Outside the walls of Impacting Love Global Ministries are the snow-dusted streets in Lackawanna.
Inside, the church offered a warm refuge for parishioners as Minister Kelly Wofford reading from the Gospel of Matthew.
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in,” Wofford said. “What you did for the least of these, my brethren you did for me.”
For decades, black churches like Impact Love Global Ministries have helped the sick and have had success in address health disparities between White Americans and Black Americans, disparities that have historic roots.
More than 120 years ago W.E.B. Du Bois conducted the first sociological study of a black community in the U.S. and documented his findings in the book “The Philadelphia Negro.”
That was the first analysis of health disparities between blacks and whites in the nation’s history — those disparities still exist including in mental and behavioral health care.
Approximately 30 percent of African Americans with a mental illness receive treatment compared to 43 percent of the total population of people with mental illness, according to the 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
Church-based health promotion programs across the country have been successful in addressing barriers to healthcare and connect their parishioners to services.
Research shows that those programs have successfully addressed disparities in cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Few of these programs addressed mental health care, according to “Church-Based Health Programs for Mental Disorders among African Americans: A Review.”
"If a person has a physical problem, they have to have a surgery or what have you. They're really apt to come and talk to their pastor, right to say, ‘you know, can you pray for me I’m going into surgery tomorrow,’” said Pastor George Nicholas of Lincoln Memorial United Methodist. “But when it comes to mental health, a lot of people are silently suffering, right?"
Churches across Erie County — from Lincoln Memorial United Methodist in Buffalo to Impacting Love Global Ministries in Lackawanna — are talking about mental health from the pulpit.
"When we talk about mental health and why it's important to address mental health in the church, [because] that's where children are being raised, that's why grandparents are there taking care of grandchildren, that is the basis of many relationships,” Wofford said. “It's a tie that binds people together."
These churches are addressing mental health in their sermons, at workgroups and by connecting people to community resources.
"You'll hear some of the conversations that we have about specific illnesses like depression or anxiety, grief management, and they'll come out in the sermon in a way that it is not accusatory, but in a way that people feel and understand that it's okay for them to be where they are, and that this is a safe place for them," she said.
Wofford said her struggles with mental health help others talk about something that is still highly stigmatized.
"I readily share my experiences with depression and suicide attempts and day-to-day life and in addressing that through faith, so that people are comfortable speaking to me," she said.
Wofford is trained in mental health first aid and is a peer support group specialist through New York State. That training helps her understand issues that reside beneath everyday conversations like how words like hopelessness or despair are signs that something deeper is going on.
"Most of the conversation that I've had with people as it relates to faith and their health is they're okay when it comes to prayer, they're okay on Sunday. They love service,” Wofford said. “But it's ‘how am I supposed to live from Sunday afternoon to the next Sunday morning?’"
The programs to address mental health and behavioral health issues at the churches are helping parishioners to just that.
Apostle Garney Davis Jr., who heads Impacting Love Global Ministry, says that openness and vulnerability allow the message to be received.
"We will change the culture so that no one will be discriminated against regarding mental health regarding any type of sickness, disease or infirmity,” he said.
That change of culture is underway in Western New York.
Both churches will have representatives at a public event called Mental Health in the Black Church at Lincoln Memorial United Methodist on May 7.
The Mental Health Coalition of the African American Health Equity Task Force will host the event to train religious leaders in better addressing mental health disparities.
"I believe that the church exists for the community, for the people. And so when the people come, it must be a refuge, it must be a safe place," Davis Jr. said.