Pillar One
Bring the whole thing. Faith included.
Scripture, prayer, discipleship, and pastoral guidance for the weight people carry.
These services are provided by pastoral counselors who are not licensed or registered by the State of California. They work as employees or volunteers of RCA, a nonprofit and charitable institution.
You are free to seek licensed mental health care from other providers. Tell us and we will help you find it.
What it is
The care of souls. It is older than psychology by centuries, and the church was doing it long before anyone thought to call it counseling.
Your counselor is a minister. Scripture and prayer are in the room with you rather than translated out of it. The work is discipleship: honest conversation, the Word opened together, and the long patience of someone walking with you.
It also means there are questions we can take up that a clinical frame has no category for. Guilt that is not a symptom. Whether God is still good when the outcome was not. Forgiveness you cannot manufacture. Calling. Doubt. Shame that theology can answer and technique cannot.
People bring us grief, marriage and family struggles, anxiety and fear, parenting, life transitions, spiritual struggle, and the ordinary weight of a hard season.
There is no diagnosis here and no file with an insurer. What you say sits with a minister, not in a claim.
How it differs from clinical counseling
Both pillars sit with the same troubles. Anxiety, grief, a marriage under strain, a hard season that will not lift. The difference is not the list of problems. It is perspective, scope, and method.
Perspective
A minister reads your life theologically. You are an image-bearer. Sin and grace are real categories, not metaphors. Suffering happens inside God's providence rather than outside it, which changes what the work is for.
Scope
Pastoral counseling takes up the soul: conscience, guilt and forgiveness, calling, doubt, spiritual dryness, and formation over years. It does not assess, diagnose, or treat a mental-health condition. That is clinical work.
Method
Scripture opened together. Prayer. Confession and accountability. The disciplines that have formed Christians for centuries, applied to what you are carrying now.
The practical details
- Who provides it
- Pastoral counselors, not licensed or registered by the State of California, serving under pastoral oversight.
- Setting
- Telehealth across California.
- Cost
- Set by the counselor's degree level. Not billed to insurance. See fees.
- Before you begin
- Informed consent, the Notice to Clients, and a Good Faith Estimate.
Your church, not instead of it
We are not a replacement for a congregation and we have no interest in becoming one. Where you have a church, we work to strengthen your place in it. Your counselor will ask about it, encourage what is already there, and where it helps and you want it, coordinate with your pastor.
Where you do not have one, and many people arrive without, that is a normal place to start. If you want help finding a church home, ask.
For pastors: if someone in your care is beyond what you can carry, that is not a failure of your ministry. Write to us.
Whom we serve
People from every background and every walk of life. Our beliefs shape what we teach and who ministers. They never decide whom we serve.
Pastoral counseling is explicitly faith-based, and our framework is openly Christian. Read our Statement of Services for what we offer and where our services have limits.
You are loved. You are welcome. And there is hope.