Improving the MQ for Pastoral Counseling at Hesed Counseling Ministries to Benefit Pro-Life Victims of Pro-Abortionist Violence

Biblical Christianity has ubiquitously denounced abortion. Unfortunately, an unprecedented number of physical attacks on the pro-ministry’s volunteers and properties have resulted in traumatic experiences. Counseling services are the natural recommendation for these volunteers thereafter. However, secular counselors are often incongruent with the values of the pro-life ministry. Hesed Counseling Ministries offers counseling services for pro-life volunteers. As a group of solution-focused practitioners, they utilize the miracle-question (MQ). To create a counseling milieu congruent to the unique subculture of the pro-life ministry, they created their own MQ. It was bereft of the voices and verbiage of the pro-life ministry. Therefore, the goal of this project was to create a research-based MQ (RMQ) derived from their voices. Three qualified participants were recruited to create the RMQ. Their qualifications were as follows: they experienced the trauma; they questioned their safety in the ministry, yet they remained in the ministry, growing spiritually through the experience. Their voices were derived from their own created MQ written as they would have liked it posed to them after their trauma. Then, through retrospective journaling, they listed the important elements of their spiritual growth from that time. Afterward, through in-depth interviews, they articulated the connection between their retrospective journaling elements and their MQs. After triangulating the data, their experiences provided data whereby six themes emerged that were included in RMQ. Post-test data indicates that the RMQ was 30 percent more helpful than Hesed’s MQ and 60 percent more helpful than de Shazer’s MQ.