Spiritual Map Quest
Note: This is the first in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling? I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends. 
Comprehensive, Compassionate, Christ-like Care
Two recent interviews with prospective faculty members reminded me of Frank Lake’s insight. “The maladies of the human spirit in its deprivation and its depravity are matters of common pastoral concern” (Lake, Clinical Theology, p. 37, emphasis added).
The first interviewee saw deprivation or suffering as the core issue addressed in Christian counseling. “We have to focus on healing the hurts in human hearts,” he contended.
The second interviewee perceived depravity or sin to be the core issue that biblical counselors must face. “God calls us to expend our energy on confronting hard hearts,” he insisted.
Which is it?
• Do we follow the counseling roadmap marked deprivation, suffering, hurts, healing/comforting, and parakaleo?
• Or, do we travel the route marked depravity, sinning, hardness, confronting, and noutheteo?
• Or, like Frank Lake, do we see deprivation and depravity as matters of common spiritual friendship, pastoral care, and one-another concern?
In this blog mini-series, I propose that a biblical and church history model includes sustaining and healing for the evils we have suffered (parakaletic counseling/comforting) and reconciling and guiding for the sins we have committed (nouthetic counseling/care-fronting). Clebsch and Jaekle, along with Lake, say it well.
“The ministry of the cure of souls, or pastoral care, consists of helping acts, done by representative Christian persons, directed toward the healing, sustaining, guiding, and reconciling of troubled persons whose troubles arise in the context of ultimate meaning and concern” (Clebsch and Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, p. 4).
“Pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with these evils we have suffered as well as with the sins we have committed” (Lake, Clinical Theology, p. 21).
Do We Even Need a Roadmap?
Of course, there’s a more fundamental issue. “Do we even need a roadmap?” Some say, “I don’t have a counseling model. I just do what comes naturally.” Still others claim, “I don’t follow a model of counseling. I simply use the Bible.”
Realize it or not, we all have some counseling “model.” We all approach personal ministry from some perspective and practice our approach according to some pattern.
Every person approaches spirituality and spiritual care out of some particular framework. The value of a model is that it makes explicit the already implicit framework.
Further, it’s evident that we either develop a biblical approach to counseling or we borrow a secular model of counseling. Speaking about what happens when we lack a well thought-out Christian model of care, Clebsch and Jaekle explain:
The unfortunate result of this circumstance is that the pastoral profession sorely lacks any up-to-date vocabulary of spiritual debilities and strengths that takes seriously man’s intense personal and social aspirations and anguishes. Faced with an urgency for some system by which to conceptualize the human condition and to deal with the modern grandeurs and terrors of the human spirit, theoreticians of the cure of souls have too readily adopted the leading academic psychologies. Having no pastoral theology to inform our psychology or even to identify the cure of souls as a mode of human helping, we have allowed psychoanalytic thought, for example, to dominate the vocabulary of the spirit. (Clebsch and Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective, p. xii).
Urgent concerns plus no Christian model equals acceptance of secular psychology as the only hope.
Someone enters your office saying, “My daughter has been diagnosed with an eating disorder . You have to help us. Please meet with him tomorrow.”
What do you do? Does your Bible concordance have a notation for “eating disorder”? Since it doesn’t, you and I are tempted to rush to the self-help shelf of the local bookstore. When faced with the complexity of the human soul, we turn to secular models if we have no thought-out Christian model.
Edwards sounds a dire warning concerning what is happening in post-modern Christianity due to our lack of a time-tested, traditional, Christian model of care.
But if there is no deep awareness of the experiential, developmental anthropology of the tradition, then there is no real mutation, just a whole-hog graft. If the graft takes, it tends to take over. Sooner or later then the Church loses its unique experiential wisdom for society; it finds itself more and more absorbed as an expedient base for someone else’s “revelation,” unqualified by its own (Edwards, Spiritual Friend, pp. 32-33).
Without a theological foundation and a historical Christian model, we reject biblical revelation in favor of human reasoning.
Wayne Oates joins his voice to the chorus of concern. Speaking specifically of Protestants, he notes:
Protestants tend to start over from scratch every three or four generations. We do not adequately consolidate the communal wisdom of the centuries because of our antipathy for tradition. Therefore, we have accrued less capital in the form of proverbs, manuals of church discipline, etc. We have been, furthermore, in closer contact with the distinctly empirical dimensions of pastoral counseling by reason of our greater dependence upon secular forms of education. At the same time, as Protestants we have tended to draw our theoretical presuppositions for pastoral counseling from the scientific sources that are extrinsic to the theology of the church (Oates, Protestant Pastoral Care, p. 11).
We all follow some model in our people helping, and our approach is either Christian or non-Christian. We surrender our approach to the prevailing secular theories unless we follow some roadmap, some model of Christian care based upon biblical theology and Church history.
The Rest of the Story
I invite you to return for Part 2 where we introduce God’s Treasure Map for one-another care.
Join the Conversation
How have you developed your biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?
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