The church tends to get mental health wrong for a specific reason. It treats the body as medical territory and the mind as spiritual territory. Then it is surprised when people with depression leave hurt. Dr. Maliek Blade, who manages The Whole Brother Mission, a nonprofit that connects Black men with mental health professionals, calls one version of this habit spiritual bypassing. His remedy is a church that prays and refers at the same time, long before a crisis forces it to.
That diagnosis is narrower and more useful than a general complaint that “the church doesn’t care.” Blade is describing a pattern with a cause, an inconsistency and a cost. Each one can be examined, and each one can be changed.
What exactly is the church doing wrong?
Blade starts with an admission, not an accusation. He speaks as a Christian who works with pastors and has spent years in church and seminary settings, and he says it plainly: “I do think we owe a lot of people an apology for how we’ve handled that in particular, due to us being spiritually focused.”
Notice who is speaking and about whom. Blade is not an outside critic with a grudge against faith. He is an insider describing “some churches,” his own words, and he places himself inside the “we.” That matters for how a reader should hear the claim. It is not a verdict on Christianity. It is a description of how some Christian communities handle one kind of suffering.
The handling he describes has a recognizable shape. A person’s thoughts or moods begin to break down. The congregation responds with spiritual counsel. Medical help enters the picture only when things become dramatic. In Blade’s account, it takes something like a manic or psychotic episode before the church hands the person to a professional. By then the person has often spent months being told, in effect, that the problem lives in their devotional life.
Why does the church treat the mind differently from the body?
The sharpest part of Blade’s analysis is a comparison any churchgoer can test. He points out that “when someone at the church is dealing with cancer or high blood pressure, we don’t mind sending them to the medical professionals and saying, get that help take that medication.”
Nobody at church treats a blood pressure prescription as a lack of faith. People pray for the member with cancer and also ask which hospital is treating her. Both happen at once without anyone feeling a contradiction. So the issue is not that these churches distrust medicine. They trust it everywhere except the mind.
Blade’s explanation for that exception is the source-earned surprise here. The habit does not grow out of indifference. It grows out of a true conviction applied in the wrong place. “I do think that tension is there because we understand how important the mind thoughts and beliefs are,” he says. “So we wanna hold that tightly and make it spiritual.”
Christians are right that the mind matters to faith. Paul tells believers in Romans 12:2 to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Scripture cares a great deal about what people think and believe. The mistake comes when that conviction slides into a second, unstated claim: that anything happening in the mind must be a matter of belief and obedience. The first claim is biblical. The second is an assumption, and Scripture does not teach it.
This is why the pattern is hard to see from the inside. The people doing harm usually think they are being faithful. They are guarding something they rightly value. They have just drawn the boundary of the spiritual so wide that it swallows conditions that are also medical.
Is depression a sign of sin?
The most damaging form of this habit is the assumption that distress means disobedience. Blade states the logic directly, as some congregations apply it: “So if you stop sinning, if you practice your spiritual disciplines more, this will get fixed. But we don’t apply that to other medical issues.”
The cost falls on the person who is already struggling. Blade describes people who feel shunned or condemned because their difficulty is read as evidence of a sinful life, “when in actuality it could be depression, and that’s not necessarily their fault.” His wording is careful. He does not say no struggle ever involves sin. He says the church cannot assume it, and that assuming it wounds people who have done nothing to earn the accusation.
Scripture addresses this assumption head on, though not in a passage about mental illness. In John 9, Jesus and his disciples meet a man blind from birth. “And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” (John 9:2-3)
Read in context, the passage concerns physical blindness, and the narrative goes on to describe a healing. It does not hand anyone a theory of depression, and it does not promise that every illness will be cured. What it does is reject one specific line of reasoning: that a person’s suffering must trace back to someone’s sin. The disciples assumed a moral cause. Jesus refused it. A church that reads depression as proof of hidden disobedience is making the disciples’ assumption, not following Jesus’ answer.
The book of Job makes a similar point at greater length. Job’s friends insist his suffering must be punishment, and the book shows they are wrong. Neither passage settles what causes any particular person’s pain. Both warn against announcing the cause before you know it.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Lisa Fields raised the term with Blade, and his definition adds something many church conversations miss. He notes that psychology had already described the pattern before church circles gave it this name. He places spiritual bypassing among the mind’s common errors, calling it “a type of cognitive distortion essentially.”
He explains that cognitive distortions are tightly held beliefs that are actually wrong but that people refuse to let go of, and that they shape how we see others. Spiritual bypassing, in his account, means disconnecting from what is really happening in the natural world and adding spiritual explanations where they may not apply.
The useful detail is which distortion he links it to. He describes all-or-nothing thinking, the habit of jumping to one extreme when the truth sits between them: “sometimes all or nothing thinking causes us to go to extremes when it’s like, Hey, it’s not that. And it’s not that either. It’s somewhere in the middle.”
Apply that to the church’s approach. All-or-nothing thinking says a struggle is either spiritual or medical, and a person of faith should pick spiritual. The middle that Blade points to is not a compromise between God and doctors. It is the recognition that one person can face both kinds of need at once, just as the member with high blood pressure can be prayed for and medicated in the same week.
Doesn’t this risk ignoring the spiritual side?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. Christians believe in a spiritual world. Scripture describes demonic opposition, spiritual warfare and the power of prayer. A reader might worry that talk of “bypassing” is a polite way to explain all of that away and hand the soul to psychology.
Blade anticipates the worry. “Now, we don’t discount spirituality as a whole,” he says, and he goes on to affirm that Christians recognize a spiritual dimension to life. His claim is limited: not every experience a person has is tied to it. That is a claim about diagnosis, not about whether the spiritual is real.
His own work shows the same balance. Blade notes that “we know that there’s skepticism within the Christian community around mental health,” and his organization responds by connecting churches with therapists who are Christians, “vetted to balance psychology with the word of God.” Whatever one thinks of that particular model, it shows that he is not asking churches to choose secular care over faith. He is asking them to stop treating the two as rivals.
Jude 3 Project holds this same position. Spiritual warfare and mental health concerns are not either/or; Jude 3 teaches that we refuse to spiritualize what is medical or to medicalize what is spiritual, and that people should seek qualified care and prayerful support together. Jude 3 also teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, because God works through trained counselors and clinicians.
There is a real limit to name here. Blade’s account of how churches behave comes from his experience counseling pastors and placing people with care. It is an informed observation, not a survey of congregations. Plenty of churches already refer people to counselors, keep therapists’ names on hand, and preach openly about depression. Blade’s point is not that every church fails. It is that the failure, where it happens, follows a predictable logic, and that logic can be corrected.
Why does this hit some communities harder?
Blade’s work focuses on Black men, and he is specific about why. “There is some stigma around black men seeking mental health services. And then when they actually do reach out, there’s some cultural barriers there.”
He adds a detail that changes how a church should think about referral: “And for some people, when they finally do it that first time, and if it’s not a good fit, they quit altogether.” That is why his organization prioritizes therapists who are culturally competent. It is a practical observation, not a claim that all Black men think alike. Some will walk into a counselor’s office without hesitation. Others carry hesitation that a single bad session can confirm.
Put that next to the church’s habit and the stakes become clearer. If a congregation spiritualizes a man’s depression for months, and then sends him to the first available name when things become serious, the referral may fail before it starts. A church that takes mental health seriously does more than say therapy is acceptable. It helps people find care that fits them, early, while they still have the energy to try.
Do pastors get caught in the same pattern?
Blade insists the problem runs upward as well as downward. “Pastors and leaders are still humans too, and they go through things,” he says, and he has seen many without support. He describes congregations that keep demanding more from their leaders, more services and more output, while no one stops to ask how the leader is doing.
He connects that pressure to identity. Men in particular, he argues, often tie their worth to productivity before coming to faith and keep doing so afterward, now measured by sermon downloads and church size. The pulpit says salvation is not earned by works, while the schedule says something else. Against that, he offers a counterweight many ministers rarely hear: “I’m sure many of us have come across moments where the most spiritual and obedient to God thing is to not do another thing.”
He also notes that when churches handle a leader’s crisis, they sometimes act like a company managing its image. “We’re trying to protect the business rather than looking at the wholeness and the wellness of the individual.” And he raises, soberly, the cases of pastors who have died by suicide, as one reason the church needs a fuller picture of what it means for a leader to be well.
Lisa Fields adds a point that explains why preaching skill alone cannot measure health: “there is a gap oftentimes between what we know in our head and what we know in our heart.” A pastor can teach accurately about anxiety and still be overwhelmed by it. Knowing the right verse does not prove that a person’s mind is well.
What should the church do instead?
Blade’s own summary is that “taking a second look at what good or doing well is beyond how someone presents or performs is gonna be really important for us.” For a congregation, that second look has concrete parts. Treat depression the way you treat high blood pressure: pray, and help the person get care. Do this early, not after an emergency. Refuse to name a cause, sin or otherwise, before you know one. Help people find counselors they can actually work with. And extend the same care to the people in the pulpit.
None of this asks the church to believe less. It asks the church to apply what it already believes, that God made the whole person and works through ordinary means, to the one part of the person it has been treating as an exception.
If you are struggling with thoughts of ending your life, please tell someone you trust today. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any time.
Quick answers
Why does the church get mental health wrong?
Blade argues that some churches treat the mind as purely spiritual while sending the body to doctors, and only refer people for care once a crisis hits.
Is depression a sin?
Blade warns against assuming distress means disobedience, noting that it could be depression and not the person’s fault. In John 9, Jesus rejects the assumption that suffering must trace back to someone’s sin.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Blade describes it as a cognitive distortion: disconnecting from what is happening in the natural world and adding spiritual explanations where they may not apply.
Does getting therapy mean I lack faith?
No. Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians.
Is the spiritual side of mental struggle real?
Blade affirms it is. His point is that not every struggle is tied to it, so care and prayer belong together.