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The Missionary Call of Christian Counsellors and Pastors in the Post-Christian West


The calling of Christian counsellors and pastors is a spiritual calling and a missionary calling, rooted in the very Great Commission of Jesus to 'teach [disciples of Christ] to obey everything that He has commanded [in the Word of God] (Matthew 28.18-20).  This calling for nurturing ministries such as counselling and pastoring is increasingly difficult in a post-Christian culture that rails against the commandments of God.  Yet nothing is more important than that the Church gives a clear witness to God in such a culture.

There has been a trend in the United States to ban sex change therapy for minors since New Jersey was the first to do so in 2013.  The current list of states doing so is: New Jersey (2013), California (2013), Oregon (2015), Illinois (2016), Vermont (2016), New Mexico (2017), Connecticut (2017), Rhode Island (2017), Nevada (2018), Washington (2018), Hawaii (2018), Delaware (2018), Maryland (2018), New Hampshire (2019), New York (2019), Massachusetts (2019), Maine (2019), Colorado (2019).  In addition to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, a number of counties, communities, and municipalities have banned conversion therapy.  Moreover, there are fourteen states with pending legislation to prevent such therapy.

Such legislation is billed as a protection of minors from abusive therapeutic attempts to alter their ‘natural’ sexual orientation.  The abuse, however, is on the other side.  What could be more abusive than to leave a child without helpful guidance while negotiating the confusing twist and turns of growing up?  And where is confusion more evident for children than as they become sexually aware?  
A child force-fed the sexual confusion and perversion of Western culture is only further abused by a culture that outlaws guidance in such matters.  As Plutarch wrote around AD 100,

Yea, and the very souls of children readily receive the impressions of those things that are dropped into them while they are yet but soft; but when they grow older, they will, as all hard things are, be more difficult to be wrought upon. And as soft wax is apt to take the stamp of the seal, so are the [9] minds of children to receive the instructions imprinted on them at that age (Plutarch, ‘A Discourse Touching the Training of Children,’ 8-9).[1]

What is interesting at this time in Western culture is that this ‘natural orientation’ argument has arisen during Postmodernity.  Postmodernity is the natural extension of Existentialism, set against Modernist, scientific arguments about identity.  Existentialism held that ‘existence precedes essence’, i.e., the human condition is that we are ‘thrown into’ existence without any essence of what it means to be anything.  There is, the argument has gone, no directive for being: our being is simply what we make it out to be through the choices that we make.  Nothing could be more opposed to science and religion.  As Francois Lyotard famously said, Postmodernity (following on from this Existentialist claim) entertains an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’.  Nothing will define us.  We are what we choose to be.  And there is no ethic—no right or wrong—to say that our choices are better than anyone else’s.

This became the basis for the Postmodern ethic of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’.  But what is tolerated is tolerated not because it is in itself good; it is tolerated because it is different.  The argument of what is ‘good’ is a Modernist argument.  Postmodernity puts its stamp only on what is alternative.  It is summed up in the practice of awarding prizes for participation rather than accomplishment, if one needs an example.  For Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness), Existentialism criticized living any ‘imbalance’ on the grounds of being—what is—and of what is not (‘nothingness’).  The right way to live was to make choices.

If this is the background to Postmodernity, where, then, did this confused combination of saying that children are wired with a particular sexual orientation (‘being’) and must be given the right to choose their gender orientation with no guidance?  The only answer that comes to mind is that Western culture has still not sorted out its recent history.  It is at the same time this Modernist powerhouse of science and technology that operates according to laws of the universe and this Postmodern, Existentialist experiment absolutizing choice per se over what is chosen.  At the same time that advocates of sexual diversity attempt, without scientific proof, to argue that humans are hot-wired for an increasing variety of sexual orientations (not just male and female) apart from their biological make-up, they also promote ‘gender fluidity’.  They want the Modernist argument (science) if they can get it, but if they cannot, they will happily promote the Postmodernist arguments of fluidity and choice.  Who needs philosophical consistency in arguments when all that matters is the conclusion?

Yet something even more ominous is lurking in Western culture: the State.  Of course it is; the State always rushes in to bring regulation where religion and tradition do not.  (What would ancient Israel have been without the prophets to oppose the culturally influenced kings?)  In the United Kingdom, the State is promoting a sex education curriculum throughout the key stages of education that includes this new agenda of Western culture.  The United States has not quite seen the same level of State management as the UK in sex education.  Yet both are on the same trajectory.  The double-edged sword of Postmodernity, however, is the education of children to choose their own sexual orientations amidst an alphabet-soup of options without parental or religious interference and the litigation against counselling that would help confused children in a sexually perverse society find the truth.  (I say ‘find the truth’ in part for effect: it is this very notion at which such a culture scoffs while insisting that their view is true over against what virtually every culture since the beginning of time has believed.)

If one wants a gage to measure the quality of a culture, one might find it in how the culture educates and cares for its children.  Western culture aborts the unborn in the name of freedom (‘the mother’s choice’), sexualizes pre-pubescent children, perverts their understanding of sex, advocates feminism over masculinity, encourages children to make choices while legislating against guidance, administers puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones on them, performs sex operations on them, and celebrates the legalization of mind-altering drugs.  While promoting every sort of sexual experimentation and perversity, it recoils in horror whenever anyone is simply accused of a single sexual impropriety as a teenager, as though it holds some moral high ground in such matters.  The duplicity is repulsive.

What is the way ahead?  It must be in the Church’s response to this double-edged sword with a clear plan and an unwavering stance.  On the one hand, the Church needs to educate its own children about sex.  In a post-Christian culture, Sunday School stories about David and Goliath constitute an inadequate education in the faith.  We need a Church education that is far more serious about the Christian faith.  It needs to be an education in Biblical literacy, to be sure, but it also needs to be catechesis in the faith, both in what we believe and how we should live.

Second, we need Christian counselling, not in the sense of therapeutic counselling (there is a place for that) but in the sense of pastoral counselling.  This begins in classrooms and through sermons and continues in the work of the pastors and the elders of the church.  The pastoral care of sinners is the primary calling of the pastor, not the running of programmes, church growth, Sunday worship services, and so forth (though all of this is important).

As the arm of the State gets stronger, it will see the Church as an enemy of the State.  This is the very point of the Book of Revelation, which paints in apocalyptic colours the relationship of Church and State in the era of the would-be god, the Emperor Domitian, ruler of the all-powerful State, the Roman Empire.  The State will try to silence the Christian counsellor and the Christian pastor (follow the battles in California, such as Assembly Bill 2943, recently stopped, AB 2119, recently passed, and now resolution 99, recently proposed, to get a glimpse of the battlefront).[2]  Whatever the world does, however, the Church needs to step up to the task of teaching a full curriculum and offering clear counselling about everything Christ has commanded (Matthew 28.18-20) us to obey, beginning with the biologically based, binary distinction of ‘male and female created He them’ (Genesis 1.27).



[1] Plutarch, ‘A Discourse Touching the Training of Children,’ Moralia, trans. Simon Ford, in Moralia, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1878).
[2] For news and helpful resources, see the California Family Council site: https://californiafamily.org/oppose-ca-ab-2943-ab-1779-and-ab-2119-reference-materials/  (accessed 22 August, 2019).

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