Nobody asks this in a seminar. You ask it in a hospital corridor, or in the silence after the worst phone call of your life, or sitting in a pew at a funeral you never thought you would plan. And underneath the question about hell there is usually a smaller, more frightened one: did God let go of the person I love?
Here is the answer, plainly. No. Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, who buried his own sister after she died by suicide, says God does not stop loving someone because they were sick. The teaching that God turns away from a person who dies this way is not in Scripture, and Moss goes further. He calls that teaching the true violence the church does to grieving families. Mental illness is a physical reality, not a moral failure. Grief after a suicide is real grief, and it heals in the light, not buried in shame.
That is the short answer. The rest of this is why it is true, why the church so often got it wrong and what to do with the ache that no answer makes disappear.
Does God Abandon Someone Who Dies by Suicide?
Start with the fear at full strength, because grieving people deserve that honesty. For generations, families were told that suicide was the one sin you could not repent of, so the person was simply gone, cut off, outside the reach of grace. Some were refused a funeral. Some were buried outside the fence of the churchyard. The message landed like a second death.
Moss rejects it without hedging. He has looked for the place in Scripture where God draws that line, and it is not there.
There is no real layout that God said, “I’m not gonna love you because you had a disease, so I can’t love you anymore.”
— Otis Moss III
Read that against Paul:
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).
Paul does not add a footnote that excludes the sick. The burden of proof sits on the person who wants to carve out an exception, and Moss says the exception was never God’s. It was ours.
The theological aspect is the true violence that we do to people.
— Otis Moss III
Sit with that word, violence. Moss is saying the cruelest wound in this whole story is often not the death itself. It is the thing a believer says next, with a Bible in hand, to a family already on the floor.
Is Mental Illness a Spiritual Problem or a Physical One?
The bad theology grows from a bad diagnosis. If you believe depression is only a spiritual failure, a faith problem or a demon to be rebuked, then a death by suicide looks like a soul that lost a fight it should have won. Moss pulls that root out. The brain is an organ. When it is sick, it is sick the way a body is sick.
You would not say to someone if, in fact, they had cancer or they had COVID and said, “Just pray it away.”
— Otis Moss III
Mental health needs to be in that category so that we don’t push it aside as something that’s solely spiritual and see it as something that’s physical. There is something happening with the brain.
— Otis Moss III
Dr. Anita Phillips, a therapist who has spent her career at the seam between faith and mental health, puts edges on what Moss is describing. Depression is not a bad week.
When we’re talking about major depressive disorder, we’re looking at it having been at least two weeks of just consistently feeling very sad, very low, and kind of an absence of any previous interest in doing anything you used to like to do.
— Anita Phillips
That is not a person who needs to try harder. That is a person who is ill. And Phillips refuses the false choice between God and treatment that so much of the church has forced on hurting people.
Plead the blood of Jesus, cast out the devil, go to therapy, take the medication, get the exercise, spend time with friends. There is no one approach to being well.
— Anita Phillips
Notice she does not drop the prayer. She refuses to drop the rest. The objection here is old and stubborn: doesn’t reaching for a pill or a therapist mean you don’t trust God? Phillips answers it head on.
Don’t let the enemy trick you into abandoning your God because you got help from something that God provided.
— Anita Phillips
Should a Christian See a Therapist or a Psychiatrist?
Yes, and Moss wants pastors to be the first to say so. He is pro-prayer and pro-professional, and he thinks a good shepherd knows the edge of his own competence. He even walks through the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a counselor, because precision is part of love here.
A good pastor should say, “I will spiritually counsel you, but I will recommend and refer you to someone who is an expert.”
— Otis Moss III
Just as if someone had a brain aneurysm or they had a tumor in the brain, you want a brain surgeon. You don’t want the dentist.
— Otis Moss III
Phillips adds the one move that saves lives and scares people most: asking directly. Many believers are terrified that naming suicide will plant the idea. She says the opposite is true.
You will not inspire them to be suicidal by asking. I think people will appreciate that you care, that you are willing to hear them even if they say yes, and that you’re not afraid of the darkness that they’re battling.
— Anita Phillips
If you are afraid of the darkness someone is in, you will leave them alone in it. Courage here looks like a plain question asked in love.
How Is the Church Supposed to Love Someone Who Is This Sick?
Here the Scottish theologian Dr. John Swinton, who worked for years as a psychiatric nurse and chaplain before he taught a word of theology, turns the whole conversation. The point is not mainly to fix the person. It is to keep them inside the body, recognized and held.
A discipleship is to be with those whom society marginalizes, to begin to resurrect the personhood in a social context wherein people sometimes forget how important it is to be recognized as a person is a very simple, but a powerful gift the church can give to people with mental health challenges.
— John Swinton
Swinton is realistic. Some seasons are hard, and sometimes a community cannot safely carry a person in the same room or the same way. But he draws one line that does not move.
And abandonment is never acceptable. So if you have to withdraw somebody from a situation, our task as the body of Christ, the whole community, is to make sure that that person remains ministered to in a different context, in a different way, and perhaps by a different person.
— John Swinton
That is the same conviction as Moss’s, said from another chair. God does not abandon the sick, so the church does not get to either. And what Swinton holds out at the end is not a cheerful feeling but something sturdier.
Joy is the thing in the midst of your darkest hour that gives you the possibility of hope. And Jesus talks a lot about joy. He doesn’t talk [an] awful lot about happiness as central to the kingdom.
— John Swinton
How Do You Grieve a Death Like This Without Drowning?
Here Moss stops being a teacher and becomes a brother. His sister Daphne died by suicide just days before his wedding. For years he could not say the true words. When people asked, he told them she had a terminal illness, and the grief he buried went underground and strained his marriage.
Suicide rips something from us in a very different way, because you begin to question yourself, and you begin to question the reasons why.
— Otis Moss III
I couldn’t even use the words that my sister took her life. People ask me about my sister, I says, “She had a terminal illness.”
— Otis Moss III
What finally freed him was not an answer to the why. It was telling the truth out loud.
Finally coming into the light was one of the most freeing moments of my life, of being able to tell her story.
— Otis Moss III
Pastor John Onwuchekwa, who lost his own brother, names why this grief never fully clears and why sealing it off backfires. He describes grief as a nonperishable thing that sits on a shelf and, the moment you crack it open, drops you right back into the day you lost them. He is honest about the cost of his own walling-off, too. He thought he was protecting himself from future pain, he says, when in truth he was only robbing himself of present joy. His picture is that joy and sorrow are not parallel streets running side by side. They cross, they overlap and they share the same corners.
That is exactly where Moss lands. He will not rush you to a happy ending, because he does not believe the gospel skips the grave.
It is not possible to live without the echo of the blues along with the gospel.
— Otis Moss III
You can’t understand a resurrection unless you know the pain of Calvary.
— Otis Moss III
Easter does not erase Good Friday. It answers it. A faith that cannot hold the blues has nothing real to say at a graveside, and a faith that holds only the blues has forgotten how the story ends. Moss asks the church to be the kind of community that carries people through what cannot be fixed in a day: elders who show up, food that arrives, presence that stays, prayer that does not preach.
Where Is God in All of It?
Right where the worst theology said he was not. Near. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Not close to the composed. Close to the crushed. If your picture of God has him recoiling from the person who could not hold on, that picture is not from Scripture. It is the idol Moss called violence, and the kindest thing you can do is put it down.
So no, the person you love did not fall outside the love of God because their brain was sick. And no, you do not have to bury your grief to prove your faith. You can tell the truth, get the help, hold the blues and the gospel in the same hand and trust that the God who is near to the brokenhearted has not left, not them and not you.
If you or someone you love is struggling, help is available any time:
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US): call or text 988
SAMHSA’s National Helpline (mental health and substance use): 1-800-662-4357
If you are walking with a grieving family, you do not need perfect words. You need to show up, stay and refuse to leave them alone in the dark.
Quick Answers
Does someone who dies by suicide go to hell? Moss says no. He calls the teaching that God abandons them the true violence the church does to families, and he insists God does not stop loving someone because they were sick.
Is mental illness a spiritual or a physical problem? Moss says it is physical, with something happening in the brain. Phillips backs this up clinically. Both urge believers to pray and to get professional care, not one instead of the other.
Should a Christian see a therapist or psychiatrist? Yes. Moss draws clear lines between pastoral counseling and clinical care and says a good pastor refers people to the right expert. Phillips says not to let the enemy talk you out of help God provided.
Is it dangerous to ask someone directly if they are suicidal? No. Phillips says you will not make someone suicidal by asking. The question, asked in love, tells them you are not afraid of their darkness.
How do you grieve a loved one’s suicide? Do not bury it. Moss buried his sister’s story for years, and it nearly cost him his marriage. Naming the loss honestly and refusing the shame was what brought him into the light.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on the Jude 3 Project episode with Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III on grief, mental health and his sister’s death, with added voices from other Jude 3 Project conversations: Dr. Anita Phillips on depression and asking the hard question, Dr. John Swinton on how the church holds people with mental illness without abandoning them, and Pastor John Onwuchekwa on grief that does not fully clear. Listen to the full conversation, including Moss’s reflections on resilience and intergenerational community.
Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III is the senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and a graduate of Morehouse College. He grew up in a family deeply involved in the civil rights movement.
