A biblical counseling ministry in your church? Yes! Joshua Waulk, director of Baylight Counseling, list 5 reasons for church-based biblical counseling ministry. Biblical Counseling Center offers LAUNCH, a one-year plan to get an effective counseling center up and running at your church. This article appeared first here on Baylight Counseling’s website.
Here are five reasons why every local church ought to embrace biblical counseling ministry:
1 Underlying Foundation: Bible
The underlying foundations of secular psychology, to which the church has turned for healing of mental health syndromes, are often bathed in humanism, materialism, Darwinian evolution, and other anti-Gospel world views. Biblical counseling ministry adheres to a biblical worldview.
2 Recognizing Differences Between Sin and Suffering
Contrary to popular belief, the biblical counseling movement recognizes the differences between sin and suffering, as well as the venues out of which mental disorders may arise (volitional, environmental, or biological).
3 Body AND Soul
Biblical counseling embraces that people have a body and a soul, and that some emotional problems do indeed have an organic component. Thus, they may require medical intervention.
4 More Than Behavior Modification
As biblical counseling is deeply rooted in Christian discipleship, it is evangelistic in nature. It is concerned with leading the counselee into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ, rather than with mere behavior modification or symptom alleviation.
5 Belongs in and to the Church
Biblical counseling holds that counseling ministry belongs in and to the church. Therefore, it seeks to equip and mobilize the church to fulfill the command to “bear one another’s burdens.” This role has been lost on the church with the advent of secular psychotherapy.
Your Turn
Would you add any reasons of your own to this list? If so, what would they be? Does you church have a biblical counseling ministry? How would one help the people in your church and community?
Scripture: Genesis 2:7; Romans 15:14; Galatians 6:2
