Counseling Virtues and Faithful Companionship
I just had the delight of seeing an article I co-wrote with a friend published in an academic journal. We decided to write on the impact of mainstreaming in personal formation. I’ll explain what that means, but first, this is why we wrote the article. We did this because through discussion, observation, and reading we have tracked the progress and approach of Christian counselors in the field, and it has been impressed upon us that there is a general approach emerging. What is published in journal articles and books is having a huge bearing on the mindset and approach of our colleagues in the field who are training up the next batch of counselors. There is so much good to say. Clinical depth, supervisory care, rigorous attempts at integration, and more. And, as you probably saw coming, we have been left with a concern. Some use these gifts and tend toward being technicians for their clients and neglect the joy of being their faithful and shaping companions.
Anyone who spends time around the counseling field knows we have a code of ethics and accreditation standards through CACREP and other entities. These parameters are robust, helpful, and substantial, guiding what we do and how we are to behave. The virtues defined by the broader, secularly oriented counseling field are great, yet we see the rich resources of Christianity providing an even more rigorous foundation to uphold client welfare through counselor development and practice. The virtues are faith, hope, love, wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage, that, expressed together, generate faithful companioning. If you are interested, you can check out our article in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, titled “Cultivating Virtue Dispositions in Counselors through Replacement Mainstreaming.”
A second thing that just happened recently is that I reread Thomas Chalmers’ sermon “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” which proclaims that our only hope of replacing an old love is to do so with a more beautiful one. Loving something changes you, orients you. Loving and delighting in God will fundamentally change our orientation to the world, and over time, the contours of our personal virtues. The article we wrote and the sermon I read have different audiences and different purposes, but they come together declaring that we need to be shaped. As Christians we have access to a love that is profoundly exciting, expulsive of the old, and intensely formative. The trouble for many of us isn’t our cognitive agreement, but the experience of exposure.
Chalmers talks about preaching and being shown the utter beauty of the gospel. Our article talks about mainstreaming, a term that describes the process of having specific messages funneled towards you in myriad ways so that they envelope you. The messages aren’t always the center of the conversation, but they are the formative backdrop. You see this all the time in social media telling us to tend to our bodies or personal thriving. Then this message repeats in ads, across news outlets, and then gets into our social events, activities, and even counseling. Ahh! As we are growing as counselors, we are often mainstreamed the ideas of our culture, such as thriving, solving, helping, fixing, and honoring. Are these the acts of virtues shaped by the beauty of Christ? Are these the acts of faithful companionship that meets and stays with another in their need? Kind of. But there is more.
My friend Seth and I wrote an article urging our colleagues to centralize gospel virtues into the ongoing experience of counseling students. We hope to see students saturated by events, reading, supervision, experiences, assignments, and mentors that focus on gospel virtues. Of course, this assumes those facilitating the mainstreaming have had their new love replace the old, whatever that might have been. Together we can create a culture for ourselves, younger counselors, and even our mentors or supervisors where we become familiar with exposing ourselves to God’s stunningly beautiful truth about himself, his work, and ourselves. We can practice committing to and sitting in a stream that shapes us. How can you be a part of this for yourself and others? How can you imagine this reviving a deep love of Christ, that over time, shapes the virtues that underpin your counseling and ministry actions?
