2023–2025 LWML Mission Grant #21 Healthy Together: Healthy Workers, Healthy Church — Lutheran Family Services, U.S. — $106,000
Healthy Together: Healthy Workers, Healthy Church
By Rev. Max Phillips with Mission Editor Brianne Stahlecker
Lutheran Family Service has served the LCMS for more than a century, always with the caring heart of Jesus. As a Recognized Service Organization of Synod, they provide excellent care with professional expertise and solid faithfulness centered in the Word of Christ. Since 2020, that work has recognized the unique needs of church workers and their families who suffer under burdens of anxiety, depression, stress, and other challenges related to ministry, marriage and/or family life ― situations which cause many to consider leaving the ministry or to experience diminished joy in serving.
In partnership with the LWML, Lutheran Family Service has increased their efforts to serve the church and its neighbors through the Healthy Together: Healthy Workers, Healthy Church initiative, adding counselors, expanding geographically, and growing their focus on wellness. LWML grant funds have helped build their counselor capacity, and counseling sessions with church workers have grown by 48%. Of their 23 counselors, five (including two pastors and two pastors’ wives) serve on the Church Worker Wellness team. Workers bring a passion assuring those who are, as the Psalmist says, brokenhearted and … crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), know that God is always near, providing them with His love and support.
Also benefitting from this new ministry expansion are those served through webinars, seminars, and group presentations which focus on wellness, resiliency grounded in faith, and those things that consistently attack God’s people, including grief that couples suffer silently in stillbirth and miscarriage. Tools to help strengthen marriage are given. Help for faithful people sorting through sinful gender confusion issues is provided, and God’s healing is applied. Lutheran Family Service brings awareness of the evil power of pornography, as well as the incessant use of technology and its impact on children, adults, and marriages. They offer God’s help with these and many other tools which are delivered, either in person or through the various avenues of social media, to congregations, networks of church workers, and individuals.
LWML’s gift has helped lay the groundwork for new service in the South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa East and West, and Nebraska districts of our church. Every day, in counseling offices and through telehealth, one-on-one and in groups, those at Lutheran Family Service join with the Psalmist to assure God’s people that the Lord hears and delivers the righteous when they call for help.
These servants know, not only from their personal relationships with God, but from their experience in His service, that the Lord is near (Psalm 34:18a). All praise be to God for Lutheran Family Service which continues to share the caring heart of Jesus.
Rev. Max Phillips serves in God’s Kingdom through a variety of ministry roles including Senior Pastor of Christ Lutheran Church/Bouton and Zion Lutheran Church/Ogden, Iowa, Executive Director of Lutheran Family Service, CEO of Perry Lutheran Homes, and President of the Board of Directors for Lutheran Church Extension Fund. In each role, Pastor Phillips blends a love for serving God’s people and pointing them to Jesus with a rich background of learning and leadership experience in ministry, community, and business settings.
This story was originally featured in the Fall 2024 Lutheran Woman's Quarterly. Order your subscription here.
For more information about this mission grant, view the individual mission grant page here.
