Is Counseling a Calling?
What is a calling? Biblical references to “call” or “calling” often occur in contexts where people are admonished to enter relationship with God and a life that demonstrates that relationship. New Testament examples include Acts 2:39, Romans 8:28, Romans 9:25, Romans 11:29, 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, 1 Corinthians 7:17-24, and 2 Peter 1:10. In the broader cultural context, we often understand a calling as work we feel compelled to do, typically for the benefit of others. Moreover, it may be characterized as the work we would voluntarily do, perhaps even without pay, because there is so much intrinsic reward attached to it.
Such work often belongs to a group of careers called helping professions. These include fields such as education, healthcare, social work, criminal justice, ministry, and counseling. In the helping professions, the demands of the work are believed to be balanced by the satisfaction that comes with making a transformational difference in someone’s life. Seeing the fruit of such labor can often lead to the sentiment that the effort is worthwhile.
Deciding to become a counselor is the same as raising your hand and saying, “Yes, I want to sit with people in the depths of their most difficult life moments, stand up with them when their lives require advocacy and empowerment, walk with them from the point of uncertainty to the edges of clarity and relief, and run alongside people when joy overtakes them.” This is a commitment to work that draws primarily on what the counselor has to offer from within – empathy, knowledge, spiritual insight, and wisdom. It asks one person to take their cumulative experiences into a room with another person, couple, family, or group and discern how much of that experience can come forward and how much must be set aside for the sake of the clients’ needs.
This work requires curiosity tempered by the wisdom to know when and how to speak and when and how to listen. It is a vocation that rests on trust in intuition, discernment, and the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. The innate desires to help, to understand one’s own history, and to make the mysterious plain are honed through academic learning, practice, and cultivating emotionally intimate relationships with people who are meant to learn, heal, and move on.
Counseling is not lightweight work. Burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma are woven into the experience. Yet, compassion satisfaction – the pleasure one derives from being able to do their work well – balances them (Stamm, 2009). Duffy, Dik, Douglass, England, and Velez (2018) sought to establish a theoretical model by which work could be understood as a lived calling. The model, the Work as Calling Theory (WCT), acknowledges that there are positive and negative outcomes to living a calling. High job satisfaction and performance have the potential to give way to workaholism, burnout, and organizational exploitation.
Nevertheless, according to the model, personality factors and a healthy psychological climate can moderate the negatives so that an individual can successfully live their calling. A 2023 study by He, Kang, Ren, and Li used the WCT model to understand the relationships between Korean counselors’ sense of calling, meaning of work, living a calling, and psychological burnout. They concluded, in part, that counselors’ sense of professional calling reduced the incidence and impact of psychological burnout.
Hurst and Prescott (2021) decided to explore whether counseling students experienced the same high correlation between a sense of calling and a sense of meaning in life as earlier studies had found for working counselors and other professionals. This team believed perceived competence to be a mitigating factor for work-related stress and burnout, as well as a contributing factor to meaning in life. Hurst and Prescott found a high correlation between students’ sense of meaning in life through their studies and their perceived self-competence in counseling abilities. They concluded that 95% of their 292 participants found meaning in their lives through counseling studies and viewed their career pursuits as a calling.
These studies highlight the fact that individuals are drawn to counseling work by a sense of meaning. They choose to remain in it and grow through it for the sake of living out a calling. It is not that the work is easy or becomes less challenging over time. It is, perhaps, that they embrace these words of Christ for themselves and their clients,
Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke Is easy and My burden is light. (New King James Version, 1982/2000, Matthew 11:28-30).
It may be that you are the person in whom others confide, and you have a deep interest in why people think and behave as they do. Maybe you have a longing to help people through suffering and find yourself drawn toward mental health. It may be that you stumbled upon this article, and something within it resonated with you so much that you are wondering whether God is redirecting your career path.
Being compassionate is not the same as being clinically competent. Professional counseling requires graduate education, supervised clinical experience, ethics, assessment, multicultural competence, evidence-based practice, and professional identity. For Christians considering counseling as a vocation, calling is an important beginning—but preparation matters too. Crown College's Master of Arts in Counseling recently reached an important milestone in that preparation. Our program is now fully accredited by The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Programs (CACREP). This body sets standards for how counseling and related programs organize and execute their missions and objectives, set curriculum, select and advise students, qualify faculty, and govern and evaluate themselves. Many states require or strongly encourage education from CACREP-accredited programs as their standard for counselor licensure. Crown graduates can confidently say they meet that requirement.
Could counseling be your next calling?
Learn more about Crown's CACREP-accredited Master of Arts in Counseling.
References
- Duffy, R.D., Dik, B.J., Douglass, R.P., England, J.W. & Velez, B.L. (2018). Work as a calling: A theoretical model. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 65(4), 423-439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cou0000276
- He, S., Kang, H., Ren, L. & Li, Y. (2024). Structural relationships between counselors’ sense of calling, meaning of work, living a calling, and psychological burnout. Behavioral Science, 14(24). https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14010024
- Hurst R. & Prescott J. (2021). Counselling as a calling: Meaning in life and perceived self-competence in counselling students. Counseling and Psychotherapy Research. 2021(00),1–6. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12406
- New King James Bible (2000). Thomas Nelson Publishers. (Original work published in 1982)
- Stamm, B.H. (2009). Professional quality of life: Compassion satisfaction and fatigue version 5 (ProQOL). www.proqol.org.
Photo credit: ©GettyImages/lorenzoantonucci
Originally published September 29, 2026.
