FAMILY MATTERS
November 2008
“Let Me Introduce Myself”
Greetings everyone. I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Pastor Baker for the opportunity to bring to life something that has been on my heart now for about a year. I am excited that he has given me the OK to develop a fledgling teaching ministry via a link on the church’s website. I hope it will be God-honoring and will be a blessing to some of you each and every month.
Each and every month, on or around the first of that month, I will submit a topic related to Christian Counseling as it relates to topics real Christians face, and who, on occasion, seek counseling. Secular counseling varies from Christian counseling, but you’d be surprised at how little they vary one from the other. I call this ministry “Family Matters” because everything that an individual in the family goes through, affects the family as a whole.
I completed my Masters degree in Christian counseling from Liberty University in April of 2008. I also took extra classes to earn a concentration in Marriage and Family Studies. I decided to forego the internship portion of my degree because I never wanted to be licensed by the state, which would have been a requirement for going into private practice. My focus will be more on teaching, lecturing, and writing on the subject of counseling and marriage and family matters.
I delayed in launching this web-page because I was finishing writing what I pray will be my first of several books on marriage and family issues. I ask for your prayers regarding this endeavor, as my book is currently being edited by an editor as well as Pastor Baker, who is focusing on making sure my Bible exhortations in the book are Scripturally accurate. Like so many people, I entered marriage with many problems and I entered marriage with wrong expectations. My wife, Sherri, and I struggled greatly at the onset and things went terribly bad. Only when I reached my lowest point and allowed God to work in my marriage, did things improve. I was encouraged by several people, including professors at Liberty and some other people I have met over the years, to write my testimony in the hopes it will benefit others.
It’s my hope that this ministry will allow me to share some insights people may need regarding multitudes of issues. Over the next several months, I plan to tackle subjects such as how to handle addictions, whether the 12-step self-help groups are good for Christians, vocational testing and how it relates to the call of God in one’s life, and many other topics. Also, I have the site set up with a “Questions & Comments” tab that will allow for questions and comments about what would be topics you would like help with. An archive will hold past months, and a “resources” tab will house papers I have submitted during my years at Liberty that will relate to what I am speaking about for that particular month.
I would welcome your comments and constructive criticisms to help me improve as time goes on. But I do want to take this time right now to give you an indication of what you can expect from this ministry. I will look at all issues from the point of view that the Bible is the first and foremost authority by which a Christian counselor should counsel. 2nd Timothy 3:14-17 is why I believe Christian counseling should be Biblically based. But not all Christian counselors use the Bible exclusively. Many practitioners today integrate psychology and theology when treating the Church.
The leading governing body among Christian counselors today is the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC). Their mission statement reads in part, “…It is our intention to equip clinical, pastoral, and lay care-givers with Biblical truth AND psycho-social insights…” I contend that if a particular counseling strategy is antithetical to Scripture, it doesn’t belong in Christian counseling (and most leading Christian counselors agree). But I would also suggest that if a particular counseling strategy falls in line with Biblical truths, then it’s OK to continue. After all, it’s pretty much a case of an old idea (God’s idea) being repackaged and called new.
The problem lies when discernment fails and seemingly harmless or well-meaning approaches to helping people end up bringing a person farther away from God and on the way to worse shape than when they began counseling. So here’s where I come in. I have spent the last five years speaking out against psychological heretics in as many of my papers as I could. I had, in the past, been blasted by some of my own professors when I took stands on counseling issues I felt were outside to realm of the Bible. Depression, addictions, homosexuality, to name a few, are relabeled, even among Christian counselors as diseases or genetic pre-dispositions and the literature, even among conservative counselors, is geared toward treating people from that slant.
There is a falling away from giving people the sense of personal responsibility for their actions that the Bible calls sin. Much of what I was taught at Liberty involved learning the classical theorists such as Freud and Jung. My whole premise that will ring throughout this ministry with every issue I take up will be this…Carl Jung, for example, did not believe in God. In fact, he believed religion to be a cause of mental illness. Therefore, he came up with a theory, based on psychoanalysis, to explain people’s tendency to be the way they are and how to treat such people. The Bible explains the depravity of man as being caused by man’s sin nature. The Bible is clear on how to treat the sin nature, and once the person is indwelt with the Holy Spirit, they can begin the work of sanctification and much of the “mental illness” and psychological distress can be treated God’s way once discernment is possible in the life of the believer. So how can a counselor, Christian or otherwise, but especially a Christian counselor, use treatment techniques from theorists that don’t even begin with the true origin of the problems in one’s life?
And there’s my desire. I want to study the Scriptures and counsel people dealing with their issues from the Bible. It may sound simple and too basic, “but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (1st Corinthians 1:27). Too many scholars nowadays are “enlightened.” I hate that word. Enlightened in my mind is synonymous with ignorant. I want to reveal the errors in Christian counseling and Christian psychology that have arisen through the enlightenment of learned men and women, who teach at the universities, where young men and women are trained in the field and who counsel the individuals in ways that are a mixture of godly wisdom and man’s wisdom, thus permeating the church as a whole with watered down ideas of what constitutes mental health and how to achieve such a state. May God help us to get back to basics and not have “itching ears.”
