Dr. Jennifer Schwirzer shares how she started a missional business that trains Adventists how to become mental health coaches. She talks about Biblical meditation and how it was like for her to win 1st prize at Hyve’s Global Summit 2020.

<p>Dr. Jennifer Schwirzer shares how she started a missional business that trains Adventists how to become mental health coaches. She talks about Biblical meditation and how it was like for her to win 1st prize at Hyve’s Global Summit 2020.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hyve

The Hyve Podcast Season 2, 2022

Jennifer Schwirzer

Adventism’s Mental Health Network

So Dixon Chibanda, this psychiatrist, had 1 of his clients commit suicide because she couldn't afford the bus fare to go see him.

And So they did a short training with the grandmothers and put them on park benches, basically, in the villages.

And they would help people with depression and anxiety.

That is, in essence, what we're doing with the Bide.

We train people so that they can help other people.

That's what prepares us for the coming of Jesus.

So those of us who work in that line, helping people change their thoughts and feelings are evangelists in the truest sense of the word.

So we're doing mental health evangelism, I would say, preparing people for the coming of Jesus.

You're listening to season 2, And I want to introduce you to Dr.

Jennifer Scherzer, mental health professional, author of 14 books, TV host, and owner of a missional business called Abide Network.

Abide Network is a community of mental health coaches and professionals, and they go out and help other people with their thoughts and feelings, and basically do the work of character building.

It's kind of like a discipleship program focusing on mental health.

Close to a thousand people have gone through that program already and there are dozens of providers active at the moment.

And I was wondering, what made Jennifer start the Abide Network?

So when I was a young adult, which was a really long time ago, I had clinical depression.

But it was at a juncture in the history of my particular subculture within my church when people didn't generally go to counselors.

Or if you did, the only counselors you could see were local providers, local professionals.

And as a result of that, I kind of lived out in the country and in an area where there just weren't a whole lot of Adventists.

I couldn't never find an Adventist counselor.

And even had difficulty finding a local Christian counselor that I could afford.

And suffered with some treatable clinical depression for a number of years.

So when I got into, I raised kids and right at the point when the kids were gonna launch, I was wanting to go back to graduate school and I was torn between theology and psychology.

I've always loved theology, wanted to go to seminary.

But I asked my husband because I needed a job, like I couldn't just go to school for fun, I had to get a job out of it.

And I asked my husband, Would you like to be married to a pastor?

And then I decided I would go to school for psychology, because I'm such an obedient wife, you know?

And so I went to school for counseling, and it worked out well because at the time, I was already doing a lot of seminar presenting on like revival type weekends in churches.

I had done music ministry for a number of years, and so this would fit in well because I could work during the week and then I could go travel on the weekends, whereas you can't do that with pastoring.

And so I got the degree in psychology from Capella University, which is a secular university, by the way, and studied psychology on a graduate level.

And I noticed that while I studied it, I started learning things about the mind that really helped me.

And then once I started seeing clients after I graduated, that helped me even more because I was seeing people and I was helping people and I felt good about myself for doing that.

And then some of the depression started to go away as a combination of helping people, making sense out of all the depression I've been through by helping others, also knowing a little more about the mind, and then making more money than I had before.

Poverty can be kind of a hit in terms of depression.

I think for all those reasons, I started to experience relief from depression.

And I thought early in the game, you know, I'd really like to provide some kind of way that people who are like what I was, clinically depressed and unable to find services, could find services.

And I thought the only way we're gonna be able to do that is to do it virtually on the phone or the internet.

At the time it was Skype, but now it's Zoom that everybody seems to be using.

But those types of applications, I thought this is the only way we're gonna be able to do this.

Because I knew that Seventh-day Adventists overall, who needed mental health services overall would want a Seventh-day Adventist counselor.

Not because we think that non-Adventist counselors couldn't help us, but because We don't want to have to explain our worldview to the person we're going to be opening up our personal lives to.

Plus, there's this thing where Adventists want to be witnessing all the time to people outside of our faith.

And so if you're sharing all of your garbage with someone that's not part of your faith.

But for the most part, it was just that they didn't want to have to explain.

And they wanted to know that that person they were opening this very personal stuff up to was someone that would not only understand, but affirm what they believed.

Because sometimes the mental health issues have to do with inter-church relationships, politics, and sometimes have to do with some of the teachings and various things.

So Adventists overall, I would say, prefer an Adventist counselor.

So there's a business opportunity right there.

If you're thinking like a business person, you're like, here's a resource, here's a need, you want to match them up.

And so, that's kind of what I did without really knowing what I was doing.

I thought, you know, what we could do is like have a network and be able to provide because I had already gotten to the place where I couldn't take on all the clients that were coming to me.

I was a published author before I got into professional counseling and my books were out there and people heard.

I just saw how people heard about 1 Seventh-day Adventist who is now doing counseling and they're like, come at you.

There's just like fly on you know what, flies on you know what.

They started to come and they started to come.

And I realized, wow, you know, there's a market here, Not in the sense of wanting to make a lot of money, because that hasn't even happened to this point, but in the sense of wanting to connect a need with a resource.

So early in the game, I started to hand off some of my referrals to 2 other counselors.

And we got together, and we decided on a brand, Abide Counseling is what we called it initially.

We set that up and then over the next maybe 8 years, started to include other providers.

Now, at the same time I was doing a training, which was designed to be sort of the gateway training through which people would come to become part of this network.

And the training was called the Abide Helper Training.

And so I would do that training, people would take it, there's a certification process that they would follow after the training, it's a 1 day training.

So it's like this big information dump in 1 day, but then the people have to sort of internalize what they've learned and follow a process of supervision and coaching others, practice coaching, reading a lot of material.

When they're done with that certification process, then they get this certification and they can become part of the Abide network.

We added 123, over the years, a few more providers.

And then what started happening is, people would come and they'd want the training, even though they were professionals in the field.

And I would have this wrestle with something, you know, Should people who do not have a professional training be helping people with mental health issues?

And I really thought through that carefully.

And I thought, yes, because this is what we do with the physical health message.

We teach people vegan or plant-based nutrition, and we teach them how to bake plant-based entrees and bake bread and all this stuff.

And the people that do this are not, by and large, professional people.

They're, by and large, lay people that love the health message.

And we've empowered them within our churches to hold these cooking schools and nutrition classes.

Because they're not saying they're a professional, they're just saying that they're a lay person that happens to love eating this way, or living this way.

So I thought we can do the same thing with the mental health message that we're doing with the health message.

And that is empower the lay people to operate within their scope of practice, to raise the general health IQ of the community, and to provide help and support within their scope of practice.

So what started to happen is I started to train non-professionals and then we started to include non-professionals in the network.

So at this point, we have a sort of a division.

There's the professional providers and the non-professional and then really the only thing that distinguishes them besides their professional credentialing is that they charge, the professionals charge more overall.

And people get a choice when they fill out the intake form as to whether they want someone with a professional credentialing or not.

And we teach a big part of the training is on, you know, when to refer, like when it's outside of your scope of practice.

So we call the non-licensed, non-graduate degree providers coaches, whereas the others can use, you know, counsel or whatever their title happens to be.

But we call everything that we do mental health coaching.

All of the virtual work that we do, we call it mental health coaching.

For legal reasons, you're not allowed to counsel across state lines, at least not yet.

I think that's going to change, because through COVID, we've kind of learned that virtual works and it's effective and why not open up sort of the information highway where people could get services across state lines.

So we call it mental health coaching and we stay within a certain confinement.

Like if someone is, we wouldn't take on someone actively suicidal, for example, or someone with severe psychotic disorders.

We just say, this is outside of our scope of practice where we will help you find a local provider.

Jesse Zwiker

Business or Vision

I had classes on business and economy, but those were my worst classes.

Like I had no interest in them whatsoever.

We set up a Squarespace website, you know, for 10 bucks a month.

And within that first month, we got our first contract to translate a whole evangelistic series into Spanish and into Portuguese.

I thought, hey, we should translate Ellen White's writings into all of these languages that have no access to Ellen White.

The reason why I got into business was because I wanted to figure out what's the most effective way to reach more people.

I'm your host Vincent Bougeor and we're talking about business and mission.

Mission and business and Jesse's journey.

Jesse Zwicker, founder of Hive, had a couple of businesses before he got started with Hive And as I was thinking about his life and the way God led him, I thought, what was there first in his life?

Was he that business guy that fell in love with Jesus or was he that missionary who discovered the power of business?

But before we get there, I wanted to ask him when did he realize that he got excited about business?

Actually, my first business was when I was about 12 years old, 12 or 13 years old, and I wanted to buy a drum set.

But the drum set that I was wanting to buy, and I was like totally into drums.

And so the drum set that I wanted to buy was at Pearl Master Studio, which was like, you know, top of the line, $12, 000, right?

My parents are not going to do this for me.

And so this is how I learned how to, from a friend of mine, how to fix little engines, like moped engines, so little motors.

And so I got into doing that, fixing them, and I would get broken ones, I would get crashed ones, whatever, I get some from the police, you know, that just pick them up somewhere and I would go to the police department, have them convince them to give them to me and I would get them.

They were not working, you know, so then I would paint them nice in metallic blue or whatever was the cool color and then make them go faster than what they're supposed to obviously.

And that was what gave me then the cash to be able to buy my drum set.

Now later I ended up selling a drum set because I got it, I went into the mission field, but that was my first real experience with business.

Although I have to say that even when I went to high school in Switzerland, you know, the gymnasium, I had classes on business and economy, but those were my worst classes.

Like I had no interest in them whatsoever it just seemed so extremely dry and you know I mean nothing made sense it was just a whole bunch of like I don't know politics or whatever it was I didn't get it at all I you know I had to like figure out how to pass these exams.

Anyway, I passed them, barely passed them.

But then what really opened my eyes was when I went, when I was 19, I went as a missionary to Honduras.

And it was in Honduras where, you know, suddenly I had to feed, you know, 20 other missionaries that were working with me.

How do we generate enough income to be able to advance God's work?

And for these people, and not all of them were missionaries from overseas that had funds that they came with, but many of our missionaries were local people that we really needed to pay that depended on us.

And so it really put a lot of pressure on me to figure out, OK, how do we make this sustainable?

And so this is where we got into a tamarind plantation that was like probably our first big, big kind of project.

We got 1600 trees of tamarind and we started processing that tamarind into concentrate.

And the concentrate then we would sell to the juicing company in the capital, in Honduras.

And they drink tamarind like we drink orange juice, right?

And so we ended up generating income that way to sustain the ministry.

And then later we got into like trying to, we were working on a life, creating a lifestyle center and then a bakery and then even the school and agriculture and other things.

So we got into a number of different kinds of...

You know, I was buying bricks cheaper, bringing them over here, and then selling them to the community, and building our own houses with the profit.

Anyway, so we started getting into all of these things.

And I saw that there was tremendous potential really to advance God's work.

If we weren't so donation dependent, which, you know, 1 time is up, 1 time is down.

And then you can't really plan for it, and you can't really grow.

So that's actually where I was like, that's what opened my mind.

I'm like, wow, if we do business As part of our ministry, if we make it, you know, the way the church founders and pioneers called it, self-supporting.

If we make our mission work self-supporting, then we can really scale our impact.

And we can do this all over the place because we're not dependent on anything else.

And that's really what then what opened my mind.

I'm like, wow, I need to get into business.

And then I started studying marketing And I realized when marketing is evangelism, you know, it's like the marketing is the science of reaching people with a product.

And I'm like, this is exactly what we're doing in evangelism, you know, except we don't have all these skills and all these methodologies that they are using, you know, in the rest of the world.

And it's like, and evangelism is the same exact thing, except where the product is actually already defined, which is the gospel, right?

So, but even the packaging and everything around it is not defined and needs to be developed like in marketing, right?

Because marketing, you know, this is a big misconception about marketing is people think it's just advertising, you know, it's just like promoting something, but it's not.

Marketing is, is, integrates product development, research and development as part of the process of You know marketing so anyway, so so that really opened my mind is like wow this is a whole world out there of Stuff that we that that I didn't realize And I was like trying to be a missionary, right?

And trying to reach a lot of people and I realized business is the key to reaching more people.

Now, tell me, I know you have a few more companies than the ones you just mentioned.

I know you have started a project that focuses on Ellen White's writings, you have also had your or still have your translation company And then obviously Hive.

Can we connect all of these things and tell me what's the chronological order here and how did you end up with Hive?

After Honduras, that was a great experience of starting and launching a number of different companies.

They were all essentially under the nonprofit that we had started in Honduras.

Even later after that, I went for a period of time, I went to Wildwood.

We developed the first medical missionary training online, which was a great business model.

I mean, we were able to suddenly, within a year, we were able to train hundreds of students and at the same time generate more cash than we had ever had.

So then when I left Wildwood and my wife and I got married.

That's when we decided to start CrossLingo.

So CrossLingo is the Christian translation company that we started.

We have focused really on Christian stuff and then also Adventist translations.

We do a lot of translations for the Adventist, you know, for many Adventist organizations, Amazing Facts, and Adventist Review, AWR, you know, all these different organizations.

But also then a lot of Christian organizations, Wycliffe, Bible Society, etc.

Like all these kinds of organizations where we help into like 50 different languages now.

But even at the beginning, this was totally, I was a poor missionary, I didn't have any funds to try to invest into all of this.

We put $10 into our, we set up a Squarespace website for 10 bucks a month.

And within that first, we put it on a credit card so We didn't even pay it out of pocket.

And within that first month, we got our first contract for a couple of companies, for ASI and for another company to translate a whole evangelistic series into Spanish and into Portuguese.

And so we then got into generating the funds to be able to actually invest into the company.

So that was really the first step for me, the first step of doing my own company that is still mission focused of course but that idea really led me to this other next idea which was the the translating Ellen White's writings I thought hey we should translate Ellen White's writings into all of these languages that have no access to Ellen White and to these books, which for me, you know, She's like 1 of the most innovative people in her time.

And so I just loved reading everything that she wrote about all kinds of things.

And when she pushes how we need to innovate to reach more people, et cetera, I just loved it all.

And so I just absorbed all of these books and I'm like, wow, why do people not read these books?

Well, the big thing is, in many countries, they don't have any of these books.

Jay Razzouk

That’s Worth More than Money

We always want to just buy the next book that, you know, someone just put out.

But I just keep going back to, okay, what would Jesus do?

And I've really come to realize that legal is really about relationships.

Most people, I think, don't like contracts, right?

Because they just seem so yucky, so selfish, so one-sided, all these problems.

And that's what I'm really trying to reinvent and show people here's the better way of doing it.

They don't feel like they've been taken advantage of.

At the core, that's what we care about more than money.

For a decade, Jay Razook worked for Fortune 100 companies and addressed matters in more than 20 different states.

These big enterprises would mess up, sue each other and then Jay had to fix things.

But then he went on and said, ok, I'll start my own missional business.

He's equipping startups how to scale without getting into legal difficulties, and his work goes way beyond the paperwork and the contracts and everything.

He's helping people to build trusting relationships with their clients.

A very unique, I could say a very biblical approach.

My business sort of starts back when I am at a law firm down in San Diego, Boutique Firm, and I was a lawyer there, taking on kind of the CEOs of fortune 500s and the board of directors after multi-billion dollar mistakes, let's say.

And then I would come, I would come in on behalf of the shareholders and try to fix it and try to say, Hey, let's make changes here to make sure this never happens again.

And we also ideally tried to get them to pay back to the company too.

And we're talking about Major scandals that you would have read in the Wall Street Journal where maybe the board makes some decision that then ends up with lots of people losing their lives because of unsafe vehicles, unsafe buildings, unsafe medical devices, things of that nature.

So we would always come in and try to say, okay, let's put in policies, procedures, things in how we run this business that will avoid, again, costing shareholders a lot of money.

But I realized in this process that a lot of money gets wasted being in court.

And it's not necessarily that lawyers are just wasting their time, but just the natural course of a lawsuit takes up so much time.

The lawyers are working round the clock, and yeah, they're all expensive per hour.

And so I really committed my heart to really work with entrepreneurs to help them put in best practices to learn how to stay out of court.

And so now I'm focusing on what I call preventative legal.

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Series

The Hyve Podcast Season 2, 2022

Adventism’s Mental Health Network

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Adventism’s Mental Health Network

19m

Business or Vision

40m

That’s Worth More than Money

31m

Saving Time and Money Through Automation

27m

The Jewish Secret

32m

The Academy for Missional Entrepreneurs

33m

Healing Chronic Wounds

30m

How to Reach Your Goals

28m

Sound Doctrine