Religion: The Pastor as Psychologist

The minister smiled expectantly at the three men and four women who were gathered around him in a parish house in Manhattan. “Well,” he said, “anybody want to start?” A lanky, well-groomed young man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a crew cut spoke up. “I had a funny dream about Walter over there last night,” he began.

For the next hour and a half they talked —smoking, sometimes laughing, sometimes passionately serious. A casual passer-by would have taken them for a group of friends chatting together after dinner. But the minister who sat with them, the Rev. Clinton J. Kew, was hard at work practicing his own brand of pastoral counseling.

Episcopal Minister Kew (who got his S.T.B. at Harvard) uses the psychiatric technique known as “group therapy.” After private interviews, patients are grouped into “families,” each containing five to ten men & women in the same age bracket. Together for 90 minutes twice a week, they air their anxieties, frustrations, fears and hostilities to each other under the careful guidance of Kew, who tries to bring about “transference” of each individual’s real-life difficulties into the group, where they can be resolved by the conscious mind.

This week Clinton Kew, in charge of healing services at Manhattan’s Church ot the Heavenly Rest, began work with a new group. At the same time his twin brother Clifton, head psychologist of Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, was conducting five similar groups. Psychologist Kew’s sessions are frankly secular; Minister Kew, who conducts his sessions wearing a cassock and clerical collar, gets most of his patients from churches or through the special midday services which he conducts for those who are troubled in spirit. Both brothers, however, look upon the church setting as an important element in their work. Reasons: 1) it gives added authority to the therapist; 2) it provides a familiar atmosphere “of protection, love and forgiveness”; 3) it reduces the patient’s fear of psychology as something to do with the “abnormal” or “insane”; 4) it unites the group.

Psychology is important in pastoral counseling, but theology is important too, according to William E. Hulme, assistant professor of Christianity at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa. Writing in this week’s Christian Century, Lutheran Hulme feels that ministers are often so afraid of frightening people away with dogma that they fail to take advantage of its therapeutic possibilities.

“Consider the feeling of guilt,” he writes. “It is fundamental to almost every problem of the human personality. Guilt begets anxiety, is manifested in the inferiority complex, and follows resentment . . . Any religion that is going to satisfy human needs must come to grips with guilt.”

Says Hulme: guilt (“the feeling of inadequacy or downright wickedness that comes from knowing that one is not the person he should be or wants to be”) is dealt with “at the grass roots” by the doctrine of the Atonement. “If we examine the feeling of guilt, we see that it is really a combination of two feelings: the sense of failure and the dread of just consequences. The doctrine of the Atonement also has two parts: the active obedience of Christ atoning for man’s sense of failure and the passive obedience of Christ to allay man’s fear of the consequences . . . Rather than frustrating [man] with demands he cannot fulfill, theology offers him a way out … Through the receptivity of faith, the righteousness of Christ is made available to the individual sinner.”

Both pastoral counseling and theology, writes Hulme, “are working for the same ends . . . Working together, they can be an unbeatable team to minister to human need. Working together, they can make of the pastor a distinctive counselor—a minister of the church of Jesus Christ.”