Basic Types of Pastoral Care & Counseling Quotes

“In our machine-dominated society of megacities, countless people suffer some degree of what has been termed ecological autism.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“A—Advising: responses by which counselors seek to teach useful information and recommend that people consider certain actions, beliefs, or attitudes. These responses can be very valuable in educative counseling, usually called “pastoral guidance.” However, they tend to be overused. Most advice is more beneficial to the one giving it than to the one receiving it.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Just as carpenters need a variety of tools to build an attractive house or a piece of fine furniture, counselors require a variety of methods to help people rebuild tragedy-shattered lives, dysfunctional relationships, or destructive religious beliefs and values.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“I don’t care how much you know—until I know how much you care! —Insightful bumper sticker”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Having the lure of even a slightly more hopeful future for oneself, other people, and society is as important for motivation as the push of hoping to lessen the pain of living, especially during crises, losses, and other times of stress.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“The word joy is used more than sixty times in the Hebrew Scriptures and a little less than fifty in the New Testament.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“The view that relationships with a therapeutic quality provide a wholeness-growing environment is implicit in the rich Hebrew word shalom and its equivalent Arabic word salaam. These words, most frequently translated “peace,” also mean sound, healthy, or wholeness. Shalom or salaam is cultivated in Spirit-empowered communities where the quality of relationships provides a nurturing environment. In fact, in the New Testament Greek, koinonia is used to describe the church as a healing, transforming community enlivened by God’s spirit.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“All of us are to participate in discerning and living out God’s call to greater wholeness.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Cultivating healing and growth involves giving back.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Healing and wholeness are cultivated best in the soil of relationships where healing affirmation and caring confrontation are experienced together.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Wholeness is a lifelong growth journey.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“This experience of grace with responsibility, in contrast to cheap grace, can produce inner transformation, enhancing self-esteem and a sense of aliveness.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Struggle, intentionality, disciplined hard work, and sacrifice are often required in order to actualize God’s gift of growing in wholeness.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“11Sin is the traditional religious word for this spiritual alienation and the resultant proclivity to inflict violence on ourselves, other people, society, and nature.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Cultivating healing and wholeness effectively requires enabling people to deal with their violence, brokenness, destructiveness, and sinfulness.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“We humans possess rich, God-given capacities for living life in all its fullness, and we have a spiritual responsibility to discover and develop these gifts.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Healing and salvation are interdependent and complementary.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Holistic healing is a fundamental dimension of religion.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Jesus the Christ, as understood by mainstream Christians, is a paradigm of spiritually empowered wholeness.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Clear identity means a robust sense of who one is as a person, a sense not derived mainly from social roles or relationships with dominant people in one’s life, although identity is always a relational reality.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Agency means the strength that comes from the inner awareness that one can achieve self-chosen, worthwhile goals and make some difference in life that matters to oneself and others.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Genuine self-esteem is the inner conviction that one is a person of inherent value.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“The usual structure of formal pastoral counseling includes appointments, a definite time and place, a private meeting place, an agreed upon counseling “contract,” perhaps a fee, and the label counseling.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Liberation is to life in all its fullness, meaning the fullest possible developments of people’s gifts and potentialities. Liberation is for enabling people to grow in their own wholeness but also become facilitators of wholeness in widening circles of outreach in a society suffering from multiple oppressions producing pandemic brokenness. Liberation is from the many forces in individuals, relationships, groups, and social institutions that foster brokenness and diminished wholeness for countless people.”
― Howard John Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“The process of liberation by means of caregiving involves three interdependent subgoals: liberation to, liberation for, and liberation from.”
― Howard Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Of course, those who have been treated judgmentally by churches are understandably reluctant to seek help from clergy.”
― Howard Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth

“Pastoral counseling, as understood in these pages, is a focused form of pastoral care geared toward enabling individuals, couples, and families to cope more constructively with crises, losses, difficult decisions, and other anxiety-laden experiences.”
― Howard Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth