Is the Bible Sufficient to Meet the Mental Health Needs of MKs?

Earlier this year, I spoke at a Christian educators conference in Thailand and posed the following question to the folks in attendance: “Is the Bible sufficient to meet the non-organic mental health needs of MKs?” My answer made a lot of people uncomfortable and exposed one of the greatest dilemmas facing the church in this generation.

Double-Mindedness: Sufficiency + Insufficiency

I stand firmly alongside the Apostle Peter who said in 2 Peter 1:3 that God has given us in his Word “all things that pertain unto life and godliness.” That means that either God’s Word is sufficient to help with each and every non-organic missionary kid “inner man” problem, or it’s not really sufficient at all. The Bible can’t be both sufficient and insufficient.

Peter claims that through the knowledge of Jesus Christ and the volumes of his grace-filled, life-giving, hope-saturated promises, we have all that we need to confidently claim that the Scripture is indeed sufficient to give hope to all the mental health needs of our missionary kids.

“The Bible can’t be both sufficient and insufficient.”

A few weeks after that Christian educator’s conference concluded, I continued getting emails and feedback from some of the attendees advocating the idea that biblical truth is helpful, but it MUST be supplemented with medication, psychotherapy, and a broader view of secular counseling. How can Christians, who operate under the banner of salvation by grace alone through faith alone reach such dramatically different answers about how to solve such practical daily life problems?

Source Determines Solution

In one sense, this discussion is not new to Christianity. Attacks against the sufficiency of God’s Word began somewhere around Genesis 3 when a snake started asking Eve “Is that really what God said?” Today, the circumstances are different, but the same voice echoes “Are you sure that God’s Words can help your MK if they are depressed? Has God REALLY said he can help an MK with anxiety/panic attacks?”

I fear that much of Christianity today has been swept away in the swirling confusion of mental health and have failed to view this as a covert attack against the sufficiency of God’s Word. We have lowered our defenses in favor of the attraction of a quick-fix solution that comes in pill form, and our missionary kids are in the crosshairs of the enemy. At this point, we need to identify a primary theme in this discussion:

We determine how to fix our problems based on where we believe those problems come from.

MK Challenges

MKs face an endless cycle of moving, getting attached/putting down roots, and then moving on again. They will move more in their first 18 years than most people will move in their entire lifetime. They will say more goodbyes to friends, family, pets, foods, cultures, languages, customs, smells, and relationships than most American church members will ever recognize.

That’s just one single aspect of the MK Experience. Think about how many MKs have grown up seeing deep poverty, starvation, violence, racism, theft, and fear. There’s a reason those MKs at your church missions conference have a “deer in the headlights” look. Their lives are often lived in stark contrast to the sanitized, climate-controlled American church. There’s a lot to unpack in the life of an MK!

I’m so thankful there are ministries like Selah International Counseling Ministries in South Carolina who are committed to helping missionary families unpack and debrief their missionary experiences with a deep commitment to biblical authority and sufficiency.

We determine how to fix our problems based on where we believe those problems come from.

Hope Through Christ and His Word

When we recognize that all our inner man problems come from our own hearts that desperately want their own way (James 4:1), we can point our MKs toward hope. They haven’t been victimized by their cross-cultural upbringing, on the contrary, they can be powerful testimonies of resiliency in the face of deep suffering and spiritual challenges when they run to Christ!  

God’s Word has all that we need for life and godliness wrapped up beautifully in the pages of Scripture. All we need is the wisdom to unpack and apply it. But we’ll have to save that for another article some other day.

This article was first published in the Winter 2025 edition of Baptist World Mission’s Messenger.

Matt and Courtney Jones have served as church planting missionaries in Southeast Asia since 2005. The Joneses have four MKs, ages 18 to 24, who have all grown up in the rural northeastern province of Surin, Thailand.

In 2020, Matt completed his doctoral work with an emphasis on organizing ministries to help missionary kids thrive while facing the unique challenges that come from growing up between cultures, customs, and countries. In 2016, with this burden on their hearts, the Joneses with others organized their first annual MK camp for Southeast Asia in Thailand. The success of these camps led to assisting others to establish them in Peru, South Africa, America, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

In 2023, Matt published MKs in Focus: Thinking Biblically About the MK Experience to help missionary families reconcile biblical sufficiency to the unique challenges of raising missionary kids.

Photo by Simon Ray on Unsplash