The Importance of Lay Counselors in Today’s Society

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that everyone experiences pain and problems in life. No one is perfect, and all individuals, marriages and families have issues. The good news is that most people can be effectively helped by trained, volunteer, “lay” counselors instead of having to pay for professionally trained, licensed mental health clinicians. The fact is there simply are not enough trained professionals to go around.

Fortunately, research shows that properly trained lay counselors can be surprisingly helpful for many people’s common life problems. Garden variety relationship conflicts, parenting challenges, work stressors and other similar universally experienced problems can often be significantly improved as the result of another person lending a listening ear and an empathetic heart. The growing trend is for many churches worldwide is to develop lay counseling ministries to do just that.

Of course, lay counselors are not trained to diagnose and treat mental illness or do in-depth psychotherapy. For those an appropriate referral is indicated. But lay counselors can offer support, emotional guidance and relationship wisdom which many times can be helpful and healing to hurting persons and relationships. Lay counseling is typically less structured, informal and shorter term than more specialized care. But many times it can be just what someone needs who is hurting, harried or hassled.

December 13 from 6–8 p.m. EST, Dr. Jared Pingleton will join Dr. Eric Scalise, co-author of the critically acclaimed book Lay Counseling: Equipping Christians for a Helping Ministry on a live webinar on how to develop lay counseling ministries. Join Jared and Eric as they discuss two creative and effective models of how to train lay people to help others.