Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

Today's podcast is a talk by Dr. Jeremy Pierre on mental health in the church.

It was recorded at our 2025 national conference.

My name is Jeremy Pierre, and I teach at the Southern Baptist Seological Seminary in biblical counseling and practical theology.

I'm also dean of the Graham School of Missions Evangelism and Ministry there.

And I am, it's a joy to be here with you all here at TGC, and I'm very thankful they gave me a very

uncontroversial topic like mental health.

Okay.

So I hope actually to serve you all well in a very specific way in this talk, okay?

And it's entitled, as you know, speaking wisely about mental health in the church.

Because mental health lingo is everywhere. Trauma, triggering, toxic relationships, emotional manipulation, emotional blackmail,

gaslighting, narcissism, intrusive thoughts, boundaries, coping skills, connection, self-care.

Everyone's using mental health lingo. So I got good news for you.

I'm going to cut through all of the complexity,

and I'm going to solve all of the problems of human existence

in the next 45 minutes, and I'm going to provide for you, thank you,

a very simple list of words that you can use and words that you cannot use faithfully. If anybody tries to do

that to you, you can get up and walk out of the room, okay? If only it were that easy. It's not

that easy because that's not how language works. That's not the complexity of what we experience in this world.

So again, this talk is about speaking wisely. That's actually the emphasis. Speaking wisely

about mental health in the church. So I'm going to be asking and answering hopefully the

larger question behind that.

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