Pastoring is more than a job. Shepherding and caring for people’s souls is a calling. This bundle will help pastors grow in both wisdom and skill as they seek to faithfully live out their calling and apply Scripture meaningfully to the hardships people face.
Here is one reason you must be called to pastoral ministry: the people you love will not love you back—at least some of them will not love you back. They will say utterly horrible things about you, so you better be sure you want to do this. It is one thing to be dissed by the world around you; it is something else again to be demeaned by your own church family while you are pouring your heart out for them.
One strength and weakness of CCEF is our name! In fact, we have had many discussions over the years about whether to change our name. Those discussions always end where they began, and our name remains unchanged. Surprisingly, the strengths and weaknesses of our name are due to the word counseling. Our debate is always about how the “c-word” both communicates and miscommunicates the vision of our ministry.
Twenty-two questions that enable a pastor or other Christian worker to evaluate both personal qualifications and ministerial qualifications in the interest of spurring growing maturity. Includes a 3-page "Application Work Sheet" to use with pastors, candidates and students
This week and next we take you back inside a CCEF Training classroom, this time Tim Lane's Counseling in the Local Church class. In a segment of the class titled "Growth in Grace," Tim helps us understand how essential the community of the local church is in the sanctification of each of its members.
Recently CCEF Executive Director Tim Lane and his wife Barbara traveled to Montreal, Canada, to share CCEF's "How People Change" curriculum with over 500 people at SEMBEQ Seminary in that city. SEMBEQ has formed a partnership with CCEF to assist in their mission of training pastors with a zeal for church planting. The seminary intentionally partners with local churches, and much of the seminarians' training takes place "on the job" in those churches.
Tim & Barbara Lane with Francois Turcotte & Francois Picard of SEMBEQ
During their visit, Tim and Barbara sat down with Francois Turcotte & Francois Picard, two of SEMBEQ's leaders, to discuss their unique vision and mission, as well as how CCEF's teaching ministry has become an indispensible part of the training they offer. This podcast is taken from that conversation.
Guidance For Churches Seeking Outside Help for Counseling
Last week, I laid out four reasons a church should counsel as part of their ministry to their members and as a result, some of you might think that I am implying that a local church should not seek the assistance of “outside” help. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me nuance my strong commitment for the local church to do counseling with the following qualifications.
Don’t Outsource By Default: There is nothing unbiblical about seeking outside assistance. But just because you feel overwhelmed by a counseling opportunity, don’t immediately think you must outsource your care. When a church immediately out-sources counseling it misses the opportunity to grow both individually and as a community.
Interview with Amoor in which he tells his story of coming to faith and ministering both as a pastor and as a teacher of pastoral counseling. Counseling in the Nigerian context differs in many ways from the American context: types of problems, social influences, opportunities for and limitations on ministry. “People are not offended when I talk to them or ask questions about their life backgrounds. Our people are very open, so it is easy to find where help is needed. No one thinks that you are meddling. Counseling and encouragement can be done even in open market
Babler teaches ministry-based evangelism at Southwestern Baptist Seminary. He brings biblical counseling principles into the activities usually thought of as social work, mercy ministry, and evangelism. "If we're biblical, and build loving relationships, then we'll be holistic," addressing every aspect of people's lives in practical ways. Doing practical good is tied to bringing the good news.
Bunyan's personal, pastoral touch has kept Christians reading him for 300 years. Touches on Bunyan's counsel to "depressed perfectionists" and the sorts of applications of truth he made. He deals with common human problems in the idiom of the 17th century, a straightforward biblical idiom. The explanatory systems and terminologies of the 20th century's secular psychologies had not claimed the turf of human ill.
Last week, I laid out