What graduate school program allows you to relearn what it means to be a child in such a tangible way? Welcome to the Mars Hill Graduate School Counseling Psychology program.

During the summer term course entitled Counseling Children and Adolescents, taught by Dr. Steve Call, we have been learning that to be a therapist to children and adolescents we have to relearn what it means to be a child. In other words, we have to learn how to play again. During class students were given a break from the lecture time and handed buckets of chalk. The only instructions given by Steve were, “go play.”

Games of hopscotch began not long after that, along with artistic expressions inspired by the beautiful Seattle summer day. There is never a dull moment at MHGS.

Shonna Porter, a 2008 MHGS Alumnae from the Counseling Psychology program, was recently featured in the local paper about her practice. Shonna is applying her degree as both a therapist and an exercise physiologist, helping people discover the root of their weight issues. Shonna speaks about why her targeted practice is important:

“Once you actually go to a counselor and really deal with the undertone of what’s happening, why you are either eating or having some form of addition come out of anxiety, you find that eating disorders, eating addition and food addiction tend to subside,”

“I want people to know that change doesn’t happen on a cerebral level,” she says. “… Change happens in a relationship … To have an authentic relationship with someone who can hold space for whatever you bring, there’s power in that and that fosters change.”

Shonna’s story is similar to many MHGS alumni who often find creative ways to use their degrees to impact the lives of others. Click here to read the whole article.

lament |l??ment|noun – a passionate expression of grief or sorrow

Lamentations is a well-known book in the Bible where Jerusalem, personified as a woman, mourns for her destruction and for her former inhabitants. It is a deeply emotional book and one that is not often read from the pulpit of churches today, which I find to be a disservice to our culture. We can learn many things from the Bible so why do we avoid the places of deep grieving?

You will hear many phrases at Mars Hill Graduate School and one of those is, ‘you cannot take your clients where you yourself have not gone.’  Client can be a broad term for anyone and everyone who ever shares a part of their story with you; you cannot help your client with their grief, no matter how hard you try, unless you enter into your own tragedy and begin to grieve and mourn for your own pain.  What would it look like for you to enter into the dark parts of your story and allow yourself to feel the pain?  Every change brings loss and every loss must be grieved. What changes have you yet to grieve? Where in your life have you moved on to another chapter without regard for the ending of a season?  We’ve all done it so please do not feel as though you are alone.

The first goal of therapy is to create safety for the client in order for them to enter into those hard places. MHGS has been that safe place for many people, regardless of their degree program, where they have come from, or where they are going. We have become a nation of people who mask our pain, for whatever reason, in pursuit of happiness. My hope is that by beginning the process of grieving we can being to find healing in our lives, community in knowing that we are not alone, and joy that comes with the morning.

I had always been taught that God is a Rock, and my firm foundation. But lately, I’ve been playing with a new metaphor: what if God is Water?

There is something to be said about God being a rock. Rocks are sturdy. Rocks are lasting. Rocks are strong. I’m thinking more along the lines of mountains here, maybe even a very, very large boulder. They are not easily moved or easily changed, they are steadfast and constant. There are scriptures describing God as a rock, you only need to flip through the Psalms for a few moments to see that (Psalm 62 is a nice read if you’re looking for something in particular).

Maybe because this is the first time I’ve lived near any body of water but I have been drawn to the beauty of Elliott Bay and the Puget Sound. Simply breathtaking! There are as many different beaches and one can imagine: sandy, rocky… okay, that’s all there really is, but they are equally fantastic! I’m a frequenter of Alki Beach in West Seattle and have had the opportunity lately to sit and watch the water. There is power and strength in water, prime examples being floods, hurricanes, and tsunamis but we tend to forget the power of streams, brooks, and rivers. Was not the Grand Canyon made from the Colorado River over the span of 17 billion years? That’s a quiet power that cannot be denied when you stand at the edge of the Canyon. Ancient Egypt depended on the annual flooding of the Nile to sustain their crops and allow their civilization to continue. Water can bring life in its path.

Jesus says that He is the Living Water. I know he was speaking metaphorically, but physically humans cannot live without water and I am beginning to understand just how much I cannot live without God. For this season of my life, God is like water, calling me to the edge and encouraging me to dive in. Maybe the next season will show himself to me in another way, but for now I enjoy the serenity of presence in water.

Lent |lent| · noun – the period preceding Easter that in the Christian Church is devoted to fasting, abstinence, and penitence in commemoration of Christ’s fasting in the wilderness. In the Western Church it runs from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday and so includes forty weekdays.

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I can remember back in high school when my friends who were Catholic would celebrate Lent and I just had no idea what that was about. I knew they gave up something for 40 days but then they ate fish on Friday? I grew up in a Baptist church so the Catholic religion and traditions were lost in my world.

Fast forward a few years and you will see a more astute Christian version of me participating in Lent the only way I knew how: I gave up sodas one year and I think gum the next year. Nothing too earth shattering or world rocking, but I am a lover of Diet Coke so it was hard. From what I understood I was to give up an earthly comfort and, when craving to partake in this earthly comfort, I should pray to God and ask Him take away the temptation, remind me of His sacrifice and then all will be well with my soul (for the time being).

Now I find myself in a different place. I have walked a rough road when it comes to organized tradition and I’ve experienced heartache in the my work with the church. But I currently find it pretty near impossible to separate the two. For most of my life I have defined myself by my religious beliefs so… what do I do now? What defines me? I struggle to be called a Daughter of the King or a Bride of Jesus or a Christian at all.

Conundrum.

I was talking with a friend while at MHGS today and she mentioned this idea that she heard from Peter Rollins: instead of participating in Lent through the act of taking something away from your life to bring you closer to God, Peter suggests doing something a bit different.

Add something to your life.

Search for the answers to the questions you may have been too scared to ask out loud.

Read, discuss, doubt, wonder.

explore.

For me this takes on a pilgrimage vibe of sorts. Am I ready to give up my anger and deal with the sadness underneath? Do I want to search for the answers God has waiting for me, or am I looking for a particular answer to an unknown question? What if nothing has changed in 40 days? What if everything has changed in 10? Am I ready for my life to be different, or for me to be different? I don’t have any answers, but that is what this journey for me is all about.

From ‘laid off’ to ‘survival mode’ to ‘grad school student’ in 4 months. Welcome to my summer of 2009.

Less than a week after I received my acceptance letter from Mars Hill Graduate School I was laid off from my job. This was the beginning of the downward spiral into survival mode until it was time to move across the country. I had previously worked at Starbucks before my foray into Human Resources and quickly fell back into the routine of early morning shifts making custom coffee and tea beverages for the great people of Houston, Texas. I also took on a second job at a gourmet grocery store in their espresso/gelato bar during the evenings and weekends. Survival was the key, not necessarily living, and I survived. I was so excited to put my two weeks notice in at my second job and begin my transfer to a Starbucks store in Seattle that I didn’t even cry when I drove away from my family in the rented Kia mini-van that would take me to my new home.

Christmas break was the first time I was able to be in that same environment with family and friends without having to be in survival mode. I was able to be present, in the moment, and that was something that I was incapable of since being laid off in April. There was a moment with my mom where I said that it all felt like a dream, that it was almost impossible to believe that it was my reality for 3 months.

On the plane ride home from Houston I was reading Trauma & Recovery, a text by Judith Herman assigned for a class this semester, and in describing people who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder the author states that these people say that the trauma they incurred was viewed as more like a dream than a reality that was lived.

I do not wish to discredit those to have lived through wars, physical attacks, sexual abuse, etc. but to realize that those months in my life really were traumatic makes me wonder if trauma is not something that can be measured on a scale of 1-10, or cannot be measured at all. According to Herman, trauma is defined as ‘a deeply distressing or disturbing experience,’ which also implies that traumatic experiences can be different moments for different people. It’s easy to look back on those months and just simply be glad they are over, but to see the pain on my roommate’s face when I share that story with her makes me realize how far I have disassociated myself from this experience, which then makes me wonder how truly traumatic it actually was.

Maybe I will never know. The new question is: will I be okay with not knowing?

From ‘laid off’ to ‘survival mode’ to ‘grad school student’ in 4 months. Welcome to my summer of 2009.

Less than a week after I received my acceptance letter from Mars Hill Graduate School I was laid off from my job. This was the beginning of the downward spiral into survival mode until it was time to move across the country. I had previously worked at Starbucks before my foray into Human Resources and quickly fell back into the routine of early morning shifts making custom coffee and tea beverages for the great people of Houston, Texas. I also took on a second job at a gourmet grocery store in their espresso/gelato bar during the evenings and weekends. Survival was the key, not necessarily living, and I survived. I was so excited to put my two weeks notice in at my second job and begin my transfer to a Starbucks store in Seattle that I didn’t even cry when I drove away from my family in the rented Kia mini-van that would take me to my new home.

Christmas break was the first time I was able to be in that same environment with family and friends without having to be in survival mode. I was able to be present, in the moment, and that was something that I was incapable of since being laid off in April. There was a moment with my mom where I said that it all felt like a dream, that it was almost impossible to believe that it was my reality for 3 months.

On the plane ride home from Houston I was reading Trauma & Recovery, a text by Judith Herman assigned for a class this semester, and in describing people who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder the author states that these people say that the trauma they incurred was viewed as more like a dream than a reality that was lived.

I do not wish to discredit those to have lived through wars, physical attacks, sexual abuse, etc. but to realize that those months in my life really were traumatic makes me wonder if trauma is not something that can be measured on a scale of 1-10, or cannot be measured at all. According to Herman, trauma is defined as ‘a deeply distressing or disturbing experience,’ which also implies that traumatic experiences can be different moments for different people. It’s easy to look back on those months and just simply be glad they are over, but to see the pain on my roommate’s face when I share that story with her makes me realize how far I have disassociated myself from this experience, which then makes me wonder how truly traumatic it actually was.

Maybe I will never know. The new question is: will I be okay with not knowing?

After the sudden death of a young colleague in 2008, many in our community were shaken and deeply grieved.  I sought comfort that day, as I often do in the natural world.  This poem came from my experience of God’s presence that day.

You Have Spoken

Dr. Stephanie Neill began her work in the practicum program at MHGS in 2001 and now serves as Assistant Academic Dean and Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology. She continues in private practice is Woodinville, where she lives with her husband and son.

On October 10th The Other Journal at MHGS hosted a book launch party and book reading for Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical.  The event was held in the main classroom at MHGS and was attended by roughly 75 people.

This just-released book is a collection of essays by both established and up-and-coming women writers who tell about growing up in their Evangelical cultures.  The event was held in the main classroom and was a festive night that included readings by 6 of the 22 authors.

Jesus Girls is a anthology of essays collected by The Other Journal’s creative writing editor, Hannah Notess, a project that she has been working on for three years.  When she came on staff with TOJ last year we worked together to publish her collection through a book series that we were developing with Cascade Press called, “Experiences in Evangelicalism.”

As a graduate of MHGS and as the editor of The Other Journal, I am thrilled to be involved with the publication of this book.

Jesus Girls talks openly about what it is like, for better or worse, to be a woman within the context of Evangelicalism.  Some women have grown within the church, and matured deeper in their faith, while others have grown outside of, and developed apart from Christian faith commitments.  The diversity of the stories allow for new ways of understanding testimonies, or narratives, that are honest about how messy and often times painful life is, and what hope might look like amidst the chaos.  This is clearly something both MHGS and TOJ are deeply interested in.

This book is also important because it provides a needed platform.  Women’s voices are heard less than men’s in many strains of Evangelicalism (sometimes women are not even allowed to speak at all in front of their faith communities or teach boys in Sunday School).  To hear the stories of women is to listen to needed perspectives, vital corrective voices that Church needs to thrive.

If you are interested in the book, you can buy it online at www.wipfandstock.com

Recently Publishers Weekly reviewed the book, and I’ll end with their review:

“Written by experienced women writers from diverse evangelical Christian backgrounds, the tales are honest, approachable and revealing. Each author has put aside her inhibitions about exposing the flaws of her home church—from power struggles to the indoctrination of shame—and takes evangelicalism to task for its ‘carefully filtered’ yet ambiguous conventions. Yet all of the authors tell of a more realistic, meandering faith, enduring even while rife with doubt. Readers will be inspired to re-examine their own beliefs and perhaps even create their own un-testimonies.”

Chris Keller is the editor of The Other Journal and an alum of the MHGS Master of Counseling Psychology program.

Phil Nellis has spent the last four years discovering himself as an artist as well as working for his Master of Divinity degree at Mars Hill Graduate School. This past week, we held an artist reception at the school for Phil’s artwork, now on display in the MHGS lounge.

As we gathered surrounded by Phil’s art, Joshua Longbrake led a conversation with Phil about his creative process stating that “when people are creative, the world get’s put back together.” As an MHGS student, Phil has found new meaning in how we interpret the text of the world. His art is usually created in response, whether it be a letter of Paul, the music of David Bazan, or the stories of Flannery O’Conner that his wife reads aloud while he works, creating an intertextual creation that includes influential voices beyond his own.

“Art has to go through your heart…and then it has to go through your lower intestine.” –Phil Nellis

You can see more of Phil’s artwork off of his site at elnellis.com and read his personal blog here.

Phil’s art exhibit was followed by an intimate performance by David Bazan. Bazan spoke about his own struggle with faith and grappling with the text of Scripture. His music was played acoustically with no microphone, yet the audience was stunned at the music’s ability to fill the room and hearts of everyone present.