(RNS) — Black and Latino Christians often turn to their pastors for mental health care, even when those clergy have limited expertise in working with those who are mentally struggling, according to a new study by the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.
Daniel Bolger, a doctoral candidate at Rice University who co-authored the report, says pastors, whether they want to be or not, “are on the front lines of this mental health crisis.”
Bolger said that mental health and medical providers have an opportunity to help clergy and congregants alike by creating networks with pastors and working with local religious communities.
“A persistent theme across the clergy members we talked to was that there’s a level of need for mental health care they’re just unable to meet,” Bolger told Religion News Service. “Maybe it was less about the types of issues they were seeing, but more the sheer number of people who needed that type of assistance.”
To Bolger, pastors are in need of support, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic wears on, citing research showing the number of pastors who have contemplated quitting ministry. “They were feeling really overwhelmed by this before the pandemic, so we can only imagine how much worse it might be during the pandemic,” he said.
For the study, co-authored by Pamela Prickett at the University of Amsterdam, the researchers held focus groups in 2015 and 2016 with 14 Black and Latino pastors from different Protestant denominations and conducted 20 interviews with church members across two congregations in Houston, Texas. Church members were between 24 and 65 years old. More than half had completed a Bachelor’s degree and 63% were women.
The Black American congregation chosen for the study was a Baptist church, with a weekly attendance of about 600 members. The Latino congregation, a Pentecostal church, had about 70 weekly attendees.
The two groups, their research showed, seek their pastors out for very different reasons.
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