Jesus Christ in Pastoral Counseling

While the world benefits from psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and marriage and family counselors, no one can take the place of Christ’s pastoral shepherds, appointed by the Lord and empowered by the Holy Spirit, spending countless hours calming the anxious, encouraging the depressed, binding up the emotionally wounded: Maria, Bill, Antonio, Ming, Abdul.

Through his pastoral ministers, Jesus Christ reaches out in every culture not only to save people from sin and set them right with God, but to help them grow psychologically and spiritually, creating in them a sound mind and responsive heart, a relaxed body and serene spirit, edifying them with enough maturity to love others as they learn to love themselves and God.

During my seminary years, a classmate of mine I will call Jeff developed suicidal urges; his study of the Bible had left him with the impression that he had too many sins for God to forgive. Though there was a professional counselor on staff, this student chose to confide his soul-pain to a professor of Old Testament, himself an ordained minister.

What struck me was how the professor took time out of his schedule to shepherd and nurture Jeff, even to the point of visiting him in the dorm at night to make sure he was okay. After several days of being watched over, Jeff’s depression lifted. He told me that the professor’s faithful caring had penetrated his emptiness, opening an inner door through which he experienced God’s love.

Churches worldwide offer a natural home for healing and personality development throughout the lifespan. Many ethnic backgrounds, all kinds of people, and every form of relationship add to the richness and complexity of local churches. And if there are biases regarding class or gender, the Holy Spirit empowers the Word of God to challenge and change them.

The church is like a living organism, where the Triune God lives and breathes, awakening individuals to their full potential in Christ, stirring motivation that draws them forward, offering hope when difficulties overwhelm. Here pastoral counseling delivers the service of repair and recovery, providing confidential one-on-one or group sessions specifically designed to explore what troubles someone, what baffles or frustrates them, to the end that their lives are clarified and they are set on a path of healthy growth.

In a church counseling growth group I led, Charlie shared in halting words, face gaunt with pain, how he’d felt shunned by church members during the two years he and his wife Linda had attended the church.

“What makes you think that people have been judging you?” I asked.

“I was divorced before I married Linda. The pastor often preaches against divorce,” he  said, arms folded and legs locked together, reminding me of an armadillo encased behind armored plates.

“I see. So you’ve assumed that people in the church won’t

accept you because you’ve been divorced?”

“Exactly.”

“And do you know this for sure?”

“Well, no one has been friendly toward us. Except maybe this group a little bit. That’s why I’m mentioning it.”

“I appreciate you sharing this issue with us. I wonder if you’re open to hearing from people what they really think?” He stiffened somewhat, yet nodded his assent. Beckoning to the other eight persons in our circle, I said, “Out of curiosity, how many of you have known that Charlie was divorced before he married Linda?”

Only one hand went up, a woman named Barbara.

“Barbara,” I said, “can you share how you came by this

knowledge and how you felt about it?”

Barbara looked inquisitively at Linda, who gave a nod for Barbara to speak freely. “Linda told me last year,” said Barbara, “to help explain why Charlie holds back from people.”

“And how did you handle the issue of his divorce?” I asked.

“I didn’t think twice about it. I love them both and just wanted them to feel at home here. I tried being friendly to Charlie, but he didn’t seem to notice.”

“Thanks for sharing.” I turned to Charlie. “Seems like no one but Barbara knew you were divorced, and she tried to show you her friendliness. What do you make of this?”

Charlie’s face slackened. “It’s new information. It never occurred to me I was reading people wrong.”

It seemed time for a brief integration of psychology and spirituality.

Addressing the group, I said, “The type of difficulty that Charlie got into happens to all of us, doesn’t it. Our private perceptions influence how we believe others see us. If we have a negative experience, we can assume everyone sees us in that light, not knowing we’re projecting our own negative bias onto them. Even God has trouble convincing us that we’re loveable. The interesting thing is, all we have to do is withdraw our negative projection and we can feel close to people again.”

I noticed that Charlie was breathing more easily, his arms no longer tucked tightly over his chest. I turned toward him. “What are you feeling right now, Charlie?”

“Kind of amazed,” he said. “I don’t feel that wall between me and the people in this group any more. It makes me wonder if I haven’t been hiding behind walls for years.” He smiled as he looked around the circle. “This feels better.”

With that the topic shifted to a new subject. Charlie sat peacefully attentive, hearing from other people with a new look of caring on his face, a fresh touch from Jesus in his heart.

Why Use Compass Therapy in Christian Churches?

The use of Compass Therapy in churches equips a new generation of pastoral counselors with practical tools that bring together spiritual faith, psychological insight, a Christian personality theory, and the use of counseling techniques to engage and heal the brokenness in a counselee’s personality

and human nature.

But why, you may ask, use the word therapy at all? Doesn’t therapy imply a secular approach to counseling carried out by mental health professionals? The answer is that major contributions to pastoral counseling have arisen from psychoanalysis, Jungian therapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt therapy, Client-centered therapy, and Cognitive-behavioral therapy. What distinguishes them is generally a tradition of empirical research and clinical validity.

However, these methodologies stand outside the Christian tradition, and some of their assumptions flatly contradict orthodox Christian teachings. While elements of these approaches have been adapted for church use, it is often because no Christian equivalent exists. Pastors and parishioners have rightly complained from time to time that secular psychologies have undermined their trust in the Bible, the Trinity, and the Church.

In contradistinction, Compass Therapy has its origins in both scientific research and biblical Trinitarian theology. While hundreds of studies validate the growth psychology behind compass theory, the core assumption is that Jesus of Nazareth reveals God’s personality and interpersonal nature, a nature known as the Trinity, and becomes the standard against which personality health and dysfunction are discerned.

While it might seem to some that Jesus’ personality would have nothing to do with modern conceptions of personality, compass theory proposes the opposite: that Christ’s personality and behavior are readily understood through the contemporary lens of the Self Compass growth tool, the central working model of Compass Therapy that points the way to mental health while illuminating the personality disorders described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

I will deal with this application as it pertains to pastoral counseling and coaching in future posts. But for now I want to underscore that Compass Therapy signifies a counseling approach backed by empirical research and differentiated from other counseling theories by a Christian ontological foundation.

The Fascinating World of Pastoral Counseling & Coaching

Welcome. I'm Dan Montgomery. I've been doing pastoral and clinical counseling for over 35 years. I've counseled several thousand people in universities, private practice, and both Protestant and Catholic churches. My abiding concern is to serve the Body of Christ through the Compass Therapy approach to pastoral counseling. More about this later.

I've always believed that the Church is a natural place for healing personality conflicts, fixing broken relationships, and finding one's purpose in Christ. Christian ministers and small groups leaders deal with people all the time who faced significant problems and need not just a friendly ear, but action steps for making their lives and relationships better. This is how the love of God gets translated into daily human affairs.

I am committed to increasing the counseling expertise and communication skill sets of professional caregivers, as well as individuals within congregation whom the Holy Spirit endows with gifts for healing and helping others. Perhaps blogging is a good way to pass on what practical knowledge about the fascinating world of pastoral counseling and coaching.

As I write this, I'm visualizing you. Are you a person others naturally turn to when they need somebody to trust? A person others confide in when their hearts are broken or their dreams shattered? Are you a healer of the soul who wants to enrich your theory and method, so that Jesus Christ can use you all the more? If you answer "yes" then we're on the same wavelength, and I know Jesus will bless our journey into pastoral counseling and coaching.

My calling from God to a lifetime of practicing and teaching counseling began in seminary, without me fully recognizing it. I not only wanted to learn every aspect of Christian faith and doctrine, but I felt a burning desire to understand the psychology of human behavior, so that I could help people grow more whole.

I felt surprised when the Holy Spirit guided me to earn a PhD in counseling and clinical psychology. Yet it began to make sense at my graduation, when a week later I was also ordained as a non-denominational minister. My full-time service from that day until now has included both therapeutic counseling, and consulting with pastors and parishioners wherever I've lived.

At the age of sixty-six has come the greatest surprise of all, that my book Pastoral Counseling and Coaching, among other books in the Compass Series, has been brought into worldwide usage, and commended by counseling peers at Yale, Princeton, Fuller, Notre Dame, and Stanford, as well as from ministerial professors in most major Protestant and Catholic seminaries.

I am humbled and amazed. But primarily I feel excited that the Church in the 21st century is showing great interest in ministering to the whole person: psychologically as well as spiritually. What you're going to see as this blog unfolds is a thoroughgoing integration of psychology and theology, because in my experience at least, when either one of these is overly emphasized at the expense of the other, the people in a congregation—each dear soul whom Christ loves—are deprived.

I know that you have your own way of intermingling  theological perspectives and psychological dynamics may differ from mine. That's what makes our conversation interesting.

That said, I consider us launched. Come join me in future posts, where I'll slow down the pace so we can savor our explorations into the fascinating world of pastoral counseling and coaching!

You can click on the title if you're interested to read the first chapter of my book on Amazon.com:

Pastoral Counseling & Coaching: Compass Therapy in Churches