Mental Health Ministry: What We’re Missing

When many churches talk about mental health, what they’re really talking about is mental illness. We must expand our perspective of what “mental health” means.

When we talk about mental health in ministry, we often focus too narrowly on mental health crises and diagnoses like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc. These are critical concerns affecting many in our faith communities. But over-focusing on crises and diagnoses often means we neglect the fact that we all fall somewhere on the fluctuating spectrum of mental, emotional, relational and spiritual health and wellbeing, even if we never experience a diagnosable mental illness. 

Here are five areas of care for mental health in ministry that we often give too little attention to in our congregations and communities: 

• Social Media’s Impact 

There is no greater new impact on our community’s mental well-being than the accelerating impact of social media and artificial intelligence. Numerous resources are available, including the latest research data on this intersection and strategies for addressing it. Some of these include books by Nicholas Carr, Jonathan Haidt, Jenny Odell, and Jaco J. Hammon.

With new AI-generated social media content, including deepfakes that are very difficult to detect, even our perceptions of the facts of our wider socio-political world are curated differently for each of us—often with malicious intent. Additionally, more people are now turning to AI chatbots for companionship and even mental health support. This can come with devastating consequences. 

How we engage in social media, how we responsibly access reliable information about the world, and the ways we integrate technology in our lives are matters of spiritual formation. At a minimum, an annual after-church forum, book study or sermon series would begin to center on this growing area of concern for our community’s mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual well-being.

• Loneliness and Isolation 

There is no greater factor influencing our mental well-being than the quality of our relationships. Having diminished quality or quantity of relationships can have profound negative effects on our bodies—from mental health to heart and respiratory health, and even increasing our risk of premature death. 

Even our individual long-term responses to a traumatic event in our lives depend largely on the support and care we receive from a community in the aftermath of the event. The greater the community of support we have, the less likely we are to experience long-term trauma symptoms following an adverse personal event or communal disaster. 

Faith communities committed to caring for the mental health of their members are attentive to the relational well-being of every person. They attend to both how people outside your community find their way in, as well as to how to intentionally create relational connections with newcomers once they are there. And when someone starts to fade away from regular presence in the community, be proactive in reaching out. 

Increasing the possibilities for connection and deepening of relational bonds is ministry that supports flourishing mental health.

• Emotional Overwhelm of the Present Era

We’re living in an era when our brain’s fear, sadness and anger buttons are pushed constantly. These emotions are what I call “apocalyptic emotions,” because they are signals to us, revealing that something is threatening our wellbeing and that of the people, places and values we cherish. 

Cultivating communities that can hold and give expression to difficult emotions through liturgy, ritual, sermons and caring conversations provides a safe space for these emotions to be expressed in loving relationships. Not talking about the hard things in church creates circumstances that can diminish our mental health. 

I am often struck by how many of my seminary students have never experienced a liturgy of corporate lament or grief, aside from funerals, in their communities of faith. Gathering weekly for worship, study and fellowship in a community that insists on silence regarding the most devastating, frightening and grief-provoking realities in our world communicates a tacit insistence that we hold the heaviest parts of our lives in the world in solitude. 

Worship and communal gatherings that give expression to all that we collectively hold—through music, prayer, preaching and conversation—are ministries that support possibilities for greater mental, emotional, and spiritual health. 

• Human-Ecological Relationality 

Nature’s impact on human mental health is well-documented in numerous studies across various social and health sciences. However, we rarely treat our relationship with the larger ecological web of life as a pressing concern for cultivating mental, emotional and spiritual health within our congregations. 

Beyond a focus on “creation care,” our ministries should also help us develop deeper relationships with the ecological beings with whom we live. In addition to restoring a now fractured human-ecology relationship, the effects of our increased exposure to nature seem to positively affect our stress levels, experiences of anxiety and depressive moods, and our cognitive function. 

In an era of climate collapse, our human fate is inextricably linked to the fate of the broader web of life. Our human health—mental, spiritual, physical and communal—is bound up with the health of the ecological web. A ministry that prioritizes strengthening the relational web is a ministry that supports mental health. 

• Social Justice and Mental Health 

While we often treat them as distinct and separate ministries, any engagement we have in increasing social justice, equity and wellbeing for the most vulnerable in our larger community also supports mental health. 

Access to affordable housing and nutritious foods is a mental health concern. Access to safe and supportive educational spaces that honor our racial, gender, sexual, disabled and neurodiverse embodiments is a mental health concern.

Reducing the prevalence of gun violence in our neighborhoods and mass shootings in our schools and public places is a mental health concern for those with increased anxiety and fear of being shot as they learn, shop, play or pray. 

Communities that take social justice concerns seriously as expressions of their faith practice don’t always connect social justice advocacy with mental health ministry. However, our social justice ministries would be more robustly conceived if we saw the health and well-being of the individual as intimately tied to the justice and equity we seek at institutional and societal levels.

Social justice ministry is also a mental health ministry. 

Areas for Growth in Mental Health Ministry Education 

We often train ministers in how to intervene and make appropriate referrals when mental health concerns and crises arise. In my teaching as a professor of congregational and community care, I also try to help students see that there are other, equally powerful interventions in the practice of care for a community. These include the ways we form and cultivate communities, the ways we work toward more just social relations, and the ways we engage in relationships with (not just concern for) the larger ecological web of life.

Engaging in caring one-on-one pastoral conversation is necessary. But a more robust model of spiritual care is one in which the pastor (ideally alongside a team of invested laity) cultivates communities of caring practice that see mental, emotional, relational and spiritual wellbeing as a function of nearly all of the congregation’s ministries, not just the ministries of hospital visitation, grief care or mental health crisis support. 

Faith communities are at the forefront of promoting mental health. Yet, they often treat pastoral care as if it were the job of the professional minister alone. However, most people will turn to a friend, family member,or fellow congregant with a concern that requires care before they reach out to their pastor. And they’ll often turn to their pastor before seeking help from a therapist. 

Care for the mental health of our congregations and communities requires an all-hands approach in which everyone has an integral part to play. Find your place within that good work and invite others to come alongside you.