Wraparound! What a concept!

Lectionary Scripture - Nov 8th - Mark 12:38-44

Wraparound! What a great means for people helping other people in their community. Its healing benefits for one’s community could increase its well-being a thousand fold. How so? Well by faith groups wrapping their heads around it to provide it, that’s how. Seriously! In fact, I believe that if they did so it would foster a new revival for faith all across the country. Furthermore, I think my politically conservative friends would love it to pieces. Why? Because of the savings it brings to the public dollar.


Wraparound, in a nutshell, is focused on helping individuals and families get unmet needs met and met sustainably. It involves bringing together a group of people for the purpose of support. The group often consists of loved ones, friends, relatives, and professionals as needed. The group forms into a care team. Their work is driven by the voice of the person or family the group seeks to support. A mission and vision develops out of the group’s work for getting unmet needs met. Subsequently, the unmet need involves a brainstorming process. Creatively and resourcefully, the team identifies and pursues means of getting the need met. Once the needs have been met and met sustainably as evident through a review process, life for the individual or family often takes on new meaning and purpose. Life becomes more satisfying often with fewer and fewer crises occurring. Initially, care teams meet frequently. But as life becomes more healthful, the care team meets less frequently. Eventually, persons or families manage on their own. If there is more than one need to address, the team works on the next need until that need is met and so on. The beauty of wraparound is seeing lives take on a radiant glow as a new vision for the future takes hold and comes into being.

I had the good fortune of being trained years ago by one of the nation’s leading experts in wraparound, Carl Schick. At the time, I had no idea that Carl was a member of my denominational church family. Carl’s training left quite an impression on me. I then spent much more time in training with his associate, Pat Miles, also a leading expert. At the time, I worked in the publicly funded mental health system in Clark County in Washington State. Having oversight and care management roles for the adult part of that system, I witnessed service providers billing the daylights out of Medicaid and Medicare. Sometimes people spent years in services achieving little headway. Little hope seemed to exist for recovering from the devastating impact of mental health crises and unmet needs. Expensive psychiatric hospitalizations consumed vast sums of tax payer dollars with little benefit apparent for the patient, their loved ones, or the community they lived in. Hospitalizations focused mostly on medications and keeping a person from harming themselves or someone else. When the person appeared safe towards self and or others, hospital discharged persons as quickly as possible back to the community. This often occurred without adequate support in the community. Long and short of it, the system was broken. Even to this day the system struggles mightily for resources it needs. It does so because there is little public will to see that mental health care is provided at the level that’s needed in our communities.

Into this dark world came wraparound. The training I received offered new vision and hope for struggling lives. Gradually, in my care management role, I identified opportunities in the Clark County system for wraparound. As a licensed mental health professional with a strong clinical reputation among my peers, I persuaded adult service providers to start care teams for persons in services but for whom those services yielded little benefit. Teams, as previously described, formed up. The results astounded us all. Expensive hospitalizations dropped dramatically. People’s lives stabilized and found new meaning. Above it all, I heard one need expressed more frequently than others. It was this: “I need God and my faith community back in my life.”

Stepping back to a few years earlier, an amazing psychiatrist supervised me in the Clark County system. He was and is the most gifted and caring doc I ever knew in 16 years of public practice. Once during supervision, Dr. George Mecouch, shared these amazing words, “Churches could be marvelous places of healing for our clients. The only problem is that their Judeo-Christian God isn’t big enough.” George’s words struck home. I resolved from that time forward that my God would be big enough. My God would be big enough no matter how hard I had to press faith communities over their resistance to change and the dysfunctional way they existed mainly for themselves. And my God would be big enough no matter how hard I had to press the public in terms of its dysfunction. It’s dysfunction you might ask? Yes, it’s dysfunction. It’s dysfunction of closeting mental health issues and stripping funds away from related services nearly every chance it gets. As for the mental health system, its dysfunction involved resistance to means and methods other than what it traditionally used.

Experience teaches me however that the battle, fraught with challenges and disappointments, has never been easy. Despite a bit of headway here and there, it seems as though things are always on the losing side. At points, I wonder why bother anymore. Why throw one’s all into the task only to encounter huge resistance or outright efforts to dismiss, discredit, or be cast aside all together?

I sense that Jesus must have felt that way at times. He struggled mightily against a bankrupt religious system, bankrupt in ways obvious to him yet lost on many others. Yet Jesus chose to stay the course in ministry and mission. He chose that path because small and seemingly insignificant events demonstrated that all was not lost. Small and seemingly insignificant events indicated progress towards the Peaceable Kingdom. All of it depending however upon loyalty, sacrifice, and commitment to service.

One of those seemingly insignificant events involved a widow making her offering at the temple. Nearby her, the scribes and wealthy made their public display of impressive offerings at the temple catching everyone’s eyes. By contrast and with much humility, this poverty-stricken widow places two small copper coins into the offering, an amount not even worth the value of a penny. The moment escapes everyone but Jesus.

Turning to his disciples after witnessing her offering, Jesus counsels them not to be swayed by the spectacle of the scribes and the wealthy. Instead, he tells them, “This poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on." In short, though the religious system is bankrupt and does not serve the needs of the widow, let alone serve her well, she continues her faithful giving. She continues giving her all believing that one day God will work all things out for the common good of everyone.

It’s nearly two thousand years since the widow dropped her coins into the temple offering. Despite all the time gone by, God still works for the common good, especially through seemingly insignificant events. God does so through human beings because we’re all that God has for turning things around. It’s a task we must do; otherwise we never learn the guiding principles that are truly important for our world to arrive at being just and peace-filled. In this great undertaking, faith communities and their leaders need to learn about, and deal effectively, with mental health needs and the related social issues. Yet faith groups often dismiss that which does not fit neatly into their evangelism program or favored church growth models. Often those things get viewed with doubt and suspicion or worse yet, “It’s not the church’s responsibility to do social work. We don’t put our money toward that sort of thing.” When I hear such statements, it’s as though people think that God’s Peaceable Kingdom will magically happen in some way or another. The mental health system for its part is so strained, overworked, poorly resourced, and fragmented that people have little energy or vision or inclination to work more closely and directly with the community. In short, little happens that advances the common good toward a just and peace-filled world as mentioned a bit ago.

In response to this dark circumstance, let me offer one story of wraparound that involved people of faith coming together with social work and mental health professionals and family and loved ones to support a struggling individual. It’s simply one of many stories that I and others who’ve participated in wraparound could tell you about it as a tool for ministry. Jean (not her real name) was a quiet, passive, dependent older adult. She lived a lonely life especially during and after her husband’s long and troubling illness. During those years, Jean served as the primary care giver. She continued her isolated lifestyle long after her husband’s death. She knew little else. She came into the mental health system following discharge from the local psychiatric inpatient unit. Admission occurred due to suicidal feelings with plans to kill herself by overdose with Tylenol. Subsequent medication monitoring and outpatient therapy failed to achieve relief from her symptoms. As a result, Jean continued to experience rapidly repeating psychiatric hospitalizations; that is until she participated in wraparound. With her care team consisting of family members and professionals concerned that she might achieve suicide given the severity of her depression, Jean identified several needs that might help her get better. The one need she identified above all others was this, “I need God and my faith community back in my life and I don’t know how to do that.”

Feeling guilt that she had been away from those things so long, Jean shared that no one in her church would probably remember her or care to be involved with her. Jean allowed a team member however to go to work on the need. The team member contacted the pastor at Jean’s old church and explained the situation. The pastor subsequently discovered three women who remembered Jean. The pastor reported back to the team that the ladies would gladly attend Jean’s next team meeting. Meanwhile they would contact Jean to reconnect and bring her to church if she wanted.

At the next team meeting, the three ladies from Jean’s church were there. The team and Jean talked further about an unmet need of what to do when Jean felt anxious and thought all was lost and that she should die, all of which led to expensive hospitalizations. Together with Jean, the team decided that someone participating with Jean in different things she liked to do might be sufficient to distract her from the suicidal feelings. The activities which Jean identified as potentially helpful included anything from playing cards to talking on the phone to going shopping or to a movie or attending church.

Bless their hearts, the three church ladies -- at that team meeting -- said they’d be glad to help with that need. So the next time, Jean felt anxious and suicidal she called one of the ladies from church. And guess what? The plan worked!! Jean’s hospitalizations fell to zero over the next six months. At care team meetings, Jean took on a glow of happiness that loved ones hadn’t seen in years. For her part, Jean found confidence in her new abilities to deal with the world and the losses she’d had the past few years. In short, she found new meaning and purpose in life, all because of wraparound and three church ladies who extended themselves to help with Jean’s need. They gave of themselves like the widow gave her coins. Despite others who gave up on Jean long ago, the church ladies didn’t give up on her or consider her a lost cause.

So many faith communities suffer decline these days. Many face the likelihood that their best days lie behind them. This need not be. Faith communities simply need to rebirth. They need to rebirth into something relevant and capable for making God’s Day of Peace possible for all. Sometimes that means dying to a past way of being that’s no longer achieving much. Sometimes it means becoming something new altogether.

For me, I know of one very small congregation trying to do the hard work that’s needed. I’m sure there are others. So I want to say that my hat is off to the Anchorage Community of Christ in Anchorage, Alaska. They are a congregation whom I had the pleasure and privilege to support over the past several years. My hat is off to the nurse practitioner pastor there, James Williams, who caught the vision of wraparound for his struggling flock and how that vision is being supported by Carl Schick, a close personal friend of Jim’s. My praise goes to the congregation members themselves for their willingness to use wraparound as a means for reaching Anchorage’s young adults and their families in this phenomenal new way in hopes that a future can yet be realized for the congregation. My hat is especially off to the congregation selling their building so they could realign their assets in order to provide wraparound’s powerful process to serve the common good of Greater Anchorage. Lastly, my hat’s off to John Smallwood, Missionary Coordinator for the Greater Pacific Northwest Mission Center of the Community of Christ (www.cofchrist-gpnw.org) who’s hoping to offer wraparound through the faith communities he supports in Central Oregon.

Perhaps nothing else gives a sense of what the future could become than if we open and extend ourselves in service and sacrifice and monetary support through new possibilities despite other parts of the system that struggle and seem broke. At a family camp the same summer that the Anchorage Community of Christ decided to sell its building, one of the mothers with a young child shared her testimony of a dream she experienced one night. Concerned with the plan to sell the church and feeling quite against it, the dream changed Laura dramatically. For in her dream, God showed her how the congregation would be renewed and revitalized and how powerful and substantive the ministry of the congregation would become over time to families and individuals and children in the whole of Anchorage. From what she experienced in her dream, God told her how necessary she would be to the wraparound work and most of all her support for the work. She then experienced a brief moment of fear for her young son, Wesley. “What about Wesley?” she asked. The Spirit replied, “He will be part of this as well. He will be fine.”

I want to share the above as far as widely as I can. I hope you will pass the story along. Some persons hear the story and the Spirit that’s moving within it. Others do not. There are also those who continue their denial that the church doesn’t need be anything other than what it already is. Their words are to the effect of, “It was good enough for me and my children. So it will be good enough for all who come along after us.” You be the judge, what do you think?