Something strange has happened inside the American church over the past decade. Mental health needs went up. Church investment in mental health support went down.
Lifeway Research’s 2025 study of more than 1,500 current and former Protestant pastors surfaces the gap plainly. The percentage of pastors who maintain a list of trusted counselors to refer people to dropped from 67 percent in 2015 to just 52 percent in 2025. Nearly half of American pastors now have no counselor referral list at all.
Inside the church, the structure has thinned out too. Lay counseling ministries existed in 34 percent of congregations in 2015. By 2025, that number had fallen to 27 percent. Pastor attendance at counseling conferences dropped from 64 percent to 48 percent in the same decade.
At the exact moment when the CDC, NIH, and every major research body in the country was sounding alarms about anxiety, depression, suicide, and substance use, the church quietly disinvested in the infrastructure that used to meet people in their pain.
The people in the pews are not okay
Barna’s research paints the harder picture. Twenty-eight percent of Gen Z report always feeling lonely, compared to just 4 percent of Elders. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z frequently feel uncertain about the future. Twenty-nine percent frequently feel lonely. In Barna’s Caring for Souls research, one in five Millennials (19 percent) say they feel lonely all the time. A plurality of 18 to 35 year old Christians (19 percent) say friends are missing from their worship community.
The people walking into your sanctuary this Sunday are carrying more than they are telling you. Many of them are walking in specifically because they hope the church might be the place where it gets named.
Why the retreat happened
This is not a story about pastors who don’t care. It is a story about what happens when the work of ministry becomes so overwhelming that the specialized, formational, adjacent work gets squeezed out first. Counseling training takes time. Maintaining a referral list takes time. Running a lay counseling ministry takes time and volunteers. When a pastor is trying to keep a building open, make payroll, preach 40 sermons a year, and lead a divided congregation through a pandemic recovery, the mental health infrastructure is the first thing that gets quietly deprioritized.
That is understandable. It is also costly.
What a rebuild looks like
The good news is that the road back is not complicated. The research points to four steps every church can implement this year.
First, build and maintain a vetted referral network of competent mental health professionals, ideally ones who understand your theological framework. This is the lowest-cost, highest-impact move a pastor can make. It does not require the pastor to become a counselor. It requires them to know who is.
Second, invest in lay counseling. Shaunti Feldhahn and Dr. Jim Sells’ research in When Hurting People Come to Church, featured on Carey Nieuwhof’s podcast, makes the case clearly: most of what hurting people need is embodied community that listens, loves, and walks with them. Specialized clinical care is for the smaller subset with severe illness.
Third, normalize counseling from the pulpit. Every time a pastor names their own counselor, a congregation member gives themselves permission to seek help.
Fourth, care for pastoral mental health explicitly. A pastor without their own support system cannot build one for anyone else. The Assemblies of God’s 2025 ministerial credential cards now carry a QR code linking to mental health resources. That is a denomination recognizing what the research has been saying for a decade.
Why this is a leadership question
This is the through-line of the TKN 2026 campaign. Nothing in this piece, or any of the pieces in the series, is ultimately about one tactic. It is about the kind of leader the next decade of the church needs. A leader who can name the hard things, steward the people actually in the room, and build structures that hold.
The TKN Leadership Summit 2026 takes place November 10 and 11 at Kingdom Fellowship AME Church in Calverton, Maryland. Theme: Inspire. Influence. Impact. The practical reason to be there is to be in the room with other leaders who are building this kind of church, right now.
