"Christian counselling" is a phrase everybody uses and almost nobody defines. It can mean a pastor offering guidance from Scripture, a church lay ministry, a counsellor who happens to be a believer, or a formal discipline with its own training and doctrine. Genuinely different things — and if you are trying to find help, the vagueness is not fair on you.
So here is an honest attempt to sort it out — including where I fit and where I don't.
What people are usually looking for when they search this
Most people typing "Christian counselling" into a search bar are not looking for theology. They want reassurance about one specific fear: that they will sit down opposite someone who treats their faith as the problem.
The worry is not imaginary. Faith can be handled clumsily in a counselling room — reframed as dependence, gently pathologised, or skirted around until you stop mentioning it. If prayer is part of how you meet difficulty, you don't want to spend half your sessions defending it before you get to your marriage, your grief or your anxiety. What you want is an ordinary competent counsellor who will not flinch when God comes into the conversation. That is a reasonable thing to want, and to ask for directly.
What I mean by it — and what I am not
I am a counsellor in private practice, registered as a social worker with the SACSSP in South Africa. I am not a pastor and I hold no qualification in theology, so let me be plain: what I offer is not pastoral counselling and it is not biblical counselling.
Biblical counselling is a specific discipline with its own training, built on the structured application of Scripture. Anyone offering it should show you where they trained. It is not what happens in my room.
What happens in my room is professional counselling — person-centred, emotionally focused, trauma-informed — practised by someone who understands that for a believing client, faith is not a footnote. It shapes how you grieve, how you forgive, what you feel guilty about, what hope means. It belongs in the room because it is part of you, not because I am qualified to teach it.
Pastoral care and professional counselling are not competitors
Your minister, priest or pastor offers something I cannot: spiritual authority, sacrament, prayer with the weight of the church behind it, a community that will still be there in five years. That is real care, and if you have it, keep it.
Professional counselling adds something different. It is one hour a week that belongs entirely to you, with a trained clinician who has no other relationship with you and no stake in your standing in the congregation. It is confidential in a way a small church often cannot be, it brings clinical training to trauma, depression and bereavement, and it is bound by registration and a code of ethics.
Most people do best with both. If your minister has suggested you see someone, that is not a failure of faith; it is a sensible referral, much as a torn ligament goes to a physio.
How faith is actually brought into the room
Client-led, always. I don't bring faith into a session unless you have brought it first — and once you have, you never have to translate or justify it.
In practice we can speak naturally about what you believe God is doing in a hard season, without me treating it as avoidance. If prayer belongs in how you process something, it has a place — at the start, at the end, or not at all, as you prefer. If a passage has sat with you all week, bring it. And where faith itself has become tangled — a harsh internal picture of God, shame given religious language, a church hurt — there is room to look at that gently, without me defending the church or dismissing it.
What I don't do: set devotional homework, teach doctrine, tell you what God is saying to you, or use Scripture to close down a feeling you are entitled to have. Verses can be a comfort or a lid; I have no interest in helping anyone put a lid on.
The questions grief puts to faith
Grief is where this comes up most sharply. Why did God allow this. Why did the prayers not work. Am I faithless for being angry with Him.
I am not going to answer those theologically — you would be right to distrust a counsellor who tried. What I can do is make room for them to be asked out loud, without hurrying you to a tidy conclusion. Believers are sometimes told, in effect, to grieve less — "she's with the Lord now" — and feel ashamed the sorrow is still enormous. Hope and heartbreak are not opponents; the shortest verse in the Bible is that Jesus wept.
Those questions need both rooms: a pastor for the theology, a counsellor for the weight of carrying them. My grief counselling page describes that work.
Christian counselling online, and for clients of all faiths and none
Sessions are 60 minutes by video call, so you needn't be limited to your own town — an advantage if yours is a community where everyone knows everyone. I see people across South Africa, the UK, Ireland and Europe, and in person in Fairmount. I don't take on clients based in the United States.
A word of balance: I see clients of all faiths and none, and all get the same respect. Nobody is preached at in my room, in either direction. My Christian counselling page sets out how I work with faith — and if you are weighing up a counsellor elsewhere, ask them plainly what they mean by the term.