Faith, Mental Health, and the Healing the Church Needs
Being in the faith and mental wellness space is difficult. Many of us who have walked in this space and listened closely to others are seeing the same tension. The church is beginning to awaken to the importance of mental health, yet many congregations still struggle to fully embrace its necessity within the life of their people.
Scripture reminds us in Galatians 5:17 that the Spirit and the flesh are in conflict with one another. The desires of the flesh oppose the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit oppose the flesh. This inner battle is real and ongoing.
What the church at large, though not all churches, often overlooks is how deeply the mind, will, and emotions influence which voice we submit to in moments of trauma, stress, and anxiety. When someone has lived with depression, anxiety, or trauma and learned to cope through behaviors like emotional eating, they may come to Christ, learn God’s ways, and recognize the call to self control. They may try to stop through sheer discipline and behavior change. Yet when stress compounds and trust feels fragile, the old coping pattern often returns because it feels safer in the moment.
Shame follows, and the cycle continues.
But what if the church understood that true submission to the Spirit often begins with tending to the mind, will, and emotions rather than bypassing them through suppression or surface level behavior change. What if healing was not rushed past but entered with wisdom and care.
This is where mental health professionals serve an essential role. They are trained to understand how the brain and emotions respond to stress and trauma. They offer language, tools, and support that help individuals feel safe, empowered, and hopeful. From that place of safety, people are more able to regulate themselves when stress comes and choose the Spirit over the flesh, not out of fear, but out of trust.
Choosing the Spirit often runs against what we were taught, what the world models, and even what our instincts tell us to do. That reality must be acknowledged.
More often than not, people fall into sin not because they want to disobey God, but because sin feels like relief in overwhelming circumstances. It feels familiar. It feels safe.
Jesus tells us that in this life we will have trouble, but to take heart because He has overcome the world. Taking heart may mean seeking mental health support and allowing God’s grace to meet us in the middle of our mess rather than expecting ourselves to be healed outside of it.
If the church does not recognize this, we will continue to see believers grow older in age but not deeper in their relationship with the Lord.
That is why we exist, and why so many faith and mental wellness spaces exist. We equip churches and individuals with the support, services, and systems needed for mental health care so that believers and the body of Christ can grow authentically, care for one another deeply, live at full capacity, feel safe in complete dependence on God, and become the kind of people this world so desperately needs.
