Most Christians (though not all) would prefer a physician over their pastor when it comes to cancer. Oh, they might appreciate their pastor for moral support and for prayer, but they’ll be going to the hospital for chemotherapy instead of expecting the pastor to cure the problem. Because the pastor is an expert in theology, not an expert in oncology.

However, in many churches, the pastor serves the role of substance abuse counselor, social worker, marriage counselor, job guidance counselor, dating coach, clinical psychologist, and so on. Every Sunday a pastor gets up to talk about how those in the congregation should be living their lives, and during the week many seem to really on him or her to figure out how to conduct their daily affairs.

Here’s the problem — very few of these pastors are licensed in anything save theology in their particular sect.

This is very scary. Christians give these pastors enormous power over how themselves and others should think and conduct themselves, and this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if these pastors were trained in these areas. But they are not. They are just random people giving advice. It’s no wonder that so much of it would be misguided. And, given that they aren’t superhuman by any means, it’s no wonder that, for many of them, the power they have in their positions would go to their heads.

Now, although I think God is a bad idea, I’ll be the first to admit that yes, it helps to share your problems with someone else (like you can here — but even these operatives are trained). And I also think the placebo effect can help people — if you think your pastors advice will help, even if it’s generally bad advice, there’s a chance that it might help. Also, given how many churches there are (here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where I live there are more churches than fast food joints), it seems that many people can and do often find churches and pastors who are going to make statements they agree with anyway, so that the pastor just gives them confidence in how they already want to live their lives.

But that said — there is an amazing amount of trust that many people have in their pastors, which leaves plenty of room for it to be exploited (which might be why the clergy is said to be one of the professions most likely to draw psychopaths). And the pastors oftentimes may not be aware that they are exploiting the congregation — the respect from the congregation cements their own thought that they are God’s messengers, which emboldens them to give advice they are not qualified to give.

This is how, for example, a pastor I once respected as a Christian, Mark Driscoll, managed to rise to such prominence and ruin many people’s lives. His speaking style and theological grounding drew several thousands to his Mars Hill Church, and his ego began to grow way out of proportion.

Among other things, he often gave thorough dating advice:

Marriage advice:

Drug abuse advice:

Parenting advice:

And so on. And even watching a minute or two from each of these videos reveals, consistently, a very insistent, strongly worded style of giving advice on almost every aspect of your and others’s lives.

Mark Driscoll is not a licensed counselor, psychologist, or social worker. He has a BA in Communications with a minor in Philosophy. He’s not an expert in any of the areas he discusses. And yet he consistently gave strongly worded, insistent advice on these matters on and off the pulpit — advice people not only followed themselves, but judged others by. And he’s by no means unusual in churches today. He just was doing it on a wide enough scale that it made a serious impact. People were seriously hurt from his uneducated advice.

Among them was Mary Lambert. As a 2014 article notes:

There are people coming forward with objections to Mars Hill, including Mary Lambert, who wrote and performed the hook on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love.” On the track, Lambert croons, “I can’t change, even if I try, even if I wanted to.” Lambert has said she realized God made her the way she is — gay — and that she can be a Christian without feeling depressed, ashamed or condemned despite what she heard from Driscoll. And as she sings at the end of “Same Love,” now that she’s left Mars Hill, she’s not crying on Sundays. KIRO 7 reached out to Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church several times. Our calls were not returned.

Knowing this makes me tear up even more at the “I’m not crying on Sundays” line.

Mark Driscoll’s uneducated advice was wreaking havoc on her emotional life, and she’s not alone.

Eventually, more and more problems came out regarding Mark Driscoll’s role in the church. Driscoll (like many clergy) had the power to raise or lower individuals’ social standing in the church, and because in his mind he was a messenger of God, he used it liberally.

As a result, Mars Hill is no more — the 13 churches that made it up are now autonomous and Driscoll resigned in 2014. But there are still people recovering from the wounds of this unlicensed counselor. For example, a website called We Love Mars Hill has sprung up, consisting of many people who, like Lambert, have been “hurt, damaged, abused, neglected, shunned, or rejected by Mark Driscoll and other elders at Mars Hill Church.” This blog and the comments also have some disturbing stories.

I think it’s clear that this destruction to personal lives is the result of pastors who are given enormous control over the interior and exterior lives and decisions of huge groups of people. I’m not saying they are intentionally deceitful, necessarily, but I am saying that even their best intentions usually come from untrained backgrounds. We should trust them to “heal” our marriages, relationships with our kids, addictions, and so on about as much as we trust them to cure cancer. What we should do is rely on professional advice for these important areas as much as possible.

So…if a pastor’s advice seems hard to follow, or if you’re one of those who feels shame from what they say in the pulpit or an office visit, or if you’re hurt by the way they tell you to treat friends or family, maybe those emotions are sourced in the fact that, like most pastors, the pastor simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Try to seek professional advice, or do your own studies. We all need people we can trust to talk to. But when it comes to trying to figure out how certain decisions will affect our futures, it becomes important to rely on expert advice instead of that of an overconfident novice.

Thanks for reading.