WASHINGTON (RNS) — Below the sparkling chandeliers of the Museum of the Bible’s ballroom, the murmurs of fervent prayers for mental health healing rose above the sound of plucked guitar strings.
Those prayers, uttered by a national gathering of Latino evangelical pastors on Tuesday (Oct. 15), will be backed by a new mental health initiative launched by the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference’s Center for Ministerial Health.
“This is NHCLC 2.0,” the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the organization’s president, told RNS. The Center for Ministerial Health is the first of three new centers that will form a new structure for the Hispanic network of thousands of evangelical congregations, many of them Pentecostal or charismatic.
At next year’s leadership summit, the organization plans to launch the Center for Public Policy, which will be based in Washington, D.C., and then a year later, it plans to debut the Center for Kingdom Collaboration, with a focus on uniting different Christian organizations.
Plans for the new centers emerged as NHCLC’s leaders gathered for prayer. “We heard this in our prayer time and in our conversations with Heaven about what’s the future for the movement,” Rodriguez said.
The focus on health was revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic. “COVID exposed vulnerabilities,” said Rodriguez, explaining that NHCLC had seen pastors leaving ministry and struggling with suicidal ideation. “It broke our hearts,” he said.
Pastor Reina Olmeda, who is directing the mental health initiative, told attendees she was hesitant to share vulnerably while doing her graduate work in psychology.
“Something inside me said, I want to do this, but my culture was speaking louder,” Olmeda said, later telling RNS that Latino communities face both cultural pressures not to disappoint their families and stigma based on ideas that mental health struggles are a sign of spiritual failure.
But the Holy Spirit was working on her, Olmeda said, and eventually she spoke about her emotions.
“That moment, I broke something for the next generation, for my daughters,” Olmeda thundered, switching to Spanish. “When I spoke, I said, my daughters will not have to battle to say how they feel.
“Embracing vulnerability allows the Holy Spirit to communicate with us, and it is through the work of the Holy Spirit that we find healing.” She said, “Jesus was a great example of vulnerability…If Jesus could do this, why can we not? Why do we have to hide?”
From left, translator Rigo Mendez, and megachurch pastors Obed Martinez, Chali Martinez, David Scarpeta, Jason Lozano, Josiah Silva, Samuel Rodriguez gather on stage during the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which was held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
NHCLC is providing various trainings for pastors to learn about their own mental health and to provide preventative care for the stressors that their communities confront. They’re also preparing sermon outlines, group session guides, a webinar and a masterclass for Mental Health Awareness Month in May.
Pastor Yudy Nina from Comunidad de Fe Church in Tampa, Florida, decided to accompany her husband to the summit because of the focus on mental health.
“This is a need that the church has, a huge need,” said Nina, who is currently studying for a master’s degree in pastoral care and Christian counseling. She sees her own community struggle with a mental health stigma that has been passed down through generations.
Olmeda said the mental health initiative was sparked at last year’s leadership summit, when her 20-minute planned presentation on pastors and mental health stretched to about an hour as pastors asked more and more questions.
“There is this desperate need to talk about this, and I think that they felt, okay, this is our permission to do this, almost like these boundaries were taken off,” she said.
The mental health initiative is just one branch of the Center for Ministerial Health, which will also focus on financial health, spiritual health, relational health and physical health.
Olmeda’s husband, the Rev. Charles Olmeda, will lead the financial health initiative at the center’s Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, headquarters, just about 20 minutes from the couple’s Transformation Church. Bethlehem is also Rodriguez’s hometown.
The NHCLC has released a survey of leaders representing more than 1,600 churches that found that 82% of pastors reported having debt that caused them stress; the same percentage said they needed a second source of income. About a quarter (73%) had incomes of less than $50,000 per year.
More than half of pastors (60%) said their financial situation was distracting them from their mission.
Through the financial health initiative, the NHCLC plans to provide financial literacy for pastors, with a focus on basic skills like budgeting, preparing for retirement and investing that can help in both their personal lives and their churches.
The NHCLC is also offering $2,500 matching grants of financial relief to member pastors who attend financial counseling. Those funds can be used to pay off debt, build an emergency fund or save for retirement.
The goal, Rodriguez said, is to help more NHCLC pastors transition from bivocational to full-time ministry.
The Lilly Endowment Inc. is providing financial support for the financial health initiative, and Rodriguez told the pastors gathered that the mental health initiative was the only one that had not received outside grant funding.
Rodriguez shared with attendees the NHCLC’s goal to raise $350,000 dollars to properly support the mental health initiative, and later in the event celebrated that over $8,000 had been raised that day. He also said he was donating the proceeds of his new book, “Fresh Oil, Holy Fire, New Wine,” to the mental health initiative.
Rodriguez told RNS that this year’s gathering was historic because of the critical mass of U.S. Latino megachurch pastors who had shown up.
In a devotional at the beginning of the gathering, David Scarpeta, the Spanish lead pastor for Grace Church, a Houston megachurch, urged pastors to be collaborators and not competitors.
Attendees pray during the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference hosted at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)
“Comparison is an enemy of service. In places like this, our tendency is to compare ourselves,” Scarpeta said in Spanish.
Later in the day, Scarpeta joined a panel of four other megachurch pastors to speak about their churches’ successes. The pastors urged other attendees to remove bureaucracy, to seek mentorship and innovation and to focus on unbelievers.
Josiah Silva, lead pastor of Freedomhouse Church in Orange County, California, which has more than 1,000 weekly attenders, spoke about his church’s recent purchase of a former Walmart next to Disneyland in the center of Anaheim.
“We’re not called just to make bricks for Pharaoh. We’re called to own land,” he said. “We’re not just going to be the ones that are here to clean America. We’re here to own as well,” Silva said to cheers.
Silva told RNS it was important to him to come to Washington for the summit, “to help empower the Latin church in America. A lot of times we’re underserved, looking for support, and the NHCLC has been that for us.”
Even with the presidential election fast approaching — NHCLC leaders expressed support for former President Donald Trump — the election was a minor issue on the main stage of the event.
The tables included voter guides that were created by a coalition between the NHCLC, the Job Creators Network Foundation and Bienvenido highlighting Republican alignment with various evangelical priorities. Issues where NHCLC leadership has historically disagreed with Republicans, like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, were not highlighted.
While the majority (57%) of Latino registered voters say they plan to support Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential contest, 65% of Latino Protestants say they plan to vote for Republican former President Donald Trump.
From the stage, pastors heard from a representative of iVoterGuide, who runs a website “informing and mobilizing voters with biblical values,” and Robert Stearns of Eagles’ Wings, a Christian organization supporting Israel.
Stearns urged pastors to sign a declaration named after Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who opposed Adolf Hitler and was hung by the Nazis, which includes commitments to speak against antisemitism, to advocate “for the security and wellbeing of Israel, as well as a ‘future and a hope’ for the Palestinian people” and criticized protests that have condemned Israel rather than Hamas. He also announced that his organization plans to take 30 NHCLC pastors to Israel in February.
“That giant of antisemitism will come down en el nombre de Jesús,” or “in the name of Jesus,” said the Rev. Tony Suarez, the vice president of the NHCLC.
Religion News Service receives funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. through the Religion News Foundation.