The short version. If you’re a pastor or small-group leader who knows somebody in your congregation is lonely, you don’t need a program — you need one phone number you can hand them. Helping lonely church members can be as small as a card in a coat pocket. We run a free line at 877-638-1122, a real human picks up, and there’s nothing to sign up for.
I’m Landon Myers, one of the founders of How To Beat Loneliness. I live in the United States and I’ve spent most of my career building teams and training people on how to actually talk to other people. When I’m not doing this, I’m usually outside with my family. I’m writing this for the pastor of a small church who already knows who the quiet ones are. Helping lonely church members doesn’t take a new ministry or a budget line — it takes a phone number you trust enough to hand out. This post is the small-town playbook for using ours.
Why pastors are already helping lonely church members
Every small-church pastor I’ve ever talked to can already name the lonely people. The widow who comes Sunday morning and leaves before coffee hour. The retired man who stays in the parking lot ten minutes after the service ends. The mom whose kids just left for college and whose husband travels four nights a week. You know them. That’s not the hard part.
The hard part is what to do about it on a Tuesday afternoon when you have three hospital visits, a sermon to write, and a building-committee email you’ve been avoiding for two days. You care, but you can’t be the person on the other end of the phone for everybody in your congregation who needs somebody to talk to. Nobody can.
That’s exactly the gap we built How To Beat Loneliness to fill. We’re not church and we don’t pretend to be. We’re a phone number. A real human picks up. The call is free. We’re companions, not clinicians and not pastors — we just listen.
What partnership actually looks like (no contract, no email chain)
When I say “partnership” I don’t mean an MOU. I don’t mean a logo on a banner. I don’t mean a quarterly meeting. I mean this: you keep a stack of small cards with our toll-free number on your desk, and when you talk to somebody who needs somebody to call, you hand them a card.
That’s the whole mechanism. Helping lonely church members through us is one card and one sentence — “This is a free phone line, a real person picks up, you can call whenever you want.” That’s it.
I’ve sat with a few pastors now who do this and the pattern is the same every time. They keep the cards in a Bible, or on the corner of the desk, or — my favorite — in the inside pocket of a sport coat hanging on the office door. Whoever needs one gets one. No tracking, no follow-up email from us, no marketing list. The card is the start and the end of our part of the work.
The conversation with the person you’re handing the card to
This is the part that actually matters. The card is just paper. The handoff is the moment.
Here’s the language I’ve heard pastors use that works. You’re welcome to use it word for word — none of this is a script and you can sound like yourself.
1. Name what you’ve noticed, gently
“I’ve been thinking about you since Sunday. The house must be quiet now that Bill’s gone, and I know you don’t always want to be the one calling people.”
You’re not diagnosing them. You’re saying out loud the thing they already know, which gives them permission to talk about it.
2. Hand them the card and say what it is
“This is a free phone line — a real person picks up, not a robot, not a recording. You can call them in the afternoon when the house gets quiet. They just listen. There’s nothing to sign up for and they’re not going to try to sell you anything.”
That sentence does a lot of work. It tells them the basics — it’s free, it’s a human, they don’t have to commit to anything — and it pre-empts the three reasons people don’t call (I don’t want a robot, I don’t want to sign up for something, I don’t want a sales call).
3. Don’t make them promise
Don’t say “Promise me you’ll call.” Don’t say “I want to know that you called.” Don’t follow up next Sunday with “Did you call?” That turns a free line into homework, and most people will say they called when they didn’t, which is worse than not calling.
If they call, they call. If they don’t this week, they might in three weeks when a particularly hard Tuesday hits. Trust the card.
What to tell your small-group leaders and deacons
If your church runs small groups, the small-group leaders are usually the ones who hear the quiet things first. Give them cards too. The brief is the same: notice somebody who seems alone in a way that isn’t a one-week-bad-week kind of alone, hand them a card after the meeting, use the language above.
Deacons doing visitation calls can carry a few cards. So can anybody who runs the bereavement ministry. Anybody whose job at the church already puts them next to grief, transition, or a quieter chapter of life.
I would not put the number in the bulletin. I’d want to. The bulletin reaches everybody. But the bulletin also reaches nobody — most folks scan it for the announcements and don’t really read it. A card placed in a hand by somebody they trust gets called. A bulletin mention does not.
What we do when somebody calls — and what we don’t
I want to be transparent about this because a pastor handing out our number is putting their trust on the line and they should know what they’re sending people into.
When somebody calls 877-638-1122, here’s what happens. A real human — usually Jewel, who runs our line day to day — answers the phone. She says hello and gives her first name. The caller talks. She listens. If they want to tell her what’s going on, they do. If they want to talk about the weather where they are, they do that instead. There is no script, no intake form, no questionnaire.
We don’t keep notes on what callers say. We log that a call happened and we log the first name, so if they call back the person on the line has the courtesy of remembering. That’s it. No therapist’s notebook on this end.
We don’t upsell. We have paid scheduled sessions for people who want a standing weekly hour with the same listener — that pays for the free line — but a caller on the free line is never offered the paid option mid-call. That is a hard rule written into our team’s playbook.
We are not a crisis line and we are not a therapist. If somebody calls us in active crisis, we will stay on the phone with them and we will tell them about 988 (the US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) and we will help them get there. But day-to-day this is for the long, quiet kind of lonely that doesn’t have a number to call.
How to know if it’s working (for the church, not for us)
This is where I want to be honest with the small-town pastor reading this: you will probably not get a feedback loop. The callers don’t tell us which pastor gave them the card. We don’t ask. The whole thing is anonymous from our end.
What you’ll notice instead is softer. The widow who used to sit alone at coffee hour starts coming over to chat about her week. The retired man who stayed in the parking lot starts staying inside instead. They don’t tell you that they called us — they probably won’t, because it’s the kind of thing people don’t talk about — but you’ll see them lighter on a Sunday morning a month later. That’s the only metric I trust on this.
If you want a harder signal: pay attention to whether the cards on your desk are running out. If you’re handing out four a month, you’re using this well. If they’re sitting untouched, the issue is probably the handoff conversation — re-read the section above. The card alone, sitting in a stack, doesn’t do anything.
What I’d love a small-town pastor to do this week
One thing, no email chain, no commitment:
Think about the three people in your congregation right now who you’d put on a list of “I worry about them being alone.” Write down their names on a Post-it on your desk. Next time you see any one of them, the line above is yours — “This is a free phone line, a real person picks up, you can call whenever you want.” Use a card if you have one, or write the number on the back of your bulletin, or just say it.
If after a few weeks you want actual printed cards, email me — partnerships@howtobeatloneliness.com — and I’ll mail you a stack. No form, no minimum, no asking what church you’re with. I’ll just put them in the mail.
A note from our call agent
I want to add one thing to what Landon wrote, from the listening end of the line. When somebody calls and says “my pastor gave me this number,” the call is almost always shorter and easier than I expect — because that one sentence from a person they trust has already done most of the work of getting them to dial. Thank you, to any pastor reading this, for being the trust layer. We’re honored to be the phone on the other end.
— Jewel
About the author
Landon Myers is the Founder of HowToBeatLoneliness. He brings a professional background in sales, team development, and leadership, with years of experience building and managing teams across multiple industries and agencies. Throughout his career, he has focused on communication as a core principle — working as a trainer, manager, and team leader dedicated to helping others refine their skills, confidence, and understanding. Based in the United States, Landon brings to the project a practical and people-focused perspective shaped by both leadership and personal connection. Outside the project, he enjoys spending time with family and being outdoors — dirt biking, snowmobiling, hiking, and traveling whenever possible.