind, and soul. To quote John Swinton, “Although the entities of body, mind and soul exist, they exist as aspects of the person and as such cannot be separated or analysed without necessary reference to one another.”¹ Understanding this brings a whole new appreciation to scriptures such as Psalm 23:3 in which God “refreshes my soul/nepesh.” God clearly cares about our spiritual life and provides us with valuable spiritual resources. He also cares for our physical and mental life and he resources us in those areas too. Not in competition with the spiritual, but alongside, as an integrated whole. 

For many people today, they still hold a more dualistic understanding of body and soul. This is as old as the ancient Greek philosophers but it remains alive and well today. For example, we’ve seen an uptake of “AI companions” and people testifying to the perceived benefits of a disembodied emotional connection.² In a world in which body and soul are separate, this makes sense but it does not bring us to our full humanity and thus, is not helping us flourish. Our theological anthropology affirms the importance of human relationships, which is to say embodied relationships. To be human is to be persons-in-relation, imaging our Triune God. Psychological research supports this with findings that the greatest benefits of social connection come from human interactions (as opposed to AI chatbots) and even more so from interactions that occur in person rather than those mediated by technology.³ Each session in The Sanctuary Youth Series includes a lived experience story from a young person and they all speak about the role that other people play in their recovery journey—friends, family, youth leaders, and mental health professionals. Participants are shown how relationships are vital for our wellbeing and encouraged to connect with those around them. 

Another example of this psychospiritual unity is seen in the series’ session on emotion. Students are taught about how to pay attention to the messages that our bodies give us about how we’re feeling. They are then taught about lament, a beautiful tradition of the Christian faith in which we cry out to God about things in this world that are not as they should be. Many of us teach young people to tell God everything they’re feeling, but many of them don’t even know how they’re feeling beyond “fine,” “good,” “bad,” “anxious.” Psychological insights help equip them with the skills and language to do the first step so they can articulate it to God and invite him into that experience. 

I now have the privilege of serving as the Head of ADM’s Mental Health Institute in Sydney, Australia. I also lecture at Mary Andrews College—an organisation that has been equipping women in Australia to serve Christ for over 130 years. In these positions, I teach and am a witness to the way that theology becomes practical and is lived out. As we look at a theological approach to wellbeing, men and women see how in their service and obedience to Christ, he also cares about their flourishing. Too often, faithful Christians have burned out when their theology wasn’t thick and nuanced enough for them to know that God cares about their mind, body, and soul. The biblical understanding of a human being as a nephesh, an embodied soul or ensouled body, is essential to our faith. My hope is that the work done by myself and others in this field would be a blessing to people like the woman I encountered all those years ago, as well as to youth who engage with this resource. Whether they have the words for it or not, my hope is that they would be able to live out their theological anthropology and integrate their mental health and their faith.