How some churches offer professional counseling to congregants, letting overextended pastors focus on spiritual guidance

After 15 years of undergoing periodic counseling, I still sometimes default to thinking of therapy as a luxury.

In my work and relationships, I am a huge advocate of professional mental health care; I can speak personally to the benefits. But between my hardworking Calvinist upbringing and cultural stigma, I’m programmed to tell myself to “tough it out” for a while before finally calling a therapist.

After a recent loss, I returned to the therapist I had seen years ago for postpartum depression. As a part-time campus minister, I didn’t have benefits for the grief counseling I needed. (Although we have public healthcare in Canada, mental health therapy is seldom covered.)

But this time I didn’t deliberate about booking the appointment. I didn’t wrestle with questions of, “Am I in a bad enough state to warrant spending the money? Should I push through a little longer and see if I can kick this on my own?”

This time the decision was made much easier because a simple hurdle was removed: I didn’t have to pay. My church pays into a local counseling service that provides each member with up to six free sessions a year, no questions asked.

I emailed the counselor’s office and told them the name of my church. On the day of my appointment, I sat down in my office chair with my steaming mug of tea, clicked on the Zoom link and felt a familiar wave of relief. I knew that someone who understood what I was experiencing could guide me on this path through grief.

The Counselling Assistance Plan (CAP) provided by Shalem Mental Health Network in Ontario provides Christian institutions the opportunity to offer short-term mental health support to their members and employees. CAP began about 20 years ago when Shalem determined through listening to faith leaders that mental health was becoming a bigger challenge and reality in their communities. Pastors said they didn’t have the resources to meet the need.

Shalem modeled the program on the Employee Assistance Program used by many Canadian employers to provide confidential, short-term therapy. They began to ask what it would look like to provide a cost-effective way for churches to provide counseling.

By 2006 Shalem had rolled out CAP with two churches and slowly increased its partnerships through word of mouth. In 2024 the network included 97 Christian organizations across Canada and 224 therapists.

Churches pay an annual fee calculated from the number of households in the congregation. In the first year a church’s fee is based on overall CAP averages, and after that it’s based on the percentage of households in its own congregation that used the program the previous year.

“People will say, ‘If the pastor’s doing his job, we don’t need therapists,’” said Tom Jantzi, Shalem’s director of CAP and Clergy Care programs. But Jantzi and others at Shalem see pastoral care and mental health therapy as distinct parts of holistic care.

“Pastoral care and discipleship are done in community,” Jantzi said. “Therapy isn’t done in community. A therapist is a licensed professional who has studied and learned the science and techniques to help people grow in their mental, emotional, relational health.”

By contrast, Jantzi said, pastoral care is theology-based. Overall, one of the biggest benefits to clergy and leadership is that CAP “frees up pastors to do the spiritual care they’re called to do.”

This isn’t to say that churches can’t support people through the process of receiving mental health treatment. Jantzi compares it to the church’s role in helping someone through physical illness. When a person is sick, they see the doctor for their physical treatment, while their church prays for them, visits and delivers meals. The same is true of mental health care. Community, pastoral care and individual therapy are all key components of mental well-being.

An article in the Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work identifies some of the reasons churches have decided to invest in CAP. Many spiritual leaders feel they are not sufficiently trained to offer the kind of therapy their congregants require, for example. Others feel the burden of socio-emotional needs has “led many [clergy] to feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of counseling in the contemporary milieu.”

In addition, Shalem is able to relieve pastors of the administrative challenges of facilitating mental health care for their congregants. It’s particularly difficult for pastors to find experts for specific issues such as OCD or childhood abuse, Jantzi said.

“Pastors were asking, ‘How do I find a therapist who has expertise in a particular area, vet them so that I’m comfortable sending my parishioner to the therapist, and then how do we navigate paying for that therapist? How do we decide how many sessions are appropriate, how many we can afford, and then how do we pay for it, decide who gets access, how much?’” he said.

Of course, pastors want to be aware of the needs their church is facing. For this reason, Shalem provides a quarterly report describing some of the overall trends in the congregation while maintaining individuals’ confidentiality.

Church leadership can then decide if they need to address any issues through programming. If the confidential report shows that several congregants have sought grief counseling or support for anxiety, for example, the church might consider providing support groups, a sermon series, prayer and other means of care to address those issues.

Sadly, harmful theologies and ideologies have damaged many believers’ understanding of mental healthcare. The prosperity gospel, toxic positivity, harmful masculinity, and name-it-and-claim-it theologies, to name a few, have influenced Christian subcultures to believe that if you trust in God, you won’t need counseling.

Resources like CAP allow churches to champion the importance of mental health, marriage counseling, parental guidance and other supports. As churches and other faith-based institutions join CAP, they communicate to their members that they are supported unconditionally, that God cares for their mental well-being, and that therapy can be an important part of healing and growth.

My four sessions of therapy didn’t end my grief, but our Zoom meetings every other week helped me develop self-care tools to move forward into a new stage of life. I felt cared for not only by my therapist but also by church members who surrounded our family in this time of change and loss. Through my therapist and my church, I have experienced the embodiment of God’s gift of healing through community.