Churches' Ministerial Counselling Service 

Ministry can bring its own stresses, and ministers are not exempt from the other problems of everyday life arising from family and personal circumstances. It is not always appropriate to seek support from a colleague or a Regional Minister. In this instance, the Churches’ Ministerial Counselling Service (CMCS) can provide confidential independent help.
 
The CMCS provides professional counselling at a heavily subsidised cost. The service is accessed anonymously, with no records available to any regional association or Baptist Union staff concerning who uses the service. To preserve confidentiality, requests for counselling should therefore go directly to CMCS and not to a regional association or the Baptist Union.

Those eligible for support from the CMCS are: Accredited Ministers, Ministers-in-Training at a Baptist college, Recognised Local Ministers, Nationally Recognised Pastors, as well as adult members of their households. (Members of staff of a BUGB Specialist Team are similarly eligible, whether ministers or not.)
 
A fuller explanation of how CMCS operates and how help may be accessed can be found on the CMCS website.

Churches’ Ministerial Counselling Service – 30 year anniversary

“CMCS was launched on 1 September, 1996. The launch was featured in the religious press, but apart from that it was a very quiet birth.” These words were part of an address given at the 10th anniversary event in London.  The full text is available from the CMCS website.

All the larger organisations and some of the smaller ones participating in CMCS at the start and after ten years are still involved, and several more have joined since then.  

The number of CMCS counsellors at the ten-year point was 268. Counselling then was almost always in person. The number of CMCS counsellors is now around 160. With relevant technology (such as Zoom) improving and gaining popularity during and after the pandemic, remote counselling has become more routine and availability of CMCS counsellors is rarely an issue. 
In the years leading up to the tenth anniversary, the number of people receiving counselling through CMCS was 150 to 170 per year. Over the last five years, the number of people being matched to CMCS counsellors by our Area Co-ordinators has been an average of 375 per year.