ABSTRACT
Psychology has embraced the value of community in the family therapy movement, the support group explosion, and the twelve-step method of treatment with alcoholics. Pastoral counseling finds its inclusion of community informed by the biblical notions of the people of Israel in Exodus and the community of the early church in Acts. In both disciplines, the individual finds healing and wholeness in the context of a community that nurtures them and instructs them. This chapter illustrates these ideas more fully and considers them as a way of healing for the client with bipolar disorder. The spiritual community creates a social reality that meets social needs, and at the same time heightens the meaning of social interaction from merely human relationship to sacred relationship. Since the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients began in the 1960s, mental health professionals have been concerned with the adequacy of care in community settings.
