The Word of Faith AND Fighting Depression

I have had many battles with depression over the years. I dont mean having the blues because my team lost the ball game, but morbid, dark, gloomy, wish you were dead depression. Self-loathing, self-hatred, hopelessness.

Last December I preached at a Word of Faith church in North Alabama. I had emailed my sermon topic and outline to the pastor, but he said that he never received it. On the way up there, I told Coni that after I deleivered this message that I would never be invited back, and I was right.

I feel like the Lord gave me a gameplan to fight depression. Part of it included seeing a doctor and taking anti-depressents. This is a gigantic no-no in the Word of Faith. Word of Faith people always have the victory and are always full of joy.

So I preached this sermon on how to overcome depression. If you wanna, you can hear it on my website at http://www.faithpreacher.com I told the congregation that if they were depressed, then go to a doctor or to a shrink and get some help. After all, if you get a migrain you take some advil right?

Or if you are having chest pains then you go to the ER. Not in the Word of Faith church, bless God. You should have seen the looks on their faces when I told them to seek medical attention for depression. From their facial expressions I might as well have been preaching nude.

I also mentioned that one of the causes of depression is not being content.

Faith people get discouraged when their harvest is slim. I told those folks to learn to be content. You do not preach on being content at a prosperity church!

After I finished, the pastor got up and cleaned up my mess. He rebuked me and corrected me in front of the people. He even told the congregation that he was believing to be in a bigger house next year, and driving a nicer car.

What a shame. After church was dismissed, many people came up to me and whispered that they were depressed too. They told me in whispers that they were not allowed to admit this in their Faith church.

A while later, we went to dinner with the pastor, his wife and a young lady that we had brought with us that had previously attempted suicide, and had been brought up Mormon. This young lady was a brand new Christian and was struggeling deeply with clinical depression. The pastor’s wife told her that the cure was to pray in tongues and to laugh in the Spirit.

hahahahahaha. The feeling around the table of faith was that it was wrong to take medications for depression, and that we should be trusting God. What is funny is that pastors wife was scheduled for an eye surgery later that week. Hmmmmm.

Depression is caused by a lack of a chemical called seritonin. It is found in the stomach, brain and heart. It is the chemical God put into us to help us be joyful and energetic. Stress can cause a lack or a misfire of this chemical.

Once it misfires, the result is often depression. Depression sucks. People that have never been truly depressed have no idea what they mean when they tell a depressed person to snap out of it.

The Word of Faith Movement is full of this backwoods thinking. I know faith preachers that will wear reading glasses and have heart surgery that will condemn and blast a fellow believer for taking an anti-depressent. This is very common in Word of Faith churches. The pressure to be well and well off is enormous. Being sick, or telling someone that you are sick is taboo.

Faith people believe that they will have what they say, so the wont say what they have. This had led to many hundreds of deaths that have been documented. The Word of Faith Message has killed more people than the kool aid Jim Jones handed out.

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