If you are bored one day, become a pollster. Ask your friends, family members, even better yet a group of counselors or therapists and ask them a simple and straightforward question, “What is the goal of counseling?” More than likely, you will hear a hundred different answers from those who even cared enough to answer your question. Yet, you might hear a common theme described by a number of nebulous synonyms.
So why are there so many different answers to this seemingly simple question, even if you narrow the polling to counseling types? Going one step further, why are there so many different explanations even to synonymous goals – like “healing,” “wholeness,” and perhaps even “recovery?”
Bottom-line, if you attempt to answer this question apart from a “grand unifying theory,” you will wind up with a myriad of answers based on your particular counseling or psychotherapeutic theory or framework.
Pastor John Piper addressed the world’s largest Christian counseling association (AACC) at their most recent conference in September 2009. Listen to his riveting sermon that gives a clear answer to the question, “What is the goal of counseling.”