James Dittes answers some of the most basic counseling questions a pastor faces: How do I guide counseling conversations yet empower those who feel helpless? How do I negotiate relationships with people who I may counsel on one day and from whom I must seek a housing allowance on the next? Can I be psychologically adept while remaining theologically faithful?
Dittes, professor of pastoral theology and psychology at Yale Divinity School, suggests that pastoral counseling "is, finally, more a matter of the heart or the soul than the head, more a matter of faith than works, an attitude and posture more than a technique or skill."
This book makes clear that pastoral counseling is a means toward, not a model for, maturity of person and faith. Dittes views pastoral counseling as a process of ministry rather than a ministerial end product. Thus, counseling is one dimension of ministry that tries to "re-call, re-deem, re-vision life into being less like it has been and more as it is intended."
