The Church & Mental Health

Quick Facts: 

• You are supporting affordable counseling, consulting, coaching for pastors, missionaries, and their kids/families/marriages
• You are supporting mental health and church project developments.
• You are helping Ingo get annual trainings and conferences, such as the Mental Health and Missions Conference
• You finance trauma training for Christian counselors in various countries who could not afford it otherwise
• You are supporting social media work around mental health and faith
• You are supporting mindfulness and deepening spiritual growth projects 
• You are contributing Ingo's working tools overhead (WiFi, phones, etc.). 
• You are supporting community transformation efforts through education support, and creating community biblical, human flourishing.

There are many more things that Ingo does around church and mental health. I invite you do connect for further conversations around any of these topics. 

Some Background

Ingo is a professional counselor (LPC) and has been in counseling since 1993. Ingo holds a Ph.D. in in Counselor Education and Supervision (CACREP accredited). 

Ingo has three adult children: Lukas (26), Katharina (23) and Annika (21) and three grandchildren. Not married any longer, Ingo honors and respects the past. Details will not be shared publicly, but continued prayers are requested for ALL family members. If you are in crisis about marital issues and/or need grief work around separation and divorce, contact Ingo.

Together with his former wife, Ingo worked as a pastor, serving churches in Berlin, Germany, and Europe for over 9 years. He also worked with pastors and missionaries using professional counseling, coaching, and consulting services that seek to combine proven research insights with theological wisdom and biblical direction. Ingo believes that the redemptive work of Christ is at the core of every counseling, coaching, and consulting interaction. Ingo will continue with this calling. The calling has not changed. 

In June of 2017 The Tophoven family moved from the mission field in Berlin back to Virginia where Ingo started as assistant professor at Regent University's counseling ministries department as department chair and was given a few too many roles as program director of various ill-designed graduate programs. Ingo experienced a full burnout in this work and had to go through much rest to recover. Today, Ingo has found grace again in his life and works at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Charlotte, where he works as an assistant professor teaching future generations of Christian counselors. Ingo remains a bi-vocational missionary, working on small and large mental health and church projects and building collaborations around global mental health delivery systems through faith communities. 

Ingo pursues three objectives: 

1. help train a next generation of counselors that can competently navigate ministry-, mission-, and church contexts here and overseas. To that end, some funds go specifically into training and education for promising Christian counselors in underserved areas of the world.  
2. help build, supervise, and consult with Christian counseling centers around the world. Self-sufficiency is the goal and non-professonal community-based mental health delivery systems. 
3. help equip pastors and missionaries globally with resources necessary to promote mental health progress for their own lives and families, their congragations, and the communities they serve. 

Last year, Ingo put some projects on hold to consider the advance of generative artifiical intelligence. New projects will include open source and AI technologies. 

If you donate to this account, you will help directly sustain the work of Ingo on counseling, coaching, consulting, and building the projects mentioned above.  

Feel free to contact Ingo anytime. Start with an email, and then we go from there. 

Blessings, 

Ingo Tophoven 

- with New International since 2010