2023–2025 Mission Grant #21
Healthy Together: Healthy Workers, Healthy Church
Lutheran Family Services, U.S. — $106,000
About This Mission Grant
God directs the church to care for those He calls to serve in ministry. Church workers and their families regularly face unprecedented stress, challenges, and suffering which affects their physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual well-being. There is an urgent need for the church to support and care for church workers.
Lutheran Family Services is responding to this need by launching a campaign to fund expansion of their services to support church workers and their families beyond Iowa and into the greater Midwest. These professional services are provided on an ability-to-pay basis through support of individuals and congregations without funding from the Synod or government funding to not limit their Christ-centered ministry.
This grant will help increase their ministry team of masters-level, licensed therapists who will provide marriage and family counseling that is Christ-centered.
Launched at the Iowa District West Convention in the summer of 2022, Rev. Dr. Jim Lamb shares a personal testimony of his struggle as a young pastor and how he was helped by an LFS counselor who brought professional support and the love of Jesus to him at a time when he was at a point of potential ministry burnout. Dr. Lamb reminded the group that he — and most pastors — are really good at hiding their pain.
More Mission Grant Photos
Pastor Kevin & Sheila Roop of Peace Lutheran Church in rural Marcus, Iowa, represent hundreds of church worker families serving in rural communities where mental health services, especially those whose counselors share their Lutheran Christian faith, are unavailable. The Healthy Together Campaign will build a team of professionally trained, Christian counselors to serve in person and via telehealth, reaching church workers and those they serve in rural communities throughout the Midwest.
The Healthy Together: Healthy Workers-Healthy Church campaign will increase the number of theologically trained men and women who are cross-trained to serve as mental health counselors. Pastor Nathan Grewe is the first pastor called and supported through the campaign to train as a master's prepared mental health counselor. He will soon serve the church fulltime as a licensed counselor, uniquely equipped to support fellow church workers experiencing family, marital or mental health crisis.
Pastor Nathan Grewe, first student counselor supported through the Healthy Together campaign, is pictured with Pastor Randall Golter, Senior Pastor serving at Trinity Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa, one of the Lutheran Family Service partner congregations.
Progress is being made in South Dakota where Lutheran Family Service has already added several professionally trained counselors who are now serving LCMS church workers and their members. Newly added counselors serving in South Dakota include Rev. Dave Gunderson, PLMFT, Lindy Hinckley, PLMFT, and Cathy VanderBraak, MSW, pictured here with LFS' Director of Congregational Services, Rev. Michael Wolfram and a guest at the Lutheran Family Service booth at the South Dakota LWML Convention in 2022.
