Dr. Daniel Shen is the senior pastor at Detroit Chinese Alliance Church. I had the privilege of doing pastoral internship under him during the summer of 2014. One area of his work is family and marriage counseling. As a great listener, he helped many couples recover from their relational obstacles. I interviewed him for this paper on Sep 24th 4:00-5:00pm.
The families Pastor Shen works with are mostly first generation Chinese immigrants. Most of them were highly educated engineers working for automobile companies around Detroit. Nuclear families are the common family type.
The interview was structured under four questions provided by Dr. Larry Wegner. The responses are summarized into the categories respectively.
Challenges of families
There are mainly three…show more content… The new families are mostly entering a new level of their marriage. The couples have many things in common. They were trained in Mainland China and came to the States for higher education. After the trainings, they started to settle down and build new families. As the one child policy generation, both of the couple may need time to mature. Pastor Shen usually will help them to identify their responsibilities and help them establish communication habits. With proper pastoral care and counseling, most of the cases ended up well, with stronger marriage and more mature couples.
Older couples: About 10 years ago, there are some cases need pastoral counseling. Usually, the couples saw Pastor Shen have internal problems. Either the husband or the wife has his/her own psychological disorders. Their marriages suffered because of the dysfunctions of one party. Because of the complexity of the cases, often they have high willingness for help but low willingness to change. The counseling sessions will end up with bad results. Their situations do not change