How can the counseling demands of the 1980s be met by the local church? Five leaders share their observations.
Fifty years ago people didn’t usually seek a pastor for counsel until a personal crisis had reached an intolerable level: bereavement, divorce, run-away child, or bankruptcy. Everyday personal or family problems, vocational questions, anxieties, and the like were usually considered outside the pastor’s sphere. Today, it seems nothing is outside that sphere. Emotional problems once suffered in private are now laid at the church’s doorstep with a request for understanding and healing.
In many ways, this increased breadth of the pastoral care task can be traced to a revitalized understanding of the church fellowship. A New Testament church of today deals not just with spiritual questions, but with whole persons, and so the church is overwhelmed with its own success.
Knowing that the increased workload is rooted in positive growth doesn’t make it any less a workload or trauma for harried church leaders. They still need to find ways to cope.
To find some of those ways, LEADERSHIP went to Dallas, Texas, to talk with Gene Getz, pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Dallas; Richard Hunt, marriage and family enrichment consultant for the Methodist Church, Dallas; Frank Minirth, chief of psychiatry at Richardson Medical Center; David Seamands, pastor of Wilmore United Methodist Church, Wilmore, Kentucky; and James Smith, director of family life development at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, Dallas. Editor Paul Robbins and executive editor Terry Muck led the discussion.
Paul Robbins: We can hardly talk to Christian leaders about the task of daily ministry without finding that they are being overwhelmed in record numbers by people seeking counseling help. Would you concur that this is generally true, and if so, why has personal counseling become such a dominant part of pastoral care?
Jim Smith: For years we played the game, “If you are spiritual you don’t have problems.” That myth has been demolished. Now it’s far more acceptable for people to surface their problems and seek help.
Gene Getz: In a positive way, we have been victimized by our success. For example, as our church has tried to develop more of a sharing, caring ministry, our people have developed a new sense of security and openness about themselves. As one member said, “When others care, you can afford to be more vulnerable.”
But this has complicated the counseling problem, for as people have been helped, they’ve spread the good news and attracted many more people who are also looking for help.
Frank Minirth: When I first thought about going into psychiatry, there was a very skeptical attitude among many church members toward it. Likewise, many psychiatrists and psychologists were very skeptical about the church.
Since then I have seen an almost complete change of attitude. The church is more open to the integration of psychiatry and theology, and psychiatrists and psychologists are more open to exploring the spiritual dimensions of life.
But far more than a change of attitudes is involved in the tremendous demand for personal counseling. I think we have a lot more problems today than we did thirty or forty years ago. For example, in 1950 we had an estimated three million alcoholics. Today we have an estimated ten million. The explosion of knowledge is unbelievable; computers can hardly keep up with it. If you put an increase of problems together with an open spirit in the church, you’re bound to have a huge demand for personal counseling.
Richard Hunt: There’s another aspect of this demand that separates our generation from previous ones. The media has raised the expectations of what people want out of life in the way of marriage, career, personal fulfillment, and so forth. There is a general assumption that life should be better today than it was thirty years ago.
Coupled with this assumption is a very real frustration that many things about life don’t produce like they are supposed to. Thus more and more people are saying, ‘We’ve tried this and we’ve tried that, and nothing seems to work. Does the church have anything to say about this?” All of a sudden they discover New Testament teachings like Romans 12, where it talks about living one’s faith in very practical ways such as getting along with one’s spouse.
David Seamands: During my lifetime there has been a tragic breakdown of personal morality. There are no moral fences; everything is amoral. When you put that problem alongside the breakdown of the family, you have a sick society which is producing emo
tional cripples like Detroit mass-produces automobiles. Many of our church people are included in this group.
Richard: I think another factor is the concept of adult development which has caught on in the past ten years. We’ve moved from the idea that once a person becomes an adult he stays that way the rest of his life. Now we’ve more or less accepted the premise of adult passages-life changes every decade. Even within the church there’s a new consciousness that people need one kind of help at twenty-five, another kind at forty, and very special help at retirement.
Jim: I want to pick up on Frank’s train of thought. It would appear we all agree that people are coming to church for counseling help in much larger numbers. Those same people could be flooding the secular psychologists. But something else is happening. Could it be that people have run the gamut of a lot of non-wholistic approaches to human problems and have found they don’t work? It seems to me that a wholistic approach to people’s problems began when the professionals in the fields of psychiatry and psychology began to critically evaluate their own techniques.
Remember the time when those of us in the church were the bad guys because we were the producers of guilt? And the way they treated guilt was to rename it, re-identify it, and release people from it. But that technique didn’t work. In its place has come a much more significant dialogue among the secular professionals about wholistic approaches to people.
David: What Jim is saying is absolutely correct. Within the last ten days I have been visited by a woman who came into my office with the standard physician’s prescription form. In his own handwriting, one of our local doctors said, “I’ve examined Mrs. X thoroughly and have given her such and such tests. I’ve done all I can do for her. I think she needs religion. Therefore I’m referring her to you.”
Just yesterday I received a letter from an optometrist thanking me for seeing a young lady he had referred to me some time ago. Initially her problem seemed to be lack of peripheral vision, even though there was no physical reason for her malady. In his letter he said, “I have just re-examined her and she has 20-20 vision. Thank you very much. In the future I will be referring others to you.” The referral system is beginning to become a two-way street.
Paul: It sounds as if we mutually agree that the Christian leader, especially the pastor, has good reason to feel overwhelmed by counseling demands. But in my conversations with pastors about overload, I hear undertones about feeling untrained for this tidal wave of need. Have local church leaders, both clergy and laity, succumbed to the prevailing trends toward specialization, and thus approach many counseling situations with exaggerated feelings of inadequacy?
Richard: I think Christian leaders are better prepared than they think, but not as well prepared as they should be. They are better prepared in the sense that they have a good grasp of basic scriptural principles, and Scripture speaks to all areas of life. They are not as well prepared in the sense that so much of seminary training is cognitive. It is a rare seminary that combines booklearning with equal amounts of hands-on, practical experience. There is no way to learn how to deal with the spectrum of human emotions from a book.
But even experience doesn’t remove some feelings of inadequacy. The best-trained and most experienced Christian professionals I know often feel inadequate to deal with the complicated problems that entangle people’s lives.
Jim: Amen. I give more than fifty percent of my time here at Highland Park to personal counseling. Even though I’ve been at this task for a number of years, it’s not uncommon for me to be listening to an unbelievable tale of woe with both ears, while my mind races in all directions searching for some kind of solution, and my heart prays “Lord, I’m not even close to an answer on this one. Please help me help this person.”
Frank: Two or three thoughts come to my mind about what a Christian leader, especially a pastor, can do. First, he knows the Word of God and has the opportunity to model it through his life and the relationships he has with his spouse and children. Living the Word of God is much more basic to helping people than psychology will ever be. Second, if the Scriptures are working in his life, he probably can help ninety-five percent of the people who come to him. Maybe many pastors don’t feel sufficient for the task, but they need to know that their “success rate” may be proportionately higher than other professionals. Being able to help ninety-five percent of the people in some way should inspire some confidence.
Third, a pastor must know when he is in over his head and to whom he can refer difficult cases. Psychotic problems, chemical problems, acute fear/anxiety problems, and societal problems probably require referral. But for the average pastor to think that he is grossly inadequate to help meet the counseling needs of people probably means he is inaccurately assessing the situation. I think he can help.
Richard: You know Jesus also felt overwhelmed. When that happened, he’d say to his disciples, “Come away for awhile and rest.” Feeling overwhelmed may be the first sign that the Christian leader should take a break, rest for a while, refresh, and regroup.
Gene: I would suspect that if the pastor continuously suffers from a sense of overload, whether it’s a counseling overload or any other kind of overload, he may have lost the vision of how God intends for the body of Christ to function.
I love this definition: “The church ought to be a reparenting community where people with problems, struggles, and stresses can come for healing through the love and acceptance of that community.”
When the body of Christ functions as it should, a lot of problems will be resolved at a “grass roots” level, the first level where counseling ought to take place.
Frank: I work in a psychiatric hospital where people with the most complicated problems are constantly coming and going. As my colleagues and I have compared notes, we have decided that a large part of any help we can give an individual consists of the support system in the hospital itself. Most of our patients interact in a very close network of about twelve people with whom they share their lives and their problems, and from whom they receive honest feedback and other kinds of support. Chemical therapies and other kinds of therapies may help, but “people support” makes the significant difference.
Terry Muck: So far we’ve said, “Hey, Pastor, even though you may feel overwhelmed and inadequate, be encouraged. Some problems are over your head, for there are a lot of real sick people out there; but you can effectively address a high percentage of the problems that come your way.”
Richard: I like your term “address the problem” rather than “solve all problems.” The most effective support system in the world is the local congregation, and they generally look to the pastor to call the cues. He has access to so much technical help from people who would love to help others solve specific problems, whether they be spiritual, physical, or something as common as family finances.
Jim: The Christian leader is also the most logical liaison between the lay person and the professional community. Every pastor needs to know on a first-name basis the psychiatrists and psychologists in the community. He or she needs to establish trust relationships in order to effectively refer people who seek him out for help.
Paul: Assuming that the need for personal counseling will continue to build momentum, what are the implications for the church as it looks toward the future?
David: In our church we are viewing the future of counseling through a series of concentric circles. The outside circle we call preventive measures. This includes such things as Engaged Discovery Seminars for young couples who are about to enter marital relationships; Marriage Enrichment Weekends for those already married, whether it be two years or twenty years; and small groups who share with one another and care for one another.
Inside this larger ring is a smaller ring that deals with slightly more complex problems, the more garden-variety counseling problems. We feel our future hope lies in training lay persons to handle these problems. Then there is the tightly-drawn inner circle where a pastor, staff professional, or other competent person deals with the more complicated problems. Right at the heart of this inner circle, we draw lines out to the various community agencies, lines of referral that take us to competent, trusted professionals.
I’m trying to cut down on my personal counseling load by concentrating on the development of preventive measures that I described in the outer circle. I’m particularly intrigued by the potential of small groups.
Terry: Would you explain what you think that potential is?
David: Well, being a good Wesleyan, I have always been intrigued by the spiritual awakening that took place in Great Britain. Much more was involved than the great sermons John Wesley preached or the hymns Charles Wesley wrote.
John Wesley was way ahead of his time. He established what he called the class meetings, groups of ten to twelve people who met every week. Being methodical-that’s where we get our name Methodist-John Wesley prepared a series of questions these people were to ask one another. The first question was “What sins have you committed this week that need to be confessed to the group?” Wesley always had a way of getting right to the point. But the fact remains that the health, healing, and wholeness of these class meetings were the foundation for the moving of God upon the entire country.
Paul: It sounds like a seventeenth century application of the Scripture (James 5:16), “Confess your faults to one another that ye might be healed.”
Richard: And if Wesley were to address a small group in our time, in addition to asking about sins and faults he would probably inquire about our fears, worries, anxieties, and those things which produce stress in our lives.
Paul: I hear what you gentlemen are saying, but I’m having a hard time integrating all of this input into the realities of everyday life at the local church.
Let me sketch a brief scenario for you. Think of yourself as the pastor of a small church where all help is volunteer. You are suffering from feelings of overload and inadequacy, but you don’t have much of an opportunity to think through your feelings because the phone keeps ringing off the wall, and at the other end of the line is a person who needs help right now. This spectrum of help ranges from the most petty things to major crises of all kinds.
Now you are reading this forum, and five experts tell you that you should “Deal with your feelings of being overwhelmed by getting away for awhile.” But you can’t get away. Somebody has to preach Sunday, and immediately after the sermon three or four people will want to see you with some brand-new, unexpected problem.
Or these experts tell you that “The best way to deal with problems is to find preventive measures.” But how can you get away, preach on Sunday, put out fires, plug up holes, and prevent problems all at once?
Richard: I would hope that if I were the pastor I would start with myself. Every day I would want to remind myself that there is more work to do than I can possibly get done, even if I work forty-eight hours a day. Jesus didn’t reach everybody, nor can I.
By starting with myself, I hope I would realize how finite I really am, and that God doesn’t expect me to do everything. Only someone who is infinite can do everything. God understands and loves me, even though I am finite.
Gene: Richard, there are several important principles involved in what you are saying. The one that leaps out at me is that when Jesus came to launch the church, he began with twelve disciples so that the church could become a multi-faceted body and accomplish things beyond what one individual could do. He put self-imposed limitations upon his own relationships so that the church could become what it’s supposed to be.
Paul: May I pick up on that? What I’m about to say is probably over-stated, but so many of the books that come across my desk written for pastors and other Christian leaders seem to say, “All of our problems would be solved if the church would become what it’s supposed to be.” I’m not necessarily arguing with the premise, but I keep wondering why in a period of two thousand years the church hasn’t become “what it’s supposed to be.”
Richard: I would turn your question around and say that part of the reason we have all these problems is that we are functioning properly. As fast as Jesus healed one person, he was deluged by a crowd of people. Let me repeat something that was said earlier: “Christian leader, be encouraged. You are doing a good job, and the better you do your job, the more problems you’re going to attract. But you’re still finite. Only God is infinite.”
Terry: I’d like to pursue David’s illustration of facing into local church counseling problems through the three concentric circles We’ve touched engagement seminars, enrichment weekends, and other preventive measures that might be a bit ambitious for many smaller churches. How can ministry structures common to most churches be adapted to help meet counseling needs?
David: Last fall I preached a series of twelve sermons called “The Healing of Human Hurts.” In fact, we structured the life of the church around that theme for three months.
Jim: What were some of the sermon topics?
David: One was based on a biblical study of infirmities. The main point was that as the Holy Spirit works in people’s lives, there are times when he needs a temporary assistant. That is the theological basis for counseling.
Four of the messages revolved around the healing of low self-esteem. The first of the four was entitled “Satan’s Greatest Psychological Weapon.” Others dealt with perfectionism and depression. Both of these emotional disorders are often related to a misunderstanding of grace. In our church, a theology of works produces as many emotional problems as any other factor.
The last sermon was entitled “Healed Helpers,” and the premise was that as God heals us, our hang-ups are to be recycled into wholeness so we can help others.
Jim: How would you evaluate the response?
David: It was one of the most exciting three months our church has ever experienced. Every service was packed out; the demand for cassettes was phenomenal.
I did something I’ve never before done in my preaching ministry. After securing permission, I used an illustration of someone in my congregation.
Betty sat near the end of the third row throughout the service. At the close of my sermon I gave a call for an altar service. As the woman next to her began to weep, she put her arm around her and asked if she could walk to the front of the church with her. The other woman said, “No, my problems are too great. My story is like Betty’s.” Well, Betty sat there for a long time debating whether or not she should reveal her identity. Finally she leaned over and whispered into the woman’s ear, “I’m Betty.” It was beautiful to see them walk up the aisle and begin a healing process and deep friendship that lasts to this day. This experience reaffirmed in my mind how a sermon can enable another person to minister. It’s almost a kind of mass counseling.
Gene: A series of sermons that I have used is built upon the “one-another” injunctions found in the New Testament. Seven of them can be found in Romans, the twelfth through sixteenth chapters, and another five are located in the Epistles. We are to be members of one another, to be devoted to one another, to accept one another, to admonish one another, to serve one another, to carry one another’s burdens, to forgive and tolerate one another, and so on. Just encouraging our people to practice these basic injunctions will help develop a healing community.
Jim: Paul, I keep feeling we haven’t quite spoken to the scenario you sketched a few moments ago. Let me summarize as a means of trying to round out our response.
We’ve said that the counselor must get in touch with himself, his own emotions, possible feelings of inadequacies, and above all, his finiteness.
Then he should take a hard look at his schedule and determine how many hours can be set aside for personal counseling. Before the fact, a counselor needs to feel good about the time that’s going to be set aside each week for crisis intervention. If he doesn’t, he’ll be torn apart both internally and externally by the demands of people. The counselor needs to create screening devices to short-circuit possible overload; a secretary or another middle person can be trained in the fine art of being both protective and gracious; an answering service is a very effective screen and is much better than no screen at all.
The counselor should be aware of community services to which he can send referrals. In many cities there is a hot line. In fact, more and more large churches provide a hot line service and constantly publish those numbers in both the church newspaper and the community newspapers. Other resources include psychiatrists, psychologists, and groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers, Over-eaters Anonymous.
David: Let me pick up on your train of thought. Once the counselor has drawn a circle around himself, and has determined what outside resources he wants to use, he or she can then begin to look for ways and means of creating preventive programs. We’ve already mentioned sermon series, weekend retreats, and Bible study groups, especially sharing and caring varieties.
Another area the Christian leader might tap into is the Christian education program. Almost all churches, regardless of their size, have some kind of C.E. structure.
Someone once said, “The Sunday school hour is the most wasted hour of the week.” I don’t particularly agree with that statement, but it’s rather alarming to see how many churches continue week after week with an ineffective “traditional” Sunday school structure.
Jim: You’re absolutely right. You have just pointed up the trap of program-centered ministry as opposed to need-centered ministry. All programs, if you trace them back far enough, were probably created to meet a need. But when the need was met, or changed in nature, the original program carried on. I’m not saying Sunday school doesn’t meet a need; but every church should devise a way to continuously reassess and evaluate the needs of the congregation, and should be prepared to put sacred cows to death without creating havoc.
One of the most fruitful things any leader can do is to take some time to sit with the “grass roots” persons and ask them to articulate their needs and the needs of the church as they perceive them. When I first came to Highland Park to direct the Christian education program, I devised a set of questions that would help me ascertain the needs of our people. For the next six months I scheduled lunch with a different person every day, and asked him or her questions like “What do you perceive to be your personal needs, the needs of your family, and the needs of this church?” All I did for six months was listen. Out of that data I synthesized specific conclusions which I took to various Christian education committees. I’d say to them, “This is what I am hearing. Do you agree, and what do you think we can do about it?” They were the ones who had the ownership of the development of new ways to meet these specific needs.
Any Christian leader can do a similar thing. The bond this creates between the speaker and the listener has positive side benefits all its own. When a grass roots person realizes that a committee has been influenced by his heartfelt need, you can count on his total support and participation in the solution.
Richard: This same thing can be done by a concerned Sunday school teacher. Every class can be asked to list the four or five needs it has, or perceives. Class sessions can then be designed to meet those needs.
Gene: I like what you’re saying about need-centered programs, as long as those programs correlate very closely with Scripture. This applies not only to preventive fellowships and supportive fellowships, but also to counseling relationships. There is a trend today to get people together and just share feelings. We can listen to one another and pray for one another, but that soon runs very thin if the group dynamics are not based on Scripture. Some of the most effective fellowships I know are ones that begin with the Scriptures, and then open themselves to everyday application.
Frank: I don’t think this is a big problem for pastors, but it can be a problem with other Christian counselors. There is a real danger of not integrating Scripture into counseling. Obviously we must be very sensitive about how we integrate Scripture, but there is the potential danger for Christian counselors to move away from Scripture to just another secular model.
Jim: And that danger is particularly acute if you’re trying to counsel someone who pathologically uses the Scriptures, who quotes verses as a defense mechanism or bangs his or her spouse over the head with Bible passages; it’s a deep psychological problem in religious clothes. This kind of problem is one of the toughest ones I face in my own counseling ministry.
Richard: One of the most tragic experiences I’ve ever had was to sit in the congregation and listen to hostile preaching that projected personal problems from the pulpit wrapped in biblical phrases. As I looked around the sanctuary, I saw a neurotic congregation.
David: Your statement only underlines what I was saying earlier about the power of the pulpit in mass counseling. Just as an insecure, anxiety-ridden, hostile preacher can use the Word of God to project neurosis, he can also use the Word of God to promote mental and emotional health, as well as spiritual health.
I have one more thought about how to integrate preventive, as well as supportive, counseling into Christian education programs.
The success our church has enjoyed with the Marriage Enrichment weekends has pointed out to me the untapped and unharnessed power of an individual couple growing in the Lord, growing with one another, and modeling the Scriptures in their lives. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised since that’s how God intended things to be in the first place; but with so many families breaking up all around us, individual couples who model Christianity through their marriages seem to stand out.
We have begun a program whereby we encourage this kind of married couples to consider reparenting young people who have never experienced healthy parental relationships. I’m particularly concerned about teen-aged girls. So many of them are emotionally fatherless, and they’re destined to become horrible wives. They are empty souls who quickly reach out for the first pair of empty arms. We can help by providing substitute families, healthy couples who will befriend these needy young people. The same thing is true for teen-aged boys who never really had a mother, but my experience shows that the problem is more serious with fatherless daughters.
Frank: You’re speaking to a very important issue. It’s been estimated that twenty-five to fifty percent of all marriages will end in divorce. It’s also estimated that one in every six children will be raised by a single parent. Unless the church prepares to meet this need, we’re going to miss a tremendous opportunity.
Richard: Couples make excellent teachers-team teachers-in all areas of the church. We did a survey in our church and asked people why they taught or went to an adult church-school class. We were surprised at the answer. The most obvious reason was that their spouse wanted them to teach or attend. If a couple does team-teaching you automatically have spouse support, and you’re providing a healthy model of male/female ministry.
David: For the first time, I have two helpers for personal counseling needs. In fact, one of my assistants will soon go to a seminar in New Orleans designed to train lay people in counseling technique. Hopefully, when he comes. back, he’ll be able to help us begin a formal lay-centered training program.
Already I can tell we’ll have to be very careful and sensitive about how we select people for lay training. I don’t think we could dare make a public announcement, or we would have droves of people come.
Richard: One impediment to the concept of lay training programs is that leaders tend to equate successful programs with numbers. Pastors of smaller churches don’t need to think in terms of ten trainees in order to launch a training program. They can begin with one person. Why not start with one and bring him along as an apprentice? In fact, the smaller the class, the more effective and delightful the experience can be.
Paul: Again, in the spirit of integration, shouldn’t the pastor keep his eyes open for teachers, small-group leaders, and other individuals with spiritual maturity and natural leadership ability so that he can ever so gently lead them into ministry involvement, including personal counseling, without signing them all up for an eighteen-month course?
Gene: In our church we try to structure training into two parts. The first part of that structure is scriptural teaching with an emphasis on application and life response. After a coffee break and social time, we come back to share and to minister to one another. The atmosphere is always informal, comfortable, and conducive to personal communication. We’ve tried very hard to break away from the traditional stereotype of one-way communication: “I am the pastor, and I am up here teaching, and you must listen to me.”
Terry: I think that brings us back to where we started. Let’s wrap up by talking about the third concentric circle, the Christian leader, and the types of problems that tend to come to his or her attention, along with the dangers those problems present to his own person.
Jim: From my perspective as a church staff member, I would say that almost all counseling problems fall into four categories. First, there are the problems that deal with a person’s relationship to himself: self-image, depression, deep-seated matters of an internal nature.
The second category involves one’s relationship to God. The root of many of these problems relates to a person’s concept of God.
The third category is one’s relationships with significant others: family members, friends, colleagues, other believers within the body of Christ. It’s interesting that when Jesus gave the two great commandments he covered these first three categories of relationships.
The fourth category is one’s relationship to things: material possessions, stewardship, ecology. Often the most significant question asked in this category is “Do I possess things, or do they possess me?” Obviously there’s a sizeable spectrum of intensity, or lack of intensity, in all of these problem areas.
David: Let me add one more thought. While these four categories cover most of the bases, I think that pastors should emotionally and spiritually prepare themselves for every kind of question. I am amazed, for example, at the number of men who come to me and ask, “Is it all right for me to have a vasectomy?” Five years ago that hardly ever happened. Our culture has surfaced a multitude of issues-medical ethics, abortion, euthanasia, aging-that crop up in any counseling session with regularity.
Frank: I cannot address this question from a pastor’s standpoint, but it would seem to me that there’s more overlap than ever before between the counseling problems the pastor would face and the ones that a psychiatrist would face. There would be a lot of overlap in the area of personality disorders, childhood disorders, and personality traits. These are maladapted behavior patterns that get people into trouble. But as I talk to my pastor friends, I discover that many people come to them for substance-use disorders such as amphetamine abuse.
Terry: What are the dangers the Christian leader faces in counseling, and how can he or she be protected from these dangers?
Jim: One of the great dangers I face is the problem of caring and being compassionate without creating dependency. That’s not nearly as easy as I first thought it should be. For the pastor/ counselor it’s especially tricky, for he is viewed as a representative of God as well as a counselor/ friend.
All counselors struggle with the problems created by intimacy. In the man/woman relationship, God designed us so that sexual tension would increase with intimacy. A lot of Christian leaders are not cautious enough in this area. We probably all know someone who has suffered devastating heartbreak and had to leave the ministry because of entering into a counseling situation without proper safeguards.
On the other hand, certain forms of intimacy can promote accelerated healing. For example, to touch others, or even hug them, may provide them with an affirmation and acceptance that words can never express. Obviously, touch is extremely dangerous in a man/woman relationship, for probably neither one knows what level of intimacy will trigger a very intimate response from the other person.
Paul: I need help with this one. It seems to me that physical contact of any kind in a counseling session could lead to disaster. What are you saying?
Frank: The issue of dependency and the issue of touch must be dealt with individually. We need to be very careful not to make wide-sweeping generalizations that apply to all people. With people who have a bent toward dependency, the counselor must carefully examine the situation and plot a strategy that will promote their growth. Rather than encourage them to come once a week for help, it might be better to schedule them every three months. Even if they preferred more frequent sessions, it would be very unhealthy to encourage them to come more often and thus keep them from growing.
The same thing is true of touch. You have to look at each situation individually and plot a strategy. If you’re counseling a 60- or 70-year-old lady who has been rejected and suffered a lot of personal losses, putting your arm around her and physically demonstrating that you care might be of tremendous help to her. And she would probably interpret it as caring. But with someone else, say a 20-year-old paranoid, you just might scare that person to death.
Richard: And if that paranoid is a woman who has suffered from an inadequate father, she may interpret your gesture as a sexual advance.
Jim: I’ve struggled a lot with this subject. If you want an interesting Bible study, carefully review the touching ministry of Jesus. My early conclusions are that there are as many nonsexual as sexual ways to touch a person. I’ve been thinking about a couple of schizophrenics with whom I have been dealing, where the issue of touch is a very difficult thing to resolve.
Gene: Jim, would you ever reach out and touch a woman in a counseling situation? For example, would you take her hands in yours and pray with her, or put your arm around her?
Jim: I tend not to put my arm around a woman, but often I will take her hand. However, let me quickly explain that my office door has an obvious glass window, and my secretary sits right outside the door. In my counseling sessions there is never a total “behind the closed door.”
Paul: But aren’t you taking a chance? Isn’t it presumptuous to assume that you have correctly read the person and how he or she might respond?
Richard: I think of two correctives: One, we must be very careful about touch, but all counseling requires the taking of some risk; so I guess I’m not afraid of risk if the counselor is wise enough to build safeguards into the counseling techniques. Second, whenever the counselor faces doubt about the counseling technique, he should quickly check with another competent person, and get a second, third, and fourth opinion.
Terry: I’ve been thinking about the recent seminary graduate who might be reading this forum. From your combined experience, what would you say to this young pastor as he or she approaches that first counseling encounter?
Gene: Any young pastor is going to face the fact of credibility because of his age and experience. It’s helpful to realize right up front that there are older, wiser people in the church who can help him with his credibility problem. He shouldn’t be threatened to admit that there are certain things he can’t handle, and to be prepared to refer the counselee to more capable people in the church, or to someone competent on the outside. It doesn’t help an individual to dispense a lot of theoretical information. I have met young pastors who quickly dispense ideas relative to marriage, childrearing, and adolescent resolution of problems that are simply inappropriate. He usually aggravates the problem, which further undermines his credibility.
Richard: I think it’s important for a young pastor to have immediate access to another pastor or experienced professional. I would also urge him or her to immediately tap into community resources. When the pastor first comes to town, he should take the time to meet physicians, lawyers, psychologists, and other professionals, and get to know them on a first-name basis.
Frank: Watch for the dangers of losing objectivity. A young pastor runs the danger of being very eager to please, and of trying to get to know many people very well. Both of these tendencies run counter to objectivity. Beware also of dependency.
David: Dependency is one of the big problems. I would suggest that a young pastor set a specific number of sessions and give the counselee an idea of the number. That emphasizes the temporary aspect of the counseling situation. It might also be helpful to let the person know that for the total healing of their situation they might need to get into a group of some kind. This paves the way for cutting off potential dependence when you feel that counseling has become a part of the disease and not a part of the cure. However, as one begins to counsel, remain flexible on both schedule and amount of time.
Richard: Young people coming out of seminary have probably been surrounded by some pretty intensive support systems. They may not even realize to what degree other students, faculty members, and a number of other friendships have carried them from one week to the next.
As they move into a parish they may quickly develop acute feelings of loneliness. The support system is gone, and not enough time has passed to create a new one. It becomes very important that young pastors find peers as quickly as possible. Colleagues who are facing the same kinds of problems will provide friendship and support, and can be a sounding board for problems the young pastor faces.
Frank: Pastors need to be very careful about their own relationship to their spouses. Obviously a spouse is central to any kind of social support system. A strong spouse relationship will help the pastor avoid relationship entanglements with patients. In fact, the more a spouse can become an integral part of counseling therapy, the stronger that counseling will be.
Jim: That’s true. And if a spouse is never involved, counseling can become a tremendous threat to the spouse. When a wife knows her husband/pastor is talking with other women about very intimate things, it may threaten her in ways that could be very detrimental to their own marriage relationship.
Frank: Pastors should know that there are some very sick people with intense problems, and they need to keep one eye on their own mental health. Watch for suicide and other physical problems. If there’s any question about suicide or physical abuse, get immediate consultation.
Gene: Stay close to the Lord. After all, he is the great physician. We are to cast all our care upon him, knowing that he cares for us.
David: The pastor’s own devotional life should probably have been the first item on our list of cautions. There is no substitute for a strong devotional life when it comes to facing the problems of the world. You must have the power of the Holy Spirit with you as you go into the counseling room.
To this day, I always try to pray before a person comes to see me, and after he has left. In spite of years of experience and my constant pursuit for more training, there is no substitute for the radar of the Holy Spirit. I am wonderfully and happily surprised at God’s guidance. I don’t know why I should be, for the radar of the Holy Spirit is on target. It’s very important that I be sensitive to the counselee, but it’s more important that I be sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
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