Not Your Father’s Pastoral Counseling Class
The first week of 2012, I’ll be teaching a modular (Tuesday-Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM) Pastoral Counseling class at Moody Theological Seminary.
After some personal introductions and connecting as a class, I begin with the phrase, “This is not your father’s pastoral counseling class.” 
In the past, Pastoral Counseling classes sought to give a person a fish, but not to teach a person how to fish.
Typically, they focus their energies giving students an eclectic smattering of resources on about a dozen typical pastoral counseling issues. This might spend two hours each on pre-marital, marital, family issues, depression, anxiety, suicide, financial, conflict, anger, pornography, abuse issues, and general spiritual growth.
A fine list. All important topics.
But they’re all fish.
Teaching Care-Givers to Fish
I prefer teaching people to fish, rather than simply giving a person a fish.
When we know how to fish, then we can develop our resources for a lifetime.
How do I do that in a one-week course?
We address life’s seven ultimate questions. Anyone who gains biblical insight into these seven ultimate questions will be able to:
• Develop their own biblical resources for addressing any specific life issue.
• Assess extra-biblical resources written about any specific life issue.
Life’s Seven Ultimate Questions That Every Pastoral Counselor Must Address
Here’s what you need to ponder and probe to be a competent and compassionate soul physician.
1. Do I know how to use God’s Word to change lives?
• Nourishing the Hunger of the Soul: Preventative Medicine—God’s Word
2. Do I comprehend how the Trinity serves as the foundation for how I relate to others?
• Knowing the Creator of the Soul: The Great Physician—The Trinity
3. Do I understand people—biblically?
• Examining the Spiritual Anatomy of the Soul: People—Creation
4. Can I diagnose problems—biblically?
• Diagnosing the Fallen Condition of the Soul: Problems—Fall
5. Can I prescribe God’s solutions (soul-u-tions)—biblically?
• Prescribing God’s Cure for the Soul: Solutions (Soul-u-tions)—Redemption
6. Do I grasp how our eternal future makes all the difference in present living?
• Envisioning the Final Healing of the Soul: Home—Glorification
7. Am I able to dispense God’s care for others by caring like Christ?
• Caring Like Christ/Dispensing God’s Care for the Soul: Spiritual Friends—Sanctification
These seven biblical categories are essential for developing a theology and methodology of soul care and spiritual direction.
In the class, and in my book Soul Physicians, we examine these seven categories meticulously, as a physician would the skeletal structure of the human body.
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Are you equipped to care like Christ?
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