Be The Fruit

Why should the local church counsel?

by Bill Blair on 04/09/09 at 10:16 am

In the modern church, counseling is thought to be something left for “professionals” to handle.  After all, they have a license issued by the state that says they are qualified to counsel, right?

With this prevailing mindset you may ask, “Why should the local church counsel?Are not the licensed people the best and most qualified to do the job?  Isn’t the church supposed to focus on preaching and holding worship services?

To begin to answer some of these questions, I point you to a new article by Tim Lane with CCEF titled “Four Reasons to Incorporate Counseling Into the Local Church” posted here.  See the following excerpt with his first reason:

Consistency: the word “counseling” is a very distracting word because for the past 100 years, it is a word that has been associated with secular therapy. But the word “counsel” is a word that is found all throughout the Bible. Just take Psalm 1 for instance. Notice that there are two forms of counsel; godly and ungodly. Godly counsel has its foundations in Scripture and ungodly counsel is at odds with Scripture. Godly counsel is rooted in the truths of Scripture that ultimately point to Christ. That is why we would never consider any text other than the Bible forming the foundation of the preaching ministry of the church. Yet, we often evidence inconsistency when we are unwisely willing to let anything other than the Scriptures form the foundation of interpersonal or counseling ministry in the church. A church should counsel if it wants consistency from pulpit to pew.

Read the rest of the article and keep up with the series. I have much more I could and will say about this topic, but hopefully this gets you started thinking about why the church should counsel.