Teaching Young Pastors about Mental Health and Mental Illness at Baltic Pastoral Institute

By Mike Rinkin, Director of Compassion Ministries

    Compassion Ministries of Corvallis, Oregon, recently sent Mike and Judy Rinkin, Barbara and Ray Ellis and Kent Schnake to teach an intensive one week course at Baltic Pastoral Institute in Riga.

    CORVALLIS, Oregon – Compassion Ministries is dedicated to the education and training of church members to help them better serve persons with mental illness and their family members.

    Several years ago, Chuck Kelley asked me to consider going to Latvia with this ministry because he had seen great need. In 2007, my wife and I went on our first trip to Latvia. BBI had arranged for us meetings with mental health workers and Christian social workers. While there we had the opportunity to meet with the only employed chaplain who worked in one of the nine mental health hospitals in Latvia.

    Just a few weeks ago, our ministry team of four returned from Latvia. The team consisted of a Christian psychologist, an adult client, my wife and me. We conducted 3-90 daily presentations for 4 days at the Pastoral Baltic Institute. Each session was on a different mental illness subject. It was our understanding we would be speaking to the seminarians. To our surprise, there were other church leaders invited. We had lively discussions on the difference between demon possession and mental illness, personal sin not causing this illness, and many other subjects.

    There were many private sessions of class members talking about their involvement with persons with mental illness. One such person was a thankful mother in tears who had a son who was 27 year old with mental illness. Three women shared they had people in their church with delusional thinking, that they thought they were directly hearing from God. These women wanted to know how to help without being intrusive with individuals of their congregation. An American, living in Latvia for 16 years, with a prison ministry wanting to know how he could better minister to persons with mental illness he encountered.

    From my view, these are just a few of the highlights. To say the least, this was an intense and gratifying ministry in Latvia.