A young single wants help distinguishing infatuation from “the real thing.” A middle-aged executive, laid off his job, wonders where to turn. A mother confesses that her anger has occasionally led to violence toward her children. The situations vary, but these people all seek counsel from the same source: their pastor.
When a pastor spends significant time counseling, what is the impact on the rest of ministry? Does it stifle or stimulate overall church health? Since these questions are increasingly debated in ministerial circles, LEADERSHIP asked four pastors representing markedly different views to discuss the issue:
-Jim Bankhead, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Opelika, Alabama.
-Paul Koehneke, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in St. Joseph, Michigan.
-Frank Tillapaugh, pastor of Bear Valley Baptist Church in Denver, Colorado.
-Tom Tyndall, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lakeland, Florida, and until recently an associate at Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas.
As you’ll see, they wrestled not only with counseling but with the underlying issues: the mission of the church and the role of the pastor.
Leadership: A pastor has many responsibilities: preaching, prayer, overseeing Christian education, outreach, counseling, and on and on. If you ranked those in importance, where would counseling fall?
Tom Tyndall: For me, worship would be top priority. That includes sermon preparation. Second would be education or teaching. Counseling would be third.
I was an associate until last year, and counseling was my primary responsibility. Now that I’m a senior pastor, I’ve found it can’t be. I have this horrible fantasy of getting up on Sunday morning and drawing a blank. As much interest as I have in counseling, I’ve got to be the preacher/teacher. I can’t feed people on Sunday morning with only what’s happened in my counseling that week.
Jim Bankhead: My elders hammered out my job description with me, and their number-one priority was the Sunday event, the sermon. They said, “Take as much time as you need to do that, because that’s when you see the greatest number of people.”
On the list, counseling is fifth. But I should clarify that. The term counseling connotes the professional kind of counselor, which I am not. That kind of technical work would be fifth. But one-on-one caring is very important to me. It’s right up there with the Sunday-morning event.
Paul Koehneke: For me counseling would be fourth. Above it would be almost everything else: preaching and worship, reaching the unchurched, and teaching.
Frank Tillapaugh: About how many hours a week do you spend in counseling?
Koehneke: Fifteen. But that’s an eighty- or ninety-hour week. And other people handle a lot of things for me. I have good staff people who organize the teaching; all I do is teach some classes. And my administrative assistant handles much of the administrative work of the parish.
Leadership: Frank, how would you rank your priorities?
Tillapaugh: Let me say something about these kinds of lists. As the senior pastor, my job is to say, “What does this organization need now?” It might be a building fund drive, help with staff problems, a new series of messages that requires unusually heavy study. Now counseling never goes away; it clamors for time. If you’re open to counseling, particularly technical counseling (which you’re probably not trained to do in the first place), then my guess is that in principle it will be sixth on the list but practically, when you look at actual hours spent, first, second, or third.
Leadership: so where would-counseling be on your list?
Tillapaugh: At the very bottom. And because of the way we’ve structured ourself, it works out that way practically. When I look at the hours I’ve spent a week in counseling, I find I actually have given it less emphasis than everything else.
Leadership: What are the dangers of doing too much counseling?
Tyndall: Neglecting the well and the willing. In my first pastorate, I tried earnestly to help some kids who had deep needs. Their families were unraveling, they had relational skills problems, and they just plain needed to know Christ. But these kids didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I spent so much time trying to reach them that I neglected the healthy kids who were saying, “What’s next? Help me grow; put me in a Bible study; send me to a missions conference.”
I basically said, “I don’t have time for you. People over here are hurting.”
Bankhead: When I do too much, my family and I suffer. I’m drained, I lose my creative edge, I lose my motivation, and I find myself waking up tired.
Tyndall: I also find I sacrifice “dream time.” I need some time just to think about what God wants this church to look like in five and ten years.
Tillapaugh: I was at a pastors’ conference not long ago, and several senior pastors were wrestling with “What is our role? When you boil down all our responsibilities, what is the one thing we can do that nobody else can?”
Surprisingly, the answer wasn’t preaching. The non-negotiable item for the senior pastor is casting the vision. But when the squeaky wheels get the counseling grease, I can quickly find myself not dreaming, not casting the vision.
As a pastor, if I haven’t developed a strategy to limit counseling, I’m playing with fire. Counseling will usurp its rightful place, and I’ll begin to see problems rather than opportunities.
Bankhead: You don’t feel real good about counseling, do you? (Laughter)
Leadership: How can you tell if you’re doing too much?
Bankhead: One red flag for me is if I’m needing the counseling relationships more than the people I’m counseling. Once I was counseling a very needy person who came by often. I finally saw a problem that only the person could do something about. I mentioned it, and the person left the church. I was devastated. It took me weeks to recover. I realized only in hindsight that I was too involved personally.
Tyndall: My wife, Betty, is a psychotherapist, and sometimes she’ll ask me, “If you’re drained after an appointment, who did the work?”
The times that really drain me are when I’m being used. A man came to me one time and said, “I’ve been in long-term therapy with Fred (another person on staff), but he hasn’t helped me, and I thought you could.” After he left I called Fred, and we discovered he had been making the rounds of everyone on staff. We had to tell him, “You’ve been to the best this church has to offer, and you either need to find somebody more professional or you need to do some work. But you can’t keep abusing the system and wearing us all out.”
It’s interesting to me that the New Testament word for comfort, which means “to come alongside,” is also translated as seduce or manipulate. That’s our dilemma: to care for people, to come alongside them, without either seducing or being seduced.
Tillapaugh: And there’s a host of those people out there. For the senior pastor to focus on counseling is to be wide open to these people. I despair at the ability of some people to work the system.
Tyndall: Competent to con. (Laughter)
Leadership: What steps have you taken to keep counseling from overwhelming you?
Tillapaugh: My policy is to talk to anyone about anything once. Then I refer. And in my experience that hasn’t been too little. That’s enough to stay in touch with the hurts and problems and get a feel for where the church is.
Leadership: You never see anyone more than once?
Tillapaugh: We have a staff policy that no pastor counsels beyond an initial visit. We’ll always refer, unless it’s purely a discipleship issue, such as “How do I get into the Bible?” or “I need help knowing how to lead my small group.” Then we might meet regularly with the person. But we don’t expect our pastoral staff to counsel in more traditional counseling areas.
Leadership: What led you to that approach?
Tillapaugh: I became a senior pastor when I was thirty-one, and I looked like I was about twelve. I sat in my office anxious for someone to express confidence in me, and the most explicit expression of trust was when someone came for counseling. So I over-counseled, a trap a lot of young pastors fall into. If a counselee didn’t show up, I would quiz him or her about it. If they said they’d had a flat tire, I’d say, “If that happens, call me. I’ll change it.”
Word got out that I was a good rescuer. Soon I found there was no end to people’s problems. I have an M.Div. degree, which means I am not a trained counselor; I had one course in counseling. I was in over my head. It got to the point where I was doing so much counseling, I could not for the life of me remember from week to week why this person was contemplating suicide.
By the time I was thirty-eight, I was ready to leave the pastorate, mostly because of the enormous counseling load I was carrying. I remember hearing W. A. Criswell say: “Counseling is like dipping in the ocean. You can dip with all your heart all day long, and at the end of the day, it’s still an ocean.”
Fortunately, about that time my wife and I went on vacation with some close friends, one of whom is a professional counselor. She said to me, “I sense you are not going to make it, and your counseling ministry is a big part of that. What if I were to do your counseling for you?”
I took her up on it, and later another professional counselor came alongside. We also began to train peer counselors in the church. So now, after the first visit, we refer a person to one of three counseling situations:
1. Our own counseling department, headed by these two professional counselors, which will cost the person $10 an hour.
2. Some layperson in the church we’ve trained as a peer counselor; that’s free.
3. Professional counselors in Denver. That costs $70 an hour, but we will subsidize the fee if necessary, because we think it’s better to pay the dollar price than to pay the time-and-energy price on our leaders.
Leadership: Jim, you probably don’t have the kind of resources in Opelika that Frank has in Denver. How do you approach the counseling load?
Bankhead: I enjoy a small church, but even there I have more people needs than I can personally handle.
One thing that helps me is a lesson I learned when I was a youth minister in a 1,500-member church in Atlanta. I was trying to involve myself with parents and kids and do everything else, and I was inundated by it all. My senior pastor, Vernon Broyles, Jr., finally called me in and said, “Jim, ministry is like standing next to a conveyor belt of tottering bottles. Your problem is you want to pick up every bottle, hand engrave it, and set it back right on the conveyor belt.”
I said, “Yes. Isn’t that what Jesus tells us to do?”
He said, “Your intentions are good, but some of the bottles are going to right themselves just by the movement of the conveyor belt. If you pick them up, you have wasted time. Some of the bottles you only have to lightly touch; that’s all that’s needed. Some of the bottles are somebody else’s to pick up. And some are going to fall off regardless of what anybody does. You’ve got to create a smooth conveyor, a preventive system, that will right a lot of bottles, and save your energies for the bottles you best can help.”
I said, “Okay, but how do you learn which bottles are yours?”
“I don’t know, but if you don’t learn that, you are not going to make it.”
Ever since, I’ve been learning which are mine.
I don’t have the kind of referral system Frank does, but I evaluate each person’s problem: Is this mine to pick up? If not, I’ll try to refer the person to someone else in the church or community.
Leadership: What “bottles” have you discovered are yours?
Bankhead: People dealing with grief. If someone has lost a loved one or gone through a divorce and has a deeply “wounded spirit,” as the Bible calls it, I seem to be gifted by the Lord to help guide the person through that. For me, funerals are the most precious time with people.
Leadership: Which bottles do you let pass by?
Bankhead: I’m not an evangelist, so I usually counsel best with someone who is already open to Christ, who’s willing to at least examine and work within the biblical framework for life. If people don’t start from that point, I’m not much help to them. So I don’t hesitate to refer in those cases.
Leadership: Paul, you are in a large church, yet you counsel extensively. How?
Koehneke: I’m a shepherd, so I emphasize taking care of people’s needs. In our parish we have about 1,550 family units, and I feel I should lead in the care of those people. Once a year with our staff people I review all 1,550 families. After twenty-two years you have a feel for each family, and what I don’t know, a staff member does. We try to make sure somebody takes responsibility for each family.
As problems arise in people’s lives, many of them come to me. My counseling load has increased 400 percent in twenty-two years simply because I’ve been there. I refer some to our staff, and send others to professional counseling, for which the church picks up half the cost of six sessions. Even so, I handle fifteen to eighteen hours of counseling a week.
Maybe it’s my background. My mother was extremely sick and housebound for years. The farthest I ever saw her walk was two-and-a-half blocks. When I think about how much visits meant to her, I can’t turn away from our seventy shut-ins. I figure they each need an hour a month.
Tillapaugh: How many of those seventy shut-ins needing one hour a month do you personally see?
Koehneke: About eighteen a month. These people are getting close to heaven! Then one week out of three I visit the hospitals. But I feel strongly about keeping close to people, because when I know the people, I know how to preach to them. You can take a sermon book and cut out sections with a razor blade, but you can’t really preach to people if you don’t know their needs.
Tillapaugh: I don’t know. I think by the time you’ve raised some kids and have been through teenage issues, this need to spend hours with people’s problems so you know what is happening out there is vastly overrated. Human beings, in the basic elements, don’t change that much.
Leadership: How do you meet the immediate demands of the wounded without ignoring the ongoing but less pressing needs of the healthy?
Koehneke: There used to be a saying, “If you want to get the pastor’s attention, either die, be in the hospital, or be a shut-in.” So we have to spend time with the others. Normally that happens naturally. If I walk uptown, people say, “Pastor, do you have fifteen minutes for a cup of coffee?” The teenagers will say, “Meet me at McDonald’s.” No, not McDonald’s, Howard Johnson’s. They don’t want to be seen by their peers. (Laughter) I go wherever they want to go.
Tyndall: Of course, you have been there twenty years, so they know you. When you have been there only five months, you have to take some initiative to meet with the well and willing or it won’t happen.
Tillapaugh: Coming from a metropolitan area, one of my concerns is pastors come out of seminary thinking they can be involved in all these pastoral responsibilities. That’s a small-town approach that’s not viable in the city. Today 85 percent of California, for instance, lives in cities of fifty-thousand-plus. The complexity of the urban environment is forcing pastors to become much more specialized.
Bankhead: I would agree with that.
Tillapaugh: There are a handful of multi-talented individuals, such as W. A. Criswell, who can manage, preach, and counsel, but in my opinion, multi-gifted people are the wrong model for most of us.
Most of us are far less gifted than that, and our models need to be pastors who realize they can’t do everything. We cannot afford to be generalists. We’ve got to narrow our focus.
Tyndall: Yes, we play to our gifts. Counseling is a major gift for some people, and a minor one for others.
Tillapaugh: But if your strengths are counseling and you end up as a senior pastor, there are some implications, because churches tend to take on the personality of the pastor over time.
Something we’ve worked hard to avoid in our ministry is the concept of the pastor as father. If you use transactional analysis terms, I don’t want to relate to people in a parent-child mode, but adult-adult. I have a feeling if you put a person who’s gifted in counseling in the pulpit, the church naturally assumes a parent-child relationship. Maybe in some settings it’s appropriate for the pastor to take the father role. But in most cases it has the potential of seriously crippling the congregation’s ability to think and minister to people outside.
The church becomes what Vernard Eller calls a commissary to the saints. And as the pastor takes on the role of counseling, he becomes part of those service ministries: “I will father you; I will care for you.”
Leadership: so you’re saying the purpose of the church is not to service the saints but to put the saints in service. And if the senior pastor majors in counseling, that won’t happen?
Tillapaugh: That’s right, because the pastor sets the tone.
In his book Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, Kennon Callahan says you don’t form a corporation to market your product back to the stockholders. Corporations don’t market to stockholders; they market to client pools.
Koehneke: Why can’t you do both?
Tillapaugh: I think you can, but the leader’s personality determines which way the scale tips.
Ministry is much more complex than it was ten years ago, and so as a pastor I keep letting go of the counseling and embracing more of the ministry to those “out there.” If you have a pastor who is mainly gifted in counseling, when push comes to shove in the schedule, he or she will, for instance, sacrifice outreach to the college down the street to do premarital counseling. It’s radical to think that somebody else could do premarital counseling so the pastor can set the example for outreach.
Koehneke: I still think we can help our people do both. For two years we’ve looked very closely at how to take care of the needs of the parish, and just last week a group met and said, “Now we need to get to outreach.”
So the pastor can be involved in both. That means a lot of work, but I’ve never seen a really overworked pastor yet. I’m sorry, but I haven’t. We have these ecclesiastical pity parties: “Boy, I’m busy. I’ve got so many things to do.” We could have done two things while we were having the party.
Tillapaugh: I have a feeling, though, Paul, that you come into this much better equipped than the average pastor. You’re one of these multi-gifted people who can do more because of being together psychologically.
When we met, you mentioned that your father was a pastor and shared some of the wise things he taught you. What a healthy environment that must have been! But recently I heard Gordon MacDonald say, “You have to understand in dealing with this generation that 50 percent of your college students are out of broken homes.” This is a broken generation, and I have a feeling you can operate on a broader scale, on more significant levels, than the average pastor.
Koehneke: I don’t know. I’m not sure how you talk about the average pastor anymore.
Bankhead: I am not afraid of the father image, because I think a lot of the problems in the church are because many people haven’t had good, healthy fathers. The pastoring job is to help people mature in Christ, to guide them like a physical father does his children until they have the resources to go into the world and not be devastated by what comes.
I come with a high fathering instinct, and yet our church is very involved in ministry in our small town. The father approach may be slower, but my intuition says the results will be sustained longer.
Koehneke: Because of the brokenness we have in society, being a father may be what’s needed. A boy in our day school came up to me recently. He’s eight years old, and he just lost his grandfather by suicide.
“Pastor,” he said, “will you give me a hug like my grandpa used to?” So I think there is much more brokenness in the church today than in the fifties, and there has to be some steadying influence.
Leadership: It seems one of the issues here is whether the church is primarily defensive, that is, a shelter to help people heal from the shocks they experience in the world, or offensive, an invasion army conquering the world.
Koehneke: It has to be both. Some people are in the church for their own personal nurture and healing from the battering, while at the same time you have others who are ready for a challenge. As the manager of that team, I’m failing unless I encourage both responsibilities.
Tillapaugh: Yes, but we are in a generation where the overwhelming mind set about the church is “What’s here for me?” Nobody is going to walk through the doors of our church next Sunday preoccupied with the thought How is this church dealing with the enormous child-abuse problem in Colorado? That is not even on the agenda. The agenda is Will I be fed? (that’s the biggie), or Do they have programs for my kids?
Taking care of the church family is legitimate, but if you polled this generation on whether they came to church to be served or to serve, the results wouldn’t be 50-50. They’d be 90-10.
You see, most urban churches are still operating on a rural model, where the senior pastor is seen as the main counselor. People expect it. I hope that will change as more people come out of Christian graduate schools with counseling degrees. It’s already happened in music, for example. People don’t generally expect the pastor to lead the choir. I hope we move to the same place with counseling, where the counseling pastor is seen as distinct from the senior pastor as the minister of music is.
Bankhead: But in the smaller church, which means 80 percent of all churches, this idea of a special person to do counseling just isn’t there. I know as a pastor trained in a specialist mind set, coming to a smaller church brought me a high level of frustration at first.
Tillapaugh: I agree, but I think the problem is just the reverse. The reason you have so many churches of less than two hundred in urban areas, where there are plenty of people to reach, is because two hundred is the maximum most pastors can counsel.
Leadership: That raises an interesting question. Since counseling focuses your attention on a relatively small number of people, does that ultimately hold the church back from numerical growth? Or does it encourage growth as people who are helped spread the word?
Tyndall: For me it has been both, if that’s possible. There are times when I’m working with the few, and I’m aware I could be knocking on apartment doors. But other times my counseling helps build things. Maybe it comes out in my preaching: I handle better the emotional implications of the text. People come to a church because they feel welcomed, and counseling sets a positive tone for the entire congregation.
People need to learn how to relate and build better relationships. How can that happen without the pastor leading the way? You pay the price for counseling, but with certain controls, it reaps larger benefits later.
Koehneke: I always ask new members what brought them to our church, and I think we get 50 percent of our people because we are a caring agency. They know they can call us seven days a week and we will minister to their needs.
Tillapaugh: I certainly don’t want my phone ringing seven days a week! (Laughter) You set yourself up for that by creating expectations. At Bear Valley, we work hard not to create those expectations of the staff.
We have a pretty good reputation of being a caring church, too. But as our staff backs off from counseling and we let peer counselors or professionals do it, we communicate from the very beginning, “We’re not your fathers. We’re not the only ones who can help you.”
Koehneke: Frank, I don’t encourage people to call at midnight, but when I’m ministering to the community, which is outreach, they don’t know anything about hours. They call when they have a need. Somebody called me at 10:30 last night, emotionally disturbed about something. And that’s okay. I sometimes feel churches want people to program their needs into certain hours.
Tillapaugh: Well, yes, I’ve gotten a number of calls after hours as well. But I don’t want people to think, “Frank’s the only guy who can help.” Taking my turn getting called after hours doesn’t bother me. But if I were getting all or even a large share of the calls, it would bother me.
Bankhead: Frank and Paul, I believe you two represent polar opposites of what we are talking about.
Tillapaugh: I think Paul’s is the most accepted model, for good reason: It’s worked in the past.
But one of my concerns is that we have all of these little churches in urban areas, and my contention is that it’s because they are functioning with a rural mind set. The fact that we turn to the pastor early on when there’s a problem is part of that.
When you’re under two hundred attenders, 90 percent of your leadership is needed just to run the Sunday school, preaching, choir, youth ministry, and other home-base programs. But above 200-250, some dramatic things happen in terms of people who are not needed at the home base, who are free to reach out. And we desperately need to get churches up and over that. I don’t think counseling pastors can do it in the city.
Koehneke: I think you’ve got to be careful when you say we are counseling pastors. It’s not our main function. It is one of them.
Leadership: What are some practical ways you’ve found to balance counseling with the rest of your responsibilities?
Tyndall: Knowing I’m not a therapist but a pastor, I do not do much long-term counseling. I’ll see a person three, four, or five times, but on deep self-image problems or other issues that require lots of time, I have to refer. And that’s hard, because if people get to me, they’ve usually got me for as long as they want. So I’ve got to consciously set limits. Frank’s referral system is one way, but for most of us it’s a secretary or an answering machine or some other way to screen appointments.
Koehneke: You limit the 1:00 appointment by seeing the 2:00 appointment on time. You push things aside and keep going.
One thing that saves me in this process is my administrative assistant. She’s been with me twenty years and handles all the initial calls. People have learned to trust her, and she runs a good share of my schedule.
Tillapaugh: We’ve found a lot of people who seek out church leaders to be counseled really need a skilled lay friend, someone with basic counseling tools who will listen. So we’ve trained large numbers of lay counselors. We offer eight-week training courses in our church at least twice a year.
Leadership: How successful can lay counselors be?
Tyndall: If you think about it, bartenders and hair dressers are the people who do an awful lot of counseling, or at least foster the atmosphere for that. Most counseling is done by friends, not by people with degrees.
I’ve had people come in who had terrible weeks, and all I did was listen-no techniques, I said nothing. Then two days later they came back and said, “You sure were a lot of help.”
So the problem is not the skill of lay counselors, but that we have not raised the vision that it is valid and good, and taught those who are interested in it. Maybe some of those people threaten us because they are good at it.
Leadership: One pastor told LEADERSHIP that when he offers lay-counselor training sessions, the people who show up are the ones with deep problems, the last people who would make effective lay counselors.
Tillapaugh: We tell the people who come to our lay-counselor training that we’ll train anyone, but only a small percentage will be assigned clients.
The biggest benefit for us in training lay counselors is prevention. These people take the skills back into their jobs, their families, their ministries, and begin to implement them. They build healthier relationships and in that way help stem the tide of pastoral counseling.
Leadership: If the pastor starts to back away from counseling, do people start criticizing you?
Tillapaugh: They did in my case. They said, “You don’t care about us.”
The biggest reaction has been from my senior adults, because I’m not visiting the shut-ins. I try to explain that the senior pastor has many responsibilities and there are other people in the church who are doing that. But these seniors grew up in a generation where there was a world of difference between the senior pastor visiting them and some other pastor visiting them.
Koehneke: We’re changing some job descriptions for staff in our parish right now, and they’re probably going to ask me to back off certain things. I’m not going to please everybody with that. But you have to present your argument and live with the fallout. People ask me why as head pastor I get more money than the others. I say, “Very simple. Battle pay.”
Tillapaugh: I wish people coming into the pastorate felt more options. I’m afraid counseling is, in the minds of both congregations and pastors, a given. It’s not up for grabs. It should be.
If you’d poll most churches on their expectations of their senior pastor, you would find, I think, visions of the pastor dropping in for a cup of tea.
Bankhead: I don’t think that’s true in my situation. The expectations were more on the sermon. I gravitated toward counseling, and they didn’t expect it or want it. They do want one-on-one caring, though.
Tillapaugh: That’s a good point. Since we limit our counseling, we try to do everything else in our ministry to communicate that we care about people.
In our church, for example, on Sunday morning there is no gathering in the pastor’s office to go over the order of services or pray. We tell our staff, “Pray at home, because Sunday morning is the one time during the week when everybody’s there. Seize the opportunity. Stay among the people. Give yourself to them. Touch as many people as you can.” I don’t even go up on the platform until it’s time to preach. I maximize Sunday morning, because I want people to perceive I care about them. And I’m not conning anyone. I really do care about them.
Bankhead: I like to think of my counseling as a way to obey the commands: “Love one another as Christ loved us,” “Bear one another’s burdens,” “Pray for each other.” When we obey Christ in that way, we do what we’re all interested in-helping our congregations, and helping them to help each other.
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