Should Pastors Really Be Doing Counseling?

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses whether pastors really should be doing counseling and where wise boundaries belong in an age of rising mental health needs. He unpacks what makes pastoral counseling unique—pastoral conversations, spiritual direction, and prayer—then explains when it is better to refer people to trained professionals.

Creators and Guests

Host

Jeff Iorg

President, SBC Executive Committee

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Jeff Iorg: 00:01

Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. That's what we do on this podcast. We talk about challenging issues in the day to day work of those of us who lead churches and ministry organizations. Well, sometime back, I got a question from a podcast listener that I wanted to address today.

Jeff Iorg: 00:25

Questions were related to pastors and counseling. Questions like, should pastors be involved in counseling? How much counseling should pastors do? What kind of counseling are pastors really skilled to accomplish? And are there some counseling situations pastors should really avoid?

Jeff Iorg: 00:44

So what I wanna do today is talk about pastors as counselors. And when I say the word pastor, I mean more broadly than just the pastor. I'm talking about those of you who are in pastoral responsibilities and some of you even may be in lay pastoral responsibilities. If you have the spiritual oversight of others and you find yourself looked to for guidance, this podcast will apply to you. So let's talk about pastors as counselors.

Jeff Iorg: 01:11

And the first question, the big question, should pastors do counseling? And I'm gonna give you

Jeff Iorg: 01:18

a short answer. Yes. With a great big asterisk. The answer is yes, but

Jeff Iorg: 01:25

with some qualifiers I hope to lay out for you as we work our way through the podcast. So before we get to those qualifiers, let me underscore that I really do value counseling. I think it is an important part of our repertoire as ministry leaders, and I think beyond that, it's a specialized field of ministry that a few people are really gifted to accomplish. And I value counseling both by pastors and by professionals who are focused just on that as their field. I've been to counseling.

Jeff Iorg: 02:02

I have no problem, owning that, especially when I was a younger man and was struggling to work through the insecurities and trouble of my upbringing. I had some real help along the way with a pastoral counselor who gave me good reflection and guidance and coaching to help me through some really challenging times in my life, particularly as I address some of the damage done by my upbringing. So I value counseling and I have been to counseling. There is, in my view,

Jeff Iorg: 02:33

no stigma whatsoever to say that I've been

Jeff Iorg: 02:38

to counseling or for you to say that you've been to counseling. Another demonstration of my value of counseling is I I started a counseling program while I was at Gateway Seminary. Now, of course, when I say I started, I was the president, and so I was the impetus behind the blessing of the starting of the program, not the one who was actually day to day, of course, doing it. But I wanted it to be a part of what we did at Gateway in training people for the future. And then beyond that, at every place I have worked in ministry, the organization has provided some kind of counseling services either to its employees or its constituents or its students.

Jeff Iorg: 03:17

Some way we've been able to provide some kind of counseling support. So for example, when I was at the Northwest Baptist Convention, we would make counseling available to pastors and their families in crisis situations. When I was at the seminary, we paid for limited numbers of sessions for students who needed specific counsel on specific areas. With both of those organizations, we've been involved in helping employees get counseling for specific issues that came up as a part of their lives in relationship to their work. We have provided counseling services.

Jeff Iorg: 03:51

And so I hope that these help you to understand what I mean when I say I really value counseling. I've been to counseling. I started the counseling program. I've provided counseling, and

Jeff Iorg: 04:03

our organizations have provided counseling. I am pro counseling. Also, beyond that, I

Jeff Iorg: 04:10

recognize that there are

Jeff Iorg: 04:12

significant significant mental health challenges going on in our world today. Of course, there are

Jeff Iorg: 04:20

people who struggle with mental illness. We've had this in our family with people who have struggled with mental illness that was both physiologically caused and psychologically enhanced. These struggles are real, and we have had, all kinds of turmoil in trying to help family members to grapple with what was happening to them physically and psychologically and to work through the difficulties. And those have involved them having counselors, and in some cases, even psychiatrists, and certainly medical professionals, doctors, and others who help them along the way. So I'm fully aware that there's a significant mental health crisis in our in our country and and really mental health challenges all around us.

Jeff Iorg: 05:04

Of course, some marked by mental illness, but others just marked by the enhanced stressors of the world we're living in today. Not time on the podcast to go into all of these, but I think we had the pandemic a few years ago, and people are still rebounding from the impact of all that social distancing and, physical, turmoil that came into our lives during that time. There's all the impact of social media. There's all the impact of screen time and what that means in the lives of people. There's all the isolation that is being experienced by younger adults particularly.

Jeff Iorg: 05:40

All of these things produce significant mental health challenges. And then on top of that, you can layer in life's conflicts that seem inevitable. Marital conflicts, family conflicts, church conflicts, work conflicts, neighborhood conflicts, all kinds of relational tension going on around us and with the people that we're working with. So I value counseling. I have experienced it.

Jeff Iorg: 06:09

I've started programs to provide it. I've made sure my organizations facilitated it. I recognize the reality of mental illness and mental health challenges in our world today. And because of all of these things, ministry organizations and their leaders have to have a proactive position on and a proactive means of providing counseling. So having said all that, let's talk more specifically about the role pastors and pastoral leaders can have as counselors, and then let's talk about some reasons that pastors should do limited counseling or to think about how to limit counseling so that they stay within their lane, if you will, in this important area.

Jeff Iorg: 06:54

I think pastors do have three unique roles as counselors or three kinds of counsel that we are uniquely suited to provide. And I believe that people in pastoral leadership have these opportunities even greater in some ways than medical or mental health professionals. These are unique to us as spiritual leaders. We have this capacity to provide certain kind of counsel in at least three different ways. First of all, pastors have the opportunity to counsel through what I call pastoral conversations.

Jeff Iorg: 07:31

Pastoral conversations. Now these take two forms. They they can be formal where someone says, you know, pastor, I I really need to talk with you. Can I come by your office at two 02:00 this afternoon and just have a few minutes? And they wanna come in and talk with you about a particular issue, a struggle, a difficulty, a challenge, something that's going on with their lives, they'd like to have a conversation with you about it.

Jeff Iorg: 07:55

That's a formal pastoral conversation. Now you might say, well, that sounds like a counseling session. Well, it it may be one. But because you're a pastor working in a pastoral role, I wanna call it a pastoral conversation more than I wanna call it a counseling session, at least in that first opportunity that you have to talk with someone. But beyond this formal kind of approach, there's also the informal approach to pastoral conversations.

Jeff Iorg: 08:22

Now I'm not sure if this really communicates as

Jeff Iorg: 08:29

clearly today as it may have in a previous generation. I've observed pastors today really changing some of how they work and what they do, and cultures, expectations of pastors have changed in some ways as well. And so this kind of informal pastoral conversation may be not as frequent as it once was and may require some challenge for you to figure out ways to do it in your context. It may also be somewhat culturally mandated or controlled. There are some cultures where this is more appropriate and more welcome and some contexts where it's more appropriate and more welcome.

Jeff Iorg: 09:07

But let

Jeff Iorg: 09:07

me tell you what I mean. I was mentored by a pastor who was the master

Jeff Iorg: 09:13

of the pastoral conversation, the informal pastoral conversation. He would say to me, let's go to the hospital and make a visit, and we would do that. On the way back from the hospital, he would say, Hey, let's stop in here for a minute. I need to see a guy. And we would pull into an auto mechanic's shop, and he would get out of the car and walk in and say, Hey, Tom.

Jeff Iorg: 09:36

I just want to drop by and tell you I'm still praying for your mom and see how she's doing. Thomas said, man, thanks for stopping by. She's doing great. You know, doctor says she's she's really improving and and I I'm and that that and we're really hopeful. Well, that's great news, man.

Jeff Iorg: 09:51

Tom, I'll check you on Sunday. All right? And we

Jeff Iorg: 09:53

get in the car and drive on. Now the first time I saw him do that, I thought, well, how did

Jeff Iorg: 09:57

he do that? He just walked right into a place of business, right into

Jeff Iorg: 10:00

a company, right into and he did. But he only stayed five minutes. He got in,

Jeff Iorg: 10:06

he got out, he got his business done. And he communicated to this guy so much by that informal pastoral conversation. He he communicated, I'm thinking of you. You're on my mind. I wanted to stop and see you.

Jeff Iorg: 10:19

I remembered that you asked me to pray. I'm concerned about you and your mother. All of that communicated in a five minute informal pastoral conversation. As he moved through life, this pastor was a master at doing what I just described to you, at stopping and seeing someone for five or ten minutes, pulling someone aside after a meeting or before an event, and just having a brief moment with them. He was a master at intentionally working these kind of these kind of conversations.

Jeff Iorg: 10:46

Now when I later became a chaplain for a Major League Baseball team and worked at that for about a decade, I had to become the master of these informal pastoral conversations. You know, as a chaplain in a Major League Baseball stadium, you don't have an office for people to come to or a prescribed length of time where they're gonna give them an hour appointment. That those things just don't happen. Instead, you find yourself walking slowly through the ballpark and stopping at vendors, stopping at security guys, stopping at clubhouse attendants, stopping at coaches, and of course, stopping at players. And as you have the opportunity one on one on one, just talking with them and having those moment those short brief pastoral conversations, informal pastoral conversations, ongoing pastoral conversations with people.

Jeff Iorg: 11:33

Now I realize that the world has changed. Circumstances are different in different places, But I wanna challenge you to think about pastoral counseling, first of all, as a series of short pastoral conversations. Some of them more formal, where a person comes by your office and spends twenty minutes and says, pastor, I just wanna talk with you because I've I've got a job offer. And I just need to pray through and think through what what it means for me to to take that job. And so I just wanna come by and talk with you about it.

Jeff Iorg: 12:06

Well, that's pastoral conversation, and that's a specific time in a specific place in your office. That's problem. But I also don't want you to go too quickly past the value of the informal pastoral conversation where you're simply intentionally moving through life, intersecting people and connecting with them about concerns, issues, things they brought up to you, and that you're doing a spiritual check-in with them, if you will, along the way. Pastoral conversations. A second role that pastors have that's unique in this in counseling is to provide spiritual direction.

Jeff Iorg: 12:42

Spiritual direction.

Jeff Iorg: 12:44

That means when someone comes to you, they're looking for God's perspective on their situation, and that perspective is gonna come through really two main resources. First, it's gonna come through the scriptures and what it teaches about whatever it is they're bringing to you. And second, it's gonna come through prayer and the spiritual direction that is gained as we pray and submit ourselves to God and ask for him to to work through situations. So when someone comes to you for counsel, they're coming to you also for spiritual direction. They're they're not going to get from their physician or even from a secular psychologist.

Jeff Iorg: 13:22

They're not going to get from a mental health worker or a

Jeff Iorg: 13:24

social worker. They're not going to get what only you, only you can provide, and that spiritual direction.

Jeff Iorg: 13:33

So that when someone comes in and says, you know, I'm I'm really struggling with whether or not I should take this job that's been offered to me. Well, there's no verse in the Bible about whether you should take a certain job or not. But you know the Bible says that men are to provide for their families, and

Jeff Iorg: 13:49

the Bible says that work is to be

Jeff Iorg: 13:52

an outlet for creativity and expression. And the the Bible says that work is supposed to facilitate the greater work of accomplishing the work of the kingdom of God. And so you can say, you know, let's talk about what the Bible says about work and how that plays into the decision you're trying to make right here. Does this decision provide for your family more effectively? Does this not just financially, but also emotionally and in their total well-being?

Jeff Iorg: 14:16

Does this position allow you to invest your creativity and gifts that God has given you in the most productive way possible? Does this new job offer facilitate the expansion of God's kingdom and give you greater opportunity, or will it cost you in that regard? These are some things that you can provide that are spiritual direction that grow out of the word of God, grow out of a theology of work, grow out of an understanding of how to apply the Bible in those situations. Similarly, someone comes to you and says, hey, pastor, I just need a few minutes. I you know, I've met someone and I I I think they might be the one and I'm just wondering, how do you know if you've found the right person that that God wants you to marry?

Jeff Iorg: 14:52

Well, there's some things the Bible says about marriage. The Bible says you can only marry a believer. Is this person we're talking about, a Christian? You know, and then you start from there and and start talking about and the Bible talks about being aligned in goals and dreams and and and in mission. The Bible talks about some of these kinds of issues and kind of the Bible talks about loving someone and sacrificing yourself for them, not marrying them so they can do for you.

Jeff Iorg: 15:16

So let's talk about what the Bible says about marriage and about relationships and about true love, and let's see if we can sort out maybe this is the one or maybe it isn't. So when people come to you for counseling as a pastor, they're coming to you for spiritual direction, and that spiritual direction comes from the word of God, you bringing to bear what the Bible says about their situation in the conversation. This puts a lot of onus on you to know the word of God and to be able to, in the moment, not just proof text or not just cite a specific verse, but to bring the principles of scripture and the particular verses when appropriate and the theology that undergirds the the conversation to bring that to bear on the issue that's being presented to you. And then also as a part

Jeff Iorg: 16:04

of that is prayer. Now I don't mean that you hand out prayer like a prescription. You just give it out like a pill. I I don't mean that. But I

Jeff Iorg: 16:16

think when someone comes to you as a pastor, they're not only coming to you for insight from what the Bible might say about their situation, but they're coming to you for assistance to pray and seek spiritual direction and to sense that spiritual guidance that can only come from God. I'll tell you, some of the most awkward moments of my pastoral ministry have been when I've had to have another person say to me, well, can we can we pray about this or can I at least can you

Jeff Iorg: 16:47

at least pray with me before I leave? Man, that was

Jeff Iorg: 16:51

kind of painful. I'm thinking of one particular situation. A woman's husband was injured at work, and I I went to see her. And she was so grateful that I came. We had a pastoral conversation about her life and about her husband's injury and about what that might mean for them.

Jeff Iorg: 17:10

And after talking about it for a few minutes, I started to excuse myself and to move on to the next thing.

Jeff Iorg: 17:16

And she said, but pastor, can't can't we at least pray about it? And I thought, man, wow. How could I have not initiated prayer in this moment? And so part

Jeff Iorg: 17:28

of spiritual direction is hearing a person, talking with them, and then saying, you know, I I really feel like that maybe the most important thing I can do with you is to pray with you right now about this situation. So if you don't feel comfortable praying, that's alright. But why don't we bow our heads together and let me pray for you in this very important decision or this variation that you're facing? It's kind of interesting. I've I've done this so many times with people where I've said, can I pray for you?

Jeff Iorg: 17:56

And and they said yes almost every time. I did have one person once say, no. I don't want any prayer. I'm like, okay. And we moved on from that conversation, but that's pretty rare.

Jeff Iorg: 18:07

Fifty years of ministry, one person who didn't wanna be prayed for. I remember once, though, I was in the ballpark. I was in the clubhouse, actually, and a Christian player told me that one of the players who did not regularly attend chapel, his father had been diagnosed with a serious cancer. So I walked over to that player. He was standing in front of his locker, and I said, hey.

Jeff Iorg: 18:26

I'm Jeff. I'm the chapel guy. And he said, yeah. I I know who you are. And I said, hey.

Jeff Iorg: 18:30

Listen. I I got word that that your dad has cancer. And he kinda looked down, like, devastated, you know, in the moment. And I said, hey. I I know that's hard news, and I wanna know how I can help you.

Jeff Iorg: 18:45

And he said, well, I don't know that you can't help me. There's not much to be done there. Just giving him a few weeks to live. It's pretty bad. I said, okay.

Jeff Iorg: 18:52

I said, well, I tell you, would it

Jeff Iorg: 18:56

be alright if I prayed for you? And he looked up and said, it sure would. Hit it. He bowed his head right there. Now there is music playing and people milling around, but he so needed a moment.

Jeff Iorg: 19:08

Here's this player. I don't even know if he's a Christian, but when I said, could I pray with you? He said, yes.

Jeff Iorg: 19:13

Hit it and bowed his head. Well, I didn't know

Jeff Iorg: 19:15

what else to do. I just bowed my head and started praying for the guy. That's what I'm talking about. Spiritual direction. When someone comes to you as a pastor for counsel, they, first of all, want a pastoral conversation.

Jeff Iorg: 19:28

They wanna talk to a pastor. They're not they don't wanna talk to a social worker. They don't wanna talk to a clinician. They don't wanna talk to a counselor. They don't wanna talk to a physic a psychiatrist or a medical doctor or

Jeff Iorg: 19:38

a social worker. They wanna talk

Jeff Iorg: 19:40

to a pastor. So have a pastoral conversation, formal or informal. And then they're coming to you because they want spiritual direction. They they wanna hear what the Bible has to say about their situation, and they wanna talk to God about it and have you talked to God on their behalf about it. They want spiritual direction.

Jeff Iorg: 19:58

And then the third role that you have besides pastoral conversations and spiritual direction is what I call triage and referral. Triage and referral. That's where someone comes to you and and you listen carefully and you have a good pastoral conversation conversation and you talk about what the Bible says about their situation and you may even pray with them, but you realize that their situation is more complicated than one pastoral conversation is going to resolve and may be more complex and require more time and perhaps even more expertise than you're going to be able to offer as a pastoral counselor in the moment. And it's in those moments that you say, here's your situation as I understand it, and here's how serious your situation really is. I think you need some really focused help to get through this.

Jeff Iorg: 20:50

And that's where a pastor needs a good network of referral, where you have a physician that you can refer to, you have a pastoral counselor that you can refer to, a professional counselor that you can refer to, I should say, that you have, even a clinician or social worker that you can refer to. You have a network of people in your community that you've established relationship with, and you can say, you need more help than I can provide you in this time that we have together, but I'd like to facilitate. I'd like to make an introduction. I'd like to help you get the help you need. Now, a very few of you are gonna be in large churches that have some kind of counseling ministry.

Jeff Iorg: 21:28

That's awesome. More of you are gonna be in communities that maybe have a counseling center of some kind that has Christian counseling you can trust. But some of you some of you are in very isolated places where those resources are not very easy to find. So I'd encourage you to connect with your association, your state convention, with people who have resources in your area and who can connect you in your area to find ways to get help to people that really need it that may be beyond what you can do even in your local community. So when people come to you, they want a pastoral conversation and spiritual direction, and they may need triage and referral.

Jeff Iorg: 22:07

Now why refer? Because I believe pastors, while they have a very important role as I've just described, should do really limited counseling. Why? Well, here's five reasons. Number one, our primary task is gospel communication.

Jeff Iorg: 22:23

That means our primary task is delivering the gospel into communities and into the lives of people. Now this is impacted by the emotional and relational and mental health needs that we discover in pastoral ministry. So we may preach and teach gospel centered communication tied to the difficulties that we're encountering and experiencing and hearing from as people talk with us about these challenges and struggles. But our primary responsibility is gospel communication. We're not primarily here to teach about marriage or teach about parenting or teach about careers or teach about life circumstances.

Jeff Iorg: 23:04

We're here to communicate the gospel, and that's our primary communication responsibility. So some counseling along the way, of course. But the bulk of our focus and time and energy has to be spent on gospel communication, getting the gospel to more people. A second reason pastors should do limited counseling is our our time, because we're pastors and generalists, must be spent on the many, not on the few. We spend our time preaching and organizing and equipping others.

Jeff Iorg: 23:37

Our task is to get people the help they need, not help people with every need. Let me say that again. Our task is to get people the help they need, not help them with every need.

Jeff Iorg: 23:52

Our time must be spent on the many, not just on the few. So for example, you say, well, I really need to spend, you know,

Jeff Iorg: 24:00

twenty hours a week counseling people one on one, and I can I can meet with 20 people an hour a week? I can meet with 20 people for an hour each for for every week. I just gotta spend that much time. It's like, well, I don't know that you can do that. Let me ask you to think about spending those same twenty hours preparing one or perhaps two really thoroughly prepared gospel saturated, practically applied biblical messages, and then preach those to two or 300 people.

Jeff Iorg: 24:35

Do you understand that every time you stand up to speak for thirty minutes to a 100 people, you've just given fifty human hours of ministry to people? Thirty minutes, a 100 people, that's fifty hours of time, of human time that you've just consumed. That doesn't even count the preparation time you've added to the mix. What I'm trying to get you to see is those public opportunities you have for gospel communication and for communicating to the many the insights and principles and directing directions they need about life, that is very valuable time well spent and really does communicate the priority of your life because that's where the most of your time is spent and must be invested. Sure.

Jeff Iorg: 25:25

Those 20 people that you helped one on one this week, I'm I'm grateful for that. But if you neglected the two to 300 that are coming on a Sunday to hear you speak, Think about the trade off. I'm challenging you to give some attention to pastoral conversations and spiritual direction and to triage those who really need serious help, but to keep your focus on gospel communication that helps the many, not necessarily the few. And then another reason pastors should do limited counseling is our primary ministry strategies are preventive and prescriptive rather than reactive. In other words, rather than focus on marriage counseling, I want you as a ministry leader to focus on marriage conferences, marriage retreats, marriage mentoring programs.

Jeff Iorg: 26:13

I want you to focus on providing marriage books and marriage resources and marriage tools to strengthen and build proactively the marriages in your church and community. It's easy to fall into the trap of being only reactive. We only deal with people when they have the problems. I'm asking you to be proactive, to say, if our church wants to really address troubled marriages, we need to have annual marriage conferences, annual marriage retreats, a continuing marital mentoring program going on in our church. We need to have some men's ministry and some women's ministry that's focused on strengthening relationships and building marriages.

Jeff Iorg: 26:53

We need to be proactive. And as a pastor, your focus has to be on the proactive, prescriptive parts of ministry, not just the reactive crisis moments of ministry. And then a fourth reason that pastors should do limited counseling is our counseling expertise is limited. We are not professional counselors. We are we are not normally trained psychologists.

Jeff Iorg: 27:18

We have a very limited perspective on most of these issues, and that's fine. We're pastors. We're we're not these other things. And we do have strengths, as I already said. We provide pastoral conversations and spiritual directions and triage to help people get the help they need.

Jeff Iorg: 27:34

And it's okay to say our expertise is limited. I don't know how to help you beyond the bit that I've done so far. And because of that, I'm gonna limit what I try to do for you in this area. It's okay to say we're limited. It doesn't mean we're weak or ineffective.

Jeff Iorg: 27:50

It just means we know our lane and we stay in it. And then finally, we should do limited counseling because our diagnostic tools are limited. For example, we we can't do medical testing, and most of us are not equipped to do psychological testing. Those kinds of things can be very helpful. I remember, as I've told you before on the podcast, there was a time when I I went to the doctor and I was recovering from surgery and I wasn't doing well, and and I thought, you know, that it was just a slow bounce back, but I Anne thought, no.

Jeff Iorg: 28:22

I think you're depressed. I you're not normal. And we went to the doctor, and the doctor said, you know, I think some of the sometimes this is this is caused by improper medication, so let's change some things. We did and within a week or so, I was pretty much back to my normal self. Why?

Jeff Iorg: 28:37

Because he had the capacity to do blood work and look at some levels in my body and realize that I was hormonally out of balance and that my medications were all off, especially coming out of surgery and he fixed me. I didn't need counseling, I needed a little more of a pill. It was just that simple. Well, pastors don't have those kind of capacities and that's why it's okay to say that we're only gonna do a certain level of counseling because our diagnostic tools are just limited. We don't have the tools that others have and so therefore we need to stay in our lane and use the tools we do have and that we're really good at using and give people the help that those can provide.

Jeff Iorg: 29:12

Well, the podcaster who asked me the question, should pastors do counseling? The answer is yes. We value counseling and I certainly value it personally, but we recognize that we have a distinct role as pastoral counselors. We do pastoral conversations and provide spiritual direction and then triage people if we need to referrals where they can get additional help along the way. And we limit this kind of work because our primary task is gospel communication.

Jeff Iorg: 29:40

We spend our time on the many more than on the few. Our primary strategies are preventive and we're overseeing the preventive nature of ministry. We limit what we do in counseling because our expertise is limited and so are the tools available at our disposal. So if you're a pastor or a person in a pastoral role, yes, you will do some pastoral counseling along the way. It's a part of our work.

Jeff Iorg: 30:04

It's a good part of our work. But keep some of these suggestions in mind today so that you do it more effectively. Pastoral counseling is a part of your role as you lead on.