Abstract
Tom Pugh understood his vocation, to mediate God’s saving grace by helping people develop personhood through relationship. He believed that every person “needs a meaningful relationship with a trusted friend to receive help in becoming the person he is capable of becoming.” Pastoral counseling is one of the forms such a relationship may take. It is a relationship among the person seeking counseling, the counselor, and the Creator. Further, it is an interactive process, “a mutual, dynamic and responsive quest,” toward wholeness and healing. Finally, Pugh suggests that pastoral counseling is a context, a “protected environment..in which an individual in need may be taught at his own rate of speed how to become a real person.”