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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