Counseling

1. LESSON 3A– COUNSELING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CHURCH
Dr. Danny B. Medina

2. Congregations and Counseling
How does counseling apply in the church?

3. What is a church?
Church is not buildings nor denominations nor places
where people gather. It is different-sized communities of
people, at different places in their spiritual journeys,
joining with others to worship, to learn, to grow, to serve,
to give. Church communities are ideally caring groups of
developing people who sometimes come together for
crucially important corporate worship but who also seek
to live every day in ways that show their dedication to
Christ and their love for others. No church is perfect, and
no one has fully reached the ideals, but nevertheless,
church communities are safe environments where people
can struggle, grow, care, share, and learn how to be like
Jesus

4. Key Passages
1. Romans 12
2. 1 Corinthians 12
3. Ephesians 4

5. Care and Counseling
Whose responsibility is it?

6. Pastoral Care
It refers to the church’s overall
ministries of healing, sustaining, guiding,
and reconciling people to God and to
one another. This includes preaching
and teaching, shepherding people,
nurturing, caring in times of need,
sometimes disciplining and
administering the ordinances.

7. Pastoral Counseling
 This is a more specialized
part of pastoral care that
involves helping individuals,
families, or groups as they
cope with the pressures and
crises of life.

8. Pastoral Counseling
 The ultimate goal is to help
counselees experience
healing, learn coping and
relational skills, and grow
both personally and
spiritually.

9. Pastoral Counseling
The Bible teaches that all
believers are to bear the
burdens of one another
and that all believers are
priests.

10. Pastoral Psychotherapy
It is a long-term, in-depth
helping process that attempts
to bring fundamental changes
in the counselee’s personality,
spiritual values, and ways of
thinking.

11. Christian Counseling and Spiritual
Direction
What is the difference?

12. Spiritual Direction
It is help given by one Christian to
another, which enables the recipient to:
1. More effectively pay attention to God’s
personal communication.
2. Respond to this God who communicates
personally.
3. Grow in intimacy with this God.
4. Live out the consequences of this
relationship.

13. The Difference:
Unlike counseling, spiritual direction:
1. Does not focus on problem-solving
or advice-giving.
2. Involves at least two people
praying and meeting together to
cultivate greater supernatural
awareness and deeper relationships
with God.

14. Counseling and the Emergent
Church
Changes in the current church and
counseling.

15. Changes in churches today:
1. Traditional churches tend to
worship using older hymns, have
strong pastoral leaders,
emphasize preaching and
rational thinking, often have
rules to guide behavior, and
utilize traditional counseling
approaches.

16. Changes in churches today:
2. Pragmatic, “seeker-sensitive”
churches have innovative
worship, try to meet needs,
emphasize reaching out, often
have CEO-type leaders and
high-quality, technologically
sophisticated programs.

17. Changes in churches today:
3. Emergent churches tend to have younger
congregations that are sensitive to
postmodernism, value relationships, and
prefer worship that involves all members
of the congregation and uses art, stories,
and the different senses. These church
members prefer more informal counseling
and coaching to traditional therapy and
counseling approaches.

18. The Church as a Caring
Community
The reason the church is on the earth.

19. Opportunity of the churches today:
1. The church has the
greatest potential for
being a caring and
healing community.

20. Opportunity of the churches today:
2. The church has divine
mandate to care and
to heal.

21. Does Psychology Help?
We need a careful intergradation of
the insights of psychology and
Biblical truth so that we can
understand and help people who
come to us for counseling.

22. Does Psychology Help?
All counselors have failures,
sometimes because of the
counselor’s inability,
misperceptions, or error, but also
because the counselee cannot or
will not change.

23. Church-Psychology Collaboration
1. Trust and respect each other as equals.
2. View each other as professionals.
3. Value the expertise that the other brings.
4. Share similar values and, in ideal situations, have similar
faith commitments.
5. Have similar goals for their clients.
6. Are creative enough to think of ways in which psychology
and theology can be applied within each other’s setting.
7. • Are willing to find innovative ways for working together
beyond the pastor referring parishioners for treatment.