Bishop Vashti McKenzie (Photo: AME Church)

EEW Magazine News // Mental Health

In communities of color disproportionately affected by COVID-19, where a lack of resources, poor access to health care and stifling stigma over mental health issues have turned pastors into counselors and caregivers, pastors have it hard.

In addition to the pandemic, difficult conversations about systemic racism have significantly raised stress levels in communities of color. Faith leaders say they are overwhelmed, exhausted, burned out and left with serious questions about how to care for their own physical and mental well-being while helping congregants in a meaningful way.

It is important to remember that “clergy are human beings,” said Bishop Vashti McKenzie, interim president and general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a retired African Methodist Episcopal leader.

“When you add racial unrest on top of burying more congregants than you’ve ever had in your whole entire ministry,” on top of losing loved ones in one’s own family, it can all add up, McKenzie said.

The challenges facing clergy of color were on display recently during a virtual event hosted by the Christian organization Live Free, two days after a mass shooting at a supermarket where 10 Black people were killed in Buffalo, New York.

The Tops supermarket in Buffalo, scene of the mass shooting that left 10 Black people dead. (Credit: Joshua Bessex/Associated Press)

The Rev. Julian Cook, pastor of Buffalo’s Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, described a clergy colleague who was unable to meet a request to provide grief counseling to local bank employees.

“She had to tell them flat out, ‘I’m just not in a place where I can even talk about grief right now,’” he said during the online event.

Many pastors have found comfort during this time knowing they are not alone, said Washington D.C.-based psychologist Jessica Smedley, who saw an increase in requests for assistance from Black clergy and African American congregations. She has held virtual webinars as a form of support.

“It gave them the opportunity to hear from other clergy that they were experiencing some of the same grief or stressors of not being in person or not knowing how to show up for their congregants in the same way and not being able to visit the hospital because of safety issues,” she said.

A recent Rice University study found that Black and Latino churchgoers often rely on their pastors for mental health care, but their clergy feel limited in being able to help them. Smedley said there is need for more research about clergy of color and rates of depression.

The Rev. Danté Quick has made Black mental health an area of focus at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey. The senior pastor has also attended to his own mental health needs and advises his congregants and seminarians to do the same.

Rev. Dante Quick, preaches during a church service at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens on Sunday, May 22, 2022, in Somerset, N.J. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

“If you go to a cardiologist for your heart, an optometrist for your eye, an oncologist for your cancer, why wouldn’t you go to a doctor for your mind?” he said, noting he has been seeing a therapist for 20 years.

Quick said Black clergy face various stressors. But social justice advocacy “brings its own stress,” he said.

“Preaching about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the (psychological) trauma that we have to try to shepherd people of color through requires an intense amount of empathy that wears on one’s spirit.”

Quick says he copes by taking time for “joy-seeking” activities – like a nice restaurant meal, an Anita Baker concert, or joining his mother in watching her favorite TV show. He also now has a personal phone and a church phone “so I can put one down from time to time.”

“I want to live to see my children’s weddings,” he said.