Agape Center puts mentally ill in a better frame of mind
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___AMARILLO--Beth spends hours meticulously clipping pictures from magazines and gluing the bright images on pieces of paper.
___It's been a big part of her life for six and a half years. For six of those years, it was a solitary activity.
___Those were the dark years when she didn't leave home much. When she wasn't cutting and pasting photos, she passed time watching TV or copying articles out of magazines. A boyfriend came to see her regularly for a while, but his visits stopped after he got a job.
___The darkness lifted a few months ago when she started attending the Agape Center, a peer support center sponsored by the Amarillo Mental Health Consumers Association and Buchanan Street Baptist Chapel.
___Beth still clips magazine pictures and glues them onto poster board or wooden blocks. But now it's part of her volunteer job. She serves as a project director at the center three days a week, leading her peers in making collages, mosaics, decoupage and other crafts.
___"This place just saved my life," she says.
___The Agape Center at Buchanan Street Baptist Chapel is open each Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Thursday evenings for a couple of hours.
___About a dozen or so people who struggle with mental health problems gather on overstuffed sofas and in worn recliners for a Monday morning Bible study led by Buchanan Street Pastor Larry Mills.
___Then they hang around to hear special guest speakers on health-related topics or to enjoy general times of peer counseling and recreation.
___Some of the frequent users of the Agape Center have become a part of the congregation of Buchanan Street Chapel, a mission of First Baptist Church of Amarillo.
___One such member--a man who was referred to the Agape Center by his mother because he never left home--now attends worship every Sunday. His mental health problems can be regulated with medication, and he drives a van for the center.
___"I'm learning more and more about mental health problems," said Mills, who noted that one of four Americans either is mentally ill or has a family member with a mental illness.
___Mike Halligan, executive director of Texas Mental Health Consumers in Austin, said the Agape Center is the only church-based ministry of its type that he knows about in the state.
___He praised Mills and the Agape Center for its peer-oriented approach, which he said is "light years ahead" of the techniques normally used in the public mental health system.
___"I love the Amarillo program. Larry may not realize this, but he is doing more to help people with mental illness than the public mental health system," Halligan said. "I wish we had a million more like him."
___At the time Buchanan Street became involved in the ministry to mental health consumers, Mills had no idea that several members of the sponsoring congregation had family members who would benefit from the Agape Center.
___"One thing I've learned is that there was nobody here wanting to minister to this specific group of people," he said.
___The church learned about the need for such a ministry through a newspaper advertising salesperson from nearby Canyon.
___Mary Kay Kuhrts initially came to Buchanan Street Chapel trying to sell the director of the Christian Women's Job Corps an advertisement in a regional Christian newspaper.
___Christian Women's Job Corps, a program that teaches job skills and life skills to low-income women, is one of several community ministries sponsored by Buchanan Street Baptist Chapel. Texas Baptists have helped to support the ministries of Buchanan Street through their gifts to the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions.
___As Kuhrts learned more about Buchanan Street's commitment to ministry among unreached segments of Amarillo's population, she went to talk with the pastor. She asked Mills if he knew of any organization that would be willing to provide a meeting place for mental health consumers.
___She explained that the Texas Panhandle Mental Health and Mental Retardation office had sponsored a mental health consumers "clubhouse." The group met at an outpatient facility for about eight years, but it was no longer available.
___She explained the importance of a non-threatening place where mental health consumers could meet with their peers for support and counseling. And she spoke with the authority of firsthand experience.
___Kuhrts first became acquainted with the Amarillo mental health consumers association upon her release from a hospital in 1992, four years after being diagnosed as bipolar.
___"I have a chemical imbalance," she says, in a matter-of-fact way. "I was luckier than most. I had a good support system in my family. A lot of people in that situation don't."
___Mills told her that nearly 30 percent of the church facility--primarily its basement--was not being used, other than for storage. They walked downstairs, and Kuhrts saw the potential.
___"We worked out an agreement with a 90-day renewal," Mills recalls. "At the time, nobody knew how well it would fit."
___Quite well, according to those who use the center. ?
___Tears welled in the eyes of one man who has become a regular at the Agape Center as he said, "If I didn't have this place, I'd either be in bed asleep or out on the streets being hassled."
___Kuhrts, who now works part-time as a public information specialist with Family Support Services in downtown Amarillo, noted: "I'm not here all the time because I have a very busy lifestyle. But a lot of these people are unable to work. They have no life outside of home, unless there is a place to come to be around their peers. ... This has given them a life."
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