About Cruciform Hope
Meet Mike
Mike Skinner has been in pastoral ministry since 2009 and currently serves as a chaplain and an adjunct theology professor. He holds an M.A. in Theological Studies and undergraduate degrees in Biblical Languages and Christian Theology. He lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and daughter.
He has also lived with anxiety, panic attacks, and depression for most of his life.
He preaches and ministers.
He also takes medication and goes to therapy.
He believes the two are not in conflict.
I love Jesus. I also take medication for anxiety and depression.
I love serving the church. I also have panic attacks.
The also is doing the theological work. It refuses the binary much of the church still imposes.
Cruciform Hope exists because too many Christians have been forced to choose.
They shouldn't have to.
Why Cruciform Hope Exists
Too many Christians struggling with their mental health are not finding what they need in their churches.
They hear just trust God when they need someone to sit beside them. They hear be anxious for nothing when they are gasping for air. They hear that they need more faith, more prayer, more discipline, when what they actually need is a theology robust enough to hold both the cross and the prescription bottle on the same table.
They are not in the wrong faith. They are in a faith whose vocabulary has been impoverished, emptied of lament, of suffering, of the slow gradual non-linear shape of real healing.
Cruciform Hope exists to recover that vocabulary. Not as a replacement for clinical care. There are excellent Christian therapists, and we send people to them often. We are a pastoral and theological companion to that care. A voice that names what most Christian mental-health content avoids: the body, the brain, the medication, the panic in the grocery aisle, the morning the bed wins, and the kingdom of heaven pronounced over all of it.
Christian hope is cruciform, shaped by the cross. The Love we meet in Jesus does not heal humanity around its suffering, or despite its suffering. It heals humanity in and through its suffering. The cross is not a detour. It is the doorway.
What makes that shape specifically relevant to anxiety and depression is that the Jesus we meet in the gospels did not explain suffering from outside it. He entered it, fully, bodily, without flinching. Between the cross and the resurrection there is a long Saturday: the day the worst has happened and the promised thing has not come yet. Most sufferers know that day well. Cruciform hope is not the promise that you will be lifted out of it by lunchtime. It is the announcement that the Saturday is not empty, and that it is from inside that day, not after it, that Jesus speaks.
This shapes everything we do.
The Beatitudes are announcements, not commands.
Jesus does not tell the poor in spirit how to climb out of poverty of spirit. He pronounces the kingdom over them.
Now. Empty. Before they earn it.
This single move is the engine of everything else we say.
Faith is not the opposite of mental illness.
You can love Jesus and still struggle. You can take medication and still trust him. You can cry in the parking lot and still be held.
Healing is gradual, partial, and non-linear.
Resurrection hope coexists with grief. Sanctification is slow. Faithfulness matters more than performance. The Christian life is participation in Christ, not self-salvation.
Grace precedes transformation.
The God we know in Jesus meets people before they get better. Always.
The logic of the kingdom is unlike anything the world or the religious system teaches.
What we believe
Who this is for
We make resources for three kinds of people, and we hold all three at once.
Sufferers
Christians struggling with anxiety, depression, shame, exhaustion, numbness, loneliness, burnout, or panic. The ones still praying, barely. The ones wondering whether their faith is broken because their body will not cooperate.
Caregivers
Pastors, ministry leaders, parents, teachers, and Christian school staff. The people who hold others' suffering and rarely receive care themselves. We see you. We are for you.
The disillusioned faithful
Thoughtful Christians alienated by shallow spiritual language, performative faith culture, and reductive mental-health takes. People who still long for Jesus even when their faith feels difficult. There is room here.
What's coming
Over the past year, Mike has self-funded a large project to transcribe and organize more than 340 sermons and hundreds of articles, because the content needed to exist before the audience could find it. The next twelve months are about letting the platform catch up to the work.
Weekly reflections across our social channels and email list, anchored to the rhythms of the church year and the calendar of mental health awareness months.
Mike's first speaking and training engagements at churches, Christian schools, and pastor gatherings, on pastoral care, mental health, and the cruciform shape of hope.
The first piece of Cruciform Hope curriculum, The First Five Minutes: What to Say When Someone Discloses a Mental Health Crisis, written for pastors, ministry leaders, parents, and Christian school staff who need a concrete, theologically grounded resource for the conversations they cannot prepare for. Ships fall 2026.
A small studio, funded by our 2026 launch campaign, that lets us begin producing higher-quality video and, eventually, podcast content.
One intentional constraint: this pace is deliberate. It would be incoherent to burn out producing content about not burning out.
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How you can help
Cruciform Hope is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit ministry.
We exist on the generosity of people who believe the church needs this work and want to make it possible.
Faith is not the opposite of mental illness. And the church can be the safest place to say so.