Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, guys, welcome back to another episode of the Parish Circuit. I'm Stuart. With me is David. This is a quick fire episode. We're going fast. This one's just fun. This one's just fun. We just saw this pop up on the Facebook feed and we were like, oh, let's talk about that. That seems like a fun thing to talk about. So here we are. We're gonna talk about it. The Extra Mile Mobile Crisis Response Team.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: What was your term for that?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: The MCR2.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Oh, well, that wasn't as.
MCREW.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: MCREW. MCREw unit. The response unit.
Yeah. I mean, you know, I work in marketing, so here's the gist. So if you're having a crisis, there is a unit available now in St. Lander Parish that can come and help you. And here's some of the things that they say that they can help you with. They say that they can help you with trauma, informed crisis intervention services.
Safety, healing and stability by responding to mental health emergencies.
Domestic violence, which I assume that means domestic violence victims. Domestic violence victims.
Sexual assault. Again, assuming victims substance abuse and traumatic crises.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: I'm really hesitant, At the risk of sounding, you know, getting accused of not caring about the people who might be going through mental trauma.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: You're so insensitive.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: We.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: You're so insensitive.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: You can probably guess what we might say to the. To the government.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Oh, man.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Being our advisors in those capacities.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So the first thing that I would say is. So the government is our pastor now.
We have. It's happened. Right. Well. And the government has been our pastor for some time. Honestly, it's just they weren't mobile before they were in the schools. In the schools? Yeah. School. What were those called? School counselors. Counselors in the school.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Guidance counselors.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Guidance counselors. Yeah, the schools. And in some states, the schools even like transition people's kids without the parents knowing them. That's factual, by the way. I know people that that's happened to.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Yep. I grew up on the west coast.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Yeah. You know about it from first hand information. So that's a thing then also just, you know, Medicaid funded psychotherapy, talk therapy, situations.
Like we've seen this before, but now it's. Now it's mobile. Now it's mobile. Isn't that interesting? I wonder how much this cost.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: I don't want to know.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: I don't want to know. I don't want to know how much it costs. But here we are, you know, like, you know what just happened? This is the thing that just happened. Guys, the government just got bigger again.
Services just grew again.
The deficit just got a little bit bigger again.
Right. Like that's what we just saw happen and it happened. And the response that, you know, I can just hear it now. The folks who are going to be upset with this, they're going to say, but these people need help.
Right. There's people who are having a crisis and they need help. That's going to be the rebuttal.
And I understand that, like, I work as a pastor, man, I know that there are hard things that happen in people's lives and they need to talk through it. They need to have people to work with them through it.
I recognize all of that.
But the problem that we're running into is at what point do we hit the wall and say, ah, now the government is big enough, now we're providing enough services, now we've looked to the state enough to save us and we will never look to the state to save us again. At what point do we stop?
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Without a, without a biblical kind of answer, without some, I mean, repentance, I guess, in our, in our looking to the government for all of our solutions, it's not going to happen.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: It's not going to stop.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Because what has happened is if we
[00:04:03] Speaker A: look at the welfare.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, That's.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: A terrifying example of explosive government growth to the tune of trillions of dollars.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: That doesn't ultimately solve any poverty problems. But, but see our other episodes.
But, but here's the point I would want to make is, so we've talked about the spheres that God has created to operate kind of in conjunction the state, the family, the church.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: What has happened over the last couple hundred years and in the west and Western civilization is that as the church has failed in some of its responsibilities and as the family has become more broken.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: And stopped taking care of some of its responsibilities, which of those spheres grows to fill in the gaps?
[00:04:50] Speaker A: The state.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: It's always the state.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: And so you just imagine like kind of this amorphous blob that keeps growing
[00:04:57] Speaker A: into the cracks, eating things.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: So when there are legitimate problems in the church or in the family that need to be addressed, rather than trying to, rather than us as a culture trying to answer the question of how do we fix the family?
How is a family supposed to operate according to God's law? How is the church supposed to be involved in the community with its own people and all that? Instead of having those things fixed and shored up, the blob gets in and stays and then grows into any new crack that forms.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: But it creates jobs, David.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: It creates jobs. A lot of jobs.
Yep. With some great benefits too, sometimes.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Yeah, the gist here. So we need everybody to hear what we're saying.
There are people who have actual crisis.
There are people who go through real difficult, hard things. And it would be really helpful to them to have somebody to help them go through those really hard things. Well, agreed with that general premise.
I think that that's. We do it all the time. We have crisis phone calls with people, we go meet with people. I've been out to people's houses in the middle of the night before. That's normal.
Welcome to life in the fast lane.
What we are saying, though, is that it's probably not the best idea to keep giving these jobs to the state, to keep letting the state grow again and again and again.
Because if you want to go back to one of our school episodes, we talk about how there is no neutral. This person who's showing up to somebody's house is coming with a preloaded agenda.
They have a worldview.
They have a set way of dealing with things. Most likely, just given all the things that I just read through, it's probably from Freud and Jung.
Those were psychotherapists, pioneer researcher guys who. Freud was crazy. My wife is reading some books that have some stuff about Freud and I'm. The quotes that he talks about.
It's absolutely like, that dude was nuts. I can't believe he was ever published in the first place.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Yeah, they won't, like. Like Freud and Jung and others. They won't approach the human being as a.
An embodied spirit made in the image of God.
They will view humanity as a whole. I can almost guarantee it. Not to say there aren't any maybe random Christians in some of these roles, but sure, they will generally approach human beings as, you know, machines. You input this and this is what will happen.
Yeah. A more mechanistic approach.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
So if this is. If you're. If you're looking at this and you're saying, what's wrong with this? This seems like it's fine.
My happy pushback is.
I don't think so.
I think the state just got bigger again. I think our expenditures just went up again.
And I don't think that the services that these folks are going to be providing are actually going to be helpful. I think they might actually hurt.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So assuming there's a problem that does need addressing, though, what's the answer?
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Go to church.
Go to church. You know, go to church man.
And I also, I would pause a little bit there and say, well, go to a good church. Maybe I should say it that way because there's going to be, obviously, the churches who don't do counseling, who don't do crisis and dealing with very difficult things going through people's lives or that
[00:08:29] Speaker B: maybe don't actually believe the Bible.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah, they might not believe the Bible. I've talked to folks who have gone to churches who've had serious real problems and gone to the pastors to get help, and the pastors kicked them to some outside counseling service. Like, I know those people. That's happened before to folks. And shame on us pastors for not being able to help people who are in real having difficult times like that. We can't counsel anymore. Your job is not pastors. If you're a pastor and you're listening to this right now, your job is not just to preach on Sunday.
Your job is not just to administrate the church.
Your job is to smell like sheep, to get in there and know your people and help them when they need it. And sometimes that means saying a hard word to them. That's true. And sometimes it really just means sitting next to them while they grieve and being present.
Like, there's a lot to that.
If we could reclaim the office of pastor and reclaim it strong here in Acadiana, I think that would be a great, a great thing to happen to our region over the next 10, 20, 30 years. But, yeah, so don't outsource your job to the M crew.
Let's get in the trenches and do good work and try to help people and move forward from there. All right, guys, thank you all so much for listening to another episode of the Parish Circuit. You go to the parish circuit.com or find us on Facebook. Submit questions Let us know if you have any other things that you would like us to talk about, because we'd love to talk talk about them and we'll see you all next time.
