You have two names on a screen, a fifteen-minute intake call on the calendar for Thursday morning, and no idea what you are actually supposed to say when the counselor picks up.
You have never done this before, or you did it once and it did not go well, and the pages you have opened tonight are all a version of the same list: five questions, seven questions, eight questions, arranged as if the call and the first session were the same conversation.
They are not.
The intake call is a mutual screening, fifteen minutes at most, and its job is to decide whether you keep this person's name on your list. The first paid session is an orientation, ninety minutes or so, and its job is to give the counselor the honest version of what you are carrying so the work can start. Same person on the other end, two different rooms, two different sets of questions. If you have not yet decided which of the four categories of Christian counselor you want in the first place, our wider read on finding one is the piece to open before this one; if you are past that decision and staring at a short list of names, this piece is the one that keeps going.
Two conversations, not one
Before either call, a word about the posture. Asking hard questions of a counselor before you commit to work with them is a Christian practice, and Paul says so at the close of his letter to the Thessalonians, where he lays out a short set of instructions for how the church holds together across time.
"Test them all; hold on to what is good." -- 1 Thessalonians 5:21
The verse sits inside a paragraph about prophecy and about the church's discernment work, and testing here belongs to the everyday habits of a healthy congregation. Which means that a fifteen-minute call in which you ask six real questions about a counselor's formation and scope is you doing the thing Paul told the church to do, and any counselor worth trusting will hear that in the shape of the call and respect it.
Some counselors merge the intake and the first session into one longer meeting, and if that is what you are booking, the two lists below still apply, sequenced. Ask the vetting questions in the first twenty minutes, decide whether to keep going, and let the counselor pivot into the orientation questions in what remains. A counselor who cannot make that transition cleanly is telling you something about their read of the room, which is data of a different kind.
Here is the map of what belongs in which call.
The vetting call: questions that decide whether to hire them
Six questions, roughly two or three minutes each. You will not get through them all in every call, and that is fine. The order below moves from the least to the most revealing, so if the call has to end early you will still have the most-decisive material. What matters more than the count is the shape of the answers, and for each question below the good-answer paragraph and the concerning-answer paragraph together are the point; keep those in your ear while you listen.
What were you trained in, and where?
You are listening for whether the counselor can locate their own formation in a sentence. Not because you need to agree with every point of their theology, and not because a specific school or tradition is the right one, but because a counselor who cannot describe their formation is usually a counselor who has not thought hard about the difference between counseling from Scripture and counseling from their own feelings about Scripture.
A strong answer sounds concrete and located. Something close to: "I have a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary, I hold ACBC certification, and the counseling framework I work from is closest to the CCEF tradition." Or, on the licensed side: "I have a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan, I am a state-licensed clinician here in Ohio, and I integrate faith when a client asks for it, drawing on Warren and Nouwen more than anyone else." The names change; the specificity does not.
A concerning answer is a devotional sentence in place of a framework. Some version of "I just love Jesus and let the Spirit lead," or a paragraph about the counselor's heart for the work that never names a school, a tradition, or a text. That is a posture, and it is often a lovely posture, but a person who cannot describe their formation has almost always not done the reading their credential implies.
How do you use Scripture in the room?
Ask this even if the counselor's website already tells you the answer, because the answer to this specific question is the tell you are actually listening for. What you want to hear is whether the counselor treats Scripture as a living text you and they are going to read together, or as a set of prescriptions handed out at the end of a session the way you might get a script at the pharmacy.
A strong answer will describe an actual practice. "I usually spend the first two sessions listening, and I do not open Scripture in a directive way until I have a real sense of what you are carrying, because a verse dropped early lands the wrong way." Or: "I will often ask you to read a passage out loud in the session, and then we sit with it before I say anything about how it applies, because the applying is usually the reader's work, not mine." The counselor who says something like that has thought about the difference between Scripture as text and Scripture as tool.
A concerning answer is a list of verses the counselor tends to prescribe. If you hear Jeremiah 29:11 come up as a general career-plan promise, or Philippians 4:13 framed as an athletic-motivation verse, or Romans 8:28 used as a way to skip past hard experience toward a resolution that has not arrived, you are hearing a reading practice that will fail you when your own suffering asks harder questions than a verse card can answer. Ask this question even if the specific verses you are wrestling with are different ones.
What was your training built for, and what was it not built for?
This is the scope question, and it is the one that separates counselors who have read their own critics from counselors who have not. Every real form of care has a shape it was built for and a shape it was not, and the counselor who cannot describe the second shape usually cannot describe the first well either.
A strong answer names the boundary in plain terms. "Biblical counseling was built for a struggle a believer wants to face in gospel terms across a few months, and what it was not built for is diagnosing or treating clinical conditions. If what you are carrying is closer to a clinical struggle, the honest move is to say so early and to point you to a licensed clinician while we do the piece I was trained to do alongside." Or, on the licensed side: "I was trained to do clinical work with trauma and anxiety, and what I was not trained to do is the pastoral formation piece across years. If what you are looking for is discipleship, I know two people to send you to." Our deeper read on where the biblical-counseling and clinical categories draw the line is at biblical counseling vs therapy, and a counselor whose scope talk matches the shape of that piece is a counselor who has done the reading.
A concerning answer says the counselor's category can handle anything you bring. It is almost always spoken with warmth, which is what makes it hard to hear as a red flag. But a counselor who has not thought about the limits of their training has not sat with the people that training hurt when it stretched into work it was not built for, and the same mistake tends to arrive again with the next person.
Do you have a referral network for the clinical piece?
If you take one question from this whole guide into your call, take this one. It is the single most-revealing question you can ask a Christian counselor, because it is impossible to fake and because the counselor who has a real answer will describe it in the kind of boring, specific detail that true answers usually have.
A strong answer sounds something like: "I have three licensed clinicians in this state that I refer to regularly, and I keep the list current, and last month I had a client who was carrying trauma from a car accident, and we did four sessions together on where God was in that while she was doing EMDR with the clinician I sent her to." Nothing dramatic about it, and that is the point. The counselor is describing an ordinary practice rather than a value statement.
A concerning answer treats the referral question as an insult, or dodges it with a devotional response, or offers some version of "prayer will handle that." Prayer belongs alongside a clinical struggle, and it belongs alongside every other kind of struggle too; the failure here is treating prayer as the whole response to a piece of work it was never asked to carry alone. The sibling read on the six traits to listen for across the whole call lives at what to look for in a biblical counselor, and it names the referral question as the most decisive one too.
What does a first session with you actually look like?
A real counselor has done this several hundred times and can describe it in the way a real teacher can describe the first day of school. You are asking for the descriptive answer of a person picturing an actual room, not a value statement about what counseling should be.
A strong answer will name the actual shape of the ninety minutes. What the counselor will ask. What paperwork you will fill out. Whether the counselor will assign a small practice for the week ahead. Roughly how long a typical engagement runs from beginning to end. What usually happens by session three or four, when the initial nerves have worn off and the real material starts to surface. That kind of answer is a picture, not a philosophy.
A concerning answer sits at aspirational altitude. It sounds like a paragraph about the counselor's heart for the work, or a promise about what you will feel by the end of the first session, or a value statement about what counseling can be at its best. Those sentences are earnest; they are also beside the question you asked, and they usually mean the counselor is either new enough to lack the pattern yet or seasoned enough to be selling.
How do you handle confidentiality?
Every counselor has legal minimums, and an honest counselor will name them cleanly on the call without you having to ask. The three standard exceptions to confidentiality are mandated reporting for suspected child or elder abuse, the duty to warn if someone in the room is in immediate danger, and a court-ordered subpoena, and those three are named consistently across states even though the specifics vary.
What you are also listening for is the practical shape underneath the legal minimums. If the counselor works out of a church, ask directly whether anything you share in a session will end up in front of a pastor, an elder, or a church discipline conversation. Some churches structure their counseling ministries with that expectation built in, and the counselor should be able to tell you plainly. If the answer is anything other than a plain yes or no, ask a follow-up, because a boundary you cannot pin down before the work begins is one you will end up arguing about at the worst possible time.
A concerning answer waves the question off or treats it as a suspicion. Confidentiality is not a suspicion; it is the boundary that makes the work possible. A counselor who is not comfortable being asked about it is a counselor who has not yet thought carefully enough about the room they are inviting you into.
The first real session: questions that shape the work
Different call, different job. The person on the other end has cleared your intake questions and you have decided to book the first paid session, which means the vetting is behind you. What follows is orientation. These questions are not screens; they are the material the counselor needs from you in order to point the work in the right direction.
What are you hoping this counseling will look like in six sessions, and in twelve?
Ask this near the top of the session, because your answer is going to shape everything the counselor does after. A polished answer helps nobody, and the counselor will pick their own frame from whatever you give them; what makes an answer useful is specificity. "I want the arguments to stop being the same argument every week" is a real answer. "I want to grow" gives the counselor almost nothing to work with.
How will we know if this is working?
The counselor may have their own version of this question, and asking yours first anyway is useful. What you are getting at is the marker of progress the two of you will use to decide whether the work is moving. Sometimes the marker is a felt change, sometimes it is a behavioral one, and sometimes it is a shift in how you talk about the thing you are carrying. A counselor who blanks on this question is one to raise a follow-up with; a counselor who names a marker that misses your own sense of what you are here for is one to have a real conversation with before session two.
What would you want me to know about you as a person before we open this up?
This one goes the other direction, and it does two useful things at once. It gives the counselor a chance to name whatever context they think you will need in order to trust them. And it gives you a chance to hear whether the counselor treats the counseling relationship as one-way or as two-way, because a good answer will name something real about the counselor without collapsing into personal disclosure that is not yours to hold.
What is the shape of the work between sessions?
Christian counselors vary in how much they assign outside of the room. Some biblical counselors will send you home with a passage to sit with and a specific practice to try before next week. Some licensed clinicians will ask you to journal, or to log a specific behavior, or to try a small experiment in a hard relationship. Some counselors assign nothing at all and treat the between-session time as fallow. None of these is wrong. What you want to know is the practice, so you can arrive next week with what the counselor asked you to bring.
What the counselor will ask you (the mirror)
The mistake most guides make is treating the vetting call as one-way, as if you are interviewing the counselor and the counselor is standing still. In practice the counselor will ask you five questions of their own in the first session, and being ready to answer them honestly is a favor to both of you. The counselor cannot help the version of you that shows up in the intake form; they can only help the version that shows up in the room.
What brought you here now, in this specific week? Not what you have been carrying for a decade. What has changed recently, what has cracked or slipped, what happened at work or in your marriage or in your prayer life that made this week the week you finally booked the call. The honest answer is often smaller than you think it is, and that is fine.
What have you already tried? Books, sermons, a friend's advice, a previous counselor, a spiritual director, medication, exercise, silence. Name what you tried and name what happened. The counselor is going to pace the early work around what has not already been tried and dismissed.
What does your relationship with God look like right now? This one usually catches people off guard, because the answer that is true is often less impressive than the answer you would give in a small group. Tell the true one. The counselor is not going to grade you, and the shape of your prayer life or the state of your reading practice is real data for the work.
Who else knows about this? Loneliness makes counseling harder. If nobody in your life knows what you brought into the room, part of the early work is going to be naming a person or two you can start to bring it to outside of the session. Naming the current answer honestly, even if the current answer is "no one," saves several weeks.
If we finished the work well, what would look different a year from now? The counselor wants a picture, not a slogan. A specific room, a specific conversation, a specific ordinary Tuesday that would go differently. That picture is going to sit somewhere on the counselor's notepad through the whole engagement, and it is the thing the two of you are going to keep coming back to.
Questions worth not asking, and what to ask instead
A few questions appear across most of the search results on this topic that do not actually screen for what they are meant to screen for. Naming them is not a criticism of the sites that recommend them; it is a note on what the question was written for and why it does not do the job it was meant to.
"Are you married? Do you have children?" This one is meant as a fit signal for readers who want a counselor who has walked through their kind of life. In practice it is a poor screen. A single counselor can do excellent marriage work, and a married counselor can miss things a good single counselor would catch. It also puts many licensed clinicians in an awkward position, because they are trained to hold personal disclosure carefully. A better version of the question is specific to the shape of what you are carrying. "Have you done substantial work with couples in the second decade of marriage where the connection has thinned?" is a real screen. "Are you married?" is not.
"Do you believe in the Bible?" Everyone will say yes, and the yes gives you nothing. The question you actually want the yes-answer to is the Scripture-in-the-room question above, which surfaces the reading practice a general belief question cannot reach.
"Are you licensed?" Fine to ask, and ask it cleanly, but a state license is a regulatory category, not a proxy for quality. Biblical counselors will often answer no, and the no by itself is not a red flag; ACBC certification and a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling are real credentials in a different regulatory category. The better version of the question is the scope question above, which surfaces whether the counselor has thought carefully about which struggles their training was built for.
If you are going as a couple
Two things change when the counseling is for the two of you. The first is that the counselor's experience with couples work is a question of its own; a strong individual counselor may be less strong at holding two people in the room at once, and asking about their recent work with couples gives you the picture you need. Something close to: "How much of your work over the last year has been with couples, and what does your engagement with a couple usually look like?"
The second is that a real couples counselor will often mix joint sessions with individual ones. Ask on the vetting call whether that is part of their practice and how they think about the balance. There is no single right ratio, and the counselor's answer will tell you a lot about how they conceive of the work.
If one of you is hesitant to make the call, name that on the intake conversation as data rather than as a hurdle to push past. Say so. A counselor who takes that seriously is a counselor who understands the room will only ever hold what both of you bring into it.
Common questions
What should I ask a Christian counselor before starting?
The most useful questions on the vetting call are the ones that surface training, theological formation, scope, referral practice, and the shape of a first session. Ask what they were trained in and where; ask how they use Scripture in the room; ask what they were built for and what they were not; ask whether they have a referral network for clinical work; and ask them to describe what a first session will actually look like. A counselor worth trusting will answer each of these in concrete terms, not aspirational ones.
How do I know if a Christian counselor is right for me?
Fit is decided on the call, not on the bio page. Listen for whether the counselor engages the specific thing you named, whether they can describe their theology in a sentence rather than a devotional, and whether they treat asking hard questions as a normal Christian practice rather than as a challenge. A right counselor will not sell to you. They will tell you honestly whether what you are carrying is the shape of work they were trained for, and they will send you elsewhere if it is not.
What questions do Christian counselors ask you in the first session?
A good first session will ask what you are hoping to see change, what has already been tried, what your relationship with God looks like in the middle of this, and who else knows about the thing you are carrying. Some counselors will ask you to name a specific goal you would like to have reached in six sessions and again in twelve. The point of the questions is orientation, not screening. Answer honestly and unrehearsed; the work goes better when the counselor is seeing the real version of you from the start.
Do Christian counselors pray with you during sessions?
Most do, and how they do it is worth asking about on the vetting call. A biblical counselor will typically open or close a session in prayer as a matter of practice; a licensed clinical practitioner who is Christian will often ask if prayer is welcome and follow the client's lead. Neither approach is more Christian than the other. If prayer is important to you, name it on the call and listen for whether the counselor's answer sounds like a considered practice or an improvised one.
The list on your screen is a script, not a scorecard. Nobody grades you on how you run the intake call, and the counselor on the other end has heard less-prepared questions from harder situations than yours. Bring the six from the vetting section on Thursday, listen for the shape of the answers more than for the exact words, and trust that a counselor worth trusting will meet the questions well. If you would prefer to have the training question, the scope question, and the referral-network question already answered before you dial anyone, that is a real part of what BetterFaith's spiritual growth service exists to handle. Get matched with a counselor and we will take it from there.
