Strategies for Brief Pastoral Counseling (Creative Pastoral Care and Counseling)
From the Preface (pre-publication version): Context shapes action. It is a potent ingredient in our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. The times and places in which you do things influence how you do them, and circumstances shape your response to the words and actions of others.  Services, products, professions, even avocations need to fit the context in which they are performed or consumed. I would not recommend sushi for a toddler’s birthday party menu—nor would I dare serve hot dogs and red Jell-O brand gelatin to my wife for an anniversary dinner (but she would be happy with the sushi). A rural general practitioner would require a new set of skills to practice medicine in a large urban emergency ward. A university English professor would need retraining to teach writing for primary school children. Anglers, of course, are accustomed to adapting to their context: jigging for walleye in a Minnesota lake requires different tackle, technique, and mystique from fly-fishing for Atlantic salmon in a Scottish stream or setting out trot lines for monster catfish in a south Texas river.  Pastoral counseling is no exception. Its usual context is not a professional office in a medical arts building or psychiatric hospital. The primary context of pastoral counseling—indeed, its heart—is the congregation. In the course of pastoral conversation with those they serve, parish pastors, rabbis, and priests daily offer counsel in some form: a late night visit with a worried parishioner in the waiting room of an intensive care unit, guidance given to parents troubled by their son’s drug use, help for a married couple at the brink of divorce who have decided to give counseling a try for a session or two, spiritual direction with a widower experiencing an arid prayer life since his wife’s death, and an infinite variety of other pastoral moments. Due to their context—the many people they serve and multitude of functions they fulfill, as well as the wishes of their parishioners—ministers rarely see people in counseling for more than a few sessions and often only for one (see chapter 1).In the congregational context, therefore, counseling inevitably is brief (“brief” in this volume designates a counseling duration of no more than ten sessions, but typically many fewer). Parish pastors have little choice in the matter; it is their reality. Like the doctors, teachers, and anglers in the illustrations above, if they are to minister effectively, they need to adopt strategies to suit that reality.  As early as 1949, Seward Hiltner wrote that the time limitations of the parish suggest that most pastors’ counseling be brief. According to him, the principal benefit of brief counseling is to help a parishioner “turn the corner,“ or change direction: “Even brief counseling can often do just enough to bring a slightly new perspective, hence altering the approach to the situation and giving a chance for spontaneous successful handling of it by the parishioner.“  Generally Hiltner and his contemporaries favored an insight-oriented, long-term counseling approach. Brief pastoral counseling methods are much more finely tuned now than when he wrote these lines, and they are better designed to help people change direction in a few sessions. Turning the corner, in fact, is a primary goal of brief pastoral counseling, under the assumption that the other ministries of the church will continue to support people as they grow and move into the future. Strategies for Brief Pastoral Counseling is an attempt to synthesize the thinking of established and up-and-coming thinkers in the area of brief pastoral counseling. It follows up the work I began in Brief Pastoral Counseling and, much earlier, in Crisis Counseling. The book summarizes the literature in the brief pastoral counseling field and offers a new way, one that addresses the real, day-to-day context of pastoral counseling as it is practiced in local congregations among living, breathing, unique persons.  The eleven authors of Strategies for Brief Pastoral Counseling propose an orientation toward pastoral counseling based upon short-term counseling theory and methodology, with the underlying assumption that the vast majority of counselees wish to deal expeditiously with their problems and are unable or unwilling to devote more than a few visits to the task. People seek help from religious professionals because they quickly want to address whatever is troubling them, and not necessarily to achieve insight or delve into their distant pasts. While the primary context of pastoral counseling is the congregation, the authors do not intend to exclude pastoral care and counseling specialists; indeed, it is my hope that many of them will read these chapters. Some may find themselves working once again in the parish setting as changes in insurance benefits and health care delivery cause a shift away from long-term therapy for troubled people. Indeed, a majority of the work of specialists, whether they are hospital chaplains, private practitioners in pastoral counseling, or military chaplains, is already brief in nature. Experiences and ideas of these professionals are needed in the conversation. It is my hope that the ministries of parish pastors and pastoral counseling specialists will inform and enrich each other.