9 Marks and CCEF on Counseling in the Church

I really am going to return to blogging on a regular basis but have to lay low for just a little while longer. The new November/December eJournal from 9 Marks was enough to make me poke my head above ground to point others to it. It's all about counseling in the church and it looks great! Here's an excerpt from the editor's note:

We know counseling ain't easy. Polls show that most pastors prefer the pulpit to the counselor's chair. Not only are the problems people bring intractably complex and heart-rending, they consume vast quantities of time.
Yet we hope this issue of the 9Marks eJournal will do two things for you, pastor: encourage you to look for ways to bring counseling into your local church, and introduce you to an incredible resource, the individuals and materials at the Christian Counseling & Education Foundation (CCEF). Both parts of CCEF's vision statement nail it on the head: "Restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church." Is your counseling Christ-centered or moralistic? And how are you cultivating a culture of counseling and discipleship in your church?

Here are the articles (full PDF version here):

COUNSELING IN THE CHURCH

Five Advantages of Church-Based Counseling
Here are five reasons why churches shouldn't be so quick to "refer out" their counseling.
By Deepak Reju
 

Counseling and Discipleship
How are a church's ministry of counseling and discipleship related? By Deepak Reju 

Why Every Pastor-in-Training Should Read Ed's Book
Every Capitol Hill Baptist Church pastoral intern is required to read Ed Welch's book When People Are Big and God is Small. 9Marks asks Michael Lawrence why.
 

Twenty Ways to Cultivate a Culture of Counseling in Your Church
By Jonathan Leeman and Deepak Reju
 

LEARN FROM THE COUNSELING PROS AT CCEF

Looking at the Past and Present of Counseling
Can biblical counseling draw from the Puritans? How are churches today doing at counseling? What is CCEF doing that's unique? An interview with David Powlison

Cultivating a Culture of Counseling and Discipleship
Tim Lane talks about counseling from the pulpit, the ideal church, recovery groups, promoting discipleship, and more. An interview with Tim Lane

Sorting Out the Spiritual and the Physical in Counseling
Former medical doctor and now CCEF instructor Michael Emlet discusses his own background and what pastors should make of the mind-body connection in their counseling. An interview with Michael Emlet

Premarital Counseling, Pornography, and Marriage
Today's buzzword for marriages is "compatibility." But counselors and couples need more wisdom than that, especially as pornography attacks marriage like never before. An interview with Winston Smith
 

What Should Pastors Do with Fear, Medication & Addiction
Welch considers questions like, Should pastors give more thought to fear? Are psychiatric medications unbiblical? Should pastors keep their hands off the psychiatric issues? An interview with Ed Welch

A new 9 Marks interview with David Powlison in which he discusses his conversion, counseling views, and assorted books is also available for listening online or downloading here.

Goldsworthy on a Whole Bible Theology

Graeme Goldsworthy recently delivered the following Gheens Lectures at Southern Seminary entitled "And Beginning with Moses and All the Prophets: Biblical Theology in the Church, the Academy, and the Home." (HT: The Road to Emmaus)

"The Necessity and Viability of Biblical Theology" (MP3) (PDF)

"Biblical Theology in the Seminary and Bible College" (MP3) (PDF)

"Biblical Theology and Its Pastoral Application" (MP3) (PDF)

A friend in Christian education recently used an illustration that highlights the necessity of helping people grasp the Bible's big picture. "Too often," he said, "we're dropping students in the middle of the desert and having them analyze grains of sand but they have no idea where they are."

Apologetics From the Pulpit

Well, not so much apologetics as in the defense of the faith as apologizing. Peter Mead has a great post about the false though prevalent dichotomy between practical and doctrinal preaching (HT: Milton Stanley). Peter relates the lament of a well-known seminary professor over visiting speakers who introduce their messages with comments about leaving theology to the faculty and wanting to be practical.


This has been a pet peeve of mine for some time. I can't count the number of pastors I've heard on the radio and in person who've timidly prefaced doctrinal expositions with an apology to the congregation as though the explanation of biblical theology is, at best, bitter medicine and, at worst, a necessary evil. Preachers don't regularly apologize for telling jokes and stories. Why, then, do we frequently feel compelled to beg our hearers' pardon for fulfilling the God-given mandate to "give instruction in sound doctrine" (Titus 1:9)?


Peter closes with this much-needed counsel to his peers:

Don’t give the impression that some sermons are biblical, exegetical, theological, doctrinal, while others are practical, pastoral, relevant and helpful. Strive to demonstrate that both sides are really on the same side - there really is no contest.

More Than Preaching: A Vision for Shepherding People

I trace my serious interest in counseling issues to the one required course in pastoral counseling I took for my Master of Divinity degree. I distinctly remember one class session in which the professor, a professional counselor, advised us that when we moved to a new congregation as pastors, we should try to make acquaintance with two professionals in the area to whom we could refer people - a Christian physician and a Christian psychologist. The physician I understood. However, I found the assumption that as pastors we would be capable of helping people with minor squabbles but in need of referring those with serious problems to psychological experts puzzling, to say the least. Here I was at a theological institution committed to equipping its students with the necessary skills for understanding and applying the Word of God so as to address people about the most important issue in their lives, their standing with respect to God. Yet, at least in this class, the impression was being given (unintentionally, I'm sure) that that same Word was largely irrelevant to significantly helping people resolve the lesser problems of life. Unfortunately, I have spoken with students who were majoring in counseling at evangelical seminaries who have expressed disappointment that they were not taught how to make substantive use of the Scriptures in the course of counseling.

My reminiscing was stirred two days ago while reading an article from a past issue of the Journal of Biblical Counseling. It's an interview with John Street conducted by David Powlison called "Exegete the Bible; Exegete the Person" (Volume 16, Number 2, Winter 1998). At the time of the interview Dr. Street was Senior Pastor of Clear Creek Chapel in Springboro, Ohio. He's now a member of the faculty at the Master's College.

Recalling the deficiency of his own seminary training Street says:

I was trained through seminary to be a pulpit-oriented pastor. By that I mean my primary role would be that of preaching. Occasionally I would make home and hospital visits and do evangelism, but I had very little to do with individual people and their problems. What problems I did handle as a pastor were minor disagreements or marriage struggles. Basically I was taught that a pastor was not capable of handling anything else.


After I completed seminary I took biblical counseling training, which was required of me as an associate pastor. The Lord humbled me and began to place within me a real burden for not just preaching but for shepherding people. My early biblical counseling training gave me a vision for shepherding people that I had not had. In one sense I had it, but it was very impersonal and from the pulpit, ministering the Word of God to a large crowd. A colleague and I joke about this now. He says, "As I look at it, it's easy to preach. You're not going to have somebody object to what you say. But when you get into a counseling situation where you're sitting across the table from somebody and trying to minister the Word of God, and the ugliness of their sinful nature raises its head and they argue and object and make excuses and blame-shift and run away from the problem, now you're in a struggle." Preaching is not the struggle. I think it's easy compared to working through problems with people.

When asked to select one passage that anchors the way he thought about counseling in the context of Christian life and pastoral ministry, Street cited Paul's farewell to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:

In that scene he is passing the baton to the leadership of the church, a non-apostolic generation like us. When he addresses them, he's addressing me. He's saying, "Here's what I want you to do in terms of ministry." He sets his own life up as an example. In Acts 20:20 he says, "I preached publicly and then went from house to house." He talked about the fact that for three years "I went to each of you, day and night with tears." I did not have that perspective at all coming out of seminary. My view of the ministry primarily was forty hours a week in the study, some occasional administration, making some evening calls on people, hospital visits, and preaching and teaching on Sunday. That was it. The rest of the time was preparation and isolation and reading all my books. Oh, my, ministry seemed so easy from that perspective! Who wouldn't want that?


I think a lot of guys escaped to that because they were scared to deal with counseling problems. I was.

I wonder how many seminary-trained pastors could share Dr. Street's testimony. Are our seminaries equipping men to be powerful preachers but impotent physicians of the soul?

Southern Baptist Scholars on Biblical Counseling

Here's an item related to the previous post: an interview (PDF) with Daniel Akin (president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) Russell Moore (dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's School of Theology), Paige Patterson (president of Southwestern Theological Seminary) and Sam Williams (professor of Biblical Counseling at Southeastern Theological Seminary) about Southern Baptists' move toward biblical counseling.

The interview, originally published two years ago in the newsletter of Crossroads Counseling, consists of responses to the following questions:

1. How do you define the difference between biblical counseling and other models of Christian counseling (a.k.a. integration)?

2. Which approach to counseling, biblical counseling or integration, do you prefer? What aspects of doctrine and personal experience are most influential in your decision?

3. What do you believe the role of the Bible, the gospel, and the church ought to have in a distinctively biblical counseling model? What role does secular psychology have?

4. How does your school teach that biblical counseling should interact with the ministries of the church?

5. What questions would you ask a counselor you were considering referring to in order to assess whether their practice was distinctively biblical? What “red flags” are you screening for as you ask these questions?

6. Do you see any potential dangers with a church referring to integrationist counselors or using discipleship materials in their church that are from an integrationist perspective?

7. What authors and organizations do you believe are doing the best work in presenting a biblical model of counseling?

8. Why do you think secular psychology has become such an attractive alternative for many church leaders and members? Why are Southern Baptists embracing biblical counseling at this time in their history?

9. How would you envision an ideal relationship between local churches and a parachurch ministry devoted to a biblical model of counseling?

10. What final words of advice would you give to pastors as they consider matters of counseling?

Interview with the Editors of A Theology for the Church

James Hamilton Jr. posts Part I of an interview with Peter R. Schemm and David P. Nelson, the associate editors of a recently released systematic theology titled A Theology for the Church. Here are their responses to James's initial question about why pastors should continue studying theology:

DPN: ....Pastors should read theology because the ministry of the pastor, from preaching to any number of pastoral acts, is inherently theological. So, the most faithful pastors will be good theologians, and good theologians are made through years of continuous reflection of the teachings of Scripture. I think it is important, as a professor of theology in a seminary, to pursue a lifelong study of theology. How much more important, then, for a pastor, who has the responsibility to feed God’s sheep, to study theology continually. We hope A Theology for the Church will aid and enrich such study of the Scriptures.


PRS: The most compelling reason that a pastor ought to read/study theology is that it is the essence of his vocation to do so. The nature of pastoral ministry is so directly rooted in truth and doctrine that the Apostle Paul can hardly write a paragraph of the so called Pastoral Epistles without referring to something like “the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth” (Titus 1:1; cf. 1 Tim 1:3; 2 Tim 1:13). This makes sense since the church itself is “the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of truth” (1 Tim 3:15). And, it is also why so many of the great pastors throughout the history of the church were theologians—from Paul to Augustine to Luther to Fuller. It is our hope, then, that TFC will assist in forming the next generation of pastor-theologians.

The interview also addresses the benefits of encouraging lay people to study theology and suggestions for cultivating a church atmosphere in which biblical theology is valued. Thanks, James!

Twenty Years of Pastors' Conference Audio

The good folks at Desiring God Ministries have made the last twenty years of their annual pastors' conference messages (a total of 127) available online for free! Looking over the themes, I think I'll start with 2001. What a gift this is to the body of Christ. Many thanks to Dr. Piper and everyone at DGM!

Biblical Counseling Resources

I recently described an article by David Powlison as one of the most thorough treatments on the subject of lust that I've ever read. With P&R's permission, Justin Taylor is posting excerpts from a revision of that article as it appears in Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture. Here's what he's posted so far: Introduction, Question 1, Question 2, Question 3, Question 4. Do yourself a favor by reading these and forthcoming excerpts.

Tim Lane, coauthor with Paul Tripp of How People Change and Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, has been appointed as CCEF's Executive Director.

Tom Brown reflects on the church's role in the counseling process:

In the contemporary world we have all become familiar with the notion of the support group. The local church is God’s ultimate support group. But unlike the contemporary model that orders its support around habitual sin like alcoholism, gambling or gluttony, the New Testament orders its support in Jesus Christ as Lord among the visible community of forgiven sinners. The ministry aim of this community is not just to deal with the symptoms of sin but to go to the heart of the matter and deal with sin at its root. This happens when the church can competently say with Paul, “We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, that we may present every man complete in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).

The Books We Need Most

Stephen Seamands, professor of Christian doctrine at Asbury Theological Seminary, is the author of Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service which I received in the mail today. In the opening chapter he states that his reason for writing the book was "to demonstrate the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity for the vocation of ministry."

Seamands says that while there has been a resurgence of interest in trinitarian doctrine on the part of theologians over the last century, many of their writings are so abstract, dense, and theoretical that they are regarded as irrelevant by those engaged in pastoral ministry. "As a result, when they reflect theologically on their ministerial practice, they do so with very little reference to the doctrine of the Trinity." Seamands goes on to tell of a luncheon he attended years ago at which Martin Marty was the guest speaker. When asked by a faculty member what kind of Christian books are needed today, Marty replied, "So many Christian books written today are either 'theologically theological' or 'practically practical.' What we need most are books that are 'theologically practical.'"

Quentin Schultze at Trinity

Those in the vicinity of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School may be interested in this. Dr. Quentin Schultze, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College and author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart (which I've referred to here and here) and High-Tech Worship?, will be speaking this Wednesday, November 1, on Trinity's campus. The lecture is part of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding "Scripture and Ministry Lecture Series." Dr. Schultze's topic will be "Beyond the Digital Rat Race: Using Technology Wisely in Our Lives, Work, and Churches." Here's the description offered by the Center:

All of us are burdened with desires and demands to expand our technical abilities and to push for greater use of information and communication technologies in our daily lives. Yet the temptations to overuse and misuse technologies are evident all around us. How can we equip ourselves, our families, and our congregations to use email, PowerPoint, cell phones, instant messaging, personal Web sites, and other technologies appropriately?

The seminar is free, open to the public, and requires no registration. If you're anywhere in the area and your schedule allows you to attend, I encourage you to do so.

Audio archives and/or notes from past Henry Center seminars and conferences are available here.

Lee Eclov on the Dangers of Practical Preaching

Everyone who preaches or listens to sermons should check out an excellent two-part article by Lee Eclov recently posted at Out of Ur. Lee takes on two popular misconceptions about biblical preaching: The Bottom Line Fallacy and the Practical Fallacy. Both, he says, demonstrate misunderstanding not only about preaching but how Scripture works:

The Bible spends much more time on shaping the spiritual mind than commanding particular behavior. We need far more training in the ways of grace, of spiritual perceptions, and of what God is really like, than we do in how to communicate with our spouse. Understanding the glory of Christ is far more practical than our listeners imagine. Properly preached, every sermon based on a passage of Scripture is fundamentally practical. Every author of Scripture wrote to effect change in God's people. It is our job as preachers to find the persuasive logic of that author and put that clearly and persuasively before our people through biblical exposition.

Thank you, Lee!

"We Need 'Apostolic' Theologians"

I finished reading Robert Banks's Redeeming the Routines: Bringing Theology to Life last night. (OK, everything except the appendix.) As I noted last week, the premise of the book is that theology and theological education are in need of being reconceptualized so as to address the daily pressures, responsibilities, and activities that form the patterns of our lives. This is necessary to foster holistic living contrary to the inclination to divvy up our lives into two realms: the spiritually significant that consists of overtly "religious" activity and everything else with which most of our waking hours are spent but about which there is little theological reflection. Some of the things that fall into this category are sleep, work, leisure, popular attitudes and values, communicating and relating, and social rituals and activities.

I think that for many believers God only seems real when they are engaged in explicitly Christian pursuits (e.g., Bible study, devotions, worship, evangelism, etc.). The project Banks contends for is remedial. He is right to stress the necessity of vocation-specific discipleship. Each of us is called to follow Jesus in the midst of specific regularities of life and we need to help each other think about and live out what faithfulness looks like in those contexts.


For years I've had one foot in the world of academic theology and the other in pastoral ministry. Each has elements that delight and frustrate me. I've sat in lectures wondering what relevance the subject matter at hand had for people in my church and how I would begin to convey its importance and application to them. Banks, a theologian himself, says that he has found the work of systematic theologians to be as much frustrating as helpful because: "Once it ranges beyond central doctrinal concerns which, though they could be, are not frequently linked to everyday issues, it tends to focus on philosophical or broader social or cultural issues." Banks properly notes that such theorizing is often necessary and helpful for addressing everyday but laments that such connections are infrequently made.

If theological education and literature can err on the side of being too abstract and conceptual, pastoral and church ministry can make the opposite error of focusing so much on immediate practicality that critical reflection is considered a waste of time that stands in the way of the urgent work of the kingdom.

I would very much like to invest my life in being a small bridge between these two subcultures in the community of faith so I was encouraged and challenged by Banks's call for what he calls "apostolic" theologians:

We need "apostolic" theologians who will leave their desk and lectern for a more down-to-earth kind of life. While there are few theologians who do not practice what they preach in some measure, there are very few who are engaged in similar work, say, to someone like Paul. That is, in apologetic and evangelistic work, in church-planting and pastoring, in pioneering new models of education and training. The apostolic theologian, of which Paul was the first great exponent, places mission first and largely allows theological reflection to be generated by that. Learning goes on as people associate with him or her in that activity-observing, questioning, and imitating. There is no reason why many Christians cannot be involved with such a person and why many of their concerns cannot be dealt with in this setting. The trouble is that taking up the "apostolic" theological life entails a large drop in status and high degree of risk.

Powlison on Praying Beyond Health Concerns

Our petitions are windows into our priorities or, put another way, what consumes our prayers consumes our hearts. In a recent article at 9 Marks, David Powlison, no stranger to health problems, gives valuable counsel for remedying a common ailment of congregational life - so much of our praying never gets beyond requests for physical healing. Powlison believes that this is due, in part, to the prayers often modeled by pastors:

Such public prayers may be medically informative, but they are spiritually impoverished. They usually center on physical healing. And they typically amount to nothing more than requests for effective doctors, procedures, and medicines.

Visitors of many churches might be pardoned if they get the impression that God is chiefly interested in perking up our health, and that radiant physical fitness is our greatest need. They might also be pardoned for thinking that God can’t do what we ask, because so many chronic illnesses remain unhealed.

Powlison's point isn't that we shouldn't pray for healing but that we should frame those requests in the context of broader biblical priorities which he reminds us of from James 5 and other passages on sickness and prayer. "Is God interested in healing illnesses?," he asks, "Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Yet he is always interested in making his children wise, holy, trusting, and loving, even in the context of pain, disability, and death."

Powlison's provides profitable instruction and encouragement to those who are sick and those praying with and for them.

Why Don't Preachers Preach?

Doug Groothuis asks that and other unsettling questions about the state of contemporary preaching. I suspect that the answer to many of his questions is, "They want to keep their jobs."

Related: So You Want to Be a Pastor? Be Something Else First by S. M. Hutchens

When Gaining Weight is Good: Redefining Ministry Success

In a recent conversation with fellow Free Church pastor Lee Eclov, I mentioned this interview with Richard Foster and Dallas Willard about spiritual formation. That prompted Lee to paraphrase something Willard said in the Summer '05 issue of Leadership Journal about how pastors measure success. Lee was kind enough to forward the exact quote later that day and I'd like to share it with you. Here it is:

Pastors need to redefine success. The popular model of success involves the ABCs—attendance, buildings, and cash. Instead of counting Christians, we need to weigh them. We weigh them by focusing on the most important kind of growth…fruit in keeping with the gospel and the kingdom.

To the Tune of "Yes, Jesus Loves Me"

Yes, God ac-cepts me,

Yes, God ac-cepts me,

Yes, God ac-cepts me,

My e-go tells me so.

That's the ditty the majority of Americans are singing to themselves, according to a new national survey conducted by the Barna Group.

Currently, nine out of ten adults (88%) feel “accepted by God.” Barna listed a pair of interesting correlations related to that self-image. First, about one-third of the individuals who feel accepted by God do not consider themselves to be deeply spiritual. Second, people are twice as likely to feel accepted by God as they are to be born again – a condition that, many Protestant leaders argue, is a key reflection of God’s forgiveness and ultimate acceptance.

Some other interesting findings:

• Four out of every five adults (82%) say they are “clear about the meaning and purpose” of their life
• The younger a person is, the less likely they are to trust the Bible as their source of moral guidance or to believe that absolute moral truth exists.
• The younger a respondent was the less likely he or she was to claim to be deeply spiritual.
• African-American adults, who generally emerge as the ethnic segment most deeply committed to the Christian faith, were substantially less likely than either whites or Hispanics to have a biblical worldview. In total, just 1% of black adults met the criteria, compared to 6% among whites and 8% among Hispanics. (Less than one-tenth of one percent of Asians possesses a biblical worldview.)

George Barna had the following to say about popularity as it relates to Christian publishing and pastoral ministry (I wonder what title he had in mind):

Most of the bestsellers have focused on meaning, purpose, security and the end times.....While there have been theological views expressed in those books, very few popular books have helped people to think clearly and comprehensively about their core theology. Consequently, most born again Christians hold a confusing and inherently contradictory set of religious beliefs that go unchecked by the leaders and teachers of their faith community.

Our studies consistently show that churches base their sense of success on indicators such as attendance, congregant satisfaction, dollars raised and built-out square footage. None of those factors relates to the kind of radical shift in thinking and behavior that Jesus Christ died on the cross to facilitate. As long as we measure success on the basis of popularity and efficiency, we will continue to see a nation filled with people who can recite Bible stories but fail to live according to Bible principles.

I agree with Barna on both points and they're obviously related. The tendency to measure success in terms of numbers leads many pastors to promote whatever Christian book is "hot" (or "blessed of God," to sound more spiritual) in their congregations and thus the cycle continues. Christian publishing is like television. Countless voices decry its deleterious effects but the producers (and publishers) are only giving the public what it craves.

What Then Shall We Read?

George Barna's findings about which books are having the greatest influence on pastors is stirring much-needed conversation about the general reading habits of Christians and the state of Christian publishing.

Peter Bogert at Stronger Church is asking for book titles pastors should recommend to their congregations. The categories he's looking for are: Bible reference, basic theology reference, God and salvation, following Christ, and home and vocation. Peter will post the results on his blog and Tim Challies will likely post them at Diet of Bookworms. Chime in with your suggestions.

What Are Pastors Reading?

Through sleep-deprived eyes I read the results of George Barna's most recent survey while waiting to board my 6 AM flight yesterday. The survey asked pastors what three books, read over the last three years, had the most influence on them. I was thinking about blogging on the findings but will direct you to Tim Challies' thoughts on the matter [HT: Between Two Worlds]. Tim asks, "If pastors don't read theology, who does?" and makes the following disturbing observation:

It seems obvious that the trend away from theology begins at the leadership level and filters down through the church. If only 9% of pastors have been influenced by a theological book in the past three years, how much less the average layperson?