African Americans and Biblical Counseling

African Americans and Biblical Counseling

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on African Americans and biblical counseling. Leaders in various biblical counseling movements lament the low percentage of African Americans attending their conferences.

Why? I think my study of Black Church history provides a convincing answer. Working on my book Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, my co-author and I were looking for any and all instances of what today we call biblical counseling—whether by pastors or lay people.

We looked for examples of:

*Soul Care for Suffering and Sanctification: Sustaining and Healing—Comforting those sinned against in a fallen world.

*Spiritual Direction for Sinning and Sanctification: Reconciling and Guiding—Confronting those sinning.

We certainly found reconciling and guiding.

However, we found a greater preponderance of sustaining and healing.

Here’s the issue. Some current models of biblical counseling focus almost exclusively on confronting sin. In fact, some leaders in some of these movements will tell you that people simply don’t come to them for issues related to suffering. Of course, this may have much to do with the message being communicated that biblical counseling is about sin and not about suffering (a false message, by the way).

African Americans, given their history of suffering, have grave concerns with any model of biblical counseling that spends the bulk of its time confronting sin while ignoring suffering. For African Americans, progressive sanctification is just as vitally related to suffering as to sinning.

For African Americans, pastoral counseling and pastoral care is equated at least as much with sustaining and healing sufferers who have been sinned against as it is with confronting Christians who are sinning against God and others. This in no way minimizes their hatred of sin, their view of depravity, or their focus on God’s glory. African Americans, however, understand from the Bible, Church history, and their national history, that true pastoral counseling, lay counseling, biblical counseling, and pastoral care must deal both with the sins we have committed and with the evils we have suffered.