“I think some in our church have come to the end of their therapy.”
I was sitting around a table with a handful of our church’s leaders, and one of them expressed this thought. He went on to explain that many who have been in therapy for years now seem to be complaining that they keep circling around the same things and feel stuck. What he articulated wasn’t a problem with therapy, necessarily, but a cultural narrative around therapy and a confusion about its goals.
But I sensed in the discussion a hesitancy to be dismissive of mental health issues and interventions. How do we talk about a therapeutic culture without sounding antitherapy? As pastors or church leaders, we can find it challenging to speak in a penetrating way to our congregants about something our culture has absolutized and commodified.
Seeking Sanctuary, Finding Shalom: Toward a Deeper Practical Theology of Mental Health
John Swinton
Seeking Sanctuary, Finding Shalom: Toward a Deeper Practical Theology of Mental Health
John Swinton
Baylor University Press. 172 pp.
Seeking Sanctuary, Finding Shalom proposes that we think theologically about mental health as a matter of the collective body of human beings and the welfare of creation. Swinton contends that the ways in which we structure creation―relational, social, cultural, political, spiritual―has a profound impact on our mental health. Failing to recognize the broader dimensions of the task of mental healthcare, we might only ease the severity of a pain or a disease without removing the cause and so never offer genuine healing that brings about peaceable connection with God, self, others, and creation.
Baylor University Press. 172 pp.
Freya India captures what feels wrong about this moment: Therapy culture, she argues, has become a kind of substitute religion—one that has extracted the comforting parts of faith while discarding its demands.
God is who all this revolves around. . . . Our online therapist is here to serve our every need, whenever we have one, any time of day. We are the divine; we are the deity. We have become the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent beings in our lives. There’s a reason, I think, that one of the most popular therapeutic phrases at the moment is is this serving me?
India helps articulate what feels wrong about our therapeutic culture. How do church leaders speak not just critically but constructively about mental health?
Few books have given me more useful vocabulary for one of the most pastorally complex conversations of our moment than John Swinton’s Seeking Sanctuary, Finding Shalom: Toward a Deeper Practical Theology of Mental Health. It provides meaningful vocabulary and frameworks for spiritual aspects of mental health without discounting psychiatry and medical interventions.
Swinton, chair in divinity and religious studies at King’s College, University of Aberdeen, doesn’t merely critique therapeutic culture. He gives pastors something better—the biblical category of shalom. He offers a vision of mental health that exposes the poverty of our culture’s therapeutic assumptions and gives the church genuinely different categories for human flourishing.
I’ll trace Swinton’s argument and what I think it means for those of us doing pastoral ministry in a therapeutic age.
Mental Health as the Presence of Something
Swinton explains that mental health can be defined as either the absence of something or the presence of something.
In our modern world, mental health is primarily defined as the absence of symptoms like anxiety, depression, and hearing voices. Someone who experiences these symptoms is unwell. “Here, mental health becomes a goal achieved by alleviating symptoms” (6). This, of course, defines what intervention and care look like. The problem is that mental health professionals often treat symptoms instead of the whole person.
We often treat symptoms instead of the whole person.
Instead, Swinton offers, Christians need a “model of human flourishing that is not limited to the absence of pain, suffering, or distress (something that Swinton argues is not achievable in this life) but is instead defined by the transformative presence of God” (11).
In other words, mental health is defined primarily not by the absence of symptoms but by God’s presence. Swinton writes, “Health is not and does not require the absence of illness. Rather, it has to do with learning what it means to encounter God’s presence even amidst unrelieved suffering” (14).
Shalom isn’t an “ideal, a social movement, or an ideology. Shalom is a person: Jesus” (13). I find this argument deeply encouraging. As pastors and church leaders, we don’t all have the competency to diagnose and intervene in ways mental health professionals do, but we likely do have the expertise to lead people toward a life with Jesus. This gives us meaningful categories to care for fellow sufferers while we partner with professionals. Swinton argues that what’s central to mental health care is also central to pastoral ministry: leading people to encounter the presence of God.
We can lead one another farther up and deeper into the life with Christ and his people with the encouragement that neurochemistry doesn’t have the final say, nor do symptoms tell the whole story. Pastoral work focused on people’s relationship with God isn’t an added extra but a primary marker of health—shalom.
Swinton doesn’t dismiss the work of psychiatry or medical interventions (he regularly emphasizes their necessity) but highlights the hopeful work of the body of Christ leading one another toward encountering God’s presence, even amid sustained symptoms and suffering.
Our Mind Isn’t a Closed System
Our culture often works within a particular model of the mind that is individualistic—one in which minds are “located within individual craniums, bounded by skin and skull” (27). Thus, disorders “affect private, isolated bodies containing minds that exist separately from those of others” (28). Symptoms are simply the outcomes of neurotransmitters, and therefore, interventions are primarily targeted there. “The individualization of our minds,” argues Swinton, “parallels the individualistic assumptions of Western culture” (28).
Swinton argues that historically and beyond Western contexts, there are better and more resourceful ways of thinking about the mind. He goes on to explore various “extended mind theories,” which illuminate what the New Testament means by the “mind of Christ.”
Rather than being independent and autonomous, human beings are contingent and interdependent. Human flourishing, insists Swinton, arises “when we exist in a state of participation and belonging” (46). In particular, we’re meant to participate in and belong to God and God’s people.
Swinton explains what Paul shows in 1 Corinthians 2:15–16 and 12:12: “We do not merely possess isolated individual minds, instead our minds participate in a larger, relational reality—the mind of Christ. This participation is not reducible to biological or psychological processes alone but is mediated through the body of Christ and the indwelling presence of the Spirit, who unites us with the mind of Christ” (51).
Swinton’s section on the mind of Christ is fresh and insightful; it contributes to a hopeful pastoral theology of mental health. Through the Christian’s union with Christ, by his Spirit, “our minds are transformed (Romans 12:2) and extended in such a way that we can share in the mind of Christ and be changed” (52). So often, pastors are discouraged by how internally focused congregants are when they struggle, how they distance themselves from God and others.
Rather than being independent and autonomous, human beings are contingent and interdependent.
Central to this framework is our participation in the body of Christ—the church. We’re one in Christ, filled with the same Spirit. In our belonging to and participation in the body of Christ, we gain from the Christlikeness of others. Communion with Christ by his Spirit and communion with brothers and sisters in Christ are critical parts of our mental health.
The New Testament gives Christians confidence that by the Spirit, we can “adopt Christ’s way of thinking,” and in “sharing the mind of Christ [we are] invited to extend our thoughts outward” rather than simply ruminate (53). We’re hopeful that we’ll not only gain knowledge about Jesus but actually receive the wisdom, perspective, and joy of Jesus.
Flourishing Instead of Coping
The sharpest critique comes against neoliberalism and corporate mental health initiatives. Our culture’s emphasis on the absence of symptoms often dismisses systemic and environmental effects on mental health.
Swinton makes the provocative claim that the way our society focuses on mental health is bad for our mental health.
Corporate Mental Health Initiatives
It’s common, asserts Swinton, for institutions such as universities, health-care organizations, and businesses to focus on mental well-being initiatives. These can take the form of mental awareness weeks, mindfulness training, or stress-management workshops. Or institutions provide free access to wellness apps like Calm or Talkspace (online therapy).
But Swinton suggests that symptoms like anxiety and depression are often created by the institutions themselves from “excessive workloads, unrealistic expectations, or exploitative practices.” The emphasis on mental health and access to resources becomes, then, “a strategy of containment rather than transformation. Instead of addressing the root causes of distress, these initiatives merely help individuals adapt to toxic environments” (71). Businesses offer coping mechanisms rather than transforming the environment, and symptom management instead of fixing unjust systems.
This dynamic resonates with me in my context as a pastor. Many of the people I serve work in competitive industries where they feel as if they’re working in an environment that requires them to make “bricks without straw” (see Ex. 5). To justify unrealistic work schedules that disrupt healthy family rhythms and church involvement, they often say to me, “This is just what you have to do.” Many accept positions at companies that seem to prioritize mental health, but they later find that emphasis is merely a means to cope with overly demanding expectations.
Neoliberalism
Mental health initiatives by corporations are a microcosm of a larger cultural dynamic within neoliberalism that celebrates mental health awareness while dismissing spiritual, relational, and familial values that support meaningful mental health.
Our society often stresses an individualized sense of self and achievement that isolates people from supportive relationships. The culture champions competition and self-reliance when loneliness, anxiety, and depression are at record levels. Our therapeutic age worsens the challenges by promoting a level of self-care that looks more like self-protection from any commitment that might be personally costly.
The culture champions competition and self-reliance when loneliness, anxiety, and depression are at record levels.
Moreover, communication about mental health—where well-being is marketed as a personal lifestyle choice requiring self-discipline, mindfulness apps, and wellness products—further reflects how deeply our Western culture frames mental distress as a personal failing rather than a structural problem.
Swinton’s critique of neoliberalism is less about its economic structures (though he has much to say on that topic, especially on the commodification of pharmaceuticals) and more about the ideology that drives individuals to “define themselves in terms of freedom from others rather than freedom for others. It emphasizes competition, which pits one person against another in all aspects of life and society” (92). It’s easy to understand, he asserts, that those within this system who are unable to meet its criteria will struggle to find sources of respect, value, and self-worth.
If many in our communities work and live within competitive and individualistic environments set up to sabotage our mental health, what can we do?
Kindness as Kin-ship
Swinton ends with a return to presence—the presence of God and God’s people. He ends not with a program or a framework but a word that turns out to carry far more theological weight than it first appears: kindness. The presence of God’s people who exhibit kindness as a fruit of the Spirit is, he suggests, central to mental health as shalom.
He includes a short reflection on the Middle English origin of the word “kindness.” The term comes from the “relationship between those who share a common nature—thus the words ‘kin’ or ‘kindred.’ . . . To say someone treated you kindly would be to say [you were treated] as if you were her relative, and in a way that is only natural to someone like her” (117).
Of course, the New Testament word for kindness doesn’t have this unique background, but the character of God’s kindness toward us reflects it. Jesus’s incarnation is the literal embodiment of this kindness—he treated us as if we were his relatives (“not ashamed to call [us] brothers,” Heb. 2:11) and died on our behalf.
As a people of God, filled with his Spirit and in union with Christ, there’s no room for distancing, only kindness. We love and serve and listen as Christ’s body. Swinton’s work leads us to maintain that the body of Christ and the presence of God are neither adjacent nor supplemental to mental health care but central to it.
“People will certainly need professional help,” he says, “and that should be welcomed. However, the role of the body of Christ is not primarily to deliver therapy. The task of the body of Jesus is to be kind and to remind people of their kind-ness” (119). Without it, there is no possibility of shalom.