They’ll Tell You to Get Help. They Won’t Get It Themselves. And the Help They’re Sending You To May Be Making Things Worse.

There is a statistic that has stayed with me.

According to a study by Lifeway Research, approximately 90% of pastors have told someone in their congregation to seek professional counseling. But only about 9% of pastors have ever gone to counseling themselves.

That gap is not a coincidence. It is a symptom.

The Gap Is Real and It Has a Name

Pastors are uniquely trained to see the need in others. You have been formed to be observant, empathetic, discerning. You know what a person looks like when they are carrying more than they can hold. You have made the referral. You have said the words. You have probably sat across from someone and said, “You don’t have to do this alone.”

And then you went home and kept doing it alone.

This is not hypocrisy. It is something more complicated than that. It is a structural problem baked into pastoral identity itself the belief, often unspoken and unexamined, that the person who tends the flock cannot be a sheep.

What Nobody Is Naming

Here is the problem underneath the statistic that almost no one is talking about:

Pastors often don’t go to counseling not because they don’t believe in it — but because the theology of their community has never made space for it.

In many church cultures, there is a working assumption that prayer, Scripture, community, and the Holy Spirit are sufficient for healing. Counseling is seen as a secular tool — something you offer to people whose faith isn’t quite strong enough, or whose problems have moved beyond the reach of the church.

That assumption is rarely stated out loud. But it shapes everything. It shapes whether a pastor feels permission to seek help. It shapes what it means to model faith for their congregation. It shapes the quiet internal calculus that says: if I go to counseling, what does that say about me?

The Fear Behind the Gap

I have talked to a lot of pastors. And when you get past the surface, the reasons they don’t seek help tend to cluster around a few core fears:

Fear of exposure. Who do you talk to when your congregation is your community? What happens if word gets out that you’re struggling? The pastor is always being watched. And that visibility creates a kind of loneliness that is hard to describe — you are surrounded by people and yet utterly alone with your actual interior life.

Fear of losing authority. There is a subtle but powerful belief that emotional struggle signals spiritual weakness. If the congregation senses that the pastor is not okay, will they still trust him to lead? Will the elders start asking questions? The stakes feel too high to risk being honest.

Fear of what they’ll find. Sometimes the reason a person avoids counseling is not that they don’t think it would help. It’s that they’re afraid of what it might surface. Years of unprocessed grief. Patterns they’ve built their ministry around. A marriage that has been on autopilot for longer than they want to admit.

The Cost of Not Going

Here is what I know from my own story and from walking alongside other ministry leaders: the things we don’t process don’t disappear. They go underground.

Unattended pain leaks. It shows up in how we preach. In how we handle conflict. In how we treat the people closest to us. In how we respond when someone challenges our leadership. In the slow, grinding erosion of the joy we once had for ministry.

A neglected soul will eventually do damage to the souls in its care. Not out of malice but out of depletion.

What It Looks Like to Go First

One of the most powerful things a pastor can do for their congregation is to normalize help-seeking by seeking help themselves.

You don’t have to announce it from the pulpit. But when you have done the work when you have sat with someone and let them help you carry what you’ve been dragging it changes the way you lead. It changes the way you preach on suffering. It changes the way you sit with someone in crisis. You speak from the inside of the experience, not the outside.

That is not weakness. That is the most credible kind of pastoral authority there is.

You Know What You’d Tell Someone Else

If someone sat across from you today and described what you have been carrying the exhaustion, the isolation, the questions you don’t say out loud, the distance you’ve felt from God or your family or yourself you know exactly what you would say to them.

You would tell them to get help.

So here it is, said directly to you: you don’t have to keep being the exception to your own best advice.