It's Christmas time. News alert, right?

Duh, have you looked around at the lights — the red, green, and gold — and all those pine needles? People carrying packages all wrapped up?

I had planned on writing something about Christmas, but then someone contacted me "out of the blue" in regards to a situation that has gotten under my skin.

I cannot escape it. I must address it.

In Oregon there is a group of Pastoral Counsellors working with about 50 churches.

These particular counsellors are part of a network of Pastoral Counsellors, and there is a board that provides organisational structure and oversight in what these people do.

One of these counsellors had begun attacking two others, saying that the way the two others work is not Christian, would lead people away from God, and should not be allowed.

The two people in question trained in gestalt therapy through the training institute in Portland that was part of the general gestalt community where I, myself, trained.

I know their trainers, and I know that one recovered her Jewish cultural identity, changed her name back to its Jewish origin, but has embraced Buddhism as her belief system.

Others seemed more or less disinterested in spirituality. The question for me has to do with legalism and sound thinking.

How so? Would Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), or Rational-Emotive-Behavioural Therapy (RENT) be suspect because someone who was not a Christian was a trainer training people how to do them, or because seminal people in their formation did not believe in God?

You'd have to throw out all of psychotherapy if that were the case, and then you'd have to throw out about 90 percent of pastoral counselling and about 75 percent of contemporary preaching on Sundays.

Why? Because we have understood that there was something of truth in what was observed by those people, who otherwise did not believe in God, and pastors have understood that what they developed "speaks" to people.

There is something in it that seems to make sense because it accords with the way things are.

All actual truth is God's truth. God is truth, and there is no shadow in Him whatsoever.

God is also infinite and so God is infinite truth. Thus, if anything is true it is of God, and it doesn't matter whether an unbeliever stumbles on it and starts wearing it around or if a Christian does.

Truth is truth. Something either accords with the way things are or it doesn't.

Thus, Martin Buber, an Hassidic scholar, observed that in God's dealings with people (the God he knew from his Jewish belief system) God reached out for relationship with mankind, and when mankind turned to face God in return, something of a spark was possible.

That spark Buber called a dialogical moment, and around the pure energy of such intimacy with divinity there arose an entire system of working intersubjectively in psychotherapy.

The gestalt therapists are not the only ones to have embraced it; now, the contemporary psychodynamic people have also embraced it.

Really, pretty much all of clinical psychology has embraced this truth, because research on psychotherapy efficacy that has been generated since Buber's influence has shown that the therapeutic relationship, that thing also called the "working alliance," is probably the most salient factor in positive outcomes for psychotherapy.

That would apply to pastoral counselling as well.

So, would that legalistic Christian counsellor be consistent and tell all the psychotherapists in the world they should not try to establish a working alliance with the client because Buber was Jewish? I think not.

That is the part that annoys me. With a profundity of thinking that would wither most plants for lack of depth, he or she uses a legalistic approach to life in Christ and tars everyone who does not see things through such a flimsy lens.

It is the weak Christian whose conscience must create such rigid structures; it is the strong Christian who conscience does not condemn him in what he affirms.

That person understands grace, the power of the Holy Spirit to direct and transform in current life, and the freedom that comes from walking in wisdom with absolutely no condemnation in one's partnership with divinity.

Truth: the four major theoretical tenets of gestalt therapy are current individual experience (gestalt follows a phenomenological method), relationship (gestalt follows a dialogical philosophy), current context (gestalt follows a field approach, otherwise also understood as complex, adaptive systems theory), and action (gestalt puts process into behaviour, where change occurs according to the client's own decisions).

Gestalt is also holistic, which accords directly with the Old Testament understanding of persons as whole beings — body, mind, spirit — and all that embedded in whole communities of various kinds.

I would challenge anyone to tell me how these are not elements of human life as it actually is, thus accord with truth, and thus are of God.

It is my belief and conviction that they are also aspects of God's design for the church, which is the body of Christ.

So, while I am away on holiday in Oregon, I'm going to meet with these two pastoral counsellors.

I imagine we will pray together about this situation and see how God would like us to deal with it. Truthfully.