An overview of basic pastoral counseling for anxiety-depression

This podcast was recorded at the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina’s 2017 Annual Meeting and focuses on explaining the effects of anxiety and depressional in a pastoral context. Anxiety and depression are the “common cold” of an emotional experience for many people. There are many questions about how to provide the most effective pastoral care for church members who experience various levels of life disruption from these difficult emotions. Brad Hambrick offers an overview of basic pastoral care for anxiety and depression and provides resources that church members can use to create an effective community of care for one another.

Here is an excerpt from this podcast:

This is a subject that I think warrants more attention. We’re going to talk about this from a ministry setting. Depression and anxiety are the common cold of human experience. And those words, if you will, the word depression and the word anxiety, they are about as broad as the word dog. If I tell you I have a dog, you have no idea what I mean. You know it’s got four legs, it barks and has a wet nose. But it could be as small as a poodle; it could be as big as a Great Dane. The word dog only tells us so much. And the words depression and anxiety only tell us so much. Just because somebody says, “I’m depressed,” we should assume we know as much about that person as somebody who says, “I have a dog.” It doesn’t do us any good to project our experience of having had a dog on their statement that they have a dog. The most important thing that we would want to do next is ask some questions. So we get to a very foundational level question: Why is it that people experience depression and anxiety? There’s this odd phenomenon: as best we can tell, people get ulcers and zebras don’t. The zebras are out there, they’re in a pack, and the lion comes up, and he’s looking. They all kind of know and the spook reflex hits and they all take off, and as soon as they settle back down, they go back to grazing on the prairie. We are under much less existential threat, but we get ulcers. Why? Our ability to anticipate and reflect.

by Brad Hambrick  /  Pastor of Counseling  /  The Summit Church