Notes of a Pastoral Counselor: Reflections across Half a Century

By Robert Marsden Knight

Are you a more concrete or abstract thinker? And what does that have to do with effective psychotherapy? Or what about the theological concepts of monotheism versus polytheism? Which is a projection of a more integrated psychological perspective? What are you grieving? What you lost? Or wanted/needed but didn't get? What do moral and spiritual have to do with what is psychological? Or counseling with the golf swing? Are you a more positive, a more thankful person, or perhaps more negative, even resentful of whatever the circumstances? Are you more of a worrier or a delighter, more skeptical or encouraging? These and other human characteristics, Monty Knight speaks to in this book of short essays, three sermons--even a hymn--written out of conversations with patients, students, and parishioners over his many years of ministry as a pastoral counselor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385213351

Robert Marsden Knight

Dr. "Monty" Knight serves as pastor of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors and an Approved Supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. The Reverend Knight holds BA and MA degrees from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a DMin from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Book preview

Introduction

This book is a collection of short essays, as well as three sermons, which I’ve written since 2009 when Wipf and Stock published my previous book, Balanced Living: Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness. Following the sermons, I’ve also included a hymn I wrote some years ago. This Trinitarian hymn emphasizes that being faithful is more gift than accomplishment

None of these articles have before been published. I wrote them to share with patients, students and clinical supervisees, and to present the material at training workshops and continuing education events which I’ve been invited to lead.

I actually did submit two of the articles to The Christian Century, which I’ve supported and read faithfully since 1963. But neither was accepted for publication. I was disappointed.

[Of historical significance: the first Century article I ever read was Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.]

I presented A Systemic Therapist’s Primer for a tele-conference sponsored by the South Carolina Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Bullying I presented at a conference for school counselors at the University of South Carolina.

And the SIP chapter is an edited version of a case study I was required to present as a participant in the program that certified me as a Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapist.

I’ve written the essays and sermons in this book in a way different from how I wrote Balanced Living.

I wrote a weekly newspaper column for the Summerville (SC) Journal-Scene for nearly twenty years (1975–1994). I can’t imagine the editor actually read Balanced Living, even though I quoted him in the book. He did, however, offer his typically un-varnished criticism: It’s too deep. No one will read it.

My wife’s reaction to Balanced Living was not quite as blunt as that of the editor. It’s too hard to read, she said. It needs to have shorter chapters, shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences.

What is it King Leopold says of Mozart’s music in the movie, Amadeus? Too many notes!

Not that I’m a Mozart. Hardly. I’m not quite that grandiose.

But a student echoed my wife’s criticism. You’ve presented so many ideas, many new to me. I need more time to think about what you’re saying. More space? More room? Did I try to pour a proverbial gallon into a quart?

And a patient’s response was similar. He used a colorful metaphor (or should I say tasty?). That’s how he said, I need more time (space/room?) to let what you’re saying marinate.

So I’ve written the essays and sermons in this collection—to quote my wife--with shorter chapters, paragraphs and sentences.

The three sermons I’ve included, I preached (recorded)—over some five years--on the radio program, Day 1. This historic weekly broadcast, produced in Atlanta, is heard on numerous radio stations across America and internationally. These days, I expect most people either read or listen to the sermons online at Day1.org.

Each of the chapters in the book were written independently and at different times in the past several years. But there are connections between them. Since they all have to do with reflections from my life and work, that of a pastoral counselor.

1

Who Is a Pastoral Counselor?

Note my use of the personal pronoun.

I say it that way because in 1967, as a seminary student, I was taught—and faithfully so—that being a minister is not what you do.

It is, rather, who you are. The Greek word for minister in our Christian New Testament is diakonos (deacon). It has to do, not with status, but with service.

It’s more about one’s sense of being and self-understanding than necessarily whatever the particular vocational and/or professional activity involved.

Our nation, at the time, was bogged down in the controversial Viet Nam War. And there were how many (?) young men seeking to avoid conscription by going to a seminary or divinity school.

Following college, I had already failed a physical exam to become a Marine aviator because of a football-related serious knee injury and subsequent multiple surgeries. I had become a functional cripple.

Reflecting retrospectively, today I consider three factors as having influenced my becoming a pastoral counselor.

1. The first was primarily unconscious.

When I was probably in junior high school, I remember reading an article in Look magazine. It was an article about the ministry, in apparently the Protestant tradition. I can still see the related black and white pictures in the article. As I recall, Look magazine itself was not published in color.

One of the pictures showed—seemingly a minister as a pastor in his study—counseling what appeared to be a couple. Was he offering marriage or pre-marital counseling? He had his coat off and his tie un-loosened. My impression was that the time of day was late afternoon or evening.

What is significant about this vivid memory was the fact that—at that time in my young life—I had never before ever even conceived of a minister in what was obviously a counseling role.

My image of a minister was that of a man (no women yet in those days, at least in my limited experience) standing behind a pulpit preaching. Or perhaps administering a form of baptism. Maybe conducting a prayer service or Bible study.

But personal pastoral counseling? I had no concept of that dimension of ministry, much less that of a specialized vocational calling and professional role.

Today, after so many years of study, clinical training and experience as a pastoral counselor, my sense is that the rather primitive experience I’ve just described: how it shaped the direction of my life and work subliminally. Since I had no understanding of what such an experience meant at the time.

2. When I entered seminary, I was first exposed to the counseling dimension of pastoral ministry, including the concept of such a role even extending to that of a highly specialized calling and vocation. Seminaries and divinity schools often broadly refer to this as Pastoral Theology. Or sometimes Practical Theology.

E. Brooks Holifield’s A History of Pastoral Care in America offers an insightful and observant documenting of what I’ve just described. As an historian, Holifield traces the evolution of the counseling dimension of pastoral ministry throughout Christian history, particularly in our nation’s developing religious life.

With elementary roots in the colonial period of our nation (Puritan minister Ichabod Spencer’s first writing verbatim accounts of his pastoral care encounters), the flowering of such ministry emerged most notably in the twentieth century. In particular, out of the personal life and entrepreneurial influence of the Reverend Anton Boisen, who developed a clinical training program for clergy in the very psychiatric hospital where he had himself been a patient.

Meanwhile, the Methodist theologian, Thomas Oden, has argued against pastoral counseling as a specialized fee-for-service ministry. As in what we commonly consider the medical model.

Pastoral care is more specifically defined as being primarily supportive, encouraging and intercessory. Specialized institutional chaplaincy is expressed primarily in hospitals and other medical facilities, in the military, in jails and prisons, in private educational settings, from primary and secondary schools to colleges and universities—and today—even in the world of private industry.

Both the House and Senate of our nation’s government have chaplains.

Whereas pastoral counseling also has a confrontive dimension to it, where patients voluntarily seek psychotherapy in an effort to understand and hopefully change something important in and/or about themselves. And they normally pay a fee for such a service. The operative words are change and growth. Pastoral counseling often involves the treatment of serious mental illness, addiction and/or marriage and family problems.

I have practiced pastoral counseling in a community mental health clinic, in a physician’s family medicine practice, in association with a psychiatrist, and also in an office provided to me in and by a church where I pay a fee for the use of such a facility.

Today, almost all parish minsters do some counseling with individuals and families, but the professional ethical guideline is for clergy to limit such engagement and refer more serious psychological and relational problems, involving a more extended devotion of time, to a more extensively trained and experienced colleague who specializes in pastoral counseling and/or marriage and family therapy.

In my seminary experience, the specialization of pastoral counseling and institutional chaplaincy was seen as a valued vocational option. And students were encouraged to pursue their own personal and family psychotherapy. Anyone in a helping profession needs to be optimally self-aware. Since no one can credibly understand and address the psychological (moral and spiritual), as well as the social needs of others apart from an understanding and the constructive managing of such matters in his/her own life.

A high school friend I hadn’t seen in years once asked me, A pastoral counselor? Does that mean you counsel pastors?

I replied, Not exclusively, but often.

Ministry is a vulnerable profession. If and/or when engaging others in the most personal of ways, it’s easy to lose one’s perspective, leading too often to ethical violations or what is considered burnout--or worse, scandal.

Or as someone has observed, in the least elegant of ways: "It’s hard to be involved with people and not get