Confidentiality

Community Knowledge

Counselees often give information about themselves which is community knowledge. Many people know these things. The fact that the counselee strictly enjoined you not to tell this may lure you into naively assuming they have not said this to anyone else. The fact is that they may have spoken “confidentially” with many people. In routine first interviews, the pastor should always ask to whom else the counselee has talked about the matter. This will reveal, if carefully and patiently done, the extent of spread of the communication.

The experienced pastor has also learned that when he gives a vow of confidence to a person he should require one in return. He should strictly charge him to go and tell no one. Otherwise this person may be spreading the story all over the community and at the same time holding the pastor to vows of confidence. He may even accuse the pastor of having divulged that which he himself told. Also, exacting a vow of confidence from the pastor may be the way one marital partner has of seeing to it that only one side of the story gets told or of establishing a secret and clandestine relationship to the pastor. This is particularly risky in the case of the wife’s conferring secretly with the pastor.

Privileged Communication

Another kind of information received in counseling is what has come to be called “privileged communication.” This is information given to the counselor on the agreement that it will not be communicated to anyone else without the specific permission of the counselee or, more generally, to anyone except other professional people with whom the pastor is working. For instance, the pastor as a marriage counselor routinely assures the marital partners that he will not quote them to each other. However, with specific permission for a certain purpose, the counselee may grant the counselor the privilege of talking over a certain matter with the other spouse. More commonly, the pastor needs to confer, for instance, with an adoption agency about the desire of a sterile couple for a child. He is given the privilege of communicating their needs to an agency. Or a specific confession, such as of a premarital pregnancy, will be communicated to an obstetrician to whom the pastor refers the person for examination and medical care. Or, less commonly, people who are seen in a teaching center for counselor-training are discussed without reference to their personal identity by the counselor with his supervising professor. These are instances of “privileged communication.”

Pastors need to be extremely cautious about making parlor conversation with their fellow pastors about people with whom they have worked. To the experienced and seasoned counselor there is no more boring conversation. But beginning students and counselors who have very few people come to them for help talk in a nonpastoral and professionally unethical way too often. A part of being a pastor is to consider communication with a suffering person a privilege and not a pastime, work and not recreation!

Confidential or “Confessional” Information

Some highly personal information comes to the pastor which should never be told to anyone except by the person himself. No one who has not gone through the spiritual disciplines of time, attention, and understanding which would enable that person to tell them himself has a right to this information. A pastoral counselor has a right to know only those things about a person which his relationship to that person can justify. He does not need to know more than this, because knowledge about people is not the heart of pastoral counseling. A durable and secure relationship to people is the heart of pastoral counseling.

Therefore, the pastor needs both a good memory to remember many things the counselee tells him and a good “forgetter” to forget certain things as far as telling them to anyone else is concerned. These are usually things which people literally tell to God in our presence as helpers and encouragers. Therefore, they are not things that really are ours to tell except as we talk with God in prayer in behalf of that person. Then we are not giving information to someone who did not already know it before we ourselves did! This is actually confessional material in the Protestant sense of a voluntarily given and not ecclesiastically required confession.

Limited Confidentiality

Biblical confidentiality is essential in building a relationship of trust between counselor and counselee. We show respect to counselees by guarding their reputations as much as possible without disobeying God. Unfortunately, confidentiality is not always possible (or desirable) in light of Jesus’ commands. In Matthew 18:16-17 He says that if a brother is sinning and proves unwilling to listen to private rebuke, we should “take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. And if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.” The implication of this biblical requirement to seek additional help in order to reclaim an offender is that Christians must never promise absolute confidentiality to any person. Frequently it is the practice of Bible-believing Christians to give assurances of absolute confidentiality, never realizing that they are following a policy that originated in the Middle Ages and that is unbiblical.

Is it right, then, to refuse any confidentiality at all? No, confidentiality is assumed in the gradual widening of the sphere of concern to other persons set forth in Matthew 18:15ff. As you read the words of our Lord in that passage, you get the impression that it is only reluctantly, when all else fails, that more and more persons may be called in. The ideal seems to be to keep the matter as narrow as possible.

What then does one say when asked to keep a matter in confidence? We ought to say, “I am glad to keep confidence in the way that the Bible instructs me. That means, of course, I shall never involve others unless God requires me to do so.” In other words, we must not promise absolute confidentiality, but rather, confidentiality that is consistent with biblical requirements.