[For the month of September 2008 we will be posting entries from Society members, Kathrin Halder and Wolfram Soldan of Germany. Regular readers will remember that Kathrin and Wolfram are colleagues at IGNIS, a training institute for Christian psychology. This post is written by Kathrin and explores the pros and cons of focusing on change methodologies.]

Have you ever had people in your life, church and esp. your classes that come up wanting to know how life works, what they can do to solve a problem in their or somebody else’s life, looking for some methods, strategies, steps to make it all easier? I understand their wish and often share it myself. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some easy rules, some methods and steps how we can help us and others psychologically?

This desire is not all together bad. Are there not creation orders, rules and regularities regarding man that can be investigated, that can be condensed into methods and strategies that give orientation and some reliability, that help to bring some direction into life that would else be even more chaotic? Is it not much better than raking around in disorientation, trying to reinvent the wheel (perhaps due to an individuality dogma)? And isn’t that something God uses. Are they not really his creation orders that he has given us for good use?

But at the same time most of us feel somewhat uncomfortable, knowing from others and ourselves that there can be something wrong with our search for methods, strategies, and five step programs. They can be an expression of the desperate attempt of fallen creation to be safe, of having life in one’s own hands, of being able to at least do something, of having some kind of power and control over life.

Perhaps natural science is so attractive to some for that reason. You have natural laws, you know if you combine two chemical substances you will have a certain fixed reaction. Things are regular and predictable so you have power over what you do.

Isn’t it sometimes the same motive that makes us look for things we need to do, so God’s blessing will flow, so we will get the new job, the perfect mate? Does that make us look for “spiritual laws”, for strategies that show us how sanctification or (physical) healing works, what steps we need to take to bring revival to pass? Or for methods and interventions that we use with individual disorders in order to cause symptoms to disappear and that make a client see us as competent?

So for one, we should question our motives in that matter, always asking ourselves whether we trust in Christ and his work or in the methods itself. And for the other we should come to hold a balanced position towards the usefulness of methods and helping strategies.

One the one hand methods and techniques are vitally important as “Finderegeln” (a German word almost impossible to translate, but could be seen as rules that guide our searching for something). They provide us with typical connections between things, e.g. between a certain disorder and an intervention, they guide our eyes towards a certain directions where often help has been found before. And that can and will often be helpful.

But on the other hand we should never restrict ourselves to just that direction, we should always be open to look at the individual situation anew. As Christian counselors we should always be ready to give all the “principles” we learned back to the Lord, waiting whether he will give it back to us or whether he shows us a different, perhaps more unusual way. If the Lord leads us so, would we be open to also go a way as radical as the one the Lord suggested to one of my colleaugues in prayer one time in a certain situation. He saw a man in a foreign city so consumed by trying to find the way with a street map that he didn’t even really see where he was. The Lord challenged him to set aside the map and ask him at every street where to turn next.

Although that will not always be the way, I am convinced our openness towards it would please the Lord and enrich us in our counseling.