📖 Pastoral Ministries — Unit 8: Pastoral Counseling

Orientation

Sooner or later, every pastor will have a chair across from his desk. A husband and wife will sit in it on a Tuesday afternoon and announce that they cannot keep going. A teenager will sit in it on a Thursday evening and say nothing for the first ten minutes. A man will sit in it after Sunday service and confess something he has carried for thirty years. A widow will sit in it three months after her husband's funeral and admit she does not know how to live anymore. The pastor who is unprepared for that chair will reach for the wrong tools and do real damage. The pastor who is prepared can do the work of a lifetime in a single hour.

This unit examines pastoral counseling — what it is, what it is not, the methodological backbone I have used for years, the principle of personal responsibility, the discipline of listening, the boundaries every counselor must keep, and the moments when the pastor must refer the person to someone else.

I. Why the Pastor Counsels

Studies have repeatedly shown that when people in distress reach out for help, the first person they call is not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. It is a pastor. People go to their pastor because they trust him, because he is available, because he speaks the language of their faith, and because they believe — rightly — that the deepest problems of the human heart are spiritual problems before they are anything else.

The pastor is not pretending to be a clinician. He is doing what pastors have always done. He is sitting with the wounded and pointing them to the Wounded Healer. The Bible itself uses several words for this work. Parakaleō means "to call alongside" — the same root from which we get the title Paraclete for the Holy Spirit. Noutheteō means "to admonish, instruct, or warn" — the verb behind biblical correction. Parakaleō also means "to encourage." The faithful pastor is doing all three: coming alongside, admonishing where needed, and encouraging always.

But pastoral counseling is also a specialized skill. It is not just sympathy with a Bible verse attached. The pastor who walks into the counseling chair without a method will, by his fifth session, be giving advice that does more harm than good. There is a better way.

II. The Mowrer-Drakeford-Glasser Heritage

The methodology I have used in my own counseling classes for many years comes from a tradition rooted in O. Hobart Mowrer, a mid-twentieth-century figure whose framework remains historically influential even though counseling and psychiatry have developed considerably since his time and some of his terminology now reads as dated. Mowrer was a psychologist who taught at the University of Illinois in the middle of the twentieth century, and he broke with the Freudian assumption that human pathology is mostly the product of repression and unmet drives. Mowrer argued the opposite. He said most of what we call mental illness is, at its core, a problem of unconfessed wrongdoing and refused responsibility. Mowrer's framework came to be called Integrity Therapy. It was a return to honesty, confession, and personal accountability.

Two students of Mowrer carried the framework forward in different directions. John Drakeford, who taught for many years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, took Mowrer's principles and built a thoroughly Christian application of them. Drakeford's book Wise Counsel and his 10-Step Method became the spine of his teaching. William Glasser, working in the secular field, took the same principles and developed what he called Reality Therapy. Glasser stressed that man has two basic needs — love and a sense of self-worth — and that the counselor's job is to help the person take responsibility for meeting those needs through right choices in the present, not through blaming the past.

Mowrer trained Drakeford. Drakeford trained me. The chain of personal responsibility from teacher to student is real, and it produces a counseling method that actually works. All three men — Mowrer, Drakeford, Glasser — agreed on a single principle that the modern therapeutic world had largely abandoned: the only person you can actually change is yourself. Until the counselee owns that, no progress is possible.

III. The Drakeford 10-Step Method

Drakeford taught that effective lay counseling could often be done in about fifteen minutes. That sentence will surprise people who assume counseling means months of weekly hour-long appointments. It is not that Drakeford disliked depth. It is that he understood the structure of a helping conversation. Once the structure is in place, the time required is far less than people think.

The strength of the method is that every step has a question that goes with it. The pastor does not have to invent the next move. He simply moves to the next step and asks the question that belongs to it. Here are the ten steps in the order Drakeford taught them, with the question that opens each one.

The genius of the structure is the turn at step five. Most counselors stay too long in steps one through four — endlessly clarifying, endlessly exploring feelings, endlessly digging into the past. Drakeford said: at some point you must turn the corner. You must move from "What happened to you?" to "Where have you failed, and what are you going to do?" That turn is where help begins. And once a pastor learns the shape of the ten steps, he often finds — exactly as Drakeford promised — that fifteen minutes is enough.

A note on lay counseling. Drakeford was passionate that counseling does not belong only to professionals. He gave three reasons every Christian church should train laypeople in the helping skills. Professional counselors cannot meet all the needs. There simply are not enough of them, and most people in distress will never sit in a counselor's office. Lay people can be effective counselors. Studies have repeatedly shown that trained laypeople, with honesty, sensitivity, and concern, counsel as effectively as many professionals. Christians have a responsibility to minister to others — Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." The 10-Step Method is not just for the pastor in his study. It is a tool that can be taught to deacons, Sunday school teachers, Bible study leaders, and mature believers in the congregation. The pastor who teaches his people to counsel one another multiplies the helping ministry of his church many times over.

IV. The 80/20 Principle

Drakeford had a particular technique for the situation every pastor faces — the man or woman who comes to talk about somebody else. A husband sits in the chair and lays out a careful case against his wife. The pastor listens. He hears the long list of grievances. He hears how unreasonable she has been, how unfair, how cold, how impossible to live with.

Drakeford taught us to handle this moment carefully. He would say something like, "Well, your wife is not here. We can't talk to her. So there is no point in going further down that road." Then he would offer the principle that has become one of the most useful tools I know in pastoral counseling. "In most relationships, it isn't just one person or the other. It's both. Let's say your wife is eighty percent at fault and you are twenty percent. Would you be able to agree with that?"

The man almost always says yes. He has been told he is twenty percent at fault, which is a relief, because he was sure he was being blamed for the whole thing. He has also implicitly agreed that he has some responsibility. That is the door.

Drakeford's next sentence would be: "Well, great. Let's talk about that twenty percent."

The brilliance of this technique is that it honors the man's grievance without joining him in attacking the absent spouse, and it redirects the conversation to the only territory where actual change is possible — his own responsibility. The pastor cannot fix the wife. The wife is not in the room. The pastor can help the husband see his own twenty percent, own it, repent of it where appropriate, and act on it. And here is the surprising thing about marriages: when one spouse genuinely changes their twenty percent, the dynamic between them shifts in ways that often soften the other eighty percent without it ever being directly addressed.

This principle goes far beyond marriage counseling. It applies to the man complaining about his boss, the woman complaining about her sister, the parent complaining about an adult child. The faithful pastor will not sit in his chair and become the instrument of an absent person's condemnation. He will, gently and skillfully, turn the conversation toward the responsibility of the person actually present.

V. Listening Well

All of this depends on listening. Drakeford taught what he called holistic listening — listening with eyes, ears, head, and hands. The eyes watch the body language. The ears hear the words and the silences. The head processes meaning behind words. The hands take occasional notes and stay open and still rather than fidgeting or pointing.

The faithful pastor learns to ask open-ended questions, not yes-or-no questions. "How did that make you feel?" opens a door. "Are you angry?" closes it, because the person can answer yes or no and stop talking. The pastor learns to use silence. Most counselors fear silence and rush to fill it. Drakeford said the silence is usually where the real work is being done. The counselee is thinking. Let them think.

The pastor also learns to listen for what is not said. The first problem the counselee names is often not the real one. The first problem is the safe problem — the one they are willing to lead with. The real problem is usually waiting somewhere behind it. Patient, prayerful listening lets the real problem surface in its own time.

There is a fallacy that good listening is the natural ability of intelligent people. It is not. Listening is a skill that must be practiced, and it can be improved. Reading does not develop listening. Everyday conversation does not develop listening. Deliberate practice — and a humility about how often we have been wrong about what we thought we heard — is what develops listening.

VI. Boundaries

Pastoral counseling lives or dies on boundaries. The pastor who has no boundaries is one bad afternoon away from a scandal or a burnout.

There is the boundary of place. Counseling sessions belong in the pastor's office at the church, with the door closed but a window in it, or in a public restaurant where appropriate. They do not belong in homes, in private rooms with no glass, in cars, or in late-night phone calls when it can be avoided. There is the boundary of time. A counseling session has a beginning and an end, usually about an hour. The pastor who lets sessions run open-ended trains his counselees to expect unlimited access and trains himself toward exhaustion. There is the boundary of confidentiality. What is said in the room stays in the room, with the very few exceptions Scripture and law require — namely, where there is danger to life, abuse of a child, or a crime against another. There is the boundary of affection. Transference is real. The hurting woman who comes for counseling will sometimes begin to attach feelings to the pastor that belong to her absent husband or her absent father. The wise pastor sees this coming and protects her, his wife, and himself by having another adult present — a spouse, a deacon, a secretary nearby — and by not counseling a woman alone in the way he would counsel a man.

These boundaries are not unfriendly. They are protective. They protect the counselee, who is in a vulnerable state and deserves a counselor who will not exploit it. They protect the pastor, who is also a sinner and is not above falling. They protect the marriage of the pastor, the marriage of the counselee, and the witness of the church.

VII. When to Refer

Pastoral counseling has limits. Not every problem is one the pastor is qualified to handle. There are seasons of clinical depression, severe trauma, addiction, suicidal ideation, schizophrenia, and other conditions where the pastor's job is to recognize the situation and refer the person to a Christian psychiatrist, psychologist, or licensed counselor. The pastor who tries to handle everything himself does damage. The pastor who knows his limits and has a referral list ready does the kingdom of God enormous good.

The principle is simple: pastoral counseling is for the spiritual and relational dimensions of human struggle. When the struggle has a clinical dimension that requires diagnosis, medication, or specialized therapy, the pastor stays in the picture as a spiritual counselor and pastor, but he hands the clinical work to those equipped to do it. The two roles work together. Many of the most effective recoveries I have seen involved a faithful pastor and a faithful Christian therapist working in parallel on the same person.

VIII. The Pastor's Own Soul in the Chair

A pastor cannot give what he does not have. The pastor whose own soul is dry will counsel out of dryness. The pastor whose own marriage is unattended will give bad marriage counsel. The pastor whose own sins are unconfessed will be unable to call the counselee to confession.

Mowrer was right about this much, even outside the Christian framework: integrity is the foundation of all real change. The Christian pastor goes deeper. He knows that integrity flows from a heart cleansed by the blood of Christ, sustained by the Word of God, and renewed by the Holy Spirit. The pastor who maintains his own daily walk with the Lord — confession, Scripture, prayer, worship, the support of his own pastors and friends — comes into the counseling chair carrying something the merely-trained therapist cannot carry. He carries Christ. And Christ is what the wounded ultimately need.

Closing

The pastor's chair is one of the holiest places in the church building. People will tell you, sitting in that chair, things they will tell no one else on earth. They will weep. They will confess. They will plead for help. They will look at you with eyes that say, Is there any hope? The faithful pastor, prepared by training and sustained by his own walk with Christ, will answer that question in three ways. He will sit and listen. He will gently turn the conversation toward the only territory where change is possible — the counselee's own heart and choices. And he will point them, every time, to the Christ who is the great Counselor, the great Physician, and the great Lover of human souls.

"Who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (2 Corinthians 1:4). May every pastor reading this become, by the grace of Christ, the kind of counselor whose chair becomes a healing station for the wounded of his community.

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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