Centering Your Week Sept. 29, 2021
Centering Your Week, Week 4: This is a Wednesday evening series that rotates each month through WORD (scriptures for the month), WISDOM (Rev. Baxter interviews a guest), WONDER (exploring spiritual practices), and WAY (the way we live out our faith, ministries of compassion and care). Tonight’s session is “Grief and Mental Health During the Great Interruption,” and the presenter is Rev. Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, an adjunct professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and Counseling. He’s calling the pandemic “the Great Interruption” because it has interrupted things on a lot of levels, particularly as we have not been able to be together. We’ve heard a lot about the pandemic, but not much regarding our mental health and grief, and that is his focus tonight. For example, each COVID death affects an average of 9 people in that person’s intimate circle. In this session he lays out a lot of evidence of the problem as well as a challenge to churches.