The Lectio Letter - Issue #74 - Part II of "You need Therapy!" - Interview with Anne Harrington

Welcome to Issue #74 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.

It’s coming to you a few days late I’m afraid, but it’s a bumper edition this time!

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You can see at the bottom of the email if it says “message clipped”, then click “View entire message” to see it all.

You are not getting it all if you don’t see my signature at the bottom.

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Introduction

In the last email, I introduced our friend, Anne Harrington who we first met 13 years ago on our YWAM Discipleship Training School.

Since that time Anne pursued a theological education and then became a trained counsellor (you can read more about that journey in Part I).

In our own ministry work, we’ve observed people become stuck or hit a wall in the ongoing journey of following Jesus.

While there are indeed “truths” in Christian life that we should learn and hold on to, those truths work themselves out relationally. The New Testament consistently reminds us that the outworking and expression of our faith (itself foundationally a relationship) is seen and should be measured on how we engage in the relationships around us. So discipleship is inherently relational. We don’t earn our salvation through our actions, but we do express it through them.

Discovering a little more about the impact of trauma on the brain and the way it impacts people’s ability to have healthy adult relationships and a healthy relationship with God has been deeply helpful to us in the context of working with children and young people growing up in a township in South Africa.

While we’ve benefitted from learning about these things I’ve noticed another trend in broader culture which is the massive influx of clinical psychological terms into everyday life by people who (like me, I suspect) don’t really understand the meaning of those terms. People are no longer feeling ‘down’ they are ‘depressed’, no longer simply feeling nervous, they have ‘anxiety’.

I don’t say this to disparage the very real challenges people are walking through. Still, it seems to me that if we can’t distinguish between the clinical and more common forms of these emotional states we will actually hurt ourselves and those around us who do actually need a more clinical level of intervention in their well-being.

That’s why I wanted to interview someone who is trained in these areas to see if we can get closer to the heart of why certain understandings from the psychology and counselling fields might unlock growth in discipleship and formation that seem for some, unattainable.

If you want to get access to continue reading this issue, you’ll need to be a paying member, but don’t worry, you can get a free 7-day trial and read it right now;

Apart from the second part of this interview, this is a bumper edition including some updates from our life, a whole list of the recipes we cooked these past 2 weeks, some new music, reviews of the flurry (pun intended) of Everest documentaries we have been watching and of course the miscellaneous links!

In fact, I’m so worried that it will break your inbox, I’d recommend reading it online at lectioletter.com instead!