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How to Destroy a Seminary: 3. Start a Counselling Programme

 To quote Stephen Neill, “If mission is everything, then mission is nothing. If everything that the Church does is to be classified as ‘mission,’ we shall have to find a term for the Church’s particular responsibility for ‘the heathen,’ those who have never yet heard the name of Christ.”  Something similar needs to be said about the seminary.  ‘If every job is a vocation, and the seminary trains for vocations, then the seminary is a place to study for any job.’  Yet, you may object, Christian counselling is not just any job, it’s a ministry.  And then we’d have to discuss what is meant by Christian counselling, who teaches it, and what the curriculum entails.

And there are different answers to those questions.  If one means ‘pastoral counselling,’ then, by all means, gives some space in the seminary to this training.  If, however, one means by counselling a degree that is accredited by a secular accrediting agency and that teaches a curriculum for state licensure and certification, then the seminary has openned itself up to government restrictions on counselling for its faculty hiring, standards, and curriculum.

Moreover, counselling faculty with adequate training in theological subjects are hard to come by. That is a simple fact. They may have a few theology courses, since they are opting to teach in a seminary, but they are probably fairly ignorant of theological subjects, let alone have critically evaluated all the presuppositions in counselling with theology.  The rest of the faculty finds themselves biting their tongues when one of them addresses a topic touching on theology or attempts to engage the Biblical text.  If one believes that counselling is not just a social science but a ministry, and if one understands that Scripture and Christian theology cover crucial subjects that arise in most counselling sessions, then there needs to be advanced study in theology for counsellors.  Why not a PhD in theology before a doctorate in counselling?  This just does not happen enough of the time to support an ongoing programme in Christian counselling.

For one of my undergraduate majors, I studied psychology, taking most of the subjects one finds in an MA in Counselling at a seminary.  In my psychopathology course, my professor began by saying that, in this course, there would be no mention of sin.  I appreciated the point as I knew that many psychoses and neuroses, were not to be interpreted spiritually so much as psychologically.  I also knew that people could overspiritualise relational and psychological problems.  Yet I also knew that this lacuna would lead to misdiagnoses and inadequate treatments.  The human condition could not be analysed apart from sin, and some issues people face have demonic causes.  I remember one counselling professor at a seminary being shocked when I suggested that some ‘disorders’ may have to do with demon possession.  And I remember another counselling professor in a seminary say that, because of state licensure, she could not address the sin of homosexuality as a problem in any way.  If this was not a comment due to theological ignorance—or rejection of orthodoxy—it was a disconnect between the seminary and the counselling profession.  Or it was all three.

Finally, professors do not simply teach their subjects and then go home.  They sit on committees and in faculty meetings.  They vote on other candidates for positions in ethics, theology, Bible, Church history, preaching, and so forth.  Giving a counselling professor an equal vote with a theologian in a seminary makes no sense.  Counselling professors also get to weigh in on the curriculum.  How about substituting the usual ethics course for a course in professional ethics for counsellors for the students in counselling?  That happened, and the counselling students lost any meaningful ethics course that they should have gotten for doing their degree in a seminary.  When a whole counselling programme is started in a seminary, not just one counselling professor but several are added to the faculty, creating a sizeable voting bloc.

This point has nothing to do with the merits of counselling or Christians becoming counsellors.  It has to do primarily with locating a counselling programme in a seminary.  It would be far more sensible to have counselling as a graduate programme in a Christian university (though I see problems with that as well).  Be that as it may, if one really wants to destroy a seminary, one way to do so is to start a counselling programme with secular accreditation and licensure.

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