The most popular biblical counseling forms for new counselees
Disclaimer: BibliCare does not offer professional, legal advice. We strongly encourage you to seek professional legal guidance when creating and using pre-counseling forms.
Generally, there are three types of forms:
- A short form that new counselees sign off on and date.
- A longer form with several personal questions.
- A form with about five questions, known as a Care Request Form. This form asks basic questions about the counselee’s reason for requesting counseling, availability, etc.
If you use BibliCare, you can use any of the pre-counseling form templates in your account and customize them as needed.
A Short Form
This form goes by several names, including:
- Intake Form
- Informed Consent Form
- Consent to Counsel
- Basic Information Form
- Counseling Agreement
In this form, new counselees sign and date a document which outlines…
- Your ministry’s goal in biblical counseling
- What your ministry believes
- Whether your counsel should be taken as professional/medical advice
It also outlines what your ministry's policies are in terms of...
- Donations
- Cancellations
- Homework
- Church involvement
- Conflict resolution
- Limited confidentiality
- Duty to warn
- Church/discipleship group attendance requirements
- Counselee responsibilities
- Audio/video monitoring
- Counseling observer/trainee involvement
- Reasons for termination of counseling
- Your confidentiality / privacy / security / release of liability statements, etc.
If your ministry doesn’t use a form like this, you may run into the same problem that a biblical counselor from Florida had. This counselor agreed to counsel a man without him filling out this form. After the man told him his problems, the counselor tried to tell him about Jesus. The man (to the counselor’s confusion) said, “No, no. I don’t want to hear about Jesus, I just want you to listen to my problems.” It’s best to set the right expectations about your counseling ministry in advance. It may also help in the event of legal trouble - please consult a legal professional before using a pre-counseling form.
A Longer Form
This form also goes by several names, including:
- Personal Data Inventory (PDI)
- Personal Information Collection Form (PICF)
- In-Depth Personal History Questionnaire
A detailed form like this will tell you quite a bit about your new counselee’s background (ex. religious background, marital life, personality type, etc.). It can help an administrator more easily determine who should counsel the counselee, and can help the counselor know what the counselee’s background is before their first counseling session.
A Care Request Form
This form typically consists of five questions:
- What problem are you currently experiencing?
- How have you tried handling this problem in the past?
- What do you want us to do for you?
- When are you available? Please list five possible times on the weekends in order of preference.
- What is your stress level (or level of urgency) on a scale of 1-10?
Some counselors put these questions on the back of their longer form (ex. PDI). For convenience, it’s better to keep these questions as a separate form. Why? Let’s say that you put these five questions on the back of a paper PDI (AKA the longer form). Each time you think, “Why did this person request counseling?”, you’ll need to…
- Drive to the office.
- Go to the filing cabinet.
- Sift through the files.
- Pull out the counselee’s file.
- Find the counselee’s PDI.
- Flip to the back of the PDI just to find out that the counselee wanted pre-marital counseling.
When the Care Request Form is on the back of a PDI, it’s a lot of effort just to find out why a counselee wants counseling!
In order to have the Care Request Form as a separate form, you could either have the counselees’ Care Request Form be paperclipped to the front of each counselee’s physical file, or you can use BibliCare to automagically pull up a counselee’s Care Request Form in seconds (yes, it’s a shameless plug! :) ).
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be helpful to use all three types of pre-counseling forms. Now the only question is, when do you assign them?