We have been laying groundwork for the past year to launch a biblical counseling ministry in 2017. We believe that the gospel is the answer to any brokenness and it is applicable in any cultural context. Yes, poverty, drugs, and poor thinking is rampant in our context. But we believe there is profound hope and deep healing in the gospel. We have been working on training biblical counselors (and will continue to do this) so that we can provide free biblical counseling for folks in our church and people within our community.
We aren’t reinventing the wheel, here. Other churches have done something very similar. What we have heard from other places is that when they made free biblical counseling available the counselors get busy quickly and the wait list grows exponentially. While I’d be happy to be wrong, I’m wondering if things might be a bit slower here. There are a few aspects to hillbilly culture that make counseling a bit difficult.
The Difficulty
First, is something we might call hillbilly avoidance. JD Vance speaks to this when he shares the findings of a few sociologists:
…avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping ‘significantly predicted resiliency’ among Appalachian teens. Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalacians to look at themselves honestly. (Vance, 20)
What this means is that usually when folks come in for counseling the problem is already at a very advanced stage. And usually you aren’t dealing with only the presenting problem but years of unbiblical thinking and harmful behavior. Most people are going to be looking for a quick fix and any counselor worth his salt is going to shoot for real redemption and not just a band-aid. This means a quick fix isn’t going to happen—which will at times lead to a frustrated counselee.
Combine this with the propensity to not “look at themselves honestly” and counseling is going to be a bit difficult to get going. If folks show up at all, many aren’t going to be willing to do the hard work of obedience, repentance, and working towards change.
Secondly, there is something that might be termed hillbilly hiding. Vance talks about the outward life of the hillbilly and the inward strife within the home that had to be kept private. “No outsiders could know about the familial strife—with outsiders defined very broadly”. And once his Uncle Jimmy left the home, “he was not to know about the inner workings of the house”. (43) In hillbilly culture you are broking a deeply ingrained code if you share your story with an “outsider”. It isn’t difficult to see why this would make counseling—or even getting someone to come to counseling—would be difficult.
Lastly, though this isn’t confined to the world of the hillbilly there is a type of victimization that is runs rampant. Again, Vance explains it well when he says, “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government and that movement gains adherents by the day”. (193) Or again when he explains this is about “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”:
Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work—a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way—carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. (Vance, 7)
It is absolutely impossible to help someone and to provide solid biblical counseling if they are unwilling to move out of the position of a helpless victim. Blaming everyone but yourself was the default position of our first couple and it shelters us from real and lasting change.
A Way Forward
So what does counseling look like in a hillbilly environment? Honestly, I think I’m only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If you are in a context similar to mine and are engaged in biblical counseling I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts. I do believe, quite strongly, that the church cannot afford to outsource her biblical counseling to secular psychology. (I’m not saying we cannot in some way partner with others who have helpful resources, but we cannot diminish the authority of God and power of the gospel alone in transforming hearts). We must do this.
In my mind there are two key questions we need to answer. First, how do I gain a hearing. Secondly, what do I emphasize once I get an audience. Given the difficulties previously mentioned both of these are difficult.
In our ministry, we are focusing on two main things in order to gain an audience. First, we are trying to create an atmosphere and a culture of grace. We are working overtime to help our community see our church as a community resource. Our free meals are helping with this on Wednesday evenings. But I’m constantly preaching to our people that we want our community to think of us as a safe place to go when brokenness catches up to you. We truly want the phrase refuge for the broken to be inserted into the DNA of our church. If develop a reputation of love then we’ve gone a long way in building bridges.
Secondly, we’ve got to put ourselves in the position of family to those who are hurting. They won’t open up if we are merely professionals. We have to build relationships and a ton of rapport. So we are emphasizing personal relationships over programs. We still do community outreaches and have “programs” but we try to emphasize that these are simply to give us opportunities to build relationships. If we are seen as their family then we’ll be in a position to speak truth into their lives.
So what do we say once we get an audience? There are a few things that should be emphasized. First, we must continually show them that there is hope. They aren’t helpless victims who have no control over their lives. There really is hope. Jesus really can provide change and hope and help and healing. There isn’t any brokenness that He isn’t big enough to heal. We might still have scars this side of a redeemed Eden but even those will be overwhelmed by His grace. They have to know that Jesus is bigger. He is bigger than their past, their present, their family structure, their economic situation, their sin, their shame, their standing in society, EVERYTHING.
We also have to walk a continual tight rope of helping them come to grips with the fact that they are almost always part of the problem but at the exact same time they are not some irredeemable freak. They aren’t alone. But we have to be bold enough, and to grasp grace deep enough, to own up to the fact that even in the times when we are victims we might have responded in very unhelpful ways.
In sum, build rapport and proclaim and apply the gospel over and over and over again.
Conclusion
It sounds overly simplistic but the answer really is to work hard to create a culture of grace and when grace starts to work on a heart and somebody starts to open up and want healing just keep applying the gospel. To be honest there really isn’t much we can do. We cannot force counseling and transformation on folks. But if we follow Jesus in loving people where they are and in proclaiming His gospel, we are finding that more and more are opening up. Jesus is providing the transformation that He promised that He would.
There are unique difficulties with providing counseling in hillbilly culture. Some of the books you read are going to be very helpful, but I’ve finding they are very helpful after about a month of laying groundwork and building relationships. People aren’t formulas to solve. I think you can get away with a distant professionalism in another environment, but here in hillbilly culture you have to become family and stay that way…for better or worse.
But there is nothing going on here that Jesus cannot redeem.
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