Blog Tour Morsels, Part One: Equipping Counselors for Your Church
I’m very grateful for the many bloggers who have reviewed Equipping Counselors for Your Church. 
I’ve collated links to a dozen of the reviews and interviews. They’ll be running throughout this first week of 2012 with brief “snippets” from each review and a link back to the full review.
Today you can enjoy review “morsels” from David Murray, Brad Hambrick, and Thabiti Anyabwile.
David Murray, Top Five Books of 2011
“Bob Kellemen shifted my thinking with this visionary yet practical book. I probably don’t reach up to Bob’s optimism about this task (who could!), but he certainly made me hope and work towards a much greater role for every-member counseling ministry in the local church.”
“Bob Kellemen is one of the reasons I love America. In fact, to me he is a classic American – enthusiastic, energetic, positive, cheerful, encouraging, stimulating, pioneering, and every other good “-ing” you can think of…. I deeply appreciate Bob’s brief, clear, and no-nonsense style of writing. He doesn’t waste words in pointless theorizing, but is always aiming at the practical and the helpful. It’s not often you find such fine balance and fervent passion combined in one person!”
“Bob does not just dream big, he details small. He gets into the detailed practical steps that have to be taken. We’re not left with, “Great idea but how do we do it?” The book is full of bullet points, step-by-step guides, tabulated information, checklists, appendices and real-life case studies. And that practicality is maybe what gives the book so much credibility and persuasiveness. Bob not only draws from almost 30 years of counseling experiences in congregational settings, but has gathered together a ton of “best-practice” ideas from other pastors and churches as well.”
“Bob’s exposition of this verse (Romans 15:14) was perhaps my favorite section in his book, and powerfully persuaded me of the biblical grounds and realistic possibility of what he was advocating. This verse is a huge encouragement and challenge to the church of Christ.”
“As Bob says, ‘Everyone is a counselor. The question is really whether it’s good or bad counsel.’”
“Yes, it’s a change from thinking ‘I need to call the pastor…’ to ‘I need to call Joe or Mary, etc,’ but it’s a blessed change.”
Equipping Counselors for Your Church meets a real need in Biblical Counseling – helping churches cultivate a counseling ministry that is tailored to the needs of their particular congregation and community. Over the last several decades Biblical Counseling has produced a large number of excellent resources, but it has not always been clear what a church was supposed to do with those resources. If you want to begin to explore that possibility with your church, I cannot think of a better book to guide you in that process.”
“Counseling might be the area of pastoral ministry that most quickly produces feelings of inadequacy for pastors. The pitfalls are man. Needs are varied and often complex. The tendency toward self-reliance gets amplified when people come to you in need of answers. Yet, the resources can be few or too difficult to digest in short order. Even pastors who love counseling find themselves emotionally and spiritually drained and in need of help. Bob Kellemen has come along with a very welcome and promising resource, Equipping Counselors for Your Church.”
The Rest of the Story
Tomorrow you can read some “samplers” from Jonathan Holmes, Paul Tautges, and Andy Naselli.
Join the Conversation
What resources do you recommend for equipping one-another ministers in the local church?
Note: If you are a blogger and would like to review Equipping Counselors for Your Church, email rpm dot ministries @ gmail dot com
RPM Ministries: Equipping You to Change Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth
I am just getting into reading Equipping Counselors and can see that Dr. K has done it again. The every-member disciple-making concept definitely shifts the responsibility to one of church unity.