The Pastor as Counselor: The Call for Soul Care by David Powlison

Crossway, 2021, 76pp

 
In this little work, David Powlison underlines the uniqueness of pastoral counselling. All pastors are counsellors, but their counselling ministry is distinct from others who offer a ‘talking cure’ to distressed individuals. Pastoral counselling is about soul care, that ‘art of arts’ that aims at helping form people into mature and fruitful followers of Jesus. Pastors are not to maintain a professional distance from those they seek to counsel. Pastoral counselling is part and parcel of the minister’s close relationship with members of the flock he is called to serve.
 
The pastor’s counselling may take place in snatched conversations at the fringes of church life, where he asks people how they are doing and seeks to encourage them in the Lord. When bereavement, family breakdown or other forms of suffering strike, the counselling will be more intensive. Similarly, when a pastor gives support to a believer who is engaged in a massive struggle with temptation and sin.
 
In all these things the pastor offers counsel not as an expert with all the answers, but as a fellow-sufferer and fellow-sinner. The work is to be carried out in God-dependent prayer, as the minister endeavours to apply the teaching of Scripture to the troubled soul. Personal counselling is not an alternative to public preaching. It is an extension of the pastor’s calling as a minister of the word of God in the service of the people of God. 

*Reviewed for the Banner of Truth Magazine