David G. Benner’s Strategic Pastoral Counseling helped me think about a question that matters to anyone offering care in a church: what makes that care pastoral?
Pastoral counseling is care offered by a pastor within the life of a church or Christian ministry. Benner wants it to draw on psychological understanding while retaining its Christian purpose. I appreciate that middle ground. I also found myself wanting more attention to the Holy Spirit and more realism in some of the examples.
These reflections follow the book’s first six chapters, where Benner introduces his approach and shows how it might work in practice.
A name for a kind of care I had been looking for
One of the most useful ideas was spiritual direction: helping someone pay attention to their relationship with God and discern how to respond. It gave me a name for something I recognized but had not heard clearly explained in church preaching.
During my studies, other students sometimes asked me how to understand experiences they believed involved the Holy Spirit. Churches talked about helping people follow Jesus, but I wondered why this kind of attentive conversation had received so little emphasis.
Benner’s broader expression, “soul care,” also helped. It describes attending to someone’s spiritual and emotional life. The purpose is more than solving an isolated problem; it includes helping a person encounter God within what they are living through.
Living what we offer to others
I love Benner’s insistence that a counselor should practise the faith they bring into a conversation. Prayer and other spiritual practices need to be meaningful in my own life before I offer them as resources to someone else.
Knowing myself matters, too. My needs, assumptions, and unresolved issues do not disappear because another person has come to me for help.
My reservation was that Benner did not give enough attention to the power of the Holy Spirit, God actively at work in a person’s life. I wanted more than a Christian setting for useful techniques. I wanted to understand how the care being offered depended on God.
A structure that makes help more focused
Benner’s model is brief, structured, rooted in the church, and concerned with the whole person. The limited number of meetings appeals to me because it encourages a clear purpose. Work and reflection between sessions are part of the process.
I especially appreciated the examples showing what active, focused counseling might sound like. I learn well when I can see an idea put into practice. General instructions become much more useful when a conversation illustrates them.
Benner also discusses limits on the length of sessions, including a maximum of ninety minutes within his approach. I found it helpful to consider boundaries around the time being offered, rather than assume that a longer conversation is necessarily a better one.
Working with a person
Benner describes forming the relationship, doing the agreed work, and bringing the meetings to a close. His terms are encounter, engagement, and disengagement. What stood out to me was the idea that counseling is something done with a person.
Empathy, respect, and authenticity matter. I have encountered judgment and superiority in settings where people should have been offering care. Someone seeking help needs to be treated as a person with dignity, rather than as a problem over which the pastor stands.
I did have questions about Benner’s discussion of the limits of counseling in relation to physical illness, drug treatment, and serious mental illness. I believe in divine healing, and I wanted room for that belief in the discussion. My objection concerns the place of prayer and God’s action; it does not establish that pastoral counseling can take the place of medical or professional mental health care.
When the example feels too smooth
The extended case example was useful, but I was not fully convinced by how smoothly it unfolded. Five sessions spread across more than ten weeks seemed to leave long gaps. In my own experience of needing help, consistent encouragement mattered, and a long interval could make things harder.
The dialogue sometimes felt idealized. I found Benner’s explanations of the conversation more helpful than the conversation itself because they showed what he was trying to accomplish and why.
One practical lesson was how a thoughtful question can return to an agreed concern without dismissing what the person is saying. A pastor’s time and attention can communicate care. For me, that care should also help the person turn toward God.
What can happen in one conversation?
I found the possibility of a helpful single session encouraging, even though the example again seemed unusually tidy. A great deal happened within sixty to ninety minutes, and I wondered how often real conversations would have that openness and clarity.
Still, I appreciated the attention Benner gives to letting the person seeking help shape the conversation. Counseling is different from delivering a sermon. The pastor cannot simply arrive with a message and assume it answers the concern.
That is one of my main takeaways: ask questions that bring focus, listen to what matters to the person, and offer care without taking over. I have questions about parts of the model, but it gave me a more practical understanding of what attentive pastoral care can look like.
Book discussed
David G. Benner, Strategic Pastoral Counseling, chapters 1–6.
A question in the margin is a good place to begin.