My journey with God has been that he comforts me and counsels me through my hardships. But this often becomes misconstrued by many people.

When people think “counsel” they often think “has an answer for me”. This is not counseling. But neither is the heart of God to answer you the moment you beg and plead for a response. Look throughout 1 and 2 Samuel with David and you’ll see this very clearly. Look in Esther and you’ll see unanswered questions constantly, too. You’ll see mistake after mistake throughout the Bible and yet, God’s promise is to save them – still.

To be an ethical counselor is to not give advice.

I’ve spoken for hours on end to many people about how a pastor is not a counselor. And that’s why they remain distinct career paths. A pastor gives you advice and prayers; tells you perhaps some scripture to lean on. A counselor sits with you in the emotion until you are ready for the answer to not be one you are able to control.

To be frank here, I worked as a student counselor, full time, for about six months. The amount of times I gave an answer that wasn’t “are you sure you want one” or some variant of that is virtually as small as the amount of times ethical.

Jesus as counselor is a fun topic, no?

It means he sits with us as a friend-mentor through our hardships until He sees we are ready to withstand the answer we are going to get. It means that our feelings are welcome. It means that our messiness is the reason He took our sinners death from us in a miraculous fashion. He wanted us so badly that He pled to God to have another will because, as John 3:16 demostrates below, He really loved us.

For God so loved the world that He gave [up] His one and only son, so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but [rather] shall have eternal life.

John 3:16

For a God with abundant love to be a counselor is to perfectly align with what some of the ethical guidelines in counseling or social work say. (Admittedly I have not read the APA ethical guidelines.) The ethical codes state (not verbatim) that therapists in those professions are to respect the client’s wants and needs in therapy. Therapists are to go with goals collaboratively formed with the client, as the client may not know limits of therapy or what can be accomplished in certain perameters. I mean, therapists get a degree that demonstrates more than the ability to talk to others coherently.

My ultimate qualm is that my Christian counseling program placed boundaries on who was allowed to be respected and wanted by not only God, but also the world.

The professors often held different views on this than each other.

Ultimately, it was incredibly confusing and annoying to find that not every professor within the same organization could agree on a viewpoint. I wrote several papers expressing how my “ideal client” (a term I still take issue with) was someone whose faith was not dictated or determined in any fashion by religious doctrine. Time and time again I would be told how my client was “not Christian enough” and time and time again I would dig in my heels that this was the average client in therapy in the real world and not in their fictitious alternate reality where conservative evangelicalism is the only viewpoint.

See, the thing was, the program was designed to help counselors be able to ethically act as spiritual mentors to their clients. Like it or not, this is not and has never been what counseling is. At least not ethical or sound practicing counseling.

I take no issue with pastors entering a counseling program to be able to more ethically place boundaries on their limits. There’s actually a benefit to allowing pastors and clergy members the ability to learn more formal counseling skills. The idea, though, that a clinical mental health program has an “ideal client” and that client furthermore is one representing disproportionate numbers of clients? Both facets are horrendous, made even more so by the claim that the program allows and welcomes all viewpoints and backgrounds represented in the cultural climate.

There’s no secret that I considered if they were Bibilical counseling.

But as their dean repeated multiple times: “We are not a Biblical counseling program; we are a clinical mental health counseling program designed for licensure.”

Now, as many know (and much more don’t), the ability to obtain (counseling and related) licensure is not the same as claiming clinical expertise. CACREP (the accrediting board for the aforementioned program) includes “related educational programs” in their purview.

This can and does include Biblical counseling. That’s fine.

But a school has a duty to accurately represent their degree.

Unfortunately for the university, I took their theology class and prequiste. This means I intimately can attest to their inherent biases discrediting the claim to be clinical mental health and not Biblical. Again, there is nothing wrong with teaching more ethical interventions in a Biblical realm. But being dishonest about that is unethical.

I quickly dropped out upon discovering this.

I did voice these concerns to CACREP. I got an immediate response that resulted in a clinical diagnostics sequence being redone within the week. My friends who were still in the program had multiple concerns about taking courses never before run by distinguished faculty in the field. I wondered what changed so drastically that professors were voicing concerns over teaching differential diagnostics.

I never did ask. And I never will.

But Jesus had the righteous anger compelling him to flip over tables in a temple.

If we are truly to be like Jesus (and let’s be honest, that school was not aiming to be like Jesus) then we are required to speak out against injustices. We are allowed to pick and choose which battles we fight to the end. But we are not allowed to claim to serve an all loving God who then also compells us against making the world a better place.

Those are contradictory ideas.

My formal degree is a Bachelor of Science in Economics. My degree will demonstrate that I have two minors (film/media studies and German) and an honor’s thesis (critiquing representations and discussions of mental illness in adult-directed animation) atop that. My heart will claim a secret third minor of mathematics (I boldly claim that attempting a class three times is as good in my heart as the potential to succeed in it). Either way, I suffered through three (3) mathematical logic courses (five if we consider that two of those required two attempts each). If nothing else, I definitely can assess logic.

When a school claims to teach something, we are called as academics to assess if the coursework will meet expectations. When the coursework contradicts program goals presented before the incoming cohort, that’s an ethical issue. Having different goals than all students may have is not unethical. Claiming to teach something the school won’t, however, is an egregious ethical dilemma.

I don’t care to mention the university.

It’s honestly not that important.

What’s important is knowing that schools exist out there who are more concerned with taking high tuition and fees. Their goal isn’t truly to teach.

For the record, if the school had been the opposite – claiming a Biblical counseling program while neglecting relgion – I would take similar issues.

The issue was not that they were who they were.

The issue was their inability to admit it.

Going forward, I urge future academics to ask the tough questions and not be afraid to quit a program that doesn’t fully meet expectations.

May you find your dream career!

XOXO,

Dorothy B.