Your Pastor Isn't Your Therapist...And Your Therapist Isn't Your Pastor.

Negotiating Two Extremes

For many years as a pastor, I’ve felt guilty for being a pretty bad therapist. If people come to me with emotional pain and trauma, it’s not like I don’t care about it. It’s just that I’m likely to give them Bible homework or something. That’s not always exactly what people need.

That’s why, many years ago, I started to recognize how to stay in my lane with these things. There are ordinary bumps and bruises in life that don’t require therapy, for sure. Sometimes people do need a little bible homework. But over the years, I grew more comfortable knowing when I was in over my head, and saying, “Hey I’m happy to keep meeting with you. But I think it would be good for you to see a counselor.”

In other words: “I can be your pastor. I can’t be your therapist.”

Maybe ten years ago, people thought I was telling them they belongs in an institution or something, or like they had “failed” my counseling or something. But that - thankfully - has changed. (It’s still true that the people who need qualified therapists the most are the most resistant to it…nothing new under the sun, there.)

But something else has shifted, too.

If ten years ago, people were asking too much of me as a pastor - to be both their therapist and shepherd - it’s almost like the script has reversed: the therapist has become not only a therapist, but a pastor.

I’m thinking of one particularly painful situation for me, where I’d been recommending to a parishioner that they see a good therapist for some family issues they’d been dealing with. It took a couple of years, but thankfully, at last, he did.

A few months into this, however, our relationship began to change.

The church member became distant. We still met occasionally, but there was a barrier. It wasn’t tension, really. He didn’t seem upset with me. I couldn’t name it.

Then he started revealing some of his cards on social media. I’m not on Twitter/X anymore, and likely never will be again, so I won’t be able to find the threads, but some of the things he began to “like” and repost concerned me. One that stood out to me at the time was a sort-of online Christian therapy guy, who criticized the phrase, “Jesus loves you where you are, but doesn’t want you to stay there.” That, he said, is an invitation to shame. Don’t let anyone tell you that. We all deserve God’s grace. If change is expected of you at all, he said, then this is an underhanded invitation to shame.

I read this and thought…”Huh. We all…deserve…God’s grace.”

Well he’s not exactly Martin Luther, is he? Or Augustine? Come to think of it, just about every church Father and Mother in history around the globe would be somewhat horrified to read this description of God’s grace and the impermissibility of telling someone to change in light of the gospel. Come to think of it, Jesus himself actually begins his gospel announcement with a demand for change: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Matthew 3:2 and everywhere in the gospels)

Before this post, I’d thought sort of the point of Christianity was that we didn’t deserve God’s grace. And I’d also thought Jesus, being Lord of the Universe, had a right to tell us that he loves us where we are, but also that we need to repent…Much like he did when he rescued the sinful woman from shame (which, by the way, is actually in scripture/most of human history more about social rejection than a personal feeling) in John 8:11:

“Neither do I condemn you…”: No shame.

“Go, and sin no more.” Still no shame.

But apparently, Jesus is being toxic, here. According to the online Christian therapist.

All of a sudden, the distance between me and my friend became clear. He was no longer in need of a pastor. In fact, any “pastoring” I’d be doing was in a neat little box for him labeled: Toxic.

Now let me say this loud and clear: from what I can tell, this is rarely, if ever, the actual therapist’s fault. Just like the biggest enemy of good religion is bad religion, so the biggest enemy of good therapy is bad online pop-therapy. A good therapist also knows how to stay in their lane. They don’t try to become anyone’s spiritual counselor or moral guide.

But there is a whole online world who will encourage you to treat your therapist that way.

I think Freddie de Boer - who, like me, is in intensive professional therapy - has incisively named the assumptions of this online therapy-as-pastor movement:

• You, your feelings, and your goals are always preeminent and in any conflict supersede those of others

• You are entitled to total and complete emotional safety at all times, and this entitlement supersedes the rights and desires of others

• That which makes you feel better is that which is right to do

• In any conflict between any two people, there is always one guilty abuser and one blameless victim

• You argue, they gaslight, you have self-respect, they are narcissists, you are still growing, they are toxic, you have boundaries, they have limitations, you hold space, they stand in the way of your growth

• Not getting what you want is always evidence of crime, abuse, mistreatment, pathology, injustice

Once again, to be clear: there are abusers and victims. Oppression and injustice is real. Gaslighting is a confusing and horrendous experience.

But these are not terms we use to describe friends - or pastors - telling us things we don’t like to hear, calling us to repentance, or failing to affirm our every whimsy.

I feel like I’m on a tightrope, here.

Some of you are only too excited to read these critiques. Well, you probably need to go to therapy.

Some of you are only too excited to call this post “toxic”. Well, you probably need a good pastor and some friends you will be honest with you.

But therein lies the problem.

And the truly concerning thing to me is this: having grown up around addiction, this kind of pop-therapeutic interpretation of reality is exactly what fuels bad, addictive and self-destructive behaviors: “If you tell me I’m wrong, I’ll call you names and cut you out.” This is the irony of the pop-therapy movement. “It’s toxicity masquerading as anti-toxicity. “

As I’ve learned to say long ago: your pastor isn’t your therapist. Still comfortable saying that.

But now, I need to add two caveats:

Caveat #1: Online voices are DEFINITELY NOT your therapist.

Caveat #2: Your therapist is not your pastor.

If you need therapy, get it. Some of us need it (I do), and many of us don’t. All of us need a pastor. All of us need a community of people who can be honest with us without being labeled as toxic, narcissistic gaslighters.

And many of us need both.

Now go, and sin no more.