When Christians show up in a counselor’s office …

Being both a minister and a counselor, I appreciate it when fellow pastors don’t “play therapist” and refer church members and people in their community to competent mental health professionals for genuine mental needs and mental illness.

But there’s a growing problem with that.

Increasingly, those “Christians” being sent for counseling are lacking the most basic Christian discipleship.

Increasingly, these new “Christian” counseling clients are biblically illiterate, do not have a biblical worldview, and have little to no understanding of the basic doctrines of the Bible.

Increasingly, these “Christian” clients have little to no biblical knowledge and understanding to draw from for navigating life.

Increasingly, these “Christian” clients are not receiving any support from within their local church family in dealing with life’s challenges.

Increasingly, Christian counselors are having to do with their Christian clients what the church should have done or should be doing —– teaching them to be disciples of Jesus.

And increasingly, when these new counseling clients happen to be the pastor (and often pastor and wife) themselves, they often are experiencing a serious discrepancy — a seeming inability to live out in their personal (off stage) lives what they teach everyone else about living as an authentic follower of Christ.

Now, I don’t know a single Christian counselor who objects to contributing to the spiritual maturing of any Christian, we’re HAPPY about doing that. But what is heartbreaking is seeing so many coming from the church who are lacking this fundamental responsibility of the church and its leaders.

What we are witnessing is not merely a counseling trend but a spiritual fracture. When people sit down in a counselor’s office with no grounding in Scripture, no practiced life of prayer, and no understanding of what it means to follow Christ beyond attending a church service, the needs and the work changes. Sessions that should build on a living faith instead begin with reconstructing the very basics of Christian identity. Before we can address trauma, anxiety, or fractured marriages, we often have to help them recover what it means to belong to Jesus at all.

And when the client is a pastor, this fracture cuts even deeper. I have sat with leaders who preach with conviction on Sunday and then confess on Monday that they no longer know how to love and care for their spouse in private. They can explain doctrine but do not feel hope for their disintegrating marriage. They can counsel others but cannot silence the shame echoing through their own minds over the conflict in the in their family. The disconnect between their public ministry and their private reality becomes a quiet, corrosive pressure — one that eventually forces them into the counseling room not for insight but for rescue.

The tragedy is that none of this had to reach a breaking point. The church was designed to cultivate spiritual stability long before life circumstances ever brought someone to counseling. Biblical understanding, shared accountability, the steady shaping of character, and the daily rhythms of obedience were meant to form a foundation strong enough to carry believers through hardship. When that foundation is missing, counseling does not simply become harder, it becomes a substitute for what should have already been nurtured in the life of the believer.

The Christian counseling office will always be a place where God does deep work, but it was never meant to replace the steady shaping that should happen in the life of every believer long before a crisis arrives. Christian counseling can clarify, strengthen, and heal, but it cannot become the sole place where Christians first learn what it means to follow Jesus. When that happens, something far more serious than emotional turmoil is taking place. A church that no longer forms disciples leaves its people spiritually unprepared for the very real battles of the mind and heart.

What Christians bring into the counseling room reveals what they were — or were not — given before they ever walked through the door. And until the church recovers its calling to make disciples who know how to think biblically, stand faithfully, and live truthfully, counselors will continue meeting believers who arrive with empty reserves and collapsing foundations. The need for counseling will remain, but the wounds will be deeper, the confusion thicker, and the work slower.

My hope is not simply that churches will “do better,” but that pastors and leaders will wake up to the reality that discipleship is not a program to maintain; it is a lifeline for the Christian’s soul. When the church embraces that again, the counseling office becomes what it was always meant to be — not a substitute for spiritual formation, but a place where maturing believers bring their struggles into the light and find the help they need without having to relearn what it means to walk with Christ.

Scotty