The history of each special ministry within the Church is the history of conceptual ambiguity, role confusion, slow attrition from ultimate goals, threatened or real take-over by a nontheological discipline, some agony of spirit, and an attempt to recover theological balance. The clearest illustration of this history is Christian education. The problem with which this paper wrestles is that the pastoral counseling movement faces the same kind of danger today that confronted Christian education in the time of Ames, Coe, Hartshorne, and Bower and to which Chris tian education succumbed. That danger is this: the categories are derived from a discipline or disciplines that are nonbiblical and nontheological. Pastoral counseling is a specialized form of ministry, and there is an ever-present threat that it will leave home, become an alien in another land, and thereby lose its identity, surrender its own implicit values (both intrinsic and instrumental), and become a confusion both to its own parent and to cognate helping services. The recent formation of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors under the sponsorship of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry underscores the reality of the threat.1 This study is an attempt to deal with the integrity of the special min istry of pastoral counseling, to suggest what it is and what it is not, and to draw some guidelines for its relationships with the human sciences and for its own operations. I am much in debt to many pioneers in this field, only some of which indebtedness will become explicit in this paper.