Equipped to Counsel 

Note: The following post is featured at the Biblical Counseling Coalition’s Grace & Truth blog site. It is Part 2 of a unique six-part series where six pastors summarize six different ways of equipping biblical counselors in six different churches. 

You can also read Part One by Pastor Deepak Reju: How We Do Biblical Counseling Training in Our Community. 

The Résumé of the Biblical Counselor: The 4Cs

In Equipping Counselors for Your Church, I ask readers to imagine that they are forwarding their résumé to the Holy Spirit, the Divine Counselor. If you did that, what qualifications would you highlight to demonstrate your eligibility to enter the ranks of biblical counselors? What do the Scriptures say? What qualifies a person for biblical counseling? What qualities make your trainees eligible to claim the mantle of soul physician and spiritual friend?

Fortunately, for those of us who train biblical counselors, the Apostle Paul already completed the résumé.

“I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another” (Romans 15:14).

In this verse, the surrounding context, and other biblical passages, we discover the four résumé qualifications of an equipped biblical counselor. They supply the biblical counseling equipping goals and objectives that I have sought to meet in all three churches where I have equipped God’s people.

Read the rest of this post at the Biblical Counseling Coalition: Equipping Counselors for Your Church.

3 More Free Disciple-Making Resources from Equipping Counselors for Your Church

Note: This is the third in a series of posts where I’m giving away free resources from the Appendix of my book Equipping Counselors for Your Church. For links to the first three resources, visit Part One and for links to another seven resources, visit Part Two.  

Appendix 5.1: A Formal Vote

In Equipping Counselors for Your Church, I explain that whether or not your church government is congregational, there are benefits that arise from having your congregation affirm the launch of your formal biblical counseling ministry (see chapter 5). Appendix 5.1: Formal Vote/Affirmation provides sample wording for such congregational affirmation.

Appendix 6.1: Biblical Counseling Information Packet

Chapter 6 of Equipping Counselors for Your Church highlights the “enlisting” process. Appendix 6.1: Biblical Counseling Information Packet is a twenty-page document with seven forms that provide what you need to enlist and “recruit” people to your biblical counseling ministry.

Appendix 7.1: Biblical Counseling Goals and Objectives

Chapter 7 of Equipping Counselors for Your Church details the biblical goals of a biblical counseling equipping ministry. Appendix 7.1: Biblical Counseling Goals and Objectives summarizes those goals and objectives.

Enjoy!

Coming Soon

Our fourth and final set of Appendix resources from Equipping Counselors for Your Church will include five Appendix documents, including the robust Biblical Counseling Ministry Policy and Procedure Manual.

Join the Conversation

How have you selected and enlisted people for “formal” biblical counseling training in your church?

Brad Hambrick Reviews Equipping Counselors for Your Church

Do you want to see your church develop a biblical counseling ministry, but don’t know where to begin? Do you feel like you don’t know what questions you would need to ask or who would need to be in the room as you seek to answer them? Are you worried about the logistics and liabilities that would arise as you sought to launch this kind of ministry initiative?

A Book You Need to Read

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Dr. Kellemen has put together a book you need to read. Not only does he draw upon his own years of experience as a pastor (both associate of counseling and senior pastor) and as a professor teaching counseling in seminary, he draws upon the best practices from two dozen counselors who have led counseling ministries in the local church or parachurch setting.

Throughout Equipping Counselors for Your Church these two dozen counselors comment about their experience in creating counseling ministries at each stage of the process. In effect, it’s a little like a recovery group meeting. Dr. Kellemen teaches the main lesson which articulates the key aspects of one leg in the journey. Then each counselor gives a testimony about their successes, failures, and key life lessons on that point.

The result is a robust resource that provides detailed guidance without succumbing to a one-size-fits-all counseling model. Rather than giving a step-by-step process to a predetermined outcome, Dr. Kellemen takes you through a question-by-question process to determine what expressions of a counseling ministry would best fit your church and community.

A Small Word, But a Big Distinction

One of the primary emphases of this book is that it advocates for churches to become “a church of biblical counseling” rather than “a church with a biblical counseling ministry.” The difference is significant. A church with a biblical counseling ministry will see its counseling ministry serve exclusively as an “ER” of crisis cases that remained hidden until they were bursting with complexity.

A church of biblical counseling becomes more equipped and prepared to handle such crisis cases, but the counseling ministry interacts with the rest of the church (as a part of the disciple-making process) so that more individuals and families receive care before their struggles become life-dominating. The honesty and transparency of a counseling relationship begins to trickle into the life of the church to a degree that members are “doing life together” in Christian community.

The 4 E’s

If I were reading this review, I would want to know what the 4 E’s were. In keeping with the power-packed, highly-concentrated nature of the book, Dr. Kellemen was able to squeeze five E’s into his four E strategy: (1) Envisioning God’s Ministry, (2) Enlisting God’s Ministers for Ministry, (3) Equipping Godly Ministers for Ministry, and (4) Empowering/Employing Godly Ministers for Ministry.

If you look at those categories and find yourself thinking, “That seems like a process that could be used for any ministry,” then you are beginning to catch the value of this book. Dr. Kellemen is not spending a large amount of time teaching you a foreign process to develop a counseling ministry. If that were the case, you would have to teach your congregation the process and then begin creating the counseling ministry. However, because the book is built around sound, biblical leadership methods, a church that has launched other effective ministries will have no problem utilizing this resource.

What you will find in each E are the key questions and implications that need to be asked for developing a counseling ministry. For the pastor, elder, or other local church leader this should be very comforting. You will find guidance for what you don’t know within the framework with which you are familiar.

A Sample

Counseling can be intimidating. If you are not slightly over-whelmed at the thought of starting a counseling ministry, you may lack the humility necessary to be a good counselor. With that in mind, one of the most effective ways I can conclude this review is to give you a sample from the book on one of counseling’s most intimidating subjects—legal liability.

On his ministry blog, Dr. Kellemen recently posted a six part series on “The Law and Church Counseling.” If you want to know the quality and type of resource you would be getting in Equipping Counselors for Your Church, I would encourage you to preview these posts.

• The Law and Church Counseling: Part One – Caring Carefully

• The Law and Church Counseling: Part Two – The Legal History and Climate

• The Law and Church Counseling: Part Three – Scope of Care

• The Law and Church Counseling: Part Four – Quality of Care

• The Law and Church Counseling: Part Five – Building Safeguards Into Your Ministry

• The Law and Church Counseling: Part Six – Counting the Cost

Other sample resources include:

• The book video trailer as a blog post.

• The book video trailer on YouTube.

• Link to a free sample chapter.

• Link to Equipping Counselors home page with several free resources. 

Meeting a Real Need in Biblical Counseling

This book 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.

Note: This post originally appeared at Brad Hambrick’s ministry website. You can also read it there at Equipping Counselors for Your Church. 

Brad Hambrick, Th.M., Brad is Pastor of Counseling at The Summit Church (Durham, NC) (www.summitrdu.com). Brad also serves as a Council Board member with the Biblical Counseling Coalition and Chief Editor for The Journal of Counseling & Discipleship with the Association of Biblical Counselors. Brad has been married to his wife Sallie since 1999 and has two wonderful boys.

Quotes of Note: What Makes Biblical Counseling Biblical? Part 1

The following “Quotes of Note” are from Chapter Eight of Equipping Counselors for Your Church. This chapter focuses on what makes biblical counseling truly biblical. For quotes from Chapter One, read God’s Grand Vision for His Church. For quotes from Chapter Two, read Knowing and Loving Those We Serve and Equip. For quotes from Chapters Three and Four read Christ’s Compelling Calling. For quotes from Chapter Five read My First Priority in Ministry. For quotes from Chapter Six read Mobilizing Ministers. For quotes from Chapter Seven read The Résumé of the Biblical Counselor.

• The Bible is the Soul Physician’s Desk Reference (SPDR) manual for dispensing grace.

• God’s Word provides not only the latest, but the eternal, enduring information on the soul’s design and disease, as well as its care and cure.

• For equipping in biblical counseling, the Bible not only guides the curriculum, it is our curriculum.

• Ask, “To speak the truth in love, what do biblical counselors need to know, do, and be in the context of community (love)?”

• Three biblical categories form the core of biblical counseling: people, problems, and solutions.

• If your trainees are to understand people created in God’s image, they first must understand the One in whose image people are created.

• As you develop your biblical counseling curriculum and content related to the Bible, ask, “How do my trainees need to view and use God’s Word in order to speak the truth in love?”

• We must communicate to our trainees by how we live and by how we counsel that God’s Word is absolutely necessary and totally sufficient (2 Timothy 3:16-17) for addressing all matters of the soul.

• Our trainees need to feast on God’s Word. They need to develop the conviction that the deepest questions in the human soul are God-questions, and that we find our deepest answers in God’s Word.

• Our equipping should help our trainees to share Paul’s certainty that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3-10).

• If our trainees are to use the Bible to nourish hungry souls, they must hear the Bible’s story the way God tells it. And God tells it in story form, as a narrative of relationship.

• Our trainees need to understand that their biblical counseling will be sterile and dead if they see the Bible as a textbook. But if they read and use the Bible as the story of the battle to win our hearts, then their biblical counseling will come alive.

• We want to communicate that the Word of God is profound—it deeply addresses the real life issues of real people in a really messy world.

• Create in your trainees the longing to share Christ’s changeless truth to change people’s lives.

• We need to train biblical counselors to use the Bible in relationally relevant ways.

• The Bible is our relational manual written by the most relational Being in the Universe.

• Through exploring the eternal community within the Trinity, our trainees begin to see that they must relate soul-to-soul because God is Trinitarian (John 1; John 17).

• A person’s image of God is central to their growth in grace.

• The goal of biblical counseling is our inner life increasingly reflecting the inner life of Christ.

• Our goal is not simply symptom relief, but Christlikeness.

• Equip your trainees to be soul-u-tion-focused, not solution-focused.

• As you develop your curriculum and content in this area, ask, “How do my trainees need to view suffering and sin in order to counsel people with compassion and discernment?”

• Ask, “What comprehensive understanding of salvation do my trainees need to grasp in order to counsel people toward progressive sanctification?”

• Our trainees need to understand that biblical counseling applies our salvation, comprehensively understood, to our progressive sanctification.

• How do people change? By applying justification, reconciliation, regeneration, and redemption to their daily lives.

• Our trainees need to think biblically about progressive sanctification.

• Trainees need to understand the process of growth of grace, including issues such as mind renewal, putting on/putting off, and the spiritual disciplines.

• Trainees need to know that sanctification is neither a self-improvement project or an individual process. We grow in community. Our trainees need the big picture of the relationship of biblical counseling to the rest of the life of the church.

• Heaven is not only the end of suffering and sinning. Heaven is the motivation for endurance of suffering today and for fighting against sin today.

• The comprehensive biblical insights of the soul physician must morph together with the compassionate, competent Christian engagement of the spiritual friend.

• Biblical counseling is not either/or: either a brilliant but uncaring soul physician, or a loving but unwise spiritual friend. God calls our trainees to be wise and loving soul physicians and spiritual friends.

• Pastoral care is defective unless it can deal thoroughly both with the evils we have suffered and with the sins we have committed.

• Historically, biblical counseling has always dealt with both suffering and sin.

Join the Conversation 

What makes biblical counseling truly biblical?

Quotes of Note: Christ’s Compelling Calling 

The following “Quotes of Note” are from Chapters Three and Four of Equipping Counselors for Your Church. These chapters focus on crafting a biblical mission and vision for your biblical counseling ministry. For quotes from Chapter One, read God’s Grand Vision for His Church. For quotes from Chapter Two, read Knowing and Loving Those We Serve and Equip. 

• “MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”—Ernest Shackleton

• “GOD’S PEOPLE WANTED FOR ARDUOUS JOURNEY. No human wages, but the internal reward of joy and the eternal reward of hearing, ‘Well done!’ Bitter cold and long months of complete darkness because servanthood is lonely. Safe return of your spirit guaranteed. Complete safety doubtful because in this world we will have tribulation, and all who attempt to lead a godly life will be persecuted. Honor and recognition guaranteed from God. Henceforth there is laid up for you the crown of righteousness.”—Your Elders

• The ways we typically invite people to do church and be the church are not compelling enough.

• We cater to consumers with eye-candy instead of challenging Christians to live courageously for Christ.

• Avoid the tired method of recruiting people to fill an opening. Instead, recruit people to a compelling mission and vision.

• Vision catching and casting is not about catering to consumers; rather it challenges committed Christians to follow Christ for God’s glory.

• Envisioning involves a biblically-based, Christ-centered, God-focused process of determining God’s will for our congregation in our community.

• Envisioning involves leaders and members together searching God’s Word for His wisdom for their ministry.

• Envisioning involves searching the Scriptures to become captivated by God’s specific calling for our church in our community for God’s glory.

• Mission is our universal calling—where God wants us. Vision is our unique future—where God is leading us. Passion is our captivating identity—who we are as we serve Christ together. Commission addresses how, in practice, we fulfill our mission, vision, and passion.

• Mission tells us where we should be according to God’s Word. Vision pictures where God is leading us. Passion tells us who we are on our journey. Commission provides the road map to travel from the present to the future.

• A biblical mission provides the theological foundation for ministry. It is God’s compass pointing true north.

• Vision orients your congregation to your sovereign gifting and to the profound thirst of your community.

• When Disney opened the Epcot Center in Florida, someone leaned over to Mike Vance, Creative Director of Disney Studios, and whispered, “It’s really too bad that Walt didn’t live to see this.” To which Vance replied, “He did see it. That’s why it’s here.”

• Passion communicates what we will die for and therefore what we will live for. Passion is our ultimate purpose statement.

• Commission provides the strategy for how you will get from here to there, how you will “pull it off,” and how you will keep your ministry going and growing. Picture the commission statement as a signpost, directional markers, or a GPS. It is your MAP—Ministry Action Plan.

Join the Conversation

Which quote about Christ’s compelling calling resonates with you the most? Why?

Quotes of Note: Knowing and Loving Those We Serve and Equip

The following “Quotes of Note” are from Chapter Two of Equipping Counselors for Your Church. Chapter Two focuses on knowing our congregation and community before serving our congregation and community. For Quotes of Note from Chapter One, read God’s Grand Vision for His Church. 

• We have to know and love our congregation before we can serve and equip our congregation effectively.

• We have to be a community before we can reach our community.

• We have to be in our community before we can reach our community.

• Biblical counselors are soul physicians who understand people, diagnoses problems, and prescribes solutions—biblically. We are also church cardiologists who understand our church and community, diagnose the heart condition of the culture in which we minister, and prescribes God’s cures—biblically.

• A relationship with the transforming Person (Christ) leads to transforming leaders (you and your team) relationally leading a transforming process (The 4E Ministry Training Strategy) that the Spirit uses to transforms your church (the Body of Christ) so others (the congregation and community) are also transformed into disciple-makers.

• We can’t attempt to examine the heart health of others if we are not turning first to the ultimate Soul Physician (Christ) and to mutual spiritual friends (the Body of Christ) to examine our own heart condition.

• Before we catch God’s future vision we must first diagnose the past history and current condition of our congregation and community.

• In John 3-4, Jesus models for us that the message is always the same, but the methods and means of communication vary because of the personal and cultural differences of the specific audience.

• In Acts 17, Paul offers their culture a biblical message in a culture-specific manner.

• Paul is not culturally-influenced; he is culturally-informed so he can be a culture-influencer for Christ.

• In a culturally-informed manner we influence our culture for Christ by relating Christ’s changeless truth to our changing times.

• The Bible teaches that we are responsible to apply Christ’s universal calling in culturally-informed ways in our particular ministry context.

• We open our hearts to experience the pain of the hopelessness of our society. We open our eyes to know our society, listening to their earthly story. We open our mouths to share Christ as society’s only hope. We open the Word to explain Scripture, sharing God’s eternal story.

• If you are going to assess how ready your church is for the relational ministry of speaking the truth in love, then your mindset must be relational connection, not data collection.

• Engaging in spiritual conversations about spiritual weakness is never easy. However, it is necessary. When Jesus addressed the seven churches of Asia Minor, He pulled no punches in exposing their sin.

• God calls us to be a church of biblical counseling to our community for His glory.

• We must diagnose our congregation and community’s readiness, health, and fitness compared to Christ’s vision for His Church. If we don’t, then our application of God’s truth will sound more like us than like how Christ wants us to communicate His timeless truth.

• There’s nothing Christ-centered about communicating truth with a “my-way-or-the-highway” mentality.

Join the Conversation 

Which quote about knowing and loving our congregation and community resonates with you the most? Why?