Befriend: Taking Care for Community through Nonprofit

By Jana Struková

Befriend narrates a personal experience of the author with the formation of a faith-based nonprofit in health services. It combines real-life examples with theories from several disciplines to describe the nature and role of nonprofit in a community. The book argues that faith-based nonprofits create spaces of hospitality and inclusion for diverse humanity. They are poised to teach practices of friendship based on the friendship of Trinity and personal awareness of how mental health can either contribute to friendships in communities or inhibit it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666709995

Jana Struková

Jana Struková is the founder and executive director of The Mary and Martha Center for Women and Community Care. She is a public scholar and professor of practical theology affiliated with different graduate schools. She is the author of Kitchen Table Youth Ministry (2010) and of the monograph A Vocational Model of Confirmation (2009).

Book preview

Introduction

When I was pondering the idea of starting a nonprofit in the area of mental health services, I had two big questions in the back of my mind. I knew that I wanted to work with a holistic and spiritual approach to mental health, so my first question was: What will it look like? The second question concerned the relevance of the nonprofit ministry to my own life. I was coming to this fresh line of charitable work from my background of teaching at seminaries in the field of practical theology. In the hustle and bustle of starting a nonprofit, these two questions guided me more intuitively rather than conceptually. In the beginning, I was preoccupied with identifying the circle of supporters and board members, finding a suitable physical location, coordinating repairs and renovations to the facility once we found it, creating a social media presence, applying for our first grants, providing our first services, and articulating the vision and mission of the nonprofit in ways that my local community could understand and relate to. In the process of growing the organization and molding its profile, the intuited framework for my vision got translated into its conceptual language. I realized what I was asking: How can a faith and community-based nonprofit engage questions of ministry and call to a life of discipleship? What is the place of nonprofit in integrating social ministry and action with the biblical and theological summons to be Christ’s disciple? I contextualized the questions of the relationship between social ministry and a person’s call in the area of mental health services. This context offered me a connection between practical theology, faith, and mental health care, prompting me further to articulate a vision for holistic care.

Trying to envision holistic care metaphorically and conceptually, I knew that I was not necessarily casting a new approach to human health and care. Holistic approaches to human health were promoted in both Western and Eastern ancient physiological practices of healing, and their influences have persisted in medicine to this day. For example, the ancient Greek philosophy of healing saw the concept of human health as a balance between body, emotions, and social surroundings. Various practices such as healthy diet, pure waters, exercise, support of family and friends, as well as good sleep, music, and prayer were seen as essential ingredients to human health.

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Later in medieval medicine, the imbalance of health was seen as the result of anatomical abnormalities that led to the improper functioning of the body’s organs. This emphasis on structural malfunction was supported by greater advances in scientific understanding of what might have impaired the body’s proper functions. In more modern phases of medical research development, the impairment of a person’s health was determined to also be a result of the invasion of bacteria and viruses and was measured by the immune system’s response to this invasion. This diagnostic way to determine health came with improving microscopic technologies that revealed a vast, intricate, and (to the human eye) invisible world of microorganisms. The field of medicine responded to this new discovery by developing chemical means of killing the invaders. This also came with the investment in pharmacological research and studies on how the human body responds to infections (i.e., through its immunological reactions), thus uncovering mechanisms through which the human body either aids or inhibits its processes of healing.

Both anatomical and microbiological approaches articulated the platform for the evaluation of human health that was pathology or problem-based. The healing of the human body was predicated upon questions similar to these: What symptoms does a patient have? What malfunctions and causes pain? By closer observation of the body’s physiology, physicians were looking for signs of illness such as fever, swelling, inflammation, cough, and many other atypical manifestations of health that were deemed suspicious and problematic. In the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Helen F. Dunbar and Franz Alexander developed a new approach to the assessment of human health. This approach sought to establish connections between the hurting soul and physical symptoms, called psychosomatic medicine. Psychosomatic medicine looked for causes of failing health in those instances where anatomical or microbiological causes were not obvious. What was needed for this type of medicine to gain credence in scientific communities worldwide were technologies that could prove connections between the chemistry of the human brain and changes in the physiology of the body on a cellular level. Psychosomatic medicine offered a broader, perhaps, more puzzling lens through which to evaluate health in that it brought to our attention the interlocked nature of human life. As such, it helped support the philosophy of holistic care.

From a philosophical point of view, I suggest that a holistic view of human health probes our understanding of the interconnectedness among various contexts of human life. It creates personal awareness of the relationship between mind, body, and soul but also the surroundings in which a person lives. In recent years medical professionals have been embracing the concept of holistic care through its focus on social determinants of health. Social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age.

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They help orient medical professionals toward a closer and more intentional examination of sociocultural stressors on people. For example, if people do not have adequate access to food, water, or shelter, or if people experience permanent or even temporary homelessness, lack of sleep due to having to work multiple jobs, lack of peace and stability, or loss of connections and community support, their health will suffer dramatically. Sociocultural, emotional, and spiritual distress manifests itself through physical symptoms and illness, thus weakening a person’s ability to cope satisfactorily with the everyday demands of life. In their work on holistic care and health, authors Gunderson and Pray define health as both a qualitative and connectional dimension of human life. Health, they say, isn’t just about invisible bugs; it is about connecting to loved ones, to the village that gives one life, and to the natural order that is one’s breath and hope.

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This view of health further accentuates the need to discuss it through the lens of personal interconnectedness with one’s self, one’s rootedness in story and tradition (whether religious, tribal, or geographic), one’s place and purpose in the fabric of the human race and one’s ability to weave these connections into the tapestry of personal and communal hope.

Hope Begins with Friendship

Holistic care nurtures a person’s awareness of the personal ecology of well-being and both external and internal factors that might disturb it. However, in a person’s recognition of interconnected influences on his or her health, it is wiser to work with this interconnectedness of one’s health restoratively rather than pathologically. Health care that is pathology-driven diminishes imagination, agency, and emergent spontaneity. The authors of Leading Causes of Life argue passionately about the fact that society’s focus on failures and losses leads to a problem-solving mindset in health care. Such a mindset creates practices with tendencies to treat human beings as problems that need to be fixed, adjusted to different norms, or objectivized into metrics of a successful resolution. Gunderson and Pray argue that Nearly every field has allowed its identity to be shaped by the problems it addresses.

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Support and fellowship groups are then constituted around alliances to solve a problem, thus creating a lens of pathology that shapes the vision and imagination of people. This pathological lens fuels the kind of response that orients people to engage, prevent, and ameliorate the brokenness . . . but as the authors argue, Life wants a different way of being together, a way in which we are pulled toward each other and at the same time toward transformation.

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In other words, truly holistic care is restorative care. Restorative care embraces hope and the inner reservoir of strengths and virtues with which every individual has been endowed. In this model, people who come to health providers for healing are not failing in the sense of personal deficiency (although one must admit that in a strictly mechanistic view of the human body, their organs might not be performing at medically expected levels). Restorative care does not see people’s behaviors as problems (despite not conforming to behavioral standards for what constitutes normalcy); therefore, it does not engage in an asymmetrical relationship between a fixer (a health care professional) and an object (a patient) who needs fixing and recalibrating. Rather, a restorative concept of care is a hope-driven approach to healing that views it as the act of restoring imago Dei in each person. A restorative approach is ultimately an approach that leads a person to hope. It does not necessarily change a person’s external circumstances. I say to the center’s clients that counselors, out of the goodness of their hearts, wish they could eradicate people’s problems, but they cannot. If they eradicate anything, it is only in the sense of changing a person’s perspective and offering a lens of hope. The restorative approach establishes grounds for connections, resuscitates deep yearning for meaning and coherence to one’s life, blesses one’s personal agency and courage to act, and empowers a person to bless others.

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This deeply theological and spiritual approach begins by acknowledging the intrinsic dignity of life, even in its brokenness or anatomical decay. The theological framework of imago Dei articulates the existence of each person as bearing Christ’s likeness. Imago Dei in each person enlivens the eternal fabric of connectivity with the universe which enables the person to experience the world around her or him relationally: as a friend with life, with another human being, and above all with God.

The Outline of the Chapters

Throughout this book’s chapters, I will outline the governing principles of hope, friendship, and hospitality that led me to the formation of The Mary and Martha Center for Women nonprofit. I argue that hope, friendship, and hospitality lend to a faith-based nonprofit a character of restorative and holistic ministry They can also inspire community-based nonprofits on how to edify life. The book walks its readers through my argument in two parts. Part One explains the role that nonprofits play in nurturing hope within the framework of Christian discipleship. The trinitarian practice of opening spaces and extending hospitality to the fallen world in Jesus Christ motivates faith-based nonprofits to mirror it as the commons. This means that faith-based nonprofits become microcosmoi of divine care for diverse humanity. In their spaces, nonprofits cultivate the mindset and practices of care that are based on theological conceptions of friendship, hospitality, and hope.

Part Two explores emotional health and its influence on the human ability to form friendships and offer hospitality. It discusses concepts such as stress, fear, and anxiety from an interdisciplinary perspective to redirect healing from a strictly clinical approach to a spiritual one. The book closes by summarizing how the theological framework of hope and friendship can reorder a lens of nonprofit ministries into restorative and healing possibilities for a broken world. What I have learned about hope through my work at The Mary and Martha Center for Women and Community Care is that hope is common in people’s vocabulary, yet difficult to articulate. When I applied the concept of hope to the context of my ministry, I faced the first hurdle: How can a sense of hope be communicated to clients at The Mary and Martha Center in a language, space, or image that they can embrace and relate to? What exactly will give people the ability to invoke hope, hold onto it, and live by it on a day-to-day basis? In daily lives, how can hope act as a sustaining practice and edify people’s dreams and potentials to the extent that they have the willpower to transcend their situations?

I begin to answer these questions in chapter 1, called "Mária and Marta: The Story of Two Sisters." The two sisters, Mária and Marta, were real persons. Their resilience and faith amidst life’s hardships inspired me. Not only that, the sisters’ stories, together with my life experiences, supported my organizational and theological ability to envision and execute an interdisciplinary model of a nonprofit ministry that addresses the care and empowerment of underserved women and their families. My vision called for the creation of a house or household with practices that could embody hope. Much theological and practical work had to be done to erect a conceptual and praxis-filled structure to translate the vision into an everyday ministry. In all honesty, this act of translating is still in progress at the center, and I will walk my readers through it in the remaining chapters.

In chapter 2 of Part One, "Call to Ministry: Being Christ’s Disciple in the Nonprofit World," the conversation about hope opens by reading John 13:1–17. I suggest that the grounds for hope can be found within the context of Jesus’ farewell discourse with his beloved disciples. Reading the passage through a spiritual formational and behavioral lens, I argue that 1. it establishes the legacy of practices that elicit and shape Christlike behaviors and virtues with believers in their ability to mediate spiritual encounters; and 2. it narrates hope in the spirit of discipleship, hospitality, and friendship, but above all in the spirit of Jesus’ conformity to his Father’s will.

Where do the concepts of hope and discipleship intersect with the nonprofit sector? In chapter 3 of Part One, "The Nonprofit Sector and Its Social Values," I focus on distilling ethical values and social practices that define the nonprofit sector. One such defining value that guides the world of nonprofits is the goal of fulfilling a particular social mission. This goal is not profit-driven but rather seeks the common good and the edification of the human condition. Methodologically speaking, nonprofits provide a space for like-minded individuals with ideals and ambitions to organize around a cause. This principle of gathering, organizing, and associating people around a set of shared values makes nonprofits indispensable pillars of civic society. Focusing on the common good puts the mission of the civic sector into conversation with the hope and friendship axioms of Christian theology.

The witness-based model of discipleship for a nonprofit context requires a conversation about practical ways to illustrate how to live out hope. In chapter 4 of Part One, Toward Community: What Nonprofits and the Book of Acts Share, I examine biblical passages from Acts 2:41–47 to highlight practices of hope, hospitality, and friendship (the Way of Christ) that the early Jerusalem community of disciples practiced. In Acts 2:41–47, the early Christian community of believers portrays this Way of Christ through four primary practices: teaching and learning, sharing community, worshipping, and sharing hospitality.

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These practices are expressions of divine befriending, pointing to God’s own initiated acts of friendship with humanity as the basis for the human capacity for authentic relationships.

What strategic insights and trajectories can a world of clinical providers glean from this focus on hope, friendship, and hospitality? Part Two opens the way for subsequent chapters to examine some of the interdisciplinary frameworks within which to envision and implement practices of care based on Christian friendship and hope. Chapter 5 of Part Two, "The Invisible and the Friendship of Three," argues that the Christian theological view posits quite a radical view of friendship. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus Christ engaged in friendships with those on the margins of his society. Jesus Christ acted out of his core trinitarian relationality that represents the ultimate space for friendship, embrace, and hospitality. The trinitarian core thus represents a primary social matrix in which human relationality, with its capacity for authentic and virtuous friendships, is embedded. A theological model of friendship then begins with acknowledging that a divine image of the Three is the leading thread of the soul tapestry in human beings, but this thread unfolds only in a life that is lived in communion with others. God’s own relational embrace of humanity equips us with a reciprocating ability to embrace others.

Can friendships heal? I especially mean friendships that are grounded in the very act of divine befriending and that reflect life-giving communion with the trinitarian God through faith and personal spirituality. Another way to ask the question is this: What role do faith and personal spirituality play in addressing mental health issues such as stress, fear, or anxiety? In chapter 6 of Part Two, Befriend Yourself: Pathways between Stress and Health, I begin to answer the question by examining some of the scientific assumptions regarding the adverse effects of stress, fear, and anxiety on human health. After sharing my experience with burnout, I examine how the lack of emotional and physical well-being gets in the way of making friends. I focus on the role of human emotions and memories in people’s ability to form friendships and see the world in a gracious and accepting manner.

Chapter 7 of Part Two, called "Anxiety and Faith: Healing Connections," explores the argument from chapter 6 further by offering both a clinical and theological definition of anxiety. A theological definition of anxiety deconstructs the concept from its pathology to refer to anxiety as a passage in the spiritual growth of a person. It helps reframe the conversation around a relationship between ego and soul. The chapter explores more in-depth the metaphor of the Saturday life that refers to the time between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The Saturday life births the hope of Christ that sustains human hope and grounds healing and emotional well-being.

In chapter 8 of Part Two, "Hope: Developing and Sustaining Connections," I talk about hope in relationship to healing and holistic care. All three concepts share a logic of connection. Holistic healing represents an expansion into other dimensions of a person’s existence (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social) and creates connectivity. Hope provides us with an experience of connection. We can learn and practice hope through spiritual practices. In so doing, hope teaches not only how to stay connected, but also how to be transformed, grounded, and imaginative. The emphasis on Christian spiritual practices is the pillar for life lived in hope because it helps translate holistic care as the process of patterning human existence after the life of Jesus Christ.

1

. Sternberg, Balance within,

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2

. World Health Organization, Social Determinants of Health, para.

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3

. Gunderson with Pray, Leading Causes of Life, loc.

1264

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4

. Gunderson with Pray, Leading Causes of Life, loc.

2357

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. Gunderson with Pray, Leading Causes of Life, loc.

2380

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. Gunderson with Pray, Leading Causes of Life, loc.

645

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7

. Hume, Early Christian Community,

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Part One

1

Mária and Marta: The Story of Two Sisters

My Place in the Family Story

With the arrival of the COVID-19 health pandemic, I found myself treating my anxiety with doses of scientific literature. I held the belief that my rudimentary understanding of this virus (or viruses in general) had the power to relieve the fear of the unknown, unpredictable, and unnerving reality that this lethal grouping of molecules had unleashed. Being a little bit more informed about the virus epigenesis gave me an illusion of remaining in control. Therefore, I voraciously consumed books on immunity, human genes and genome, the origins of the human race, and human consciousness, ending with sync and vibration of our universe. Furthermore, at the very bottom of my bedside stand, one could also find that the physical-mathematical explanations of the universe synchronization were replaced by books on angels and angelic numbers. The presence of these books instigated my logical husband’s dismay that I could descend so low in my scientific ascent. Even I, on some level, was surprised.

Yet, this collection of books that I piled up during the dark and anxious months of the pandemic is also representative of my family’s story. It is a story of a family who places a high value on education (in both sciences and humanities), is faithful to the Word of a Christian God but also believes in angels and curses, has a curious mind about different cultures, enjoys traveling around the globe (even if it is sometimes only through a TV travel channel), and loves nature and gazing at the stars, wondering in awe about the aesthetics and symmetry of our universe. These are just a few generations with whose tastes I am familiar. What about the ancestors whose footprints have been blown away by the winds of change, migration, or lost records? How to tell the story of their ashes that punctuated their mortality and transitioned their names into the swirl of history?

I think about them and wonder about the place of my existence in this ancestorial mosaic because my story of calling is nestled in their lives of faithfulness and resilience. Popular genetic test 23 and Me, which I got as a gift for last year’s Christmas, has pointed to other regions in Eastern and Northwestern Europe where my ancestors came from. I knew that we had Polish and Ukrainian influences on my father’s side. What surprised me is that the test also revealed a significant share of genes from Romania. I knew that we had German ancestry on my mother’s side. Yet, a deeper genetic analysis revealed some Scandinavian heritage and circled more firmly around Berlin and Dresden as possible geographical soil for my family’s roots. As I think about the personal thread in the tapestry of my family’s larger story, these ancestors draw me into imaginative efforts to trace how their lives might have affected my life. What were their dreams, personality traits, beliefs, and places which they traversed or soil they tilled?

When I got a birthday card and a letter from my mother, I clung to her reflections on the significant milestone birthday that I was celebrating away from my loved ones. In her reminiscence, my mother focused on those traits that propelled me to leave my homeland and come to the USA: You took after your father, not only in appearance, my mother wrote to me, but also in your exceptional drive and ambition to change the circumstances in which you grew up.

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In a confession of its own kind, my mother also included a paragraph about her desires for life, stemming from her early career of acting and singing. She had quite a few opportunities to develop and offer her talent to audiences in big cities in Czechoslovakia and possibly elsewhere. It was her fear of the unknown and its paralyzing effect on her ability to surrender to the arbitrariness of life that stymied and made her pass on the opportunities. She did not say this in her letter, but I believe that it is also her artistic and intellectual creativity that I have inherited and have been using to sculpt my dreams in a way that redefines many life exigencies. Personality traits that I have inherited from my parents also laid down bricks for the foundations on which I stand now: in my faith and vocation, in my nonprofit work, and in my academic teaching. Each of them carries its respective energies that fuel my interdisciplinary enterprise.

The Story behind the Nonprofit

The story behind the nonprofit that I founded reflects my personal trajectory of vocation that draws on the wealth of interactions and experiences spanning across generations.