Sylvia Clemons is an ordained UPCI minister, a licensed professional counselor and chemical dependency counselor in San Antonio, Texas, and is on staff at Hope Center Church, pastored by Reverend Nathan Scoggins. She maintains a counseling practice at the church, as well as a ministry of traveling and teaching in Apostolic churches around the country and overseas. Sister Clemons has a master’s degree in counseling from East Texas State University (now Texas A&M-Commerce) and has been a counselor, speaker, and trainer since 1981. She has written for numerous print publications and e-zines.
My “Philosophy of Helping”:
I believe the Lord is the one, true healer and all healing—whether emotional, physical or spiritual—comes from Him. Sometimes, He chooses to heal by direct intervention; other times, He chooses to use people as instruments of healing.
I see the church as a hospital, full of people who struggle with many things. Just as in a medical hospital, people need varying levels of care. For some, the consistent preached Word, personal prayer and faithful practice of spiritual disciplines yield the desired results. For others, the need for one-time or occasional personal assistance of pastoral counseling is helpful to provide the scriptural guidelines and needed application of the Word. For yet others, more concentrated levels of care are necessary because of the depth of their woundedness and dysfunction (sin).
To be effective, the church must have a way of functioning within all these levels with programs of both prevention and remediation. In the area of prevention, churches need to provide teaching in basic life skills and character development to help avert many of the problems we see so frequently because their homes—even Christian, Holy Ghost homes—are not providing the necessary skills. I see professional, Truth-based counseling fitting into the remediative framework of counseling within the church body.
In working with multiple generations of clients—both churched and unchurched—and in teaching within different congregations for years, I see a pattern of generationally cumulative dysfunction, even within the church body. Each successive generation seems to be a little less equipped than the one before with the necessary life skills to be responsible and accountable adults and parents. Even when I find that people know what the Lord asks of them in how to live and relate to others in a godly way, I discover many of them have no to little idea how to get from where they are to where they need to be because of their deficiencies in knowledge and life skills.
I believe a part of my role as a teacher and counselor is to help provide the skills and knowledge for people to make the necessary changes in their lives and their families. I believe that is how I can best help to strength the body.
Ministry Motto:
Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees;
And make straight path for your feet,
lest that which is lame be turned out of the way;
but let it rather be healed.
—Hebrews 12:12,13