Elders & Counselors – Part 1

Imagine, for a moment, that the elders of your church are faced with a pastoral case that is complicated and demanding.

A marriage slowly crumbling, one that has been for several years. Or a twenty-something sister with a history of being sexually abused during her childhood. Or a 45-year-old man with anxiety that just doesn’t get better, and which prevents him from participating in church life.

The elders are struggling to know they should do: after years of trying to help this brother or this sister, they are making little progress. After yet another visit, they really feel like they’re in well above their heads.

Outside Help?

This is when a question arises: Can they (may they) get outside help? Can they involve a counselor in this situation? If so, what would that help look like? And what would that mean for the elders’ care for this member? Is he or she still fully their responsibility? Or if they opt not to get help from a counselor, what will they do to keep working on this?

Questions have often been asked about using counselors in the context of church life, and about how this would fit into existing structures of care. These are the right questions to ask, given that these structures (broadly speaking) are divinely ordered; that is to say, ministers, elders, and deacons are appointed by God to oversee the spiritual well-being of the congregation and to provide for her needs. Ministers do this work through preaching God’s Word; elders do this through visiting members to encourage, comfort and admonish; and deacons do this through providing physical and spiritual support to the needy. 

Ministers and elders in particular operate in a position of authority that has been granted to them by God.

Their involvement always comes with the strength of the authority that has been vested in them. So when a counselor gets involved with one of our members to give spiritual support, it means that in some respects, he or she is functioning in the same domain as the elders. Is this overlap of care an acceptable thing, or a legitimate thing? If there is to be cooperation, how can we navigate this relationship carefully? This what we want to consider.

Pastoral Care in the Context of Christ’s Church

To begin with, let’s establish a few key principles for our work of caring for the congregation. Firstly, pastoral care is meant to take place primarily within the context of Christ’s church. All believers are called to be part of the church: not to exist as individual and disconnected people, but part of the body of Christ. And this body is fundamentally the possession of Jesus Christ. 

For instance, Jesus in John 6:35-40 refers to the church as “all that the Father gives me,” because the Father has entrusted the church to him as an act of everlasting love. Similarly, in Ephesians 5:25-27 the church is described as the bride of Christ, washed and purified in his blood. The members of the church have been created for God’s glory, redeemed at the cost of Jesus’s blood, and made into the dwelling of the Spirit.

Lord’s Day 21 of the Heidelberg Catechism affirms that the Son of God “gathers, defends, and preserves for himself…a church chosen to everlasting life” (Q&A 54). All this to say: a believer in the name of Christ ought to live and flourish and even struggle within the context of the Lord’s holy church.

The church is where Christ wants us to be.

 A second principle for congregational care: while the church is the special possession of Christ, and the constant object of his “gathering, defending, and preserving,” He has instituted the three offices to nurture his people. We can think of the Scriptures where we see these offices described (e.g., 1 Tim 3:1-13; 1 Pet 5:1-5), and we can think of how the Reformed confessions summarize these passages.

For example, the Belgic Confession speaks of this in Article 30: “We believe that this true church must be governed according to the spiritual order which our Lord taught us in his Word… There should be ministers or pastors to preach the Word of God…[and] there should be elders and deacons…”

And what is their task? Article 30 says, “They preserve the true religion; they see to it that the true doctrine takes its course, that evil men are disciplined in a spiritual way and are restrained, and also that the poor and all the afflicted are helped and comforted according to their need.” Likewise, the Catechism teaches how the elders are given the sacred privilege of using the keys of the Kingdom: the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of discipline (LD 31).

Christ understands our human need, and He lovingly meets that need through appointing godly men to care for his flock. He knows that his people can be greatly helped by the physical and emotional presence of fellow believers: elders and deacons who themselves are weak and sinful, yet equipped and strengthened by Christ and his Spirit.

Office bearers get to be instruments of God, charged with watching over the souls of the members.

And a third principle for congregational care: while the elders and deacons have an integral role in caring for the church, this care takes place within the fellowship of the Christian community. Think of Ephesians 4:11-13, about mutual responsibilities within the body of Christ. It says that God provides gifts to specific individuals, such as teachers and pastors, for the purpose of equipping all the saints for ministering to one another, in order to build up the body of Christ. In other words, it should not only be the elders and deacons who bear the load of spiritual care.

This principle means that within the church, we are called to exhort one another towards growth in Christ (Heb 10:24-25), and we are called to encourage each other with love and truth (Eph 4:25-32). Lord’s Day 21 of the Catechism captures this well when it speaks of how we are “duty bound to use our gifts readily and cheerfully for the benefit and well-being of other members” (Q&A 55).

Conclusion

Let’s draw these three lines together:

Scripture teaches us to expect that pastoral care happens best when it is connected to the structures and resources of the local church.

That is to say, it is right and beneficial that the elders remain closely involved in a believer’s pastoral care, and that fellow church members also join alongside with prayer, encouragement and support.

Next time we’ll consider more closely how external helps such as counselors or therapists might fit into this model, in our desire to give good and effective care to the people of the Lord’s church.