Professionalizing Clergy

In a book written almost thirty years ago, and yet just as relevant today, the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon laments the “professionalization” of clergy, especially as it relates to counseling. What is gained for in competence may by lost in other areas, notably our essential task of preaching the gospel:

[T]here is a tendency now to suppose that the way to train clergy to be good pastoral counselors is to give them professional competence in what are usually called the “helping professions” — to make them trained psychologists, or knowledgeable hospital visitors,…