Spiritual help...using spiritual support...like therapeutic support....has its place in ministry interventions. But...the generally supportive minister will support the incompetency of the troubled person...and at the same time support their competent thinking and behavior. This creates subconscious contradictory messages for both minister and the one ministered to.
When a minister gives spiritual help by using supportiveness selectively to help a troubled person obtain some outcome or goal...then the spiritual support will most likely bring desired results.
However, many helpful ministers want to appear to others to be supportive and encouraging. But this has to do with developing the minister's persona...and not with helping others.
The minister should consciously choose what to support or reinforce because a counseling 'policy' of general supportiveness never helps anyone improve their troubling situation. A generally supportive approach to dealing with troubled people may cause the troubled person to like his or her supportive minister...but it reinforces the person's incompetent behavior.
Supportiveness is not a necessary quality of the minister's personality. It's an intervention specifically chosen to reinforce competent thinking and behavior in troubled people.
All ministry interventions are boundary crossings. And to cross boundaries and intervene in a person's life by shoring up incompetent thought patterns...attitudes...and behavior is really an unwitting and unintended boundary violation.
Such boundary violations...even though unintended by the minister...can create subtle...complex...and difficult to change thinking and behavior for troubled people.
By clicking on the link below...you can read a clear example of how a supportive minister giving spiritual help to an abused woman...reinforced the woman's contradictory idea that she was loving her husband by letting him abuse her.
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