Brian dropped by my campus ministry office one day to chat. This was not uncommon as he was one of the students I knew best. He wanted to share about his anxiety, which he had managed to keep hidden during the year and a half I had known him.

Affable and handsome, shy but determined, Brian was well-liked by all of his classmates and professors. Yet he told me about history with anxiety, the medications he had been prescribed in high school, the various triggers he had learned to avoid or cope with. He wasn’t looking for help from me, exactly; he just wanted me to know that he was one of the many young people on our campus who deals with anxiety but had found relief through mental health treatment.

Brian was serious about his faith. He was not angry. He did not feel that Christians had let him down by promising too much. On the contrary, his home church sounded extremely supportive, and his pastor knew to steer clear of the topic—not shaming people with anxiety or promising that the faith would bring relief.

But Brian also didn’t seem particularly hopeful that his identity as a Christian could have anything at all meaningful to say to his experience of anxiety. Perhaps a guest speaker in chapel might speak insensitively about anxiety—Brian knew to simply ignore the speaker. His mental health journey and his faith journey were entirely separate spheres.

I wanted to help Brian through my preaching but wasn’t sure how. Sometimes it seems that pastoral ministry in an age of anxiety is just about staying in our lane, getting out of the way so that mental health professionals can help the anxious person. But I yearn for more.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Wesleyan with a rich tradition of heart-religion, but I believe that when we are talking about moods and dispositions, we are talking about more than a medical reality: somehow, we are talking about the soul, the human person.

How can our pulpit ministry provide more meaningful, tangible support for people who experience anxiety—without repeating the mistakes of previous generations of pastors who simplified and pathologized anxiety, or who promised that Christian maturity meant that anxiety would go away? Here are a few ways.

Preachers can Lift an Anxious Person’s Horizons Beyond Their Own Experience and Into a Larger Story

When people with anxiety seek help for their mental health, one crucial lesson they learn is that their own inner experience is not reality. An anxious person’s world spins awfully quickly. We are in control of so little, and most of us can manage that uncertainty most of the time.

Almost all of us know that awful feeling of lying in bed, worrying about all the things that could go wrong tomorrow. We desperately play through potential scenarios in our head, somehow willing the positive ones to come to fruition; we vainly remember all the embarrassing moments from the previous day that threaten our sense of security tomorrow, replaying embarrassing moments, wishing that somehow by replaying them mentally we could make them turn out differently. This is a familiar feeling for all of us, but for an anxious person it is a consistent—even constant—reality.

When we meet a parishioner with anxiety, our first instinct might be to help correct these damaging patterns. We point out the truth—that worry is fruitless, that replaying the past doesn’t change it, that desperately imagining future outcomes has no positive impact on what those outcomes are and may well negatively impact one’s sense of agency to bring about a positive outcome.

Indeed, some forms of treatment for anxiety have incorporated elements of this re-education. But increasingly treatment has moved away from trying to correct anxious thoughts to putting them in context.

A lot can go wrong when a therapist tries to correct a client’s anxious thoughts. The client likely has already had a lot of significant inner dialogue about their own anxiety—that is, they likely realize in some ways that their anxious ruminations are fruitless, but they have some internal rationalization for why the rumination seems logical or even comforting. If a therapist chooses a frontal assault on those ideas, the therapist should prepare for a lengthy battle where the client clings to those beliefs and feels that the therapist doesn’t understand.

Whether or not a client “should” feel anxious, anxious feelings are normal to have when there is a significant possibility of a negative outcome, and they can have a variety of impacts. Some anxious feelings can even be helpful for us as we prepare for different eventualities, while others are harmful because we waste worry on things that are extremely unlikely to happen, or the worry paralyzes us.

So increasingly mental health professionals are less focused on evaluating the feelings themselves and more focused on setting those feelings in context. “Feelings are only feelings,” the rationale goes, “not binding realities.”

When you find yourself spinning with worry, your goal should not be to eliminate the feelings or argue them away, but to realize that there is a whole objective world outside those feelings. And while you have those feelings, you can take them out of the driver’s seat as it were, and put them in the passenger seat, or the back seat, or the trunk.

Maybe the feelings will get offended at being displaced and get out of the car altogether, maybe not; but that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that you’re aware that you exist in a larger story than your own feelings, and that you can make choices consistent with your values even when your feelings suggest otherwise.

We are accustomed to thinking about our listeners’ felt needs when approaching the pulpit. That’s commendable in lots of ways! But here the strategy can backfire.

When thinking about how to preach to anxious people, we want to have lots of content about anxiety. But paradoxically that content can drive them further into constantly weighing and judging their feelings. This isn’t helpful; it keeps the anxious cycle spinning.

Instead, helpful preaching about anxiety sets our experience in the wider context of God’s work in the world. So, the best preaching for anxious people isn’t about anxiety at all: it’s about the wider story of the gospel, about what God is doing in the world, which sets our own individual experiences—and our feelings about those experiences—in proper context.

Within individual sermons, this means being aware of what people are experiencing but not letting our experience drive the sermon. We should keep sermons focused on God’s action in the text and in the world today, drawing attention to the way that each of us is playing a part in what God is doing. This appropriately relativizes our inner experience within God’s bigger story.

Over the course of weeks and years, celebrating the Christian year and following a Lectionary can be helpful. We can tell people that they should think of themselves as part of a bigger story, but it’s hard for our listeners to get it unless we immerse them in a bigger story.

I am not saying you should observe the Christian year because it’s objectively better to do so—so often, arguments for the Christian year end up sounding elitist. I am simply saying that it becomes much easier to show people that they are part of a bigger story if we are constantly telling a story that is too big to tell in one week.

Similarly, Lectionary preaching demonstrates to our listeners that there is a broader logic to our preaching than simply meeting individual needs or preferences. When anxious people know that we see and validate their experience without catering to it, we are demonstrating that it is also possible for them to experience their feelings without letting them dominate.

Preachers can Help Anxious Listeners in the Way We Interact with the Bible

As preachers, we are not only finding content in the Bible to share with our listeners; we are also modeling a relationship with the Bible that our listeners can learn from. Often our approach to the Bible in preaching is riddled with anxiety.

For example, many of us preach in churches where some of our listeners are divorced; which of course stands in some tension with Jesus’ teaching on the matter. It can be tempting to ignore those passages altogether. Or, on the other hand, it’s also easy to approach those passages with a kind of steely resolve, imagining our listeners’ resistance to evangelical teaching on divorce and taking our cues from the culture warriors.

This is, of course, a false dichotomy. But when our listeners see us treating the Bible in this way, they quite naturally conclude that that is the right way for them to look at the Bible too. If they see us ignoring difficult passages in the Bible, or evidencing discomfort with talking about some of the ways the Bible challenges our cultural sensibilities, they will think they should avoid these passages too.

On the other hand, if they see us using the Bible to club our enemies, always thinking the worst of those who are not like us, they will also conclude that this is what the Bible is really for.

Preachers can—and must—do better, especially for anxious listeners. As people with anxiety are learning to accept their feelings and discover that they can act in ways congruent with their values even when they are feeling anxious, the Bible can be a source of strength for them.

They can learn that the Bible is a trusted guide and friend, and that the Word helps us to discover the heart and will of Jesus for our lives. This can only happen if they learn to approach the Bible with a reverent curiosity and trust that it has something good for them. We preachers can show them what that looks like.

Over the course of seasons and years, that again means preaching the whole scope of the Bible. Whether you choose to submit to the discipline of Lectionary preaching or not, take an honest account of your own biases and be sure you are not only preaching in accordance with them.

Know yourself well enough to know what passages you are tempted to dodge. Don’t shame yourself for this, but try to understand why it seems logical to not talk about these things. What are you afraid may happen? How realistic is that fear really? What does that fear reveal about your own journey with Jesus?

Within a particular sermon, we reveal a healthy relationship with the Bible when we are rigorously faithful to both the text and our listeners. We show that we love our listeners enough to walk right up to the heart of the text with them, and that we know them well enough to know what will be difficult about that journey for them. We long for them to see the beauty we see in the text, and so we take no passive-aggressive delight in those who cannot see it yet, even those who resist it.

So, we speak with clear eyes, to our listeners instead of over or around them. We show them, through our tone and our body language, that we are for them. That does not mean that we never raise our voices or speak sharply; it only means that our delivery and content reveals that we see our listeners, that we understand their concerns, objections and fears, and that we will be with them as we look at the incisive Word of God together.

Preachers Help Anxious Listeners by Learning Essential Information About Anxiety that Reassures Our Listeners that We Know Where They Are Coming From

Multiple times I have heard sermons on Philippians 4:6 (“Be anxious for nothing …”) that imply that anxiety is a choice, or that anxiety is a product of having insufficient faith. This idea immediately primes young people like Brian to believe that the sermon has nothing to say to them, since the preacher has flagrantly contradicted other helpful advice about anxiety, apparently in ignorance. They simply conclude that this message has nothing to do with them—except perhaps in some spiritual sense, safely kept away from the real discussion of their mental health.

Further, these sermons usually don’t treat the biblical witness about anxiety very seriously. Paul himself uses the same Greek word for anxiety (merimna) in 2 Corinthians 11:28, talking about the anxiety he daily feels for all the churches. This anxiety does not appear to abate for Paul—his concern for the churches seems to be part of the care he experiences for the churches that are so dear to him. In fact, merimna is even translated as “care” in 1 Corinthians 12:25 when Paul talks about the sort of sacrificial concern we should have for each other within the church. I have never heard these ideas referenced in a sermon on anxiety.

When we show that we care enough for our listeners to understand the experience of anxiety and the current conversation around mental health, we open doors for our listeners to take us more seriously. This does not always mean deferring to cultural thinking about anxiety; there may well be ways that we need to push back on some cultural wisdom about mental health as we seek to integrate its wisdom into a gospel-centered life.

The fact that we are Christian must mean something as we think about our feelings and moods. But that complicated conversation can only really happen fruitfully when we demonstrate that we understand its contours. Our anxious listeners who have received help from mental health professionals need to know that we understand and value what they have learned, even while we want to think more about the role of our faith in all of this.

In sum, the best preaching for anxious people reassures them that they are seen and loved right where they are. This is deeply incarnational; we step into the experience of anxiety with them by refusing to simplify it for our own convenience. This allows us to imagine with the anxious person how Jesus wants to be with them in their anxiety, and what good may come of it.

When we do this, we are not only helping those with clinical anxiety, but that anxious self that lives in each of us that wonders if anyone really sees, knows, or cares. All of us, in our anxiety, need a word from the Lord—and this kind of preaching paves the way for that word.

J. Michael Jordan is Associate Professor of Theology at Houghton University, where he served as Dean of the Chapel from 2013-2024.