One of the most important distinctives of Church Therapy is that the church therapist works in tandem with the pastors. It is my firm belief that pastors and professional counselors need each other in order to best help those in their care. The partnership that pastors and counselors on the same church staff have is unique because there is a united team providing wraparound services to each parishioner. In other contexts in which pastors refer church members out to a nearby Christian counselor or other mental health agency, collaboration on the case (if any exists) is generally limited to an occasional phone call. There is not a team framework for understanding the person’s discipleship and mental health needs.
A church therapist’s office is in the church, often right beside the pastors’ offices. There is opportunity for casual interactions — spontaneous check-ins that can often guide and shape the clinical and spiritual understanding of a person in the midst of crisis or pain. The church therapist can attend staff meetings or consult with pastors when they unsure how to guide a parishioner through an emotional struggle.
This team approach is also surprisingly comforting to clients. Every client who attends the church must sign a release of information before the church therapist can speak with the pastors. I always explain how our team approach works and why it can be helpful to the client. The client has the right to refuse this information-sharing or limit what types of information can be shared. Overwhelmingly, my clients express positive feelings about the team approach — a sense of safety in knowing that those whom they are choosing to trust with their spiritual and emotional growth will be working together to care for them in a unified way.
The other benefit of the team approach in Church Therapy is a reduction in stigma. Those who receive mental health services through the church know that they are loved and accepted by the church staff in every type of interaction.
As much as the mental health field is making a push towards reducing stigma about mental illness, there are subtle ways in which our common therapeutic structures emphasizing anonymity in therapy actually create stigma. There is still an overriding belief that a therapist should never share any personal information (even when therapeutically beneficial), and that the client and therapist should never run into each other in any other context.
Anonymity in therapy can be useful, but it can also be detrimental as clients often feel an artificial tone in the relationship. The church setting creates a place where clients can be loved by a whole team of people in a variety of ways throughout their week. Their spiritual leaders have come alongside them, worshiped along with them, and demonstrated consistent structures of caring for the whole person.
Church Therapy creates a culture of safety, where pastors and the church therapists are on the same team, all in agreement that mental illness is real and needs professional treatment. In that context it is an act of courage and a sign of forward movement when a parishioner enters the therapy room. And whole-person care is able to extend far beyond the four walls of the counselor’s office.