Pastoral Counseling Guidance for Those Who Wish

Pastoral Counseling

Guidance for Those Who Wish to Guide

For individuals who wish to use online educational pastoral opportunities to gain skills and expertise so that they can go on to serve the counseling needs of undergraduate students face a number of challenges. This does not mean that this is not a valid and appropriate method of learning, merely that those engaged in any form of distance learning that leads to accreditation within the field of counseling must be attentive to a number of specific challenges. This paper examines some of those challenges.

One of the key challenges faced by this type of student is to learn to differentiate pastoral counseling and psychological counseling within a Christian context from mainstream psychotherapy. This is a complex series of negotiations for anyone to make, and it is especially challenging to accomplish in the relative isolation of online learning. Online learning is an excellent medium for conveying factual information and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for helping students learn how to articulate their own beliefs.

What online learning is generally less good at is helping students understand in a nuanced way how other individuals' arguments and beliefs differ from their own in ways that can help them come to deeper understanding of their own beliefs. While most online courses contain an element that requires students to post opinions about a designated topic and to engage in some degree of online conversation, the members of any particular online class are likely to be relatively similar to each other, which means that there is likely to be a relatively low degree of intellectual diversity. This may serve to reinforce the ideas and beliefs that each student comes into the class with rather than allowing each student to extend her/himself into new intellectual and psychological territory (Paul, 2005).

Thus it would be a vital aspect to such an online class to have each student perform some in-person practice with a diverse group of "clients" to come to a better sense of what it is like to work with individuals who may have very different backgrounds and priorities than the counselor him/herself does (AAPC Code of Ethics, 2011). A vital aspect of learning to provide skilled counseling is understanding how to use timing and silence in encounters with clients, and this is something for which there is no analogue in online courses.

On-line classes for this population is a background in traditional psychotherapeutic practice and theory, because these can provide a basis (as well as a framework) for the overall, ongoing relationship between the counselor and the client. Psychotherapeutic theory has a number of models of how the human psyche functions and these are useful for all client populations, including individuals who belong to a community of faith.