I love it, and I hate it. It’s exhilarating, and it’s exhausting.
Pastoral counseling—it’s part of who I am and what I do, yet it often feels as if it’s an invasion into my life.
No one does pastoral counseling better than a pastor. Not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a psychotherapist.
Professional counselors, the good and the biblical ones, have an important role to fill. I don’t understand much about schizophrenia, repressed memories, cyclothymic disorder, or the treatment of ADHD, OCD, or PTSD. Mental illnesses are complex, and I’m not equipped even to recognize some of them. My parishioners and I have benefited from good counselors, and I consider them my allies.
But they are not my replacements. I’m not prepared to yield to a society enamored with Sigmund Freud, B..F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, or Albert Ellis. Pastors can still do things that professional therapists can’t.
After all, the prefix psych means “soul,” and pastors are tenders of the soul. That’s our job.
Pastoral counseling, as I’m using the term, is helping people resolve their problems, facilitating positive changes in their lives, and helping them grow toward greater wholeness. No one does that better than pastors. Here’s why.
Pastors care as friends
When people come to me with problems, they come to someone who loves them. I’m not just a professional; I’m an extension of the love of Christ, a channel of his grace. Professional counselors exhibit genuine concern, even love, for their clients-but not as only a pastor can.
When I began pastoring twenty years ago, I studied shepherding in the Bible. The Hebrew word is closely aligned to the Jewish word for friend. That’s what people need. In its essence, Christianity is nothing more than personal relationships-with God and each other. Within these friendships comfort is best proffered, advice best taken, rebukes best accepted, and corrections best made.
I may not have all the answers, but I can love and listen. I may feel I’m doing little good, but I can pray. Recently I sat in my office absorbing the laments of a young couple. I felt a tide of frustration rising in me, and my inner voice muttered, How in the world can I help them? My outer voice took them to the Scriptures, shared an anecdote from my marriage, and prayed with them.
When they left, I sighed, feeling the session had been wasted. But the next week, the wife called. “Thanks for seeing us,” she said. “John said he wouldn’t talk to anyone else, but he likes you. He said you’d understand, and things have been a little better. He said he’d like to see you again.”
Pastors build on an existing relationship
Recently a Bible study leader called and said, “I’m about to leave my wife. I’ve gotten involved with a woman at work. But I want to talk to you about it.” We met, and after several chin-quivering, heart-throbbing, plain-talking sessions, he repented.
I referred him and his wife to a trusted marriage counselor, but it was the friendship of years that laid the cobblestone path he followed to my door. We had long joined in worship every Sunday. We had butted heads in meetings and prayed and planned and consoled one another. I had baptized his children, buried his father, and visited his hospitalized sister at all hours. The connections were already in place.
A therapist recently told me, “You pastors have a real advantage because you’re part of a person’s life more than I can ever be. Counselors get intimate with people quickly; then we’re gone. You are in a person’s life consistently. My role is short-term; yours is long-term, and it’s the long-term role that usually proves more valuable.”
Who but pastors can do incisive, on-the-spot grief counseling at funerals, marriage counseling at weddings, bedside counseling in hospitals, and conflict resolution at committee meetings?
Pastors preach care every Sunday
The apostle Paul said to his elders, “You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house.”
Our house-to-house, person-to-person ministry doesn’t stand alone. It rests on a public role of preaching the Word, correcting, rebuking, and encouraging with great patience and careful instruction. One of the boons of a long pastorate is the accumulation of encouraging letters that testify to this, like this one:
“I wanted to let you know how much I appreciated your message Sunday morning … I learned Saturday night that my younger brother in Idaho attempted suicide after drinking all night Friday. I badly needed your words about troubled loved ones. I want you to know I’m keeping two copies of the message in our file with important papers, one copy for each of our two sons so I can share it with them when they are older.”
Pastors give biblical solutions for spiritual issues
Most people who approach pastors expect us to speak of spiritual realities. Many would be disappointed if our Bibles remained closed and our knees straight. I can’t reduce everything to an over-simplified, black-and-white, wave-the-Bible-at-it problem. Human complexities can be as impossible to untangle as a child’s ball of string. Yet I sometimes wonder if such an over-simplified reduction might, in the final (psycho)analysis, prove more helpful than some of the counsel dispensed at $75 an hour.
Ever wonder what a psychoanalyst would have said to Cain? “Let’s talk about your childhood. How did you feel when your father bragged on Abel’s mutton stew instead of your vegetable soup? And your mom’s apple pies—what was that problem all about?”
The Divine Counselor told him, “Sin is crouching at your door.”
What would a modern therapist have said to the unraveling King Saul? To the woman taken in adultery? To shy young Timothy? To the demoniac of Gadara? To Paul, the intense man?
There is no better tool than Scripture for penetrating soul and spirit, joints and marrow, thoughts and intents. It is the Bible in all its authority—specifically the promises in all their sufficiency—that revives the soul, makes wise the simple, gives joy to the heart, and light to the eyes.
Pastors are more accessible
I have the privilege of sacrificing more. Few professional therapists remain on call twenty-four hours a day. Maybe I don’t either, for over the years I have learned to build some safeguards into my schedule and some hedges around my family. But I’m still generally more accessible than anyone listed in the Yellow Pages under “PSY____.” I have the opportunity to hurt more, to care more, to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn.
One more reason …
For these reasons, I think I am better at counseling than … well, than I think I am. And the final reason why? My fees. I’m free, so to speak. Even that counts for something.
Robert J. Morgan is pastor of Donelson Free Will Baptist Fellowship in Nashville, Tennessee.
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
