My goal in this article is to briefly consider a specific pastoral question: What is a wise approach to those in your church who see a secular therapist? Since this question is part of a long and winding road, we will make a couple of stops before we arrive at an answer.

The modern therapeutic era made its first obvious appearance with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his associates in the early 1900s. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961) was among those associates. Both men had religion in view as they developed their therapeutic approaches.

Freud’s theory created a doctrine of the person that attempted to explain both the conscience and belief in God as mechanisms within the person rather than as evidence of humanity-before-God. Jung was even more deliberately anti-Christian as he reacted against his Swiss Reformed upbringing.1 He replaced God with the Self and sought to rectify what he thought were imbalances in Christianity. His teaching is less frequently cited today (perhaps with the exception of Jordan Peterson). You will, however, find that Jung’s Self and the centrality of our internal experience quietly remain the center of modern psychotherapy. Together, Freud and Jung announced the emergence of what we might call secular priests.

Christians would expect the rise of a secular priesthood. Secular people want help, but they don’t have pastors or a church community. Instead, they go to their friends and therapists. But I see, especially in Jung, something more than secular therapists filling a secular void. At times throughout history, perhaps particularly in the 1900s, the church tended to focus on combatting the rise of liberalism, while careful work on soul care languished. By the 1950s, many churches emphasized the end times, neglecting to create fresh applications of Scripture for present-day pastoral care.

How did the world of secular therapies grow so quickly? A secular community wanted help, and many churches were not listening carefully to their people or bringing the direction and comfort of Christ in meaningful ways. Instead, church cultures commonly suggested that Christians should feel happier than the rest of the world and have fewer problems. When that becomes the normal Christian life, churches lose their voice and can no longer speak into daily trouble. We are recovering from that era, but slowly, and sometimes in ways that mimic the secular therapies.

Appeal of Secular Psychotherapy

American psychotherapy accelerated during the decades after World War II but with a different feel from its European lineage. Given the profound differences between war-torn Europe and the relatively unspoiled and victorious United States, American therapies were more optimistic, favored autonomy and the freedom to live with fewer constraints, and believed in the agency of individuals to help themselves.

We might suspect as much, for these therapeutic foundations were forged in an unleashed economy that was ready to accommodate new desires. The birth-control pill was on standby to push those personal freedoms into sexual realms. The self, as a result, officially had a makeover and was reframed in various ways. One such reframing is “the empty self” — hollow, consuming, and hoping to be full. A better-known version is called “expressive individualism,” in which feelings become the new morality — they should be expressed to others, and they should guide us.2

There are other perspectives on our humanity. The study of the brain is in the news, and our self-understanding tends to follow media interests. Who are we, according to this perspective? We are bodies and brains. The feelings that are so important to us are embedded in our brains, as are our sexual preferences (or sexual confusion). Since our brains can be changed profoundly by our experiences, hardships and trauma seem to etch into our brains, and only rewiring the brain can undo it.

This perspective is best known from Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score. It is also represented in a catalog of recent Christian books about the physical body in life and worship. My point in highlighting this perspective is not so much that an interest in the body is misguided, but that it is triggered by technological developments and cultural trends.

Should secular psychotherapy receive the credit (or blame) for these changes? Not exactly. Modern psychotherapies are not so much leading the culture as they are taking notes. Therapists are known for their listening skills. These skills are at the heart of their broad appeal. Their clients feel known, which is a prized and rare human experience. As they listen, therapists have found so much wanting and so much pain, and they have designed their therapeutic models around that neediness and hurt.

If we want to look for the more powerful influences on our changing views of ourselves, we look to the world broadly more than just its smaller slice of secular therapies. The world is the sub-biblical culture that is in the air around us, and it cannot be reduced to one particular participant — like secular therapists — in that culture.

How Do We Respond?

Now to the question about people in your church seeing secular therapists. What might we do when Christians confide in secular priests? This question becomes even more significant when we learn that clients tend to drift toward the worldview of their therapists.3

All secular theories receive at least two biblical critiques. First, they do not see their patients as persons before God, but prize independence and self-care as the goal rather than the problem. Second, they are reductionistic in that they point to certain influences in our lives as fundamental, such as past victimization or early-childhood attachments, while neglecting (or not seeing) other influences, such as our own hearts and moral agency.

Those who embrace secular care, therefore, will be more prone to managing their own world rather than learning dependence on Christ in weakness, and they may miss how the heart is the real center of human life. They certainly will not be encouraged to see the connections between life and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Given these critiques, our preference would be for pastors to vet potential counselors just as they would vet elders, church staff, and others who do the work of ministry. That is the ideal. We would direct church members to Christian counselors skilled in both understanding people and applying God’s word to the whole person.

Vetting Counselors, Processing Care

Vetting, however, has its challenges. Christian counselors share a number of characteristics with their secular counterparts. Some are experienced; some are less so. Some are skillful and know people well; some are blunt objects that offer an inflexible script. “Christian” does not mean competent. We can inquire into theological orthodoxy, but orthodox beliefs do not equal orthodox practice, and orthodox beliefs do not reveal one’s character and experience.

And what if congregants are already seeing a secular therapist? Or perhaps they cannot find a local Christian counselor with the needed skills for a particular problem. We are unlikely to prohibit those in our churches from seeing secular therapists, a move that would come close to transgressing the bounds of pastoral authority. Among secular counselors, some are foolish in how they steer everyone away from “toxic relationships,” fail to distinguish severe offenses from minor ones, or neglect skills in self-control and humility. Others work out of the wisdom tradition that existed among the ancient Near Eastern nations and persists today. They do not know the true God, but they have keen instincts on how to live well, and they offer concrete advice that is easily reframed in a larger scriptural context.

These are some of the complexities of pastoral care in an environment where there are more pastoral needs than there are those who can care well for those in need.

A worthy goal would be to become familiar with the Christian counselors around us who have been helpful to people we know, and offer to subsidize that care. Also, if we know people who receive formal secular care, we can give them opportunities to reframe their care with Scripture. This offer could be as simple as asking someone how we can pray for them and their counseling. Prayer is a natural way that we connect troubles in daily life to Christ, and it takes us to those deep matters of the soul that can be reached only in Christ.

The Care All Christians Need

It’s important to remember that all of us receive “secular care” for our souls from neighbors, the Internet, advertising, movies, music — the list goes on. In a sense, we’re all listening to secular priests, and our corporate mission is to bring everything back into God’s house, where we can see its wisdom or folly clearly. Even more, we listen to Scripture and search together to see how God’s words in Christ go deeper and are more liberating and life-giving than even the best of what we hear in the world around us.

And so, prodded perhaps by secular therapists who listen well, we carefully listen to the troubles of people’s lives so that they feel known, and we also carefully listen to Scripture until God’s words sound as good, true, and beautiful as they are. Consider the counsel of J.I. Packer:

As a Puritan once put it, the pastor must study two books, not just one. Certainly, he must know the book of Scripture. . . . He must also be a master in reading the book of the human heart. He must know men no less well than he knows his Bible.4

The task is not easy, but it can be accomplished in small steps: mature laypeople take initiative in “the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:12), sermons make connections to trauma and other common struggles, Christian counselors have a person’s soul and life-before-God always in view, and we all insist that Christ reach into every dark or uncharted recess of the human heart with words that speak life in a way unlike any other.

Just last week it was a necklace.

My 6-year-old daughter brought me the tangled mess and pled for help. With a little effort and patience, it was like new in a few minutes.

The week before it was leather strings on a baseball glove. First we had to loosen two entrenched knots; then we could tighten up the space between the fingers.

Before that, it was a shoestring. And every winter, on repeat, it’s the laces on the kids’ ice skates.

As a father of four, I find myself working regularly at untying knots. I try to count it a privilege, rather than burden. Parents often undo knots for our children, not only because we have the required strength in our hands and the tips of our fingers, but also, let’s hope, because we have the required patience.

Whether repairing a ball glove or unlacing a shoestring, complex knots require both strength and strategy, both effort and patience. The task simultaneously makes two demands on us that create a certain tension: engage your attention and energy and, at the same time, exercise patience. If you dive right in and start pulling on strings, you will worsen the knot. Or, if you only observe the tangle, and reflect on strategy, but neglect to actually engage your fingers, the knot will only persist.

This duel demand for initiative and patience, for effort and composure, captures well what Christ often requires of local-church leaders in the complexities of church life. We regularly go to work on untying figurative knots, complex relational messes — and with the stakes raised. Here neglect won’t leave the knot as is, but only make it worse.

Knotty by Nature

The risen Christ calls pastor-elders to two main tasks in the local church: teaching and governing. To make it rhyme, we feed and we lead. We exercise abilities to teach God’s word, and we exercise oversight to lead the church. So, among other qualifications, pastor-elders must be both “able to teach” and “sober-minded.”

Strangely, some aspiring or current pastors would rather not teach. This is odd, and not ideal, and may reflect confusion about the nature of the office. Among other things, pastors are teachers, and as Don Carson captures it well,

A substantial part of the ruling/oversight function is discharged through the preaching and teaching of the Word of God. This is where a great deal of the best leadership is exercised: “What does Scripture say?” means “What does God say?”

From the beginning, Christianity has been a teaching movement. Its best leaders teach, and its best teachers soon become leaders. Healthy churches thrive on ongoing, healthy preaching and teaching.

However, as vital as pastoral word-ministry is, this is not the entirety of the calling. Carson lands the other foot:

Oversight of the church is more than simply teaching and preaching. . . . [A] comprehensive vision of the ministry of the Word demands oversight . . . of the entire direction and priorities of the church. . . . [I]f [a man] shows no propensity for godly oversight, then no matter how good a teacher he may be, he is not qualified to be a pastor/teacher/overseer.

We not only feed and teach but also lead and govern. And in this exercise of oversight is the underserviced task of regularly untying some complicated knots — that is, seeking to bring order to the chaos of church life.

Order in the Church

Paul in particular writes about the need for “order” in church life and assumes this to be, in some measure, the work of Christian leaders.

“From the beginning, Christianity has been a teaching movement. Its best leaders teach, and its best teachers soon become leaders.”

This is his explicit commission to Titus as his delegate: “I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town . . .” (Titus 1:5). Not only will Titus’s own teaching and oversight bring order to the disordered young church, but also the appointing of elders will bring about further order. Their very appointment will create clarity and structure in church life, and then the tangible effects of their work, over time, as they are faithful and fruitful, will bring more order.

This was true for Paul himself, as he saw it, in his apostolic teaching and governing. Speaking frankly to the Corinthians about marriage and divided interests, he writes, “I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35). He would not be content with confusion and disarray in the household of God. Bringing order to the chaos would be a fitting summary of his work in both spoken and written word.

Perhaps Paul’s most memorable mention of “order” comes in the context of corporate worship, in the same letter to Corinth. Here he lays it down almost as a maxim: “all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). If we ask why, Paul has given his reason already, in the context, grounding it in the nature of God himself: “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33).

The language of “decently” in verse 40 that Paul pairs with order (“decently and in order”) is the same as his charge to “walk properly” in Romans 13:13 and 1 Thessalonians 4:12. Beneath the collective order and decency of church life is the order and decency produced in individual Christian lives by the Spirit through steadfast faith: “though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ” (Colossians 2:5).

Sin brings chaos, disorder, and confusion to human lives and relationships, and so one critical aspect in Christian ministry is our envisioning restored order and seeking to move our people, from their hearts, toward that order. Increasing order and holy propriety, on God’s terms, characterizes the maturing Christian life, and maturing church. Which makes it very much a pastoral concern.

Order on the Way to Order

Such order not only means putting desires and words and behaviors in their proper places, but also having a sense of sequence, the steps in which the vision might be pursued — the order in which to pursue the order.

Some issues in church life are simple and can be addressed in single actions. These issues might appear on the pastors’ meeting agenda once, and in a manner of minutes, a next and final action becomes clear. This was no knot; just a need. The pastors gave it their brief focus, made a decision, and life moves on.

But other issues are complex and cannot be tackled all at once. They appear on the agenda meeting after meeting for a season. These thorny situations cannot be adequately addressed in a single discussion and action but require a sequence of actions — some particular wise arrangement of steps, in proper succession, toward the goal of restored order.

This sequence is the order on the way to order. This is the kind of order Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 15:22–24, where one item follows another in proper sequence:

in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end . . .

We see such ordered sequences particularly in Luke’s Gospel and its sequel. Luke explicitly set out “to write an orderly account” (Luke 1:3) and speaks of events in the life of Christ that followed after others (Luke 8:1). In Acts, Peter explains his story “in order” (Acts 11:4), specific prophets follow after others (Acts 3:24), and Paul moves “from one place to the next” in his missionary journeys (Acts 18:23).

In God’s ordered world, sequences matter — in biblical events, and in pastoral ministry — and especially when we encounter the most complex and convoluted of knots. Able oversight (“ruling well,” 1 Timothy 5:17) requires more than a single moment, meeting, action, or conversation, but humble and evolving multiple-step processes of pastoral attention, and the pastoral superpower called patience.

Call for Attention

First, gnarly pastoral knots demand our attention and engagement. Here the danger is neglect. We’d rather not deal with this complicated and emotionally draining issue: the divisive person, the troubled marriage, the flagging finances. We got into this work to preach and teach the Bible, and would rather not have to untangle all these thorny knots.

True, some potential ministry “black holes” might quickly drain far more energy and time from us than they are worth. We can consider that and set boundaries. But negligence is not the answer. Rather, as a team, we need to dedicate sufficient time to getting our minds together around enough of the details to make wise collective decisions that aren’t manifestly distorted by glaring unawareness.

Our tendency once briefed, especially as men, can be to get the problem fixed all at once. Again, some pastoral issues require only one step. But many need sequences. And when we come across these complicated knotty ones, we do well to identify one clear, worthwhile next step, even as we begin to envision some kind of sequence of actions toward resolution, whether it might take weeks or months or longer.

The need of the hour is to decide what step to take next, then gather further intel, and later identify the following step. All the while, the team keeps moving the issue forward, however deliberate the pace, and doesn’t let it stall out and go underground.

Call for Patience

It’s one thing to get up to speed and begin a sequence, one careful step at a time. But it’s another to walk the process with patience. And note well, true patience is not neglect. Patience is not slumber or naivety. Patience is wide awake and alert, with self-control.

Here the danger is hurry. We’ve assessed the problem and are ready to fix it right now. But complex knots can’t be expedited. We must untangle a thread at a time. Often these clusters are so layered that we cannot see all its sections at the outset. We need to first untangle a strand or two, or a few, to then get a line of sight deeper into the nub and discern what steps will follow.

Christian patience is not laxity. Nor is it weak, if rightly exercised, but a force for good. Spurgeon was speaking about his deacons, but might as well have been speaking of pastor-elders, when he said that such spiritually mature men “reduce chaos to order by the mere force of Christian patience” (Spurgeon the Pastor, 162). Even if we don’t smite the beast in one fell swoop, there is power in a band of godly men deliberately surrounding a nuisance, keeping their eyes on it, and moving slowly toward it together. We can be confident of resolution in due time.

After all, the pastor-elders should embody and exemplify normal, healthy Christian maturity, and be among the most patient souls in the church, and also the least resigned. They should be resolute about not being lazy or apathetic, and be assured of Christ’s commitment to build and bless his church.

We learn to roll our anxieties onto the broad shoulders of our chief Shepherd, and try to count it a privilege, rather than burden, to work at untying these knots.

The ache comes unexpected. The random sight of a yellow door turns a handle in your memory. A restaurant song plays a tune that returns you to former times. The passing smell of a backyard meal takes you to a table long ago. For a few moments, you grow quiet and thoughtful — remembering, reliving, perhaps reaching for something once loved, now lost.

We name it nostalgia. The wistful backward glance. The photo album of the mind. The string that tugs the heart from years gone by. The yearning to find a bridge across the gap of canyon time.

For many, nostalgia comes as infrequently as a stranger at the door, and leaves just as quickly. But others know the ache more intimately. Perhaps because they have lost more than most, perhaps because they have a sentimental bent, perhaps because their present life holds little pleasure, the past lives vividly before them. Nostalgia is no stranger.

Backward glances, even backward longings, have their good purposes in the lives of God’s children. If we allow it, nostalgia itself can become a prophet of the Lord. But nostalgia can also take a darker turn, can tell a sadder tale. As the winds of memory blow from yesterday to today, they can carry a whisper barely heard but deeply felt: “Your best days are behind you.”

Best Days Behind

The Greeks of old spoke of a Golden Age, a lost time of peace and prosperity, happiness and wholeness. Many of us, without pretending the past was perfect, likewise discern a golden glow in former days. The walls of our heart, if not of our home, hold pictures of better times, of youthful laughter and young romance, of beginning ambitions and a body less broken. Once, we lived in a land without shadow, or at least without these shadows.

We walk today in the Age of Bronze, it seems, or Iron. The pages of the present lie rough and plain; the golden days are gone. Even for those with happy lives, today may seem more sorrowful than yesterday. Amid present joys, many can still hear the soft sounds of children grown, of loves lost, of dreams that never took flight. Autumn comes to every life. The leaves fall from our happiest days.

And the future? We recite by creed “the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting,” but for many the light of such days shines dimly. The eye of memory often sees clearer than the eye of faith. Heaven will be a happy place, no doubt, and Jesus’s face a sight to cure all sorrow. But today, what was weighs more heavily than what will be.

So speaks nostalgia’s bleaker voice. But in the midst of such remembrances, we may hear another speak: “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). The pangs of nostalgia can lead us into folly if we let them. They can force past, present, and future into a familiar story often told but largely untrue. “Your best days are behind you,” we may hear nostalgia say. But wisdom says otherwise.

Ungild the Past

When the wise look backward, they do indeed see good days — even glorious days. To David, the past held the “wondrous deeds” of God, far “more than can be told” (Psalm 40:5). Past years are chapters in God’s own book (Psalm 139:16), and God knows how to write good stories. And yet, for all the wonders of yesterday, the past is not always what we remember.

Human memory does not tell objective history, though we often assume otherwise. Like even the best historians, it selects and emphasizes — and like even of the worst, it distorts and embellishes. Consider, for example, what the wilderness-wandering Israelites remembered of their stay in Egypt:

Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at. (Numbers 11:4–6)

O dear and dangerous memory: faithful reporter and seditious scribe, beloved witness and bold perjurer! Egypt, the house of slavery; Egypt, the furnace of Pharaoh; Egypt, the land of forced labor — now Egypt, the oasis of the Lord? The mind, when distressed, can remember the melons and forget the misery.

Our own distortions may be less extreme. But the Preacher’s warning not to glorify the past (Ecclesiastes 7:10) suggests that we too can gild the pages of former days. Especially when the present feels unpleasant, we can fail to remember the more painful parts of the past. Then, as now, we dealt with apathy and discontent. Yesterday, as today, we carried wounds. The past indeed holds a Golden Age, but that garden was lost long before our lifetime.

Remember, dear saint, that even the happiest past grew not only flowers but thorns. If we could travel backward, we would indeed find many good gifts — perhaps even more than we now have — but we would not find all that we are looking for. Nostalgia’s longing leads us elsewhere.

Undim the Present

If the past is not always what we remember, we may then ask whether the present is more than we perceive. Might the backward glance, indulged too often, make us blind to present blessings?

However dim our days may seem when compared to the past, we still live beneath “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). Every past glory was a gift from his own hand, and though many years have perhaps rolled on, that hand remains open and unchanged. His gifts may differ between then and now, but he has not stopped giving.

Look around. Pause and consider. Stand like Elisha’s servant and ask for eyes to see (2 Kings 6:16–17). However bitter your cup, does it not hold some sweetness as well? Has God not surrounded your sorrows with comforts, or filled ordinary days with lawful pleasures, or given you some sphere of usefulness for Christ, however small? Has he not given you his words and his church — a song in the night and a choir of voices?

But more than that, more than all of God’s gifts combined and multiplied, has he not given you himself? If you find yourself in a wilderness, has not the pillar of fire and cloud gone with you? “Behold, I am with you always,” says our Lord (Matthew 28:20). Does not his always include today as well as yesterday?

The pastor John Newton once wrote to a woman recently widowed, “Though every stream must fail, the fountain is still full and still flowing. All the comfort you ever received in your dear friend was from the Lord, who is abundantly able to comfort you still” (Letters of John Newton, 225). In Christ, our comfort comes not mainly from a where or a when, but from a who. And though time has changed life, has changed us, it has not changed him. The eternal God is still our dwelling place, and underneath remain the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27).

Unveil the Future

So then, a golden thread connects our past and our present. And if we continue to follow this thread, we will find ourselves facing not backward, but forward — looking now not for a lost Eden, but for the New Jerusalem.

Here lies the secret of holy nostalgia. If we heed the whisper that our best days lie behind us, if we allow a gilded past to dim the present and abolish the future, then nostalgia will prove a persecutor, imprisoning our joy. But if we follow the longing to the land that lies not behind but beyond, nostalgia will turn prophet and apostle, a preacher of the coming glory.

David Gibson writes, “Wise people who understand how God has made us to long for him and for heaven don’t look backward when they get nostalgic. They allow the feeling to point forward. They look up to heaven and to home” (Living Life Backward, 103). We traced nostalgia’s faded letters and thought they read here, but all the while they were telling us of heaven.

Past gifts, however wonderful, were only a taste, a whisper, a window, a trail — “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited,” as C.S. Lewis puts it (The Weight of Glory, 31). They were firstfruits promising a harvest, olive branches heralding a new earth, the grapes of Canaan bidding us to look beyond the Jordan of death to the land of our inheritance.

As God once said to his backward-looking people, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old” (Isaiah 43:18). Behold, the God of wonders does a new thing, dawns a new day. From the grave he has “brought life and immortality to light” (2 Timothy 1:10), and now he waits to receive us. Soon and very soon, we will dwell in a world where sadness cannot live (Revelation 21:4). Soon and very soon, we will see the Person behind all our past joys (Revelation 22:4).

Our past may hold the happiest life this world has ever seen. But compared to the future God holds for his people, even that past becomes shadow and mist, broken tune and burnt image. So, when nostalgia visits, by all means ache and long, crave and thirst, pine and yearn — but not for the past. Rather, hunger for heaven and for home.

In Christ, our best days always and forever lie ahead.