Main Session 3

Description: Author, speaker, and conference favorite Will Miller explores the barriers that keep community from optimum growth—and the tools needed to overcome them. With his unique blend of humor and insight, you´ll discover how hearts get wounded and how community is necessary to heal them.

Speaker’s Bio: Dr. Will Miller is from New York City and is an ordained minister, a hospital and police chaplain, and a psychotherapist. He has worked in community mental health centers and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. Will has served as a spokesman for the National Institute of Mental Health. He is one of the country’s foremost media and popular culture analysts, and has been profiled on NBC’s Dateline and in People Magazine.

Simultaneously, for 16 years, Will had a successful career as a stand-up comedian, opening for Aretha Franklin and hosting Nick-At-Nite. Currently, Dr. Miller is a therapist and campus minister at Purdue University where he lectures on media effects. He holds a Masters Degree and a Doctorate in Urban Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Masters in Clinical Social Work from Columbia University.

Will’s books include Why We Watch: Killing The Gilligan Within; and Refrigerator Rights.

Notes:

There is a healthy suspicion and distance kept among police officers with shrinks.  Any intimation that they may not be handling their lives well has consequences for their jobs.  They don’t seem to have the same issues with chaplains.  Police have some of the highest rates of stress, suicide, etc. of any group in America.  They do what they do with remarkable focus.  When that radio crackles, their adrenaline ramps.  When they’re done, they get back in their car, and they can relax.  But they don’t know if it’s going to be 5 minutes or 2 hours before it happens again.  Most of us can look out at our weeks on Sunday night and figure out what parts of our weeks will be stressful.  Police can’t do that, and when your adrenaline isn’t managed, it whacks you out.  Part of the way that police cope is to wall themselves off in an exclusive community.

When you think about what’s happening in American culture.  We lead the world in stress related disorders. 1 in 4 Americans has a stress related disorders.  Stress is a generic term, but it means different things to different people.  You may not sleep well or get edgy or depressed.  Shrink talks about it in terms of mood.

Aren’t you related to people with whom you would have nothing to do if you weren’t related to them.  Why is it so hard to get over these idiosyncracies?  It’s because of American culture.  46 million Americans moved last year, 45 million the year before that, and 45 million the year before that.  Second, the average American watches 28 hours of TV per week.

Together these two facts have made us individualistic and self-reliant, and we have idolized those things.  “I can be who I wan’t to be.”  But you can’t.  You’re stuck within your gift set.  We have become timid to acknowledge the gifts that we lack.

The theology of the psychology in the Gospel is that all of our gifts together create the Body of Christ.

Questions:

• How much TV do you watch per week?
  Violence on TV is overblown.  I used to watch the three stooges and never thought that if I whacked my brother on the head with a hammer that it would go “boing.”
• How many hours/week do you spend in front of a computer?
• What is the total number of times you have moved in your life?

The premise of refrigerator rights:

What would happen if somebody you didn’t know very well started rummaging around through your refrigerator?  It would be weird.

What would happen if you didn’t know the person but we were related?  It might still be a bit strange but much less so.

Using that litmus test, think about the people occupying your life.  Think about the type of people you are trying to get to join small group.  Think about the people you see with regularity every day.  How many of these people have refrigerator rights in your house?  How many of them do you have refrigerator rights with.  Really the only definition of family that matters is the feeling that you belong.

Many times we feel like we belong to a church or congregation, but we it’s hard to get to belong with a small group because it becomes more real.

The way God made you is to be re-formed externally.  If you adjust your life-style, it will radiate back into the triage of healing and feeling better on the inside.

Often the problems within marriage are a leading challenge.  By the time they get to a therapist/pastor, they’re rarely there for a tune-up, and the story is all the same.  It was great in the beginning and got lousy later.  Very few think it sucked from the get-go.  Most marriages with problems are two people who just ground each other into powder.

What stunts community growth?  Trying to be the best me I can be. By being an other engaged person will come a particular you and other yous who gravitate towards me.

We’re having a hard time with our mood.  Mood is a big issue.  We have a lot of anger in our culture.  The difference between a sociopath and a neurotic is that a sociopath doesn’t care.  Neurotics have to endure stuff.  Basically neurotics just put up with it.  The greatest laboratory for America’s disorders is driving.

What stunts group growth is fear that we will have tempermental incompatibility.  That is cultural.  We have to get over that.

What is so hard about this?

Love is the voice that tries to cut through the noise of individuality.

Do you know what the psychological premise of crisis counseling is?  When people go through something you have a short window to get in.

I’ve got a right wing Republican brother and a flaming liberal sister, but when they get together, their relationship trumps that.

What stops small groups is the failure to understand and make the connection that our mobile lifestyle and our landing someplace and giving so much time to screens stunts community growth.

Small groups are hard because your pressing against habits that have been inculcated for years.  We know you know two things: that you have few friends with whom you have refrigerator rights and that you have unfulfilled stress in your life.  What you fail to understand is that this is what causes angst in your life.

In Mark 3 Jesus has become famous.  His family heard what he was doing and they went to take charge of him because they said he was out of his mind.  Jesus’ response, “Who are my mother and brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

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