Integrating Inner-Healing Into Missions Education

In this article, Meynor Clara Cheng reviews cross-cultural stress and emotional bruises, four common damaged emotions, three models of inner healing, and a checklist of possible issues needing to be addressed in inner-healing ministry. Dr. Cheng explains how new missionaries are vulnerable to low self-esteem. Using David Seamand's writings as her framework, she identifies the common damaged emotions and the causes of emotional bruises. The four major common damaged emotions identified are a sense of unworthiness, a perfectionist complex, supersensitivity, and depression. These damaged emotions can be capsulized in one phrase:"low self-esteem." The five common causes of emotional bruises are parent-child relationship, conditional parental love, cultural overemphasis on being strong, sexual abuse, and faulty Christian concepts. Nevertheless, the parent-child relationship and the response to inflicted hurt are the two main factors in emotional bruises. Those who train missionaries should be knowledgeable of various approaches to inner healing so that they will have their own compatible model(s) of inner healing to use with their students. However, the author contends that intimacy with God, the Word of God, appropriation of the cross, and cooperation with the work of the Holy Spirit represent the essential dynamics and approaches in inner-healing.