As we get close to wrapping up our Who We Are blog series, we wanted to spend some time with City Church's Counseling Center. Laura Turner sat down with Jay Wilson, director of the Counseling Center, to talk about how the Counseling Center got started, why City Church is a great home for the work they do, and how to get connected with a counselor.
The Counseling Center got started at City Church in 2009. Who was involved in getting it up and running?
That year, Chuck DeGroat came on staff at City Church. City Church was in the third year of its strategic plan, which entailed having a church-based counseling center. Chuck had experience in this field from a previous church he had worked at, so he came out here to help get the Counseling Center started as well as to work with Newbigin House. In the late summer of that year, I (Jay) came to San Francisco as an intern from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
In the beginning, the Counseling Center was actually Chuck's office in the Cathedral Hotel. We were pretty full with clients right off the bat, which I think shows that there was (and is) a huge need for people and the type of depth work we could do with them in their relationships.
We were at that office for a year and then moved to our current space. City Church, in finding the office space we're in now, wanted to make sure the Counseling Center had its own space. That, I believe, shows the belief they had in the importance of counseling in the church. Another three counselors came on the next year, all with different specialties. We've pretty much always had a full client load, from the very beginning, with no marketing at all. It's just word of mouth.
How would you characterize your philosophy and theology of counseling?
I would say there has been a philosophical shift for us as we've become more of a training center, where we can really begin to bring in interns and develop them. We talk often about the intersection between theology and psychology, and how spirituality and counseling go together.
Christian Counseling is a rare thing in this city, to begin with. There are only two other Christian counseling centers in San Francisco. Because of that, we want to help shape, develop, and train more Christian counselors who have the DNA of how we approach counseling. And with all of that, we want to have an influence in the therapeutic community in San Francisco. A Christian perspective leads to all these discussions around our dignity, humanity, what is harmful, worldviews, how they get shaped. Part of our hope long-term is to have more of a voice in that community, which leads us to emphasize our professional nature.
Why is City Church the right home for the Counseling Center? In other words, why do you operate in partnership with a church rather than independently from it?
It's beautiful for a church, because people need multiple layers of care. Counseling is a slice of the pie, as far as what care looks like: pastoral, deep friendships, spiritual direction, a community of people that they can relate to, and, in places of their life where they feel stuck or it feels unmanageable, counseling. A counselor fills a different role than a pastor or a friend. In the context of a church, it's not just counseling as an isolated endeavor, but counseling connected with a community to join. There are also incredible resources made available from the diaconate to help people get the care they need when they may not be able to afford it.
Connecting counseling with a church also does something powerful for the people of the church: it normalizes brokenness. We expect that all of our souls are fractured to the degree that will need care. That's a good thing.
Why is counseling something that would benefit everyone?
I always come back to John Calvin on this one: the more we know ourselves, the more we know God. The more we know God, the more we know ourselves. There's a reciprocity that occurs in counseling. As we engage our stories, we see how we are relationally consistent, so we usually get stuck in the same places or patterns. We wonder how we can move past that. We can get stuck in what we believe about ourselves and live out of that cultural narrative--we're often blind to that narrative until some real work has been done around that. It's hard to move toward something until we know our story. When we pay attention to our stories, we learn something. If you try to manage something away, you don't really learn what that thing is teaching you.
What do you see the role of a counselor to be?
Counseling is always about holding up a mirror. It's mirroring, reflecting, and helping people navigate their story: where they have been wounded, how they have responded in light of that woundedess, and what growth and healing begins to look like in light of that. It involves making a space for transformation to happen. A counselor will put his or her arm around someone and meet them where they are, willing to talk with them and listen to them on a road to health.
So really practically, how does this work if I'm interested in pursuing counseling?
It's pretty simple! You can contact us through our coordinator, Laura Zimmerman, whose information is on the website. We'll do an intake with you to hear what you would like to get out of the process, what your availability is, and things like that. I'm also happy to meet with people and talk with them to come up with a plan of care that would be best for them. Sometimes that involves counseling, sometimes it doesn't--but either way, it's a good conversation to begin.
It is very exposing, very vulnerable, and takes a lot of courage to pick up the phone or send an email. You're opening yourself up to something new, which can be hard. And that's exactly why we're here.