How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life

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Rebecca McLaughlin
3o’clock. It’s time. Okay, we’re starting. It’s the opposite of church. I don’t know about your church, but in my church, we go to the 9o’clock service, and at 9o’ five, it’s like it feels kind of like half full, and then by nine o7′ suddenly all the pupils are here, and then at 920, all the kids go downstairs, and we’re half full again. So it’s kind of a wild ride. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the People’s Republic of Cambridge, as it’s sometimes called. And one of my greatest joys and delights there is getting to meet people who have recently become Christians. Now I don’t know how many of you come from parts of this great country that are perhaps more familiar with Christian culture, even if they’re not necessarily always more familiar with the actual gospel. My husband’s from Oklahoma, so you know I’m familiar with this part of America as well. When we got married, people said, “Oh, you made a real American. I was like, “Yes, I did. But I live in Cambridge, where I will frequently meet people who have zero exposure to the gospel whatsoever, and they don’t know the claims of Jesus. They don’t know what offer is on the table for them. And a few years ago, I had the joy of meeting a young woman who had shown up at our church and basically said, “I’m ready to repent and believe and put my trust in Jesus, and I said, “Tell me more. Now, when I met her, her name is Justine. When I met her, she had tried everything. She had tried meditation. She had tried crystals. She had tried drugs. She had tried alcohol. She had tried sleeping with men. She had tried sleeping with women. She had tried yoga. She had tried therapy. She had tried medications. She had tried every kind of like ceremony, like neo-pagan thing that you can think of, and she had tattoos all over her body from the various stages and phases that she had been through. And even though she had grown up in with a mum who had some sort of exposure to church and some experience with church, she didn’t really know the claims of Jesus. And and one day when she was 19 and studying abroad in Madrid, funnily enough, she clicked on a beauty YouTuber’s video. Now, at the time when she was telling me this, I didn’t know what a beauty YouTuber was. It’s pretty obvious I don’t follow any beauty YouTubers, but some of you guys might know it’s like people you follow for makeup and beauty tips. And my friend Justina clicked on this beauty YouTuber’s video, and instead of sharing makeup tips, this woman had shared how Jesus had saved her from an eating disorder. And Justine was so moved by the message of the gospel that she heard that she just crumpled into tears in this little dorm room in Madrid. And she Googled local English-speaking churches, and she found a Southern Baptist church in Madrid. I mean, Southern Baptists just get everywhere, right? You just can’t can’t get rid of them. I should go to a Southern Baptist church in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. That’s a whole other story. And so she she started going to this church, but after a few weeks, her her boyfriend at the time and several members of her family and her friends were saying, “What are you doing? You can’t be a Christian. This is this is ridiculous. What Christians believe is is is stupid and deluded and harmful and bigoted. And after a few weeks at this church, Justine decided, you know what? Maybe they’re right. But she remembered one of the last sermons that she heard at this little Southern Baptist church in Madrid. The pastor had told the people there, I want you to go home, and I want you to ask God, show me how much I need you. And so Justine had gone back to her little dorm room, and she she sort of prayed, Lord, show me how much I need you, and then she’d kind of not really thought anything else of it.

Rebecca McLaughlin
She moved back to Boston after a series of difficult situations with young men, she decided that maybe the answer to her problems was that she must be a lesbian, and so she, she she put it cut all her hair off, changed her dating profile to explicitly dating women, covered her body in sort of tattoos of of naked ladies, and and thought you know maybe maybe this will will offer me the the piece that I’ve been looking for. Maybe this will sort of solve the restlessness of my soul. But after several months of that, she realized no, this this actually isn’t the answer either. And in in all of this time, she hadn’t quite been able to put Jesus out of her mind, and she continued listening to podcasts and reading books. She actually read the first half of my friend Rachel Gilson’s amazing book, *Born Again This Way: Coming Out, Coming to Faith, and What Comes Next* on her Kindle, and then she’d been so angry that she deleted it because she was like, “I don’t, I don’t want to repent. I don’t, I don’t want, and I don’t want anybody to see that I have this on my Kindle because it’s embarrassing. But but eventually she came to the end of her resources, and she decided, you know what? I think maybe Jesus is the answer after all. Friends, I don’t know about each of you individually. I don’t know your your stories. I don’t know the backgrounds you come from. I don’t know the the people in your lives. But my guess is that that wherever you you come from in the U.S. or abroad. Whatever your your life situation is right now, you have some realization of the fact that currently we are living through a mental health crisis. This is a crisis that is impacting people across all demographics, but it is a crisis that has especially impacted what I think Americans call Gen Z, we Brits call Gen Z women, so so young women who who have are now in their their 20s or or in their their teens. This demographic is suffering one of the worst sort of mental health crises, probably the worst mental health crisis we’ve we’ve ever seen. In 2021, for example, almost a third of teenage girls reported that they had seriously considered suicide, up from 21% a decade earlier, and actually twice the rate of boys. So our culture right now has a mental health crisis, and if you were to Google right now, you know top 10 tips for improving your mental and physical health. My guess is that they would read something like this: Number one, exercise. Number two, eat more healthy foods. Number three, yoga, meditation, etc. etc. etc. Right? You would find certain sort of physical health practices, and you would find some kind of Eastern adjacent spiritual practices that would be be sold to you and and to me as the solve for our mental health crisis. What you almost certainly wouldn’t find on that list is go to church. But in actual fact, if you look at the data and the evidence generated not by sort of random Christian speakers like me, but by people at places like the Harvard School of Public Health. You will find that going to church once a week or more is one of the absolute best things that you or I could do for our mental and physical health. In fact, there’s a professor named Tyler Vanderville who’s at Harvard School of Public Health, he’s a he’s an extraordinary intelligent guy, and he even has like tortoiseshell spectacles, like like he looks like an academic as well as like you know it sort of looks right on the outside and is right on the inside, and he leads a whole team at the Harvard School of Public Health looking at the mental and physical health benefits of regular religious participation-you know what people call organized religion-which has become a sort of dirty word in our culture. And a few years ago, he wrote an article for USA Today, which began like this: If one could conceive of a single Alexia designed to improve the mental and physical health of millions of Americans at no personal cost, what value would our society place on it?

Rebecca McLaughlin
And he went on to enumerate the mental and physical health benefits of going to church once a week or more. So, in our short time this afternoon, I want to talk through some of the mental health benefits of going to church, some of the physical health benefits of going to church, and then, of course, sort of most importantly, the spiritual health benefits of going to church, but my hope is that as you leave this afternoon and a little bit after our Q and A as well, you’ll be freshly encouraged by the the the reality that what your and my friends and family members and neighbors and colleagues who do not go to church, what they most desperately need is first and foremost Jesus, and secondly his people. And that contrary to popular belief, rather than organized religion and specifically in the form of Christianity being probably detrimental to your mental health, then in fact it’s it’s about the best mental health and physical health intervention in town. So number one, let’s let’s talk about the the mental health benefits. And I want to be careful as as I even start to talk about this because I want to be really clear that it is not the case. And there’ll be people in this room who know this from personal experience. It is not the case that if you go to church once a week or more. If you truly, in your heart, believe in Jesus, if you study His Word, if you pray, etc. etc. that you will not struggle with depression. Right? I have I have dear Christian friends who are profoundly faithful followers of Jesus, and who struggle with depression, with anxiety, with bipolar disorder. To be very clear, I am not saying that all our mental health problems are going to be solved by going to church. However, if you look at the the evidence, if you look at sort of the large data sets for the impact of regular religious participation on our mental health, one of the things you’ll find is that people who go to church once a week or more are 33% less likely to become depressed than people who do not. And in fact, if you are depressed, then you are more likely to recover from depression if you continue to go to church, or if you start going to church. Now, again, I want to be careful to to. Be clear about the the data when it comes to these questions. So the mental health benefits are exceedingly impressive. Most of the the studies are not done exclusively on on Christian religious services, right? They they tend to include all all forms of religious services. So perhaps a friend goes to a Jewish religious service once a week or more. Those those folks are included in these studies, and it’s not. It hasn’t been shown that Christianity has a sort of different league effect from other religious participation. But it does seem to be the case that regularly worshiping, like it being a specifically religious service, is important. It is not just the sort of social impact of going to the same place once a week and doing a shared activity with a bunch of people. So, for example, if you went to the golf club once a week or more, turns out that kind of social support accounts for only about a third of the effect. So, sort of significant, pretty dramatic mental health benefit of going to church once a week or more, and again, notice that it’s going to church once a week or more. It’s not the kind of, well, every month or so I go to church. Actually, for for the the benefits that we we see through these sort of large scale studies, it’s from the very regular religious participation, not the kind of more sporadic or occasional or kind of every now and then. If we look at again, I sort of want to be sensitive as I even bring up these these issues because there’ll be people in this room who have struggled with suicidal ideation. There’ll be people in this room who have lost loved ones to suicide or to alcoholism or to drug abuse.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And again, I don’t want to oversimplify any of these things, but but people who go to church once a week or more are 50% less likely to die what the experts call deaths of despair. So that’s from suicide, drug use, or alcoholism. And it’s actually quite interesting if you if you look at the the gendered effect of this, because I think, especially in our particular cultural moment, there’s this impression that Christianity is, you know, probably bad for your mental health in general, but especially bad for women, right? You know, the the kinds of stereotypes people have about how Christians view women make it make it seem to many that Christianity will be harmful for people in general, but for women in particular. And in fact, one one of the the sad things that we’ve seen in recent years is probably for the first time in kind of recorded history that fewer women are going to church. That there’s more of kind of exodus of women from church than men. But if we look at this this data around deaths of despair, so due to suicide, alcohol, or drug abuse, women who go to church once a week or more are 68% less likely to die from those causes versus women who never go. Men, it’s about 33% less likely to. So still a very significant effect, but actually, even going to church is even better for women than it is for men, according according to the data there. And if you were to compare some of these effects with some of the medications that you might get offered if you went to the doctor and said, “I’m struggling with depression. Can you prescribe me something? I mean, going to church actually looks exceedingly good compared to compared to many of the medications that are on offer in our in our hurting world, in our neighborhoods where people are often lonely, where people are struggling with their their mental health like honestly never before, and desperate for the next kind of mental health hack that will help them. Why don’t we get out there and at least expose them to the evidence that going to church might actually be the mental health intervention that they’re looking for? So, so, so number one, church is is meaningfully good for your and my mental health. Number two, and this is almost bizarre. I mean, this is the mental health thing. I’m like, okay, I’m glad to hear that data, but it’s not surprising in some ways, right? It’s sort of somewhat intuitive. Like, I feel like I need church on a Sunday, like a druggie needs her mets, right? I’m like, I, I just, I don’t do so well if I if I miss church on a Sunday, and that’s very rare that that I would would even do so, but it turns out there are significant physical health benefits to going to church. So, so for example, I don’t know how you feel about fruits and vegetables, but going to church once a week or more is similarly good for you as eating more fruits and vegetables. So, if you hate broccoli, then you know you go to church, right? Going to church is almost as good for you as starting to exercise or quitting smoking. So if you’re lazy or you really like smoking, then you’re not at least go to church, like balance it out. In fact, I’ve got to tell you, just this is only silly, but my friend Justine, one of my my favorite ever anecdotes from her, was yeah a few months after she had become a Christian. She had previously vaped. You know, amongst all the other things that she was doing, she was also vaping because you know she’s a Gen Z girl, and which Gen Z girls don’t vape? Probably none of you, but you know it’s a thing. And her dad walked into into her room one day, and he saw these little sort of neon colored things on the floor of her room, and he was like, “Justine, are you vaping again? And she said, “No, Dad, those are my Bible highlighters. They’re the best thing you’ve ever heard. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, physical health. Oh, yeah. So if you want to keep smoking, I’m not saying I recommend it, but like at least go to church. You know, balance balance it out.

Rebecca McLaughlin
If you’re 40 or over, you will know that it is strongly recommended you have an annual mammogram. Turns out, going to church once a week or more is equivalently like protective of your health as a mammogram. Again, I’m not saying don’t get your mammogram, go to church, but I am saying, guys, like this is serious stuff, right? People who go to church once a week or more when they’re 20 live on average seven years longer than people who don’t. I mean, some of this is just wild. I mean, forget yoga. Like, come to church, right? So the significant physical health benefits of church are really well documented at this point. And again, as we look at both of these things together-sort of mental health benefits and the physical health benefits-we’re living in the midst, actually, of a public health crisis that has been driven by what has sometimes been called the great dechurching. So the fact that over the last 25 years, millions of Americans have stopped going to church, often not really kind of fully meaning to, but doing what’s called kind of casual dechurching of moving to a new place and not finding a new church, or having a life change and and somehow getting out of the habit of going to church. There’s actually far fewer people than we might think, kind of slamming the door on church and saying, “I hate this place. I never want to come back. And a lot of people who’ve just kind of accidentally, somewhat exited church. And you know what is extraordinary is how many of those people, and how many of people like my young friend Justine, who didn’t have a church exposure before, would come if we invited them. So I’d love you guys to see this as sort of one tool in your toolbox for just extending that invitation to the people in your lives, and before we we talk about the the spiritual health benefits of the church, I just wanted to share a a poignant moment I had just a few weeks ago with a young man who I know through the coffee shop where I regularly do my writing, and he I’ve known him for for several years. He’s also in the UK, he identifies as gay, and he had zero kind of church exposure whatsoever. Like literally, he had only been to church for weddings. And for the for the last few years, I sort of been praying for him because he’s somebody I’d kind of see regularly, and and I’d been you know every time I’d like write a little book because I often write in the coffee shop, and then I’d sort of give my little evangelistic books to my coffee shop buddies, and and he would receive the book politely in a way that indicated he was definitely not going to read it. But thanks very much. And we then a few months ago, it turns out he had a Christian roommate. He’d actually got really curious about church because he was realizing that actually what his roommate had were many of the things that he desperately wanted in terms of community, and hope, and meaning, and purpose, and all the things, and he said to me, “I don’t know why my friend never invited me to church before, and I thought to myself, “I know exactly why he didn’t, and it came home to me that probably there are many people in your life and mine who we have just dismissed from the list because of one way or other of how they have how they identify. Because in one demographic sense or other, we don’t think it’s likely that they would want to come to church with us, and we just need to stop doing that. I think another young woman, a dear in in my life, especially right now, hanging out with my kids, grew up in a Jewish home in California, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts a few years ago for her first job. You know, did an undergrad at Stanford, Gen Z girl. Like again, in multiple demographic senses, you would not think, oh, this is somebody who would respond to an invitation to church. But we literally went like knocking on doors in the neighborhood, inviting people to church one Christmas, and she came, and she’s been engaging with the gospel with us ever since.

Rebecca McLaughlin
She’s still trying to figure out what she believes between Judaism and Christianity and all the things, but just again, like somebody who could easily have been dismissed as oh no, she’s from a different religious background. She’s you know, got a very fancy education. She is in a generational demographic that would not typically be associated with church, so we’re just not going to invite her. Or if you think even about young Justine a few years ago, you know, when she was identifying as a lesbian, when she was on. Various substances and presenting in ways that you would not have thought. Oh, here’s a young woman who, if I invited her to church, she would definitely want to come. And yet, she had a deep and desperate hunger in her heart that was only going to be met in the Lord Jesus. So let’s think finally before we do some Q and A about the the spiritual health benefits of church, and this is probably going to be very obvious to many people in this room. But I think it’s always worth us, even for ourselves, rehearsing and remembering what Jesus said when he was being criticized for hanging out with the kind of people who don’t belong in church. Right? When the Pharisees were saying, “What is your rabbi doing, having dinner with these tax collectors and sinners, this riffraff. What is he up to? And what did Jesus say? It’s not the healthy who need a doctor; it’s the sick. I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Going to church once a week or more is not going to solve your spiritual health crisis or mine. Only Jesus can do that. You know, tragically, we could go to church once a week or more for our entire lives, and if we don’t actually put our trust in Jesus, it’s gained us nothing, but I think it can be really easy for those of us who do go to church once a week or more to forget that we are also in that category of sinners who desperately needed Jesus, who desperately need Jesus. It’s easy for us, actually, almost parallel to those who’ve casually dechurched, it can be easy for us to sort of casually Pharisaify, if that’s a word. I just made it up, so it isn’t. But you know what I mean. It’s easy for us to get into the position of thinking, okay, I’m in the category of people who don’t need the great physician. Like those people over there, they’re the sick ones who need the doctor. I’m fine. I’m great. I’m good. Maybe it’s just me. It’s easy for me to sort of slip into that mindset, and to forget that it’s actually me as much as the person on my street or in my neighborhood who looks most lost and far from Jesus. I’m desperately in need of of Jesus’s forgiveness every day. Friends, as we look around our neighborhoods, as we look around our families, as we look around our workplaces, as as we look at our our colleagues and our fellow students and our parents and our grandparents and our children and our grandchildren, we have the opportunity to extend to them the hope of the gospel. They may never have heard this gospel message before. They may never have been at a point in their life where they were so desperate they were ready to receive it before. But we could be the ones to extend it to them. I don’t know how encouraged or discouraged you are feeling in your evangelism, either individually or in your local church. But I think it’s it’s easy for us to feel like, as my friend Glenn Scrivener puts it, you know, how’s your evangelism like hit or miss, but mostly miss. Right? It’s easy for us to feel like, oh well, that means we’re doing something wrong, or this doesn’t work, or there’s there’s you know we need some sort of new strategy. But but in reality, when we look at the New Testament, that’s what we see. You know, we see Jesus’ parable of the sow. His sow is going out and he’s throwing his seed all over the place, and most of the seed is falling in places that aren’t responsive, or are sort of quickly responsive and then falling apart.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And yet, the Lord of the Harvest is going to bring this extraordinary harvest from the people who is calling, and we cannot tell who those people are. We just-it’s just our job to be throwing out the seed hither and thither at every opportunity that we have. My friend Justice Seed is actually here at this conference this week. It’s not a weekend. What is it? Today and tomorrow. Thank, thank you, Thursday. It’s a long weekend. I’m calling it. I’m calling it that. And it’s been one of my great joys over the last several years to get to see her move from darkness to extraordinary light, and to get to see some other young people in our in our community either come to church for the first time or come back to church after many years of being away, and I want to end actually with an encouragement to those of us in the room who are at the kind of mammogram annual mammogram phase of life. Let’s call it okay. If you like me, identify as a middle-aged woman or more, I want to encourage you guys in particular, because there’s a cultural narrative out there that says as we women get older, we become less and less relevant. In reality, I actually think as we get older, in some ways, we become more and more useful in the church, and let me tell you a couple of reasons why that’s the case. Number one, the the rising generation of young women is desperate for maternal love. Actually, like the the number of young women who, in my life, I’m just sort of privileged to to get to be there for, to feed a meal to, to give a hug to, to give the advice to that they need, just to be a kind of sounding board for them and to give them kind of spiritual encouragement and and and love and nurture. That that’s a calling for all of us who are in a sort of parental phase of life, whether we have biological children or not. It’s actually completely irrelevant whether you have biological children or not to this to this question. And number two, I want to encourage again those of us who are at the mammogram stage or above, we are we are in some ways uniquely positioned to welcome newcomers at church. Because when somebody comes in new to our church on a Sunday, and this happens basically every week, at least one person kind of walks in off the street. Maybe they’ve never been to church before. Maybe they grew up going to church and haven’t been for years. And how we welcome them is vital to whether they’ll come back again. I can go and sit down next to a 25-year-old girl or a 25-year-old guy, and nobody thinks I’m heading on them. I can go and like I can, I can use my middle-aged woman’s superpowers to welcome basically anybody, and they feel welcomed rather than like creeped upon, I hope anyway. That’s my assumption. So I just want to encourage all of us in this room, actually, that that that we, in our various ways, are going to have unique opportunities to reach people who won’t be reached by others outside the church, and we will have particular opportunities to welcome people within the church, with the kind of welcome that we have received from the Lord Himself, and and there’s a beautiful verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans, which is so full of beautiful verses that it’s almost hard. Like it’s easy to miss this one because there are so many other great ones, but Paul says this: Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you to the glory of God. How did Jesus welcome us? Coming as a human being to die for us, so that we could live with Him forever. I mean, what a welcome has He given to us, and what a welcome can we extend to others?