Pastor Lorenzo Neal had the first panic attack of his life on a hot summer night during the pandemic. He imagined it was what a heart attack would feel like. His neighbors called 911.
As the pastor of New Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jackson, Mississippi, he was carrying a lot of burdens through the pandemic.
He has pastored New Bethel for 14 years, and said his 130-member church lost several key members to the virus, including a mother and son who died within two weeks of each other. Neal himself contracted the virus early on and was sick for more than a month. On top of that, he was initially shouldering the entirety of virtual worship himself.
“I was doing too much,” he said. “I was already seeing a therapist for some other things, but once that came to light, we were able to explore some areas that needed to be addressed.” He asked his congregation for prayer without specifying what he was experiencing in his own mental health, which he said is common in Black faith communities. His anxiety has since calmed.
COVID-19 hit Black congregations harder physically and brought a heavier mental health burden to Black or African American pastors, according to a new study on the impact of COVID-19 on the American church from Arbor Research Group and Church Salary, a sister publication of Christianity Today. But the study showed Black churches also had more unity about pandemic health measures and lower closure rates.
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THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF COVID-19
COVID-19 Hit Black Churches Harder, but They Weathered It Better
New research shows how Black churches suffered during the pandemic. But these congregations also found unity where others were torn apart.
COVID-19 Hit Black Churches Harder, but They Weathered It Better
Mourners attend a funeral for COVID-19 victim Conrad Coleman, Jr., at New York Covenant Church in July 2020.
Pastor Lorenzo Neal had the first panic attack of his life on a hot summer night during the pandemic. He imagined it was what a heart attack would feel like. His neighbors called 911.
As the pastor of New Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jackson, Mississippi, he was carrying a lot of burdens through the pandemic.
He has pastored New Bethel for 14 years, and said his 130-member church lost several key members to the virus, including a mother and son who died within two weeks of each other. Neal himself contracted the virus early on and was sick for more than a month. On top of that, he was initially shouldering the entirety of virtual worship himself.
“I was doing too much,” he said. “I was already seeing a therapist for some other things, but once that came to light, we were able to explore some areas that needed to be addressed.” He asked his congregation for prayer without specifying what he was experiencing in his own mental health, which he said is common in Black faith communities. His anxiety has since calmed.
COVID-19 hit Black congregations harder physically and brought a heavier mental health burden to Black or African American pastors, according to a new study on the impact of COVID-19 on the American church from Arbor Research Group and Church Salary, a sister publication of Christianity Today. But the study showed Black churches also had more unity about pandemic health measures and lower closure rates.
In interviews with CT, a number of Black pastors affirmed the study’s findings. The pastors dealt with a disproportionate amount of sickness and death while carrying the additional burden of ministering in their communities after the murder of George Floyd. Other ministry demands cropped up too: Married couples needed a lot of counseling during the pandemic, they said, and then local health officials came to the pastors to convince their congregants to get the vaccine when it became available.
Pastor Jerry Young is the head of the National Baptist Convention and has also pastored in Jackson, Mississippi, for 50 years.
“I do not know of anything that has adversely affected the church as much as COVID has,” he said. He said the mental health of pastors “has not been sufficiently diagnosed or attended to.” But he added that the pandemic also “caused a lot of people to become a lot more serious about their walk with the Lord.”
Black Americans experienced higher rates of COVID-19 and death than white Americans, according to analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by KFF.
In May 2020 in New York City, for example, African Americans counted for 28 percent of coronavirus deaths, even though they made up only 22 percent of the population. COVID-19 also killed a number of bishops in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the nation’s largest African American Pentecostal denomination. COGIC urged its church leaders to follow government directives and follow scientists’ advice.
“The last three years brought a level of unraveling that was unusual,” said bishop D. A. Sherron, the pastor of Global Fire International in Brooklyn, New York. Sherron lost five family members in the first COVID-19 wave. “It really, really took a toll on everything.”
The Church Salary study also found that Black or African American congregations were the most likely to have a positive response to pandemic health measures and were less divided about health measures, which “may have insulated them from the kinds of internal COVID-19 conflicts that negatively impacted so many other churches,” Church Salary found.
Two-thirds of Black congregations interviewed for the study had an “extremely positive” reaction to pandemic health measures, compared to only 29 percent of multicultural congregations and 20 percent of majority-white congregations. Black congregations were among the most likely to still mask and practice social distancing indoors in 2022.
The study also found that the ethnicities that were the “least polarized” in response to health measures also had fewer church closures. But most Black congregations also saw a decrease in attendance. Pastors said that some of their congregants still watch services online, though they’re trying to get people to come back.