Pre Marriage Counseling, Clergy Should Avoid Creating Life-time Religious Aversion

Spiritual Pastoral Counseling before MarriageEnjoyed the articles in this week’s CT Pastors clergy newsletter (link below), especially the Pre-Marital counseling section. So many of us originally become ordained to officiate a wedding, and there is much wisdom clergy can convey before the marriage!

Also very insightful (to me, at least) is the opening blurb how people get infected with a life-long aversion to the Bible, or to religion.  I have met people who are so burned from childhood experiences of religion being shoved down their throats that they have a terrible bad taste in their mouth to all things religious. As clergy, we must ever strive not to be the source of someone’s life-long bad taste to religion, scripture or spirituality! I think this is also why so many say “I’m spiritual, but not religion,” because they just don’t trust organized religion. Since our network here is alternative clergy, alternative spirituality, and thus non-mainstream, we probably encounter more “burned” or bad-taste-in-their-mouth people.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/lyris/ctpastors/archives/05-23-2017.html