(by Philip G. Monroe. Associate professor of Counseling & Psychology at Biblical Seminary. Dr. Monroe is our blogger for the month of July and this is his first post)

Psychology is a parent term covering diverse fields of specialized study relating to human functioning. You have your neuropsychologists, child psychologists, developmental psychologists, social psychologists, educational psychologists, counseling psychologists, forensic psychologists, industrial/organizational…and on it goes. Further, there are ideological focused psychologies-Buddhist, analytic, behavioral, humanist, and of course, Christian psychologies. And yet, I suspect that most people in the United States think of individual therapy and the work of clinical psychologists when they hear the term psychology.

One such field of study is community psychology. It does not get as much “air-time” as other subfields, partly due to its focus on community rather than individual. Instead of merely seeking to fix what is already broken, the heart of community psychology is a focus on change in systems to prevent problems in the first place. In essence, community psychology seeks to find the fluoride equivalent to prevent mental health decay. (For those interested in a quick summary might try Wikipedia’s page on “community psychology.” Check this professor’s vita for an example of Christians doing community psychology research).

Most PhD programs in clinical psychology provide very little focus on this subfield beyond a course or two on the topic. This, I think, is a mistake. I do not think that we can prevent all maladies nor do I think that social change, empowerment, justice seeking, etc. will ever alleviate most psychological problems. But, I want to suggest to you that Christian psychology ought to think more in community terms than ANY other ideological field of psychology. Why? We, of all people, are called to care for widows and the poor, to uplift the downtrodden, to protect the oppressed. We are called to think more about the community’s best than our own. We have the example of Jesus who serves the church even though he rightfully is her head!

But, I must confess that I read little in the Christian psychology literature that moves beyond the individual to the community. The truth is most of us humans think in terms of individual-of Me. We think about our individual relationships with God, our individual struggle against sin and for holiness, and we think about our individual needs in our individual prayer requests.

Okay, so I’m overstating the facts here but I do so for one simple reason. I’ve just returned from a trip to Rwanda. During my stay there I hung out with African Anglicans loving Jesus and their neighbor as one seamless action. They could not imagine changing either their love for the whole Bible nor their hard work to bring reconciliation, justice, and mercy to their genocide induced traumatized neighbors. They had little, but they gave out of their poverty to build a widow a house, to take in orphans, to reduce the scourge of malaria for all, to improve the lot of prisoners-even those who had killed the rest of their family members in 1994.

What would happen if our project of Christian Psychology took even more seriously the call to be neighbor centered? What if we thought both about loving Jesus through holiness and working hard at reducing systemic problems in our world today? How might this change our field of study, our focus on the nature and task of healing and reconciling a world to Jesus Christ?