Sign of the Times

Don Browning, a pastoral counselor, and trainer of such counselors, writes of a change in culture he has noticed. Years ago he write that pastors were trained to suspend moral judgment as pastoral caregivers. The assumption was that when people came for counsel there was a common moral understanding. "I know what I am supposed to do in life, but I have gotten to the place that I cannot do it."
But now the culture has changed, observes Browning. When people come to pastors today, their cry is often not "I know what I am supposed to do; I just can't do it," but "I do not know what I am supposed to do."
Browning says that because people are unsure about what constitutes the shape of a life that matters and what it means to live a life that has moral substance, that pastors have to be willing to speak of these matters. "This does not mean that the church and its pastors should become hectoriing and judgmental moral exhorters, but instead that pastors should call morre freely upon those swaths of scripture that appeal to the wisdom and ethical traditions o0f the faith and should seek to help people discern what the total acceptance and grface of the gospel looks like on the moral ground."