The Need for Pastoral Counseling

Physicians deal mainly with sick numerators, persons who have presented their bodies a living sacrifice for us -- our community is the sick. There have been efforts within medicine to deal with the whole community, and public health medicine is its best expression, but for most practicing physicians, the community is more or less out of reach. As far as sickness is concerned churches deal with denominators -- both the sick and the well within the community of faith. The Church also deals with the “fields white unto harvest,” the pagans, both sick and the well in those fields. While medicine has incorrectly restricted itself to empirical, evidential data, it has also drawn its data too often from numerators only. The Church has the opportunity to see these sick numerators in the illuminating context of their spiritual denominators -- how sickness relates to spiritual condition. Furthermore, medicine has cut off revelational data -- input from the Bible. Pastoral counseling can restore this missing feature of revelation to its powerful role in maintaining and regaining health.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Neglect of the Heart

Our priorities in medicine are badly skewed. The heart is the neglected sine qua non of health in the U.S. today. Jesus said, “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness. All of these things come from within and defile a man. (Mark 7:21-23) We need this kind of “kardiology” for our spiritual and physical health.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Godliness is Greater

1 Tim. 4:8 "For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come."

Physical elements have a place. Godliness has a greater place, not only for the here and now, but for the hereafter, also.

Limitations on the Disease Model

The medical profession's perception has become so limited to the theoretical constructs known as “disease entities,” by which is meant only the physical causes and manifestations of disease, that it is unable and unwilling to see that mankind is a living, breathing spirit folded into a body. Pastoral counseling offers one major avenue to instruct the medical profession and other onlookers, as it instructs the direct recipients.

Of the many possible examples, one of my favorites is a two-page ad for the anti-viral drug Zovirax appearing in many medical journals. Page one of the ad shows a downcast young woman seated alone in a sidewalk cafe lamenting that genital herpes has put her into “solitary confinement.” Page two shows the same girl smiling and in the convivial company of another young woman and two very nice-looking young men. The girl was in “solitary confinement” only in that she could not fornicate. Better living through chemistry “solves” the problem by enabling her to fornicate somewhat more freely. The ad treats of the issue of genital herpes as though it is merely a matter of viruses, their DNA structure, and chemically substituting a different base in the thymine, guanine, etc., pairs. The acceleration of this kind of narrow thinking is traceable to about 1960. Since that time, all of our venereal diseases have increased in frequency, greatly, with the addition of new diseases such as AIDS.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers