Dr. Jennifer Schwirzer shares how she started a missional business that trains Adventists how to become mental health coaches. She talks about Biblical meditation and how it was like for her to win 1st prize at Hyve’s Global Summit 2020.

<p>Dr. Jennifer Schwirzer shares how she started a missional business that trains Adventists how to become mental health coaches. She talks about Biblical meditation and how it was like for her to win 1st prize at Hyve’s Global Summit 2020.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hyve

Jennifer Schwirzer

The Hyve Podcast Season 2, 2022

Adventism’s Mental Health Network

Jesse Zwiker

Business or Vision

Jay Razzouk

That’s Worth More than Money

Lyndon Sweeney

Saving Time and Money Through Automation

The Jewish Secret

Rob Bertholf

The Academy for Missional Entrepreneurs

Rivelino Montenegro

Healing Chronic Wounds

Vincent Bujor

How to Reach Your Goals


So Dixon Chibanda, this psychiatrist, had 1 of his clients commit suicide because she couldn't afford the bus fare to go see him. And So they did a short training with the grandmothers and put them on park benches, basically, in the villages. They called it friendship benches. And they would help people with depression and anxiety. That is, in essence, what we're doing with the Bide.

We train people so that they can help other people. That's character development. That's what prepares us for the coming of Jesus. So those of us who work in that line, helping people change their thoughts and feelings are evangelists in the truest sense of the word. So we're doing mental health evangelism, I would say, preparing people for the coming of Jesus.

Welcome back to the Hive Podcast. You're listening to season 2, And I want to introduce you to Dr. Jennifer Scherzer, mental health professional, author of 14 books, TV host, and owner of a missional business called Abide Network. Abide Network is a community of mental health coaches and professionals, and they go out and help other people with their thoughts and feelings, and basically do the work of character building. It's very powerful.

It's kind of like a discipleship program focusing on mental health. Close to a thousand people have gone through that program already and there are dozens of providers active at the moment. And I was wondering, what made Jennifer start the Abide Network? So when I was a young adult, which was a really long time ago, I had clinical depression. But it was at a juncture in the history of my particular subculture within my church when people didn't generally go to counselors.

Or if you did, the only counselors you could see were local providers, local professionals. And as a result of that, I kind of lived out in the country and in an area where there just weren't a whole lot of Adventists. I couldn't never find an Adventist counselor. That wasn't gonna happen. And even had difficulty finding a local Christian counselor that I could afford.

So as a result, I didn't get services. And suffered with some treatable clinical depression for a number of years. So when I got into, I raised kids and right at the point when the kids were gonna launch, I was wanting to go back to graduate school and I was torn between theology and psychology. I've always loved theology, wanted to go to seminary. But I asked my husband because I needed a job, like I couldn't just go to school for fun, I had to get a job out of it.

And I asked my husband, Would you like to be married to a pastor? And he said no. And then I decided I would go to school for psychology, because I'm such an obedient wife, you know? And so I went to school for counseling, and it worked out well because at the time, I was already doing a lot of seminar presenting on like revival type weekends in churches. I had done music ministry for a number of years, and so this would fit in well because I could work during the week and then I could go travel on the weekends, whereas you can't do that with pastoring.

So it worked out well. And so I got the degree in psychology from Capella University, which is a secular university, by the way, and studied psychology on a graduate level. And I noticed that while I studied it, I started learning things about the mind that really helped me. And then once I started seeing clients after I graduated, that helped me even more because I was seeing people and I was helping people and I felt good about myself for doing that. And then some of the depression started to go away as a combination of helping people, making sense out of all the depression I've been through by helping others, also knowing a little more about the mind, and then making more money than I had before.

Poverty can be kind of a hit in terms of depression. I think for all those reasons, I started to experience relief from depression. And I thought early in the game, you know, I'd really like to provide some kind of way that people who are like what I was, clinically depressed and unable to find services, could find services. And I thought the only way we're gonna be able to do that is to do it virtually on the phone or the internet. At the time it was Skype, but now it's Zoom that everybody seems to be using.

But those types of applications, I thought this is the only way we're gonna be able to do this. Because I knew that Seventh-day Adventists overall, who needed mental health services overall would want a Seventh-day Adventist counselor. Not because we think that non-Adventist counselors couldn't help us, but because We don't want to have to explain our worldview to the person we're going to be opening up our personal lives to. Plus, there's this thing where Adventists want to be witnessing all the time to people outside of our faith. And so if you're sharing all of your garbage with someone that's not part of your faith.

Some people felt bad about that. But for the most part, it was just that they didn't want to have to explain. And they wanted to know that that person they were opening this very personal stuff up to was someone that would not only understand, but affirm what they believed. Because sometimes the mental health issues have to do with inter-church relationships, politics, and sometimes have to do with some of the teachings and various things. So Adventists overall, I would say, prefer an Adventist counselor.

So there's a business opportunity right there. If you're thinking like a business person, you're like, here's a resource, here's a need, you want to match them up. And so, that's kind of what I did without really knowing what I was doing. I thought, you know, what we could do is like have a network and be able to provide because I had already gotten to the place where I couldn't take on all the clients that were coming to me. I was a published author before I got into professional counseling and my books were out there and people heard.

I just saw how people heard about 1 Seventh-day Adventist who is now doing counseling and they're like, come at you. There's just like fly on you know what, flies on you know what. They started to come and they started to come. And I realized, wow, you know, there's a market here, Not in the sense of wanting to make a lot of money, because that hasn't even happened to this point, but in the sense of wanting to connect a need with a resource. So early in the game, I started to hand off some of my referrals to 2 other counselors.

And we got together, and we decided on a brand, Abide Counseling is what we called it initially. We set that up and then over the next maybe 8 years, started to include other providers. Now, at the same time I was doing a training, which was designed to be sort of the gateway training through which people would come to become part of this network. And the training was called the Abide Helper Training. And so I would do that training, people would take it, there's a certification process that they would follow after the training, it's a 1 day training.

So it's like this big information dump in 1 day, but then the people have to sort of internalize what they've learned and follow a process of supervision and coaching others, practice coaching, reading a lot of material. When they're done with that certification process, then they get this certification and they can become part of the Abide network. That was the idea. That's what we started to do. We added 123, over the years, a few more providers.

And then what started happening is, people would come and they'd want the training, even though they were professionals in the field. And I would have this wrestle with something, you know, Should people who do not have a professional training be helping people with mental health issues? And I really thought through that carefully. And I thought, yes, because this is what we do with the physical health message. We teach people vegan or plant-based nutrition, and we teach them how to bake plant-based entrees and bake bread and all this stuff.

And the people that do this are not, by and large, professional people. They're, by and large, lay people that love the health message. And we've empowered them within our churches to hold these cooking schools and nutrition classes. Because they're not saying they're a professional, they're just saying that they're a lay person that happens to love eating this way, or living this way. So I thought we can do the same thing with the mental health message that we're doing with the health message.

And that is empower the lay people to operate within their scope of practice, to raise the general health IQ of the community, and to provide help and support within their scope of practice. So what started to happen is I started to train non-professionals and then we started to include non-professionals in the network. So at this point, we have a sort of a division. There's the professional providers and the non-professional and then really the only thing that distinguishes them besides their professional credentialing is that they charge, the professionals charge more overall. And people get a choice when they fill out the intake form as to whether they want someone with a professional credentialing or not.

And we teach a big part of the training is on, you know, when to refer, like when it's outside of your scope of practice. So we call the non-licensed, non-graduate degree providers coaches, whereas the others can use, you know, counsel or whatever their title happens to be. But we call everything that we do mental health coaching. All of the virtual work that we do, we call it mental health coaching. For legal reasons, you're not allowed to counsel across state lines, at least not yet.

I think that's going to change, because through COVID, we've kind of learned that virtual works and it's effective and why not open up sort of the information highway where people could get services across state lines. But right now, that's not happening yet. So we call it mental health coaching and we stay within a certain confinement. Like if someone is, we wouldn't take on someone actively suicidal, for example, or someone with severe psychotic disorders. We just say, this is outside of our scope of practice where we will help you find a local provider.

So anyway, I just gave you a whole bunch of information, but we started then to include these coach level providers. And then something interesting happened. My clients started to want to come to the training. And I had this revelatory process, where I realized, wow, these clients want to come and I thought, is that too much of a dual relationship, but then I experimented with it. And I found that the clients that came to the training and got equipped to help others actually got better, more effectively, more quickly.

And so at that point we adopted what I would call a discipleship model where we train people so that they can help other people. We help people and part of helping people is learning how to help other people because you get better when you do that. And there's tons of support for that in both scripture and the spirit of prophecy. Another thing that I started to realize, and it was a little self-conscious about having non-professionals providing services, but here's what helped me get past that. I learned about some things going on in the international realm.

I saw a TED Talk by a psychiatrist named Dixon Chibanda from Zimbabwe. And in Zimbabwe, they didn't have sufficient, they didn't have sufficient providers to be able to meet the mental health needs there. And of course, only the professionals were meeting the mental health needs of the people. So Dixon Chibanda, this psychiatrist, at 1 of his clients, commits suicide because she couldn't afford the bus fare to go see him. And he decided he would do, he needed to somehow meet this emergency need for mental health resources, and he did a resource assessment.

He went into the villages and he says, what resource are we over... I get choked up when I talk about this, so please, don't think I'm weird, but I'm very emotional about it because it's so beautiful. The grandmothers were the overlooked resource. They lived longer than the men, and so they would have had all this life experience and compassion, and they were wonderful people that had a heart to help and serve. And so they did a short training with the grandmothers and put them on park benches basically in the villages, they call it friendship benches.

And they would help people with depression and anxiety and they did follow-up research and they found that they helped just as effectively as the professionals did. There's another guy named Vikram Patel who did the same thing in India. He went into the villages and he said, we can train people. And he taught villagers how to help other villagers with depression. That is, in essence, what we're doing with Abide.

And when we started to do that, this incredible synergy occurred. And it started to be that people weren't just getting help from individual providers, they were getting help from the community itself. They were coming into a level of help with what they were struggling with that was bigger, so much bigger than any 1 council. You know, you hear about people's lives reaching a turning point because they went to some wise person, and that's true and it's good. But when you've got a whole community of people that somehow God is able to work more powerfully through the synergy of the entire community than he can through any 1 individual, you realize this is on another level.

And it's so much the model that the church is supposed to function on. So that's what started to happen with Abide, is we've started to see this incredible synergy. So we eventually changed the name of Abide Counseling to Abide Network because it's more than just counseling. We do workshops, group workshops. Now we have telephone support groups, where 4 times a week, individuals who just volunteer, I mean, I've tried to pay these individuals, they won't take money for it, they love it.

And they go through the books that I've written, that I have 3 books that go step by step through biblical principles of healing and they use those books as a basis for these telephone support groups and those are happening 4 times a week and they're free. Anybody can come at any time and they're run by volunteers And we have workshops that are paid workshops that I do for anxiety and depression. And I have another 1 for trauma, working on another 1 for marriages that I'm partnering with David Asher, a pastor friend of mine, an amazing communicator, and he wants to do some marriage stuff with me and family life, dating stuff eventually, and really looking forward to working with him. So we have all these workshops either in the running or they're actually happening. And we have a Friday night Bible study that started during COVID called Food for the Heart Bible Study.

We just did it because everybody was like, I can't go to church. What do I do? So I started out on Facebook, just a live stream. But we still had it going after 2 years because it became a proper spiritual community. We're like a church.

And we meet every Friday night and share the gospel with a mental health angle on it. It's amazing. It's truly amazing what God is doing through that little community. We still have 70 people coming pretty much on a regular basis. Oh, amen.

Praise God. What's your vision for this network? What do you want to achieve long term? That's a really good question. Thank you for, you know, I need to reorient myself every once in a while.

What am I doing here? You know, I have a mission statement somewhere. I can look for it on my computer, but I would say it's basically like we just want to, Well, the way I see it, if you want to go deep spiritually, is the work of helping people change their thoughts and feelings is basically the work of character development. And it is being, I would say, ministered and mediated through counseling and coaching and all this other stuff going on. But it's essentially the work of character development, because our thoughts and feelings combined prize our moral character.

And preparing for Jesus to come involves character development, you know, coming to the place of loving the way Jesus loves, having an inner life like the inner life of God. You know, that is essentially character development, because then that internal experience spills out into behaviors. And we've kind of had that backwards in Adventism, where we've been very externalistic and behavior oriented. But we're learning, and I think there's been a lot of growth there. And so we've come to understand that there's transformation, internal transformation.

So that's character development. That's what prepares us for the coming of Jesus. So those of us who work in that line, helping people change their thoughts and feelings and our own thoughts and feelings changing at the same time, are evangelists in the truest sense of the word. So we're doing mental health evangelism, I would say, preparing people for the coming of Jesus. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Missional entrepreneurship is life-changing, And it's worth sharing.

That's why we want to hear your story. Tell us how God has worked in your life, how you've reached customers and shared the gospel with them. Send us your story and get featured here on the podcast. Just email us at hello at hive international dot org. Hello at HiveInternational.org

Back to Menu

Series

The Hyve Podcast Season 2, 2022

Adventism’s Mental Health Network

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

Adventism’s Mental Health Network

19m

Business or Vision

40m

That’s Worth More than Money

31m

Saving Time and Money Through Automation

27m

The Jewish Secret

32m

The Academy for Missional Entrepreneurs

33m

Healing Chronic Wounds

30m

How to Reach Your Goals

28m

Sound Doctrine