If we are immersed in a therapeutic culture, many churchgoers have a question in the back of their minds: Do I need a pastor or a professional counselor?
This is not a simple a question to answer since most evangelicals would argue that you need both. But it is helpful to see a few questions in back of the question of which is needed.
Helping Professions
First, we have to ask ourselves why someone would need to see a professional counselor. Likely it is becaue they have some problem, a habit, a behaviour or something else that they know is wrong or harmful or sinful. So in order to get assistance, many people immediately look to the most dominant ‘helping professions’ in our culture, doctors, pharmacists, therapists and counselors.
On the list of ‘helping professions’ few in society would rate pastors as very important. For Christians who have been steeped in a therapeutic culture which elevates the prowess of these other helping professions, it can seem like pastors are part of a quaint and antiquated system for dealing with problems. So to get in the back of the question about professional counselors or pastors, we have to recognize the therapeutic culture we live in.
Therapeutic Culture
Since 1993, David Wells has exposed the therapeutic culture in a series of books. Specifically, he has outlined how modernity has affected evangelical churches so that Christians desire therapy.
Wells has said that instead of therapy, we need to feel God’s weight at the centre of our lives, not the periphery:
What gives weight to God in our lives is two things. First, he has to be enthroned in the center and not merely circling on the periphery. Second, the God who is enthroned must be the God who has revealed himself in Scripture. This God is not simply the supplier of everything we want, our concierge, and our therapist dispensing comfort as we feel the need for it. He is the God of burning purity as well as of burning love. That God, as he rules our own private universe, will wrench around what happens in that universe to conform us to who he is in his character. The “god” who is there only for our needs as we define them will be a “god” who is light and skinny.
Crossway Interview with David F. Wells
So in the first place, we have to have God at the centre of all that we do, and recognize the powerful effect which modernity has on our own self-perception. We need to see how we perceive the sufficiency of God’s Word, the significance of God’s church, and the strength of God’s shepherds to care for the sheep.
The Context of Care
The second question behind the question is to ask where is the context of care which we all need to live within? There is a big difference between seeking help for problems within the church and seeking help outside the church. When the first instinct for a Christian is to look outside the church for solutions, they are declaring the utter insufficiency of God, his Word and his people. They don’t mean to do that of course. But evangelicals have cultivated church-less habits for nearly a century, so it is natural to look for expertise outside of the local church.
Yet it can be surprising to see how effective the local church context is for someone, even when they have to have help from outside the church. For example, when a young woman in my church had a medical emergency requiring medical professionals, the care and counsel of the church was still immersive for her. Even in the hospital, doctors and nurses were engaged by the church’s care as much as she was.
So the context of care must be understood clearly. There will be times when a Christian must go outside the local church for counseling and medical help. But the dominant context of care will be in the local church so that the pastoral and congregational care that a person receives will follow them.
Pastoral Care as Congregational Care
A third issue behind the question of professional counselors versus pastors, is to recognize that pastoral care is expressed not merely in one-to-one care from the pastor, but in the one-another care of the congregation for each other. In accordance with Ephesians 4:12, the pastors are to “equip the saints for the work of ministry”. If they are equipped, even as co-counselors, then that is an extension of the pastor’s counseling ministry, and makes his work more wholistic and thus more effective.
By contrast, the professional counselor enters into a counseling situation as a sole filter for the person’s problems, offering them an assessment that the counselee can either accept or reject as any consumer can when they have paid their bill.
The pastor, unlike the professional counselor, offers spiritual counsel and care for a person within the context of one-anothering by the congregation. To the covenanted church member, there can be no ‘take it or leave it’ kind of response when the counsel they received is biblical and appropriately conscience-binding. The context of care for the Christian being counseled by their fellow congregants will be an expression of meaningful church membership. This is where our view of counseling is shaped by our view of the local church and what it means to be a member.
The Place of Professional Counselors
For Christians there is still a useful place for professional counselors. Professional counselors ought to be biblical counselors. They have been biblically trained and use the Scriptures not only as a proof text, but as the interpretive mechanism for all human problems.
Certainly, the professional biblical counselor will have some subject matter expertise. But the primary way that biblical counselors differ from pastors (other than the fact that pastors, not professional counselors occupy an ecclesial office) is that biblical counselors are able to offer specialized, intensive and extended care. Pastors offer the same thing. But for people who have multiple complex sin issues, habits, and consequences to deal with, a dedicated helper can be very useful.
This is why it is helpful to encourage biblical counseling generally. When pastors recognize their large role in providing nouthetic care (1 Cor 4:14, Col 1:28, 1 Th 5:12,14, 2 Th 3:15), they will do more than be a personal counselor for people. They will cultivate a culture of one-another co-counseling. The result will be a caring context for every Christian to be helped to deal honestly with sin and the consequences of sin in their lives. Then, even if someone needs some special, intensive, extended attention from a professional biblical counselor, they are immersed within a culture with God at the centre.
All faithful professional biblical counsellors desire this pastoral/congregational context for the people they serve. And all pastors welcome the additional help that they can look to in certain situations that require more attention than their time and space allow.
So to answer the opening question, “Do we need professional counselors instead of pastors?”, no, we do not. Rather we must recapture a sense of what the local church is for (a clinic of co-counselors), what is the role of the pastor (equipping the co-counselors while modeling biblical care), and then we are in a position to value another kind of counselor (professional biblical counselor). At such a re-ordering of priorities, the professional biblical counsellor will rejoice together with the pastor and the local church.