The Present Challenge of Pastoral Care and Counseling

On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur there was once a crude little lifesaving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought of themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Many lives were saved by this wonderful little station, so that it became famous. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give of their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifesaving station grew.

Some of the members of the lifesaving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. So they replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely, because they used it as a sort of club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on lifesaving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The lifesaving motif still prevailed in this club's decoration, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held. About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick, and some of them had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.

At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club's lifesaving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own lifesaving station down the coast. They did.

As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another lifesaving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown!

In this striking parable Theodore Wedel depicts the perennial danger confronting the church—irrelevance. The peril is especially acute in periods when the church is outwardly successful. The parable highlights the fact that the only relevance that really matters is relevance to the deep needs of persons—relevance to the places in their lives where they hurt and hope, curse and pray, hunger for meaning and thirst for significant relationships. Pastoral care and counseling are valuable instruments by which the church stays relevant to human need. They are ways of translating the good news into the "language of relationships," as Reuel Howe expresses it—a language which allows the minister to communicate a healing message to persons struggling in alienation and despair. Pastoral counseling is an essential means by which a church is helped to be a lifesaving station and not a club, a hospital and a garden of the spiritual life—not a museum. Counseling can help save those areas of our lives that are shipwrecked in the storms of our daily living, broken on the hidden reefs of anxiety, guilt, and lack of integrity. An effective caring and counseling program, in which both minister and trained lay persons serve as enablers of healing and growth, can transform the interpersonal climate of a congregation, making a church a place where wholeness is nurtured in persons throughout the life cycle.

Pastoral care and counseling contribute to the continuing renewal of a church's vitality by providing instruments for the renewal of persons, relationships, and groups. By reducing the crippledness of our ability to give and receive love, counseling can help us to be the church—the community in which God's love becomes an experienced reality in relationships. Thus, counseling is an instrument of continuing renewal through reconciliation, helping to heal our estrangement from ourselves and our families, from other church members, from those outside the church, and from an enlivening, growing relationship with God. It can create windows of new awareness, restoring sight to eyes previously blinded by our anxious, guilt- ridden self-concern—to the beauty, tragedy, wonder, and pain all about us. Counseling can allow us to discover fresh dimensions of our humanity. It can release our potentialities for authenticity and aliveness. It can help to release our trapped creativity—the potential creativity present in every person. By renewing us as persons, counseling helps empower us to become renewal agents in a church and in a society that desperately need renewing.

Pastoral counseling and care can be instruments of healing and growth by helping us develop what is most difficult to achieve in our period of history—depth relationships. Most of us can identify with the pain of the minister who said to his psychotherapist, "My life is characterized by a plethora of contacts and a poverty of relationships." This is the common blight that threatens the creativity of each of us in our touch-and-run culture—a culture oriented toward interpersonal superficiality. This is the blight that militates against the continuing rebirth of a church as a redemptive social organism, preventing it from becoming a place where persons experience transformation. This is what prevents a church from being a lifesaving station engaged in rescuing persons from our...