People usually see a professional counselor for psychological relief. People often go to a pastor for spiritual relief. This puts the pastoral counselor in not only a healing role but also a discipling role.
—Gary Gulbranson
My wife’s father and mother used to attend our church. One Sunday night, as she had done many times before, my mother-in-law played piano in the service. Two days later she collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where the doctors determined she had a brain aneurysm. On Friday she died.
Although grieving with my family and congregation, I decided to preach on Sunday. My sermon, from the Book of Joshua, discussed the sovereignty of God. I related the message to her death and spoke openly about my own feelings.
Later in the foyer, I overheard a woman from the church say, “Well at least now Pastor Gulbranson knows a little about the pain some of us have gone through.” At the moment I thought it was a cruel statement.
Later I thought about her comment. It was, in fact, a perception of me shared by a few others. Because of the standards I preached, some regarded me as lacking empathy.
Yet I shouldered a heavy load of counseling and relied heavily on my training in listening skills and empathy. I prayed for my counselees and took their problems home at night. Of those who came to me for counseling, I doubt if any would label me as critical or unaccepting.
It seemed, at least in the eyes of some, that Pastor Gulbranson in the office and Preacher Gulbranson in the pulpit had little to do with one another. And that perception undercut some of my effectiveness as their minister.
As a result of that experience, I began consciously to let my counseling strengths find greater expression in the pulpit. It has made a marked difference.
In turn, my style of counseling has also evolved over the years, due partly to what I know about preaching, making me, I think, a much more effective counselor.
Just as all-around gymnasts perform better on rings because of the flexibility they develop on floor exercise, and better on floor exercise because of the strength they develop on rings, so pastors can be more effective overall because of the mutually beneficial ministries of preaching and counseling.
As I learned in the experience above, however, the synergy of preaching and counseling is not automatic. Here’s how I make the most of it.
How Counseling Shapes My Preaching
There’s an old saying that a preacher should prepare sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, meaning that our exegesis ought to touch the daily lives of our people. More helpful than the newspaper is counseling. In fact, I’ve found that counseling helps my preaching in at least four ways.
• Counseling helps me select topics. During my first few years at Glen Ellyn Bible Church, a lot of new people began attending. For many this was their first church experience; others hadn’t been to church since childhood. With them they brought all kinds of struggles, especially family problems, emotional hurts, and an inability to forgive. Some had a hard time grabbing hold of God’s forgiveness and reordering their lives.
I counseled most of these people in my office, indeed suffered with them, anxious about their turmoils. One day I happened upon a book of the Bible that spoke to a common thread of their experience—Hosea. God had asked Hosea to live in a wrenching situation in order to communicate who God is. He was a God who had been betrayed, who had been hurt, yet who still passionately loved his people.
So for several months, I preached from Hosea, and we saw lives healed and hope restored. That sermon series, which impacted people as much as any other sermon series I’ve preached, germinated in the counseling office as I listened to people and saw the circumstances of life up close.
Counseling compels me to preach to people’s needs. Marriages on the rocks, confused youth, questions about God’s will, bitterness—as I brush up against real life each day, the answers in God’s Word often beg to be preached to the entire congregation.
• Counseling helps me identify the emotions of a text. For me, identifying and communicating the emotional texture of a passage is what distinguishes preaching from teaching. The text is not just ethereal ideas, impersonal principles, and detached theology, but people—commands for people, sins of people, dilemmas of people. The sons and daughters of Adam and Eve are beset with complexity and pain, joys and hope—an emotional smorgasbord.
My sermon preparation and delivery is intensely personal. I often have the faces of counselees in mind as I prepare messages. Not that I preach at those individuals, but their lives, being significant to me, make the truth of Scripture ring with emotion. Also, as I preach, the faces in the sanctuary stimulate unanticipated thoughts and emotions in me.
This helps me project the Word not just to the head but also to the heart.
• Counseling helps me ask the empathy question. I often ask myself during my sermon preparation. How will the person going through this situation or being corrected by this verse or falling short of this ideal feel about what I am saying? Whether their feelings are right or wrong is not the issue; what matters is how I can help them through those feelings to move in the direction of God’s will. My answering the empathy question enables the listener to hear not only the letter of the Word but the spirit of the Word.
In one sermon series, “I Believe in the God Who Believes in Me,” based on the Gospel of John, I dealt with the subject of self-image by looking at the interactions of Jesus with Nicodemus, with the woman at the well, and with others. At the same time I was counseling a young woman who had grown up in a dysfunctional home. Her father had left when she was a little girl; several male figures had come and gone, abusing her in the process. After a string of negative dating experiences, she eventually married and later came to know Christ. But she still had curdled ideas about her identity and life in general.
As I prepared my sermons each week, my mind would frequently turn to her. When I preached about John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, I emphasized John’s special ability to notice the love Christ uniquely had for him. The following week this woman came to my office for her appointment and said the message had been transforming. Even though we had discussed many of the same ideas before, hearing them in a sermon affected her differently. I think our discussions helped me to ask better the empathy question and focus that sermon in a way that would address her emotions.
The empathy question impacts the application section of my sermons. This is especially important when I’m preaching about sins like child or wife abuse, because my temptation is to get angry and blast people with generalities. Neither the blast nor the generalities are much help.
Instead, I put myself in the place of the people hearing my message and ask, “How are they going to hear what I’m saying?” Dealing with their feelings, then, becomes the first step in application, for a person’s feelings skew everything else they try to do.
In addition, when I’ve thought about how people are going to react, I think more realistically and specifically about what they probably will and will not do after the service. In short, I try to understand the pain of those who will be bloodied by the sharp “two-edged sword” of Scripture.
In that sense, I’ve been given a glimpse of the Old Testament prophets. They were not smug and self-righteous, not Pharisees who gloated over the judgments to come. They spoke clearly about right and wrong—and wept in the process, anticipating the feelings, thoughts, and responses of people.
• Counseling is a source of illustrations. Obviously this requires sensitivity and careful attention to safeguards. Past or present counselees listening to a sermon naturally tend to read themselves into any illustrations or comments I make, especially if they are emotionally on edge or their self-image is teetering. But with conscientious protection of confidences, counseling becomes an artist’s palette for coloring my sermons.
There are three primary safeguards.
1. I illustrate more with generic circumstances dealt with on numerous occasions than with an individual’s story. For example, “I talk with many wives who can’t get in spiritual sync with their husbands. They feel lonely at home and frustrated when they come to church. ‘He just doesn’t show interest in what is happening between me and the Lord,’ is the common complaint.” A generic illustration isn’t as gripping, but it still helps people hear and see the relevance of Scripture.
2. If I tell someone’s story, I request permission. To avoid surprises or misunderstandings, I inform the person in detail what I would like to say and the context in which it will be told in the sermon. Most people are grateful that their painful circumstances can help others. Although we often discuss how I can keep their identity hidden, rarely has anyone refused me permission.
3. I will use stories from my past, before I came to Glen Ellyn. I make sure listeners know they don’t know the person in the story. I also tell it in such a way that it doesn’t dishonor the person in the story. I don’t want anyone in my congregation to think, I would never want a preacher telling a story about me in this way.
How My Preaching Influences Counseling
If people’s lives need to get into the sermon, the Word of God, written and spoken, needs to get into the counseling session. Being a preacher has enabled me do that, helping me deepen and improve my counseling ministry.
• Preaching provokes listeners to come to counseling who might not otherwise come. Often sermons stir listeners’ interest in something, opening their eyes to what they perhaps had grown complacent about. It reveals needs they have suppressed or ignored or simply endured but now want to resolve.
People come to preachers for counseling for different reasons than they go to full-time counselors. People usually see a professional counselor for psychological relief. People often go to a pastor for spiritual relief. They come seeking guidance in decision making as well as specific application of the Scriptures in their lives. This puts the pastoral counselor in not only a healing role but also a discipling role, and the basis for counseling becomes the Scriptures and their meaning.
In addition, as I give people glimpses into my personal life when I preach, many are prompted to come for counseling; they can identify with me.
I’ve been extensively involved with the business world. While pursuing my doctorate, I worked for almost eight years in real estate investment. I am on the board of a bank and interact regularly with business people through the Rotary club. As a result, my sermon applications and illustrations are often business related. After such sermons, I am often approached for counseling by business people who now see me as more credible.
• People who hear me preach expect answers in counseling. Those who come to pastors want more than empathy and affirmation, which I give; primarily they come to a pastor/preacher to learn what God’s Word says about their situation. They sense in preaching a source of wisdom and authority they can’t find outside of Scripture. They come to me because they rightly assume that the source of truth in preaching and counseling is the same.
Over the years I’ve become increasingly directive in my counseling. I’m more willing to point people to what’s right and wrong, as you might expect more of a preacher than a counselor. Many people in our day live with deep insecurities. They crave a moral, ordered world. Especially in light of so much moral confusion, I want to be as clear as possible about morality, even if it troubles them at first.
One pastor I know had a single woman come to see him. She had been sleeping with a man occasionally. She complained, “Whenever I give myself to him, he loses interest in me for a couple of weeks. Then he starts paying attention to me until we sleep together again.” She couldn’t figure out what was going on.
My friend gently but firmly explained the biblical counsel about extra-marital sex and outlined its wisdom. Her response: “This is a new age. You can’t live like that anymore.” She left the office clearly disturbed, but with an understanding of what God’s answer was to her situation. She didn’t like God’s answer, but she wasn’t finding the world’s alternative any more satisfying.
Like that pastor, I explain what’s right and wrong, but I also urge people, when appropriate, to do what’s right. I make it clear that it’s their choice, but I let them know what I hope they will do. When counseling in a directive manner, of course, appropriateness is everything. The owner of a trucking business attended my church years ago, and he unloaded some wisdom on a young preacher. “You can’t drive a 12-ton truck over a 10-ton bridge.”
I had been trying to, but with little success. I would rev my engines and roll an eighteen wheeler of God’s will onto people, and they would collapse; they wouldn’t come back to church or to counseling.
Jesus criticized the Pharisees for the same thing, for laying heavy burdens upon people without lifting a finger to help them. My mistake was I had not yet established enough trust in our relationship or built enough faith in God or encouraged them sufficiently with God’s love and good news. So I have learned to first build bridges both in preaching and counseling.
• Listeners come for unique, personal application of sermon principles. As true as scriptural principles are in general, they often require application to an individual’s unique needs, problems, weaknesses, and gifts.
One woman attended our church sporadically because of agoraphobia, the fear of public places. On one Sunday when she was present, my sermon included the statement: “It is God’s will for you regularly to attend church.”
She called that week and came in for counseling. “You don’t know what it’s like to suffer with this fear,” she said. “Sometimes I will have panic attacks while in church: I can’t breathe; my heart starts racing; I break out in a sweat; I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. God doesn’t want me to suffer like that. How can I come to church when I suspect this is going to happen?”
As often happens, she had a problem but saw few options. I showed her how to defuse some of the threat. “God wants to help you overcome this, and church is one of the easiest places to do that. You can sit in the balcony if you want. You can come a little late and leave quickly so that you don’t have to interact with a lot of people. We are a large church, so you can remain fairly anonymous until you become more comfortable. It will be hard at first, but eventually if you take these first steps, things will get better, and you’ll be able to go out to other public places.”
The personal integration made the difference, and it was the very thing she hoped counseling would do for her. Counseling helped her see how she, with her barriers, could obey God. She started attending every Sunday and eventually got a job in a Christian organization.
Not every case is this easy, however. Sometimes people come wanting personal application but then object when I give it. They want to hold the truth at arm’s length. They avoid it intentionally. At such times I get specific about the actions they need to take.
• Since I preach for decision, I can counsel for decision. Each week after my sermons I use a variety of invitations to challenge people to respond to the message. Since people are used to that from the pulpit, they are not surprised when I use that same approach in the counseling setting. So I lay out the options, explain God’s will, urge them to do what’s right, and then tell them they have a decision to make. I can’t make it for them.
Most people in counseling feel like victims, as though they’re trapped. They feel they don’t have any options or decisions available: the problem is a result of their past, other people, or unchangeable circumstances, and they are left with no apparent control of their lives.
So after talking through their problems, I tell people, “We’ve talked about your past, but that’s not an excuse for your present; it’s an explanation. This is how God sees your difficulty. We need to focus on what your choices are today.”
Most of the time, I’m confident people will decide for the right, but even when I’m not, I still want to bring them to a point of decision.
One woman who came to me with marital difficulties was extremely withdrawn, shy, and noncommunicative. For three sessions I gradually drew her out, patiently listening to bits and pieces about how terrible her husband was, how he never met her needs, how frustrated she was, and what a victim she was.
Finally, in the fourth session the truth came out: she had been entangled in an adulterous relationship for years. Having made a commitment lo Christ, though not actively attending church, she was carrying a heavy load of guilt.
We talked about God’s will. I laid out her options and the consequences. “You can continue in this other situation,” I said, “be miserable, and feel tugged and torn. Or you can leave your husband, go off and marry this guy, and grab a measure of happiness for yourself, but more than likely you will be frustrated; there will be brokenness that won’t disappear. Or you can ask God’s forgiveness; you can turn around and start moving in the right direction. We’ll work with you and your husband to restore what has been broken.”
She exercised her freedom. She never came back to see me, and she chose to leave her husband. I’ve lost touch and have no idea what has happened since.
Though it usually doesn’t turn out so bad, that’s still a painful thing for a counselor to experience. But it’s unavoidable.
Several years ago my mother wrote a Christmas letter in which she said, “This has been the toughest year of my life.” All of her kids, she said, were grown, but some had made bad decisions and were suffering terribly. She felt guilty about their problems, nagged by the idea that if she had “been a better mother” or had come to Christ sooner, some of these things wouldn’t have happened.
Then God gave her an insight. Though he was a perfect parent, his first two children chose wrong. She wrote, “If God, the perfect parent, was not going to control the choices of his children, I realized I needed to exercise that same attitude toward my children.”
I have learned the same lesson about my counselees.
The Goal of Both: Applying God’s Truth
I grew up in a home with many problems, problems in my parent’s marriage, struggles between parents and children. When my folks came to know the Lord (I was 11 at the time), they were extremely fortunate to have a pastor who got close to them and demonstrated real care.
During the week he would take the truth presented on Sunday morning and explain to my parents, who lacked some basic living skills, how to integrate the biblical truths with their situation. Otherwise it would have been an extremely frustrating and discouraging experience to sit for long under his preaching.
Because a preacher got close enough to understand what was going on and help us through the struggles, we made it.
I can’t imagine my preaching apart from being involved with people in counseling. To get close and wrestle with the human condition and to explore the depths of God’s Word, to speak to people’s situations from the pulpit and in the counseling setting — these are to me the perfect, indispensable complements of pastoral ministry.
Copyright © 1992 by Christianity Today
