Making Christian Counseling More Christ Centered

Chapter 1, pages 6-8:

Chapter 1

What does “Christ-centered” mean?

Come to me all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will refresh you. Matthew 11:28

“I shouldn’t be so depressed (or anxious, or impulsive, etc.). I’m a born-again Christian. Christians shouldn’t be depressed. I must have a weak faith. If only my faith were stronger, I wouldn’t be so depressed. My friends, even my pastor, tell me that if I just prayed more and read the Bible more and trusted in God more, my depression would go away. But I’ve tried those things over and over again, and I still feel depressed. I feel so guilty for being so depressed…”

Christian clients often come to Christian counseling professionals with spiritual issues embedded within their psychological concerns. Their Christian friends and pastors often do, in my experience, tell them to pray more and trust in God more, but when that doesn’t work they usually feel even more depressed or anxious. They often believe that struggling with depression is, in itself, somehow sinful.

Standard counseling strategies, rooted in theory and empirically tested, are often helpful in alleviating psychological symptoms and relationship issues. However, these strategies rarely address the concomitant spiritual and sin/guilt/shame issues that Christian clients often raise. Those concerns are often embedded in spiritual and existential questions whose interventions need to have their foundations in clear theology. One specific theological framework has been overlooked in evangelical circles: the Reformation discovery of the proper distinctions between “Law” and “Gospel.” This framework was extremely important to Luther, Calvin, and other reformers. Luther once said “To know this doctrine of the difference between the Law and the Gospel is necessary because it contains the gist (summa) of all Christian doctrine” and “This difference between the Law and the Gospel is the height of knowledge in Christendom. Every…. Christian should know and be able to state this difference” (cited in Plass, 1959, p. 743, 732).

This Law-Gospel distinction, along with other related theological concepts, will be more fully explained in Chapters 3 through 8. Some of the counseling strategies that flow from this framework will then be explored in Chapters 9 through 16. Counselors who are not familiar with the theological framework should resist the temptation to skip over the first chapters and go straight to the strategies. The strategies will only make sense and, more importantly, be applied correctly if you understand the theology that underpins them.

Christ-Centered counseling – even in a secular agency!

“I don’t know what to do with these Christian clients I have now. They come all guilt-ridden. When I try to suggest to them that what they are struggling with is fairly normal, they tell me that the Bible and their pastors call it sin— – and they don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with them. Nothing seems to work.”

A counselor made this comment in a staff meeting in a secular agency I worked at years ago. At the time I was a lowly intern surrounded by mostly secular, yet well-meaning counselors. Several of the senior staff had at some time in the first months of my internship expressed reservations, even distrust, about my evangelical Christian faith (I was not yet a pastor at that time, but my vita showed that I had worked for several Christian colleges). They feared I might “mis-treat” clients who were, for example, homosexual or contemplating abortion. However, when this counselor expressed her frustration in working with guilt-ridden “fundamentalist” Christian clients, the rest of the staff admitted they were at a loss to know what to do either. Nothing they had tried seemed to help relieve these Christian clients of their excessive guilt. All the eyes at the meeting turned toward me as one of the senior staff asked “Rick, you’re a Christian. How do you think we should help clients like these?”

A bit shocked to have been elevated to the role of “cultural group expert” for Christian clients, I told them: “In my experience, many Christians are burdened by guilt because they and their pastors often forget that Christianity is NOT primarily a religion of rules and laws. It is about the Gospel of forgiveness we receive because Christ died and rose again for us. It is more about God’s love and grace, not ‘do this and you’ll feel better about yourself.’” I suggested to these secular counselors that they could ask their clients leading questions like: “I thought the Christian faith was more about Jesus forgiving you?” or “I thought that Christians believed God loves them more than God expects them to be perfect?” I even suggested that these counselors could cite well-known Bible verses like John 3:16 as evidence that they appreciated their clients’ faith and that God loves them. Nobody at the staff meeting spurned my suggestions. My “cultural group expertise” had seemingly been appreciated.

At a later staff meeting I was even more shocked. A senior staff member asked how it was going with some of the Christian clients the counselors had. To my amazement several counselors had taken my suggestions to heart and had asked those questions and shared those Gospel messages and verses. And they reported, to their amazement, that this “counseling strategy” seemed to be helping. Their clients were a bit surprised to hear these messages come from their counselors, but when they heard them they agreed that their Christian faith was based in God’s love and that they had forgotten that along the way. They appreciated the reminder that their sins were forgiven and they should, therefore, not feel so guilt-ridden. The counselors then felt like they were able to make better progress with these clients on other issues.

Through those events I became even more convinced of the power of God’s Word, especially the life-giving Word of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Here I had suggested to well-intentioned unbelievers that they speak some explicit Gospel to troubled believers, they had done so, and the Holy Spirit used those words to help them! I should not have been surprised, but I was. God’s Word does not return to him void (Isaiah 55). I have continued to pray that it was helpful to my secular counselor friends as well, changing their own opinions about the role of the Christian faith. More than one of them had told me that they had been raised in legalistic Protestant or Catholic families and churches and were “recovering” from the “Law” orientations of their childhood.

We should not be surprised that secular counselors struggle to know how to treat guilt-ridden Christian clients. Basic listening skills texts often have lists of emotion words in them, placed there to help increase the basic vocabulary of emotion among counselors-in-training. These texts have categories of emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, anger, etc. Years ago I began noticing that most of these texts left out one important category: Guilt/shame. This may be evidence that, unconsciously, the secular counseling field prefers to handle guilt and shame by ignoring it. This should not surprise us. From a theological perspective the only way to truly treat objective guilt and shame is with the Gospel of Christ.