In December 2024, days before his 70th birthday, Denzel Washington walked up the aisle at Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ in Harlem, got baptized by full immersion, and received his minister's license. The license is the step before ordination. He is studying for it. His late father was a Pentecostal minister.
The room was full of family. The video clip of the baptism circulated for weeks. The thing it surfaced for a lot of Black readers was not theology. It was the recognition that the institution Washington just stepped into is also the institution mental-health researchers have spent the last decade trying to figure out how to work with.
Black adults are half as likely to be screened for depression in primary-care settings than white adults. The numbers come from the Hankerson lab at Mount Sinai, working in 30 Black churches in New York City under an NIMH-funded trial called TRIUMPH (PMID 35101100). The same lab found that 20 percent of Black adults in those churches screened positive for depression on the standard PHQ-9. The gap between where Black men carry depression and where the medical system catches it is the gap Washington's pulpit sits inside.
Why the church is the lever
The cleanest peer-reviewed framing is Sidney Hankerson and Myrna Weissman's 2012 review in Psychiatric Services (PMID 22388529). Their starting fact: African Americans use traditional mental-health services at lower rates than white Americans, and the gap has been stable for decades. Their proposal: meet people where they already gather. For Black adults across most US metros, that gathering happens at church before it happens at a clinic.
The trust gap is not abstract. It traces through documented Black experience with the medical system. Tuskegee. Henrietta Lacks. The 18-percentage-point treatment-receipt gap between Black and white adults with mental illness that NIMH has been publishing every year. The Hoffman 2016 finding that medical trainees believe Black bodies feel less pain than white bodies. Black adults walk into a doctor's office carrying every one of those.
Black adults walk into a Black church carrying something different. The trust has been built across generations. The pastor's name is known. The room is friends. The risk of the doctor's office, that what you say will get used against you or written into a chart that follows you, is not the risk of the church, where what you say is held in a different kind of confidence.
This is the lever. Washington's minister's license sits on top of it.
What the trial-stage evidence shows
Hankerson's TRIUMPH trial is the largest test of the church-as-screening-site model so far. The design is straightforward. Train community health workers, who are themselves church members, in the SBIRT protocol: Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment. Have them administer the PHQ-9 to congregants who consent. For positive screens, do a brief motivational-interviewing session and refer to a clinician.
The headline from the preliminary work, before the full trial: when researchers tried referring positive screens directly, almost zero of those people actually went to the clinician. When trained community health workers from inside the church did the referral, the uptake jumped. The trust pathway is not a soft variable. It is the whole intervention.
The full RCT is enrolling 600 congregants across 30 churches. Primary outcome is treatment engagement: did the person actually attend a depression-related clinical visit. The secondary outcomes are PHQ-9 score change at 3 and 6 months. Results are still being reported through 2025-2026.
The model is replicable. The work is not specific to New York. The community-health-worker-from-the-church piece is the part most-likely to scale.
Where Washington's voice fits
Public-health messaging on Black-men's mental health has had two lanes for a decade. Lane one is the disclosure lane: a public figure says they have depression, the conversation moves a little, the policy sometimes follows. DeMar DeRozan in 2018 is the model and it worked. Lane two is the institutional lane: faith-based programs, community-health-worker training, screening at non-medical venues.
Washington at the pulpit is lane two. Not because he has disclosed a mental-health diagnosis. He has not. Because the role of pastor in a Black church is the role researchers have spent ten years figuring out how to partner with. A pastor with credibility, a willingness to be trained on referral pathways, and a relationship with congregants is the operational unit Hankerson's work has identified as the lever.
Washington has not framed his ordination path in mental-health terms. He has framed it in faith and family terms. That is fine. The mental-health work in this lane does not require the messenger to be a clinician. It requires the messenger to be trusted, available, and willing to point people to care. The Hankerson model assumes the pastor is none of those things at the start of the partnership and then does the work to make them all three. Washington is starting in a different position.
How to follow his work
Washington's public posture on the ministry path is documented across his late-2024 and early-2025 press tour for Gladiator II. The most-quoted line from his Esquire UK interview around the baptism: "I've been protected. I've been blessed. It took me a while to know how blessed I was."
Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ is in Harlem at 10 East 130th Street. Public services are listed on the church's site. Bishop J. Drew Sheard is presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ denomination, which is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US and is predominantly Black.
Washington has not announced a public-health initiative tied to the ordination path. The work he is most-publicly tied to remains the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, where he has been a national spokesperson for decades.
What you can take from this
Three concrete moves.
First, if you are a Black adult who is part of a church and you have been carrying anxiety or depression symptoms you have not addressed, the church is a real first stop. Tell your pastor. Ask whether the church has a relationship with a mental-health clinician or a mental-health-trained lay leader. If the answer is no, ask whether the leadership would be open to one. The Hankerson team's open-source training materials for church-based community health workers are listed at triumph.mssm.edu.
Second, if you are a Black man who is not part of a church and the medical system feels closed off, the trust pathway research applies even when the church is not in the picture. A Black therapist who comes recommended by someone you know is the closest substitute for the from-inside-the-church referral. Our piece on finding a Black therapist covers the directories and the first-session questions. The Black Health provider directory covers primary-care clinicians too.
Third, if you are a pastor, ministry leader, or board member at a Black church, the operational template is in the literature. The TRIUMPH protocol is published. The Hankerson lab takes calls from churches that want to set up community-health-worker training. The barrier to running a screen-and-refer program in your congregation is lower than most leaders assume. The infrastructure to support it is already built.
Citations
Hankerson SH, Weissman MM. Church-based health programs for mental disorders among African Americans: a review. Psychiatr Serv. 2012;63(3):243-249. PMID 22388529.
Hankerson SH, Shelton R, Weissman M, et al. Study protocol for comparing Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) to referral as usual for depression in African American churches. Trials. 2022;23(1):93. PMID 35101100.
National Institute of Mental Health. Mental Illness Statistics: Treatment Receipt by Race/Ethnicity (2022). nimh.nih.gov.
Malik Johnson is a senior staff writer covering Black health. Send tips to malik@blackhealth.org.
