Be The Fruit

About

You can read more about the inspiration for the site here.

Personal

My name is Bill Blair. I was born July 5, 1974 in Anderson, Indiana.  I now live in Nashville, Tennessee with my lovely wife Jennifer, and my two beautiful daughters Allison and Sarah. I am currently working as home-builder in the area in a business that I started about 10 years ago.

Read my Testimony here

Education

I am currently a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary working towards completing a Masters of Divinity with a concentration in Biblical Counseling.  I began my studies at Southern in the Fall of ‘07.

I graduated from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1997 with a B. S. in Business with a concentration in management from the Kelley School of Business.

Purpose

My main purpose for starting this site was to write about things that might help people “be the church” instead of just “going to church.”  “Be the fruit” is essentially a synonym for “be the church.”  What I want to see is Christians taking up the mission of God and producing good fruit by helping others and changing lives.  I see too many people content with going to church on Sundays, but leaving their faith behind the other six days of the week.  My goal is to help those people “be the fruit” in the lives of the people around them.

Goals

It is my goal to enter into the pastorate with the purpose of equipping people to do works of ministry (Eph 4:12).  I wish to combine my experience and training in business with my increasing knowledge of Scripture to help others to help others be more effective serving the Lord.

My interest in Biblical Counseling is not merely for the purpose of myself counseling people through their problems, but for the purpose of training up an army of lay people who know and understand how to utilize the principles of Scripture to help one another get through the trials of life.  I want to see more Christians counseling one another with Scripture rather than always calling on the Pastor or a “professional” counselor.

Recently, my focus on equipping Christians to counsel one another with Scripture has expanded somewhat as I have felt an increasing burden for families and parenting.  The focus on helping people and utilizing biblical counseling has not changed, but it is clear to me the majority of counseling that people do happens in homes beginning with one’s immediate family.  If you think about it, helping a Christian brother or sister deal with depression is not unlike a parent teaching a child how to deal with struggles at school or something else.  In truth, both parenting and counseling are forms of discipleship (or the making of disciples) with different relationships.

My goal is to utilize all of my gifts and experience to glorify God.  Ideally, I would like to end up balancing my time between counseling (intense discipleship), training (equipping), teaching, and planning.  I would focus all of these areas on the purpose of equipping the body to do works of ministry.

My desire is to shepherd and equip people.  Although I am in a transition period of my life, I don’t view that as something have to wait to do in the future.  I try to do this now in whatever capacity I can.  Read more about that here.