Mental health is hard to talk about in many Black churches because the reluctance was learned, and much of it was learned for real reasons. Dr. Christina Jones Davis, a minister trained as a licensed marriage and family therapist who serves as clinic director and teaches pastoral care and counseling at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, points to two sources. One is a health care system with a long record of mistreating African Americans. The other is a hard-won resilience that taught people to carry their pain without help. The church helps when it stops treating mental illness as a verdict on someone’s faith and starts spending its trust to walk people toward care, with prayer kept in the same hand.
Davis put the first point in a phrase worth slowing down on. Speaking with Lisa Fields, she said that in African American communities “we have come by our difficulty in talking about this very honestly.” To come by something honestly is to have inherited it from somewhere real. The silence is not simple ignorance or spiritual immaturity. It has a history, and a reluctance with a history has to be answered differently from a reluctance with none.
Where does the wariness about mental health care come from?
Davis does not start with the mind. She starts with medicine in general. Before anyone can trust a therapist or a psychiatrist, she argues, they have to make some peace with health care as an institution, and for African Americans that institution carries a long legacy of mistreatment. She named the Tuskegee cases, the government study in which Black men with syphilis were observed rather than treated, and the sterilization of African American women without their consent. Her conclusion is that people have warranted reasons for caution about both mental illness as a label and mental health care as a system.
Notice what kind of claim that is. It is a claim about cultural memory: what a community remembers about how institutions treated it. It is not a doctrine. Nothing in Christian belief requires suspicion of doctors. But a memory of harm can borrow religious language. A person who would never admit to distrusting the clinic can comfortably announce a plan to just pray about it, and both statements can be doing the same work.
That distinction changes the remedy. If the problem were bad theology alone, better teaching would fix it. If the problem is earned mistrust, then lecturing people about stigma will not move them. Davis’s answer follows from her diagnosis: the community needs trust rebuilt, and it needs trusted providers who have been established and vetted. Mistrust learned from institutions has to be answered by people.
Can resilience become part of the problem?
The second source Davis names is one she clearly admires. She spoke of “this sense of resilience that’s really wonderful in African American communities.” People had to be tough-minded and resourceful, she said, and had to overcome a great deal without much support from mental health providers.
Here is the turn in her argument. A strength built for survival does not automatically know when to stand down. Davis described the present task as “learning that we don’t have to carry all these things by ourselves when we have our emotional distress or burdens.” Then she redefined the strength itself: “vulnerability is its own form of strength.” And she gave her reason: “it is harder oftentimes to ask for help than it is to try to grit and bear it on one’s own.”
That is a challenge to a cultural assumption made from inside the culture’s own values. She does not ask anyone to stop being strong. She argues that asking for help is the more demanding act, the one that takes more nerve.
Scripture does not picture Christian strength as carrying everything alone. Writing to the churches of Galatia, Paul says, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). A few lines later he adds, “For every man shall bear his own burden” (Galatians 6:5). Read in context, these do not cancel each other. Verse 1 is about restoring someone who has stumbled, and verses 4-5 are about each person examining his own work before God. Paul holds both together: some weights are meant to be shared, and each person still answers for his own life. What he never commends is the person who refuses to let anyone help.
Is mental illness a sign of sin or weak faith?
This is where Davis is sharpest, and where she widens the lens. The problem she describes is not unique to Black congregations. She called it common to African American churches “as well as other faith communities.” The damage comes from interpreting mental illness as the result of something a person did wrong: some sin, some lifestyle, God punishing you.
She answers on two levels. First, much mental illness involves heredity and biochemistry that have nothing to do with whether someone sinned. Second, environment matters. Two people can share the same biology, Davis explained, but a condition may only surface under a certain set of stressors. She named economic stress and exposure to violence, and said these fall on African Americans disproportionately. Given all that, she called blaming the individual harmful theology.
She also connected the blame to a pattern in outcomes. As Davis described it, African Americans show lower prevalence of most mental illnesses, but the conditions that do occur tend to be more chronic and more severe, which she attributes largely to people not seeking help in the numbers other groups do. That is her clinical summary rather than a figure the conversation documents, but the logic stands on its own. A person told their depression is a spiritual failure has one more reason to stay away from the help that might shorten it.
The strongest objection deserves a fair hearing. Scripture does sometimes link inner distress to sin. In Psalm 32, David describes what unconfessed sin did to him: “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long” (Psalm 32:3). A Christian could reasonably ask whether the church is wrong to see a spiritual dimension in suffering.
The answer is that a connection in some cases does not license an assumption in every case. When Jesus’ disciples met a man born blind, they assumed a moral cause: “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). That narrative concerns a physical condition and describes one encounter rather than setting a rule that no suffering ever relates to sin. But it plainly shows Jesus rejecting the reflex his followers brought to suffering. Davis is not denying that sin is real or that spiritual life matters. Her target is the reflex, the habit of reaching for sin first and asking questions never.
What changes when you treat the mind as an organ?
Lisa Fields asked Davis to define mental illness, and the definition turned out to be part of the cure for the silence. Davis described it as a set of symptoms in a diagnostic manual that, once met, gives a name to what is hurting, and the name provides orientation. She compared it to a heart condition or diabetes, where a doctor assesses symptoms, names the condition and offers a treatment plan that may or may not include medication. “Our brain, our mind is an organ and we’ve gotta take care of it.”
The comparison has a limit. Christians do not believe a person is only a brain, and Davis is not claiming that. Her analogy addresses shame: nobody thinks a diabetic is spiritually deficient for needing insulin. On that narrow point it holds well. She also stressed that a diagnosis is not the entry fee: “You don’t have to even have a diagnosis to be able to say, I’m grieving a loss right now, and I need some support with that.” She added her estimate that one in five people will experience a mental illness in a given year, and that the same person may not face the same condition the next year.
Then she told her own story. After her first child, she was diagnosed with a postpartum mood disorder. She already sensed “something was not right, but this gave a name for it.” The name pointed her toward support. For a community wary of labels, that reverses the expected meaning. The label was not a sentence passed on her. It was directions to help.
Does trauma count if you only watched it?
Lisa Fields raised a stressor she had not planned to ask about: the repeated experience of seeing Black men killed by police on video, including footage of Philando Castile dying. Davis pointed to growing research on post-traumatic stress that no longer treats it only as the result of a single event a person directly experienced. It can also come from “a chronic accumulation of feeling unsafe,” and from secondary exposure: first responders, ministers, therapists, neighbors, and people watching through media. What accumulates is a message that “the world is not safe, that I am being targeted.”
Again she refused to blame the individual, and she said that “it is a miracle that we have made it this far, and that we have been this resilient as a people.” Resilience is real and worth honoring, and it is also costly. A community can be strong and worn down at once, and saying so is not ingratitude. Davis described therapists who made spaces for her that felt like a sanctuary, places where she could let out fear and anger and have someone hold it with her.
How can a church hold prayer and professional care together?
Davis is not trading prayer for therapy. “Prayer is still powerful,” she said, and she cited research on therapy with African American couples in which integrating prayer led to better outcomes. Her qualification is the key sentence: “It’s just to also say that’s not all there is, that God has given us in our toolbox.”
Lisa Fields brought Scripture in from her own experience. After a traumatic experience in college, she did not see a counselor until graduate school, where her school offered free sessions with a licensed therapist, and that counseling became a place of healing. Later, rereading James, she noticed that “you could be forgiven and not healed.” The verse she had in mind reads, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). Other translations render “faults” as “sins.”
In its setting, James 5:13-16 addresses believers who are suffering and sick, telling them to pray, to call the elders and to confess to one another. Interpreters differ on details such as the meaning of the anointing with oil, and the passage does not promise that every illness will lift. Its original subject is not counseling. Lisa’s use of it is an application, and a fair one: in James, healing is pictured as happening in community, through other people, not through private prayer alone. As she put it, “that confession piece comes through confessing to other people.”
Davis turned that conviction into practice. Pastors often feel they must be everything to everyone, she said. Instead, they should keep at least three kinds of trusted professionals on speed dial: a psychiatrist who can prescribe medication, therapists for both couples and individuals, and a psychologist who can do testing. Vetting matters. Ask a psychiatrist how long intake sessions last; ten or fifteen minutes is a warning sign in her view, thirty minutes to an hour is better. Ask “How do you account for spirituality?” and how they handle cultural differences.
Her most important advice concerns the handoff. The pastor has what the clinic lacks: a relationship built over years of Sundays. She urged pastors to “transfer that trust to that provider by saying, let me go with you.” Go to the first appointment. Wait in the lobby. Help the person find the place. This is the answer to earned mistrust that her analysis demanded from the start. A stranger’s credentials cannot undo a community’s memory, but a trusted person’s presence can carry someone across. And because cost is a common barrier, she pointed people to providers who charge sliding-scale fees based on income. Anyone in suicidal crisis in the US can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour.
Davis applied the same standard to ministers themselves. “The mental health of the minister matters too, right?” At her seminary, counseling students are “actually required to have their own personal therapy,” because “we have to take ownership of our own stuff first.” A congregation learns what is speakable by watching its leaders. When a pastor names his own counselor as easily as his own doctor, the culture of carrying it alone loses its strongest argument.
She wants pulpits to say plainly that help exists, because on any given pew someone may be struggling, and “we really just don’t want them to suffer in silence.” Then she widened it to everyone listening: “if it’s not you on that year, it could be you on another year.” The church that learns to talk about mental health is not making room for a troubled few. It is preparing for its own members, which is to say, for itself.
Quick answers
What if counseling costs too much? Davis suggests calling your insurer to ask who is in network, looking for sliding-scale fees, and checking seminaries or universities that run training centers, where sessions may be affordable. Students should check whether their school already offers free sessions.
Where can a pastor get basic training? Davis recommends an introductory pastoral care course and a Mental Health First Aid training, which teaches people to recognize warning signs and know how to respond or refer.
What can a church host itself? Davis points to NAMI peer support groups, which churches can host, and to Mary Ellen Copeland’s Wellness Recovery Action Plan workbooks, which help a person tell family and church what to watch for and how to help.
What if someone is in danger right now? In the US, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and contact emergency services if there is immediate danger.