Here’s something neat: an LCMS pastor, Rev. Kirk Triplett, recently earned his doctorate, researching pastoral mental health. In particular, he studied their positive mental health as influenced by the actions of church members. Interested yet? 😉 Now he’s written a book, Affirmed: Building the Positive Mental Health of Your Pastor, and he has started a kickstarter to raise funds to get it into the best shape possible.
Here is a link to the kickstarter page. Feel free to spread the page around since surely we can all agree that pastoral mental health is important and often requires specialized materials.
I love how this sounds like a promising book for congregation members to read and not just pastors and their families!
For the sake of his book, Rev. Dr. Triplett has created a character (“Pastor Don), who is at the end of his rope. Depressed and feeling like a failure, tired and struggling to find the strength to continue in the ministry, what should happen but the Holy Spirit recalls moments that influenced his positive mental health.
Pastor Don’s recollections were created from interviews with Northwest Lutheran pastors, so they are based on real-life events, which I appreciate!
In Dr. Triplett’s words:
The book chronicles the six components of positive mental health and the themes that arose from the interviews in each component. After each theme, there are questions to consider and practical challenges to help influence the positive mental health of pastors.
Sounds promising to me!
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