An Unexpected Way to Improve Your Health

If you google “Top Ten Mental Health Hacks” or “Best Ways to Boost Your Physical Health,” you’ll read about prioritizing sleep, the benefits of exercise, eating more fruits and vegetables, and not smoking, taking drugs, or drinking too much alcohol. You may hear it’s good for you to spend less time online and more time face to face with real people. You might be encouraged to do yoga or to practice meditation. What you almost certainly won’t hear is that weekly church attendance is one of the very best things you can do for both your body and your mind. But that’s what researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have found. In fact, they have discovered that going to church can add multiple years to your life.

1. Physical Health Benefits

Church attendance once a week or more is linked with a 20 to 30 percent lower likelihood of dying in the next fifteen years. Those who attend religious services each week when they are twenty years old live, on average, seven years longer than those who never attend. Weekly church is as good for your health as eating more fruits and vegetables, or (if you’re a woman over forty) having yearly mammograms. It’s almost as good for you as quitting smoking or starting to exercise! What’s more, if you start attending church, you’re much more likely to be able to quit smoking if you have that habit. These positive effects are not just because healthy people are more likely to attend church than those who are already sick. Researchers have controlled for baseline health and still found a significant effect. So, if you want to boost your health and add years to your life, why not try church?



2. Mental Health Benefits

When it comes to mental health, the benefits of regular religious services are also striking. In America, church-attending adults are 11 percent more likely to describe themselves as “very happy” than their nonchurchgoing peers. While the most faithful church attenders can and do experience depression, people who go to church each week are 33 percent less likely to get depressed, and substantially more likely to recover from depression than their non-service-attending peers. What’s more, if nonchurchgoers who struggle with depression start attending, they are also more likely to recover. Kids who go to church weekly are less likely to get depressed or take illegal drugs and more likely to become happy, healthy adults.

Tragically, as church attendance has declined in recent years, the number of people dying deaths of despair—from suicide, drug abuse, or alcohol addiction—has substantially increased. But church can turn that tide. Weekly churchgoers are 50 percent less likely to die from suicide, drugs, or alcohol than people who never attend. So, if you or your children are struggling with mental health or battling addiction, why not join a local church? It could be just what the doctor ordered.

In fact, one of the strange claims Jesus made about himself is that he is the doctor we all need.

3. Spiritual Health Benefits

Regardless of how long, happy, or healthy your life is, the grim reality is that each one of us will die. We can (as it is sometimes put) delay the decay with healthy living. But in the end, our bodies will break down and death will come—regardless of how frequently we exercise, how well we sleep, get health checks, or go to church. One day, a doctor will pronounce us dead. So, what hope can we have when that day comes?

Mark’s Gospel tells a story of a time when Jesus was at dinner with some people the religious leaders of his day thought of as very sinful—total rebels against God. They asked Jesus’s followers, “Why is your teacher eating with sinners?” If Jesus had been sent by God, they thought he’d want to spend his time with good, religious people—righteous people just like them. But Jesus replied, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I haven’t come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). Maybe the religious leaders felt reassured by this. But if they listened to the moral teaching Jesus gave, they would soon have found out that they weren’t righteous after all.

The treatment Jesus offers is a great exchange: his life for ours.

Like a trained physician, Jesus diagnoses all of us—both then and now—with spiritual cancer. We are sinners who will face the wrath of God if we don’t turn to Jesus. But thankfully, this doctor has the treatment we all need. It’s not an operation or a pill or even a prescription that we go to church. The treatment Jesus offers is a great exchange: his life for ours. When he died on a Roman cross 2,000 years ago, he took the punishment each one of us deserves for our rejection of the God who made us. If we put our trust in him, his death will count for us and he will give us a new life—a life that starts now—and will carry us through death to everlasting life with him. The message of the gospel is much more offensive and much more amazing than most people realize.

You could live to 100, build a loving family, make millions, and change the world with some amazing discovery. But if you do not put your life in Jesus’s hands, you’ll find yourself facing God’s judgment on your sin. Or you could die tomorrow, with no money in your bank account, no credits on your resume, no friends or family to mourn your death, and you could walk right into everlasting life with Jesus and his people in a world of joy and love beyond your wildest dreams.

Church could improve your physical and mental health. But if you do not truly put your trust in Jesus, none of that will matter in the end. Church isn’t just a nice thing you could do on Sunday morning. It’s a gathering of sinners who have recognized their spiritual cancer and their need for one doctor who can save them from eternal judgment and give them an everlasting, love-filled life with him. If we go to church just for the physical and mental health hacks, we are missing out on what church really is. But if we go to church to feel good about ourselves—if we are looking down on sinners out there while we pride ourselves on our own righteousness—we’re missing out on what church is as well. In fact, just like the religious leaders who were shocked that Jesus was spending his time with sinners, we’re in the spiritually dangerous state of not seeing our desperate need for Jesus’s salvation.

So, don’t miss out on church. It’s really good for you. But going to church and missing out on Jesus is like going to the ER and just sitting in the waiting room. He is the only doctor who can save us in the end, and all of us need saving. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus declared. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:26–27).

Rebecca McLaughlin is the author of How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life.