Moving Beyond Individualism in Pastoral Care and Counseling

Reflections on Theory, Theology, and Practice

Barbara J. McClure

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781556359675
  9781498211246
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877255
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Despite astute critiques and available resources for alternative modes of thinking and practicing, individualism continues to be a dominating and constraining ideology in the field of pastoral psychotherapy and counseling. Philip Rieff was one of the first to highlight the negative implications of individualism in psychotherapeutic theories and practices. As heirs and often enthusiasts of the Freudian tradition of which Rieff and others are critical, pastoral theologians have felt the sting of his charge, and yet the empirical research that McClure presents shows that pastoral-counseling practitioners resist change. Their attempts to overcome an individualistic perspective have been limited and ineffective because individualism is embedded in the field's dominant theological and theoretical resources, practices, and organizational arrangements. Only a radical reappraisal of these will make possible pastoral counseling practices in a post-individualistic mode. McClure proposes several critical transformations: broadening and deepening the operative theologies used to guide the healing practice, expanding the role of the pastoral counselor, reimagining the operative anthropology, reclaiming sin and judgment, nuancing the particular against the individual, rethinking the ideal outcome of the practices, and reimagining the organizational structures that support the practices. Only this level of revisioning will enable this ministry of the church to move beyond its individualistic limitations and offer healing in more complex, effective, and socially adequate ways.

part one

The Development of Pastoral Care and Counseling as a Professionalized Practice

1

Contemporary Pastoral Care and Counseling

Definitions of Terms and Descriptions of Practices

Introduction

This project is a study of pastoral theology and its practices of care and counseling. While these terms are interrelated, they have important distinctions. For this reason, the first part of this chapter will define and describe the objects of study in the book, and the second will describe, through presentation of empirical data, practices and perspectives as they are currently configured in contemporary pastoral care and counseling.

Discussion of Terms

Pastoral Theology

Although its identity is complex and its meaning debated,1 the field of pastoral theology has its origins in the “theology of shepherding.”2 Pastoral theology is the branch of theology that is concerned with the basic principles, theories, and practices of the caring and counseling offices of ministry. Pastoral theology includes a study of the methods of care and healing as well as “studies of moral and religious life and development, personality theory, interpersonal and family relationships, and specific problems such as illness, grief and guilt.”3 Pastoral theology is a reflection on concrete human experience with the explicit goal of formulating practical methods of dealing with problems or crises that can be used in the context of ministry. In this it is less concerned with developing meanings and principles (such as are found in systematics and ethics) and more concerned with how theology connects with concrete experience. Pastoral theology thus involves the definition, critical development, and application of normative meanings and principles.4 Its point of departure is human experience, which “serves as a context for the critical development of basic theological understanding.”5 Thus pastoral theology is not just a theology of or about pastoral care and counseling. It is a mode of contextual and practical theology.

Pastoral theology as a discipline is largely indebted to the work of Seward Hiltner, who distinguished pastoral theology from other forms of theology centered on operations such as “organization” or “communicating” by proposing that pastoral theology has the perspective of shepherding. Within the shepherding perspective, Hiltner included healing, sustaining, and guiding aspects.6 Since Hiltner, others have expanded its purview to include dimensions such as liberation.

In summary, pastoral theology seeks to bring religious and moral meanings to bear on the needs, problems, and activities of everyday human experience to interpret their significance, understand their etiologies, and guide appropriate and healing interventions. It interrelates a normative vision, concrete understandings of human being, and practical wisdom about means of care.7

Pastoral Care

Pastoral care is the practical arm of pastoral theology, and usually refers in a broad and inclusive way to all pastoral work concerned with the support and nurturance of persons and interpersonal relationships including everyday expressions of care and concern that may occur in the process of various activities of ministry.8 Pastoral care has come to specify the function of a minister (either ordained or lay) and congregation in responding to the needs and yearnings of the parish. Whereas pastoral theology is the critical theoretical/theological reflection on the functions of caring, pastoral care has historically included any activity of the church that meets the needs of its members and its community; thus, activities of pastoral care can include preaching, visitation, performing funerals, counseling parishioners, outreach to the homeless, and many more. Although counseling may be a part of the caring life of the church, counseling done within the parameters of pastoral care is typically less theoretically and even practically complex than specialized pastoral counseling, especially as it tends to be shorter term, not as oriented to depth work as specialized counseling, and being a pastoral care provider does not require the same clinical training and certification pastoral counseling does.

Pastoral Counseling

Pastoral counseling can be considered a subset of pastoral care, or a specialized form of pastoral care, and the term is used to denote a more narrowly defined relationship between a pastor and a person in need.9 Whereas pastoral care is typically provided within the confines of parish ministry, pastoral counseling is a discrete set of particular practices that are less bound to the ecclesia for its location than is pastoral care. Pastoral counseling is a ministry of care that is more structured and focused on a specifically articulated need or concern than is pastoral care. This structured, more specialized, and often professionalized form of ministry inevitably involves some form of “contract” between the “client” and the “expert.” The contract is a part of the frame that is established after a formal request for help. Once the request for help is made, specific arrangements are agreed upon concerning time and place of meeting, frequency of meetings, as well as the projected duration of the client/counselor relationship. In professionalized counseling a fee is usually agreed upon, depending on the institutional setting and other considerations. Pastoral counseling typically suggests long-term depth work, exploring psychodynamic and interpersonal relationships. Brief pastoral counseling has gained attention in recent years, in part because of the challenge for clients of financing care for an extended period, and it is the form most often found in parish settings. However, as I will show later, the long-term care that many pastoral counselors prefer to provide is now more affordable for clients as the field has become increasingly professionalized and costs are subsidized by third-party (insurance) payments. Thus, despite the challenges posed by insurance company restrictions on numbers of sessions, pastoral counselors recommend longer-term, more in-depth work than congregational pastoral caregivers typically provide.

Institution

Throughout this study I refer to pastoral counseling as an institution, by which I mean a complex of patterned, overlapping practices that have been regularized and routinized. Institutions are the repositories of resources and commitments of their members, and the means by which we organize social experience. Family, healthcare, education, are all institutions that take particular and predictable form in American society. Institutions are enduring structures that carry out collective purposes. Family, healthcare, education, are all institutions that take particular and predictable form in American society. Institutions are enduring structures that carry out collective purposes. They are the repositories of resources and commitments of their members, and are upheld by collectively defined meanings and purposes. Institutions thus defined create and carry normative values, and are sustained by a system of rewards and sanctions such as in the legal constraints of marriage or parenthood or the charters of professional organizations.10

Institutions also structure our cognitive and moral life, shaping the way we think about life by framing the way we experience it. Sociologist of religion Robert Bellah and his associates describe institutions as patterns of normative activity that mediate ontological commitments in the form of practices, noting that “various institutional spheres . . . embody and specify culturally transmitted ultimate values in terms of what is right and wrong, good and bad. These normative patterns do not only indicate the ends and purposes of our actions, but also set limits to the means used, validating only those that are morally acceptable.”11 As Bellah and his coauthors remind us, cultural ideals of character, conceptions of God and self, and religious convictions do not float over the heads of human beings, determining their thoughts and actions in an intangible way. Rather, moral ideals, ontological assumptions, and normative values are transmitted through institutions and their prescribed practices. (For example, in pastoral counseling clients are expected to be open and honest about their feelings and experiences when they are with their therapist so that both parties can examine interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics as closely as possible. The effectiveness of a counseling relationship often is judged by how well this is achieved.) Bellah thus recommends institutional analysis as a way of unpacking the relationship of cultural values and particular forms of self-understanding. It is through institutionally structured practices that ontological assumptions and ideals of moral character are mediated to individuals. We learn who we are, and who we should be, through the institutions that pattern our lives.

In addition to analyzing theoretical and theological resources, I examine the organization of pastoral counseling centers. An organization is similar in some ways to what is meant by institution, yet there are important distinctions. While both organizational life and institutions share patterns of practice and embody and enact beliefs, organization is used in this project to mean the localized form of an institution. It points to concrete ways institutional values, beliefs, and teloi are embodied in business models, specific practices, and patterns of hierarchies. Institutions are organized practices. They are structured social engagements. As such, institutional analysis invites us to examine organizational form or organizations themselves as “institutional scripts” that tell us about values, beliefs, and assumptions. Just as congregational forms of organization are rife with theological meaning, so too is the organizational form of pastoral counseling loaded with theological and moral assumptions and meanings.

Pastoral counseling as I describe it in this study is an institution in the sense that it is a discrete set of practices that reflect and support particular understandings of the self and the world, as well as normative views of what is good and what is not, what is healthy and what is not. Seeing pastoral counseling as an institution brings its complex network of beliefs and practices, as well as its mode of organization, into sharper focus and suggests the values that pastoral counseling embodies and supports.

Furthermore, pastoral counseling as an institution has a particular institutional history. The institution of pastoral counseling has emerged as a profession defined and supported by its governing bodies such as the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC), which accredits practitioners and centers, mandates and enforces a code of ethics and conduct, requires certain educational experiences of its members, and helps define and articulate the goals and means of the profession. Pastoral counseling is a specialized form of care, oriented theoretically and practically by psychology and psychotherapy. Though less specialized, pastoral care too has drawn heavily on these resources and in many cases has modeled itself after pastoral counseling; in fact, in lay perspectives the two are often conflated.12 In fact, many teachers of pastoral care are trained counselors and teach courses in “Pastoral care and counseling.” In many ways, the underlying assumptions and goals of pastoral care practices are more focused and more clear in practices of pastoral counseling: the two have informed each other, though I argue pastoral counseling has been more influential on practices of care than vice versa. In other words, the institution of pastoral counseling is part of a larger institution of theological education. For this reason, an examination of how specialized pastoral counselors are trained can shed light on the broader rubrics of pastoral care and theology.

In this project, then, when I refer to “pastoral counseling” I mean the specialized, often professionalized form of care, while “pastoral care” refers to the less specialized, more varied practices of att...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: The Development of Pastoral Care and Counseling as a Professionalized Practice
• Chapter 1: Contemporary Pastoral Care and Counseling
• Chapter 2: The Development of Professionalized Care and Counseling in the U.S.
• Chapter 3: Limits and Costs of the Current Model
• Part Two: Accounting for Individualism’s Persistence in Pastoral Theology, Care, and Counseling
• Chapter 4: Examination of Theory, Theology, and Organizational Arrangements
• Part Three: Moving Beyond Individualism in Pastoral Care and Counseling
• Chapter 5: Imagining a Synergistic Relationship between Persons and Society
• Chapter 6: A Broader Mission for Pastoral Theology, Care, and Counseling
• Chapter 7: Proposals for the Field of Pastoral Theology
• Appendix: Methodology and Research Protocol
• Bibliography