When Should I Seek Pastoral Counseling?
When you think of pastoral counseling, I wonder if you think of someone in a crisis who has come as a last resort. Someone who needs real help. Most of us look at it that way, as if pastoral counseling were for other people with bigger problems. “My pastor is busy,” we think, “and do I really want him to know about this anyway?” But the point of this article is to say something that goes against most of those intuitions.
If you have a pastor, pastoral counseling is for you.
Plenty of us have struggled through the last two years, on top of those of us who were struggling already. Now is a good time to ask: what is pastoral counseling, and when should I come in for it?
Pastors may do many things on a given day, but all those things fall into two categories: prayer and the ministry of the word. This is what the Apostle Paul said when he delegated the widow care system to the first deacons, “But we will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4).
That devotion informs everything a pastor does, including counseling. It helps us see pastoral counseling in its right category, as word-based ministry. It even helps us define it. Pastoral counseling happens when your pastor tries to understand a difficult situation you’re in and give you advice from the Bible.
From our end, we pastors often think of it as preaching reversed. In the pulpit, we start with a Bible text and ask how it applies to real-life situations. In counseling, we start with the real-life situation and ask what the Bible says about it–the same process backwards. And most pastors I know say that counseling has made us better preachers.
That makes counseling different from therapy, which has a more pointed aim to heal or relive a particular disorder. Where therapy is specific, pastoral counsel is broad. It can speak to any tricky situation (including a disorder) and may have any number of goals (including healing or relief).
If it isn’t just for disorders, when should I seek pastoral counsel? If you have a pastor, pastoral counseling is for you. But when do you need it? When you’re in a difficult situation and you’re thinking, “I want to handle this rightly,” ask yourself if the preaching you hear regularly, your friends, your mentors, and your knowledge of the Bible are enough to equip you for this hour. If they are, seek wisdom from those sources. If your situation is too complex for that, it’s time to seek pastoral counseling.
Here are a few situations I can think of:
You find yourself prone to fear and anxiety too often. You know Jesus speaks to those things, but they’re proving too difficult to overcome.
You heard a specific sermon application that was close to your situation, but not quite. It made you think, “I wonder what he’d say about my situation.”
Your therapist is helping you with depression, but you still want a biblical framework to help you understand it.
You need help with something that you don’t feel like you can tell everyone about.
If you’re in a tricky situation and the regular ministries of the church aren’t enough, come on in.
What happens when you come in is far less intimidating than the feeling you probably have before you come in. Because I usually don’t know much about the situation, I’ll ask a lot of questions and listen. Eventually, we start looking to the Bible for answers and make a plan to go forward. Most situations require a few sessions, but rarely more than five. You could expect about the same thing with Pastor Paul.
Another difference between counseling and therapy is confidentiality. Psychologists are often protected by doctor-client privileges, and so sometimes people assume that pastors are too. But a pastor promises only to use what he knows for your good. The key word here is not confidentiality, but discretion. That may mean he calls the police if he thinks you’re going to hurt yourself, or that he reports abuse when you don’t want him to. But it means he does that to help you, and he does it carefully. So if you tell a pastor something, you’re trusting him to be very careful with it and never use it to harm you. That usually–but not always–means keeping it a secret.
If you’d like, consider this article an invitation. Not every situation needs a pastor’s hand to walk through, but plenty do. If yours does, feel free to call the office, or email me or Paul, and we’ll set something up.