Programs in pastoral studies and counseling prepare ministers to guide and comfort people. Students learn how to help people in crisis. They learn leadership methods and study human development.
Ministers and priests are most visible when they lead services in front of a congregation, but they do some of their most important work in one-on-one or small-group encounters. They provide counseling to help people overcome or learn to cope with their problems. People in distress often turn to their spiritual leaders for guidance. For many people this form of counseling is both more meaningful and more affordable than secular alternatives.
As a pastoral counselor you may help rescue a marriage that is coming apart. You may help a young person overcome drug addiction. You may provide consolation for someone devastated by a death in the family. To do this work, you need a mixture of skills. You must have a thorough mastery of biblical sources of inspiration and consolation. And you must be able to build a relationship of rapport and trust in which people are willing to talk and you are supportive in your listening. More important than knowing a quick-fix solution to every possible problem is knowing how to be a sounding board for people's feelings.
In seminary, you will almost certainly do some course work in pastoral counseling, but to specialize in this field, you need additional training. One way to get started in this field is to study pastoral counseling as an undergraduate, before you enter seminary. About 110 colleges offer a bachelor's degree program in this subject. This normally takes four years of full-time study beyond high school. Like most programs that prepare you for seminary, it includes a lot of Bible study. It teaches you about church history and theology. You also study psychology and theories of counseling. The program often includes an internship or practicum where you get experience at counseling. Your work is supervised, and you may report to a class what you have learned.
The bachelor's program is good preparation for seminary. And at seminary, whatever your undergraduate background, you can expect to be required to take some pastoral counseling courses. But to become a specialist in this field, you need to take more than the minimal course requirements. You need to study human development and personality; interpersonal, marriage, family, and group/community dynamics; cultural systems; and research methods. Finally, you need supervised field experience in pastoral counseling. You may take some or many of these courses after you have left seminary and are already working in the ministry.
It is possible to become a clinical pastoral counselor by completing a two-year master's degree program after you finish your bachelor's degree. Clinical pastoral counselors receive significant supervised training, and after graduation, usually work in churches, hospitals, or in private practice. Clinical pastoral counselors, then, usually do not work as ministers, priests, or rabbis, but solely as counselors. Over 70 theological schools and seminaries offer clinical pastoral counseling programs. (Because of the nature of the work, you cannot receive a bachelor's degree in clinical pastoral counseling.) Course work in these programs is similar to what is listed above. You also learn about mental illness, substance abuse, early childhood trauma, marital problems, and grief.
A few schools offer doctoral programs in clinical pastoral counseling. Most people with a doctorate become professors, supervisors, and researchers. Doctoral degrees take from three to five years after you finish your master's.
Some seminaries allow you to be ordained on the basis of a master's degree in this field (not just in divinity). A master's program at a seminary tends to resemble the bachelor's program. It includes a lot of Bible and theology as well as counseling. A master's program offered at a secular university often assumes that you have acquired a good fund of religious and pastoral knowledge elsewhere. Thus it may concentrate on psychology and counseling.