Surprisingly informative

After reading quite a lot of material on pastoral care, I picked up this book. The content focuses mainly on how to do short-term pastoral care/counseling in a way that respects the time of the pastor, and in a way that encourages the client to either grow on their own, or realize that their needs require a professionally trained therapist.^M

They made me read it...

Dr. Benner notes that 87% of surveyed pastors wished they had more pastoral counseling training, and that they thereby regard themselves as unprepared for counseling circumstances they encounter, despite seminary training and a large number of books published on the subject. This sense of pastoral inadequacy has spurred Benner to write Strategic Pastoral Counseling, which hopes to address the lack of practical pastoral counseling guides by providing busy pastors with a framework or methodology for effective counseling. ^M

A helpful book providing a realistic model

Benner begins this book by discussing the context in which Pastoral Counseling is to take place. He maintains that the challenge for pastors has "been to find a model of counseling that is both distinctively pastoral and psychologically responsible" (p. 13). This is so because Pastoral Counseling (counseling which is genuinely pastoral) must be subsumed under the general rubric of the Pastoral Ministry. In other words, the pastor is not a clinical psychologist and he should not counsel like one. He is a pastor and he must counsel those in his congregation with the selfless, caring nurture which is to characterize those who are responsible to look after the spiritual well-being of Christ's flock.