This is part 6 of a 7-part series. Listen to the other episodes below:

1. The Personal God Gets Personal with Us
2. Scripture Comes from the Mouth of God
3. We Are Embodied Souls Shaped by a World of Influences
4. Our Hearts Are Active
5. Help & Change Follow a Path, but Not a Script
6. Care & Counsel Are Pastoral & at Home in the Church

•

What makes the local church the natural home for biblical counseling?

In part 6 of our 7-part series on CCEF's distinctives, Gunner Gundersen is joined by Jonathan Holmes and Ed Welch to discuss why care and counsel are pastoral and at home in the church. Together they explore the beauty of face-to-face ministry—the calling of every Christian, and the unique role of parachurch organizations in serving the local church.

Along the way, they reflect on stories of faithful ministry, the ordinary conversations God uses to bring change, and the vision of a church where every member participates in caring for one another.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Explore CCEF books at ccef.org/book
• Learn more about our beliefs and distinctives at ccef.org/about
• Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands | Book by Paul David Tripp
• Side by Side | Book by Ed Welch

00:00 Introduction & New CCEF Book Announcements
03:35 Distinctive #6: Care & Counsel Are Pastoral & at Home in the Church
05:18 Why the Local Church Is the Home of Biblical Counseling
11:35 The Ministry of the Word Done Face-to-Face
14:06 Ordinary Conversations as Ministry
28:20 How Parachurch Ministries Serve the Church
34:56 Practical Ways Counselors Stay Connected to the Local Church
37:32 Encouraging Pastors in Soul Care
41:11 Closing Reflections from Ephesians 4

Hello and welcome to our CCEF podcast. We call these conversations “Where Life and Scripture Meet.” My name is Gunner Gundersen, and I have the privilege of serving as the dean of faculty at CCEF. Friends, we're excited to announce five new books from CCEF faculty coming this August and September. Two are minibooks: How Do I Get the Most Out of My Pastors Sermons? by Gunner Gundersen—that’s me—and: When Siblings Fight by Lauren Whitman. Two short books—one for boys, and one for girls—on puberty by Darby Strickland, and an illustrated children's book on gratitude by Dr. Mike Emlet. You can find all of our books at ccef.org/book. 

Today I'm very happy to be joined again by my colleague, Jonathan Homes—our executive director. Welcome, Jonathan, again.

Thanks for having me.

And also by Dr. Ed Welch, longtime faculty member with CCEF. Hey, thanks for joining us again.

Hey, Gunner.

Hey, as we kick things off and continue this seven part series on our distinctives, we wanted to start with a little warm up question. Ed, would you be willing to just share a CCEF story that maybe you like to tell? Any story at all…one that maybe you find yourself telling in various situations? We'd love to hear something about CCEF that you've experienced, and that maybe you enjoy telling.

Well, my mind goes immediately to a few Dave Powlison stories. So let me tell one, one story about Dave Powlison. I think it was in the later afternoon, a couple of us were hovering around in the lobby taking a study break, and Dave was working on his dissertation at that point, and he was in the bowels of the organization down in the basement going through files, all the counseling files, which was part of his dissertation.

And he came up and he just joined the conversation. And, and just it was just his normal, normal, cheerful and engaged self. And then I after around five minutes, I said, “Well, what are you working on today?” And he talked about what he was working on. And then he casually identified that there was a water leak in the basement, and it got on his computer and it ruined everything that he had been working on.

And I was utterly. It may not sound like that big a deal. I was utterly stunned that we had this pleasant five-minute conversation, and he just lost all his data, at least from the last day, and maybe much more than that. So to this moment, it still becomes one of my greatest illustrations from my own heart of somebody who believes God truly is sovereign over all things.

And at that moment I began thinking, I want to be like Dave Powlison when I grow up, but I don't think I'm going to have time. So anyway, it was a wonderful example of theology in action.

Wow. That is a beautiful story. I think that my losses there, if I were in his shoes, would have been the first topic of most conversations that day.

Oh I would have been crying. Yeah, I wouldn't have been able to say anything.

Wonderful story. Thank you, Ed, for that. And I believe we've gotten the basement cleaned up since then, which I'm grateful for.

Well, we are really delighted. We've been delighted to have this seven part conversation on our distinctives at CCEF. And today we're talking about number six. And so we are rounding the corner and entering the home stretch. And as we've shared, each of these distinctives works together. And so they all form really a package, an ecosystem that represents our values, perhaps a constellation, if you will, where you can look at each of these insights that we seek to have guide our ministry.

But they're also beautiful and really more beautiful when you look at them together. So before we dive into our sixth, we would just love to read those seven distinctives together as a team so that you can hear those statements. And then we will begin to expand on number six. Jonathan, would you like to kick us off on reading the distinctives?

Yes, I'd love to. Distinctive number one: The personal God gets personal with us.

Number two: Scripture comes from the mouth of God.

Number three: we are embodied souls shaped by a world of influences.

Number four: our hearts are active.

Number five: help and change follow a path, but not a script.

Number six: care and counsel are pastoral and at home in the church.

And number seven: biblical counseling engages with the voices around us.

So that's a kind of full summary picture of those seven distinctives that we hold to and seek to promote here at CCEF. And if you'd like to read the descriptions for each of those, those are at ccef.org/about. 

Today, we'd love to talk about number six, which says, “Care and counsel are pastoral and at home in the church.”

So allow me to read that description, and then we'll talk about it for a bit: “As the care of souls, biblical counseling is the ministry of the Word done face-to-face. It shares the same interests as the preaching of the Word in that it brings the many facets of the gospel of Jesus to the details of daily life. Yet its setting is the wise, encouraging conversations that are essential to church vitality, and the skillful help offered during crises. Biblical counseling is one-another ministry carried out by every person in the church in which we speak the truth in love so that we might all grow up into Christ (Eph 4:15). From this home in the church, biblical counseling moves out and appears in conversations with neighbors, parachurch organizations that strengthen communities, professional counseling offices, and many other places where God’s people work to meaningfully bring the truth of Scripture to the troubles of life.”

Guys, what stands out to you about that description as you hear that reread?

How much time do we have? Gunner, there's so many things in here. This is a real rich paragraph. I'll go to… I'll start personally.

My background is that I have secular training. I'm licensed as a counselor in my state. I'm aware of the legal obligations associated with that particular license and normal ethical guidelines. So I have professional credentials. But when I think of myself, I, I have to be aware that I have these credentials, but I think of myself as a pastor.

That's the first thing I think when I, when you read through these things and when I, when I say pastor, I'm an elder in my church. But thinking of “little p” pastor, I'm not necessarily thinking I'm functioning as the ordained pastor, but a pastor, a pastor, there are two things about a pastor's job description. The first one is “I am concerned about the heart of this person, the very heart, the very soul of this person.”

In other words, we are people who live before God, we live before him, and we live with him and we listen to him. There is nothing more important. There's nothing deeper than that. There's nothing better than that. So that's how I am thinking. I am thinking I'm a pastor and I am concerned for that person's heart. And it's going to be the words of God in Scripture, the words of Christ that are the things we need the most.

So that's I guess that's an identity question. How do I see myself? Technically, I'm a professional counselor, but I see myself as a, as a pastor, in the broadest sense of the word, who has the privilege of knowing a person and being able to care for their very heart.

And I love that. And I agree with you. There's so much in the paragraph that, you know, depending on how much time you know, Gunner gives us, we could be here all day thinking about these things. But, you know, the phrase that sticks out to me is, is just in the title itself of “care and counsel are pastoral, that they're at home in the church.”

And, you know, all of us have different experiences of home. Some of us come from troubled homes, good homes, boring homes, perhaps. But I think all of us innately, right, we have a sense of wanting to be at home. Right? We want to have a place where we are known, where we are loved. And when you think about what God has designed for us in the church, this is our home.

These are our people. And so what better place to do this face-to-face ministry? So when we read Scripture and you see all of these one another's pray for one another, help one another, love one another, be patient with one another. What better place to do it than in a local community where you were gathering together, you're eating together, you're living life together so that at homeless for biblical counseling to be at home in the church, it just seems like the most remarkable combination. God, you know, God had it right when he took these two things and joined them together. And I think it's something that at CCEF, we really strive to help people have a vision for and equip people for in terms of ministry, there in their local community and in their local church.

Yeah, that's very helpful. I experience the same application that you're identifying where I mentioned the first one. The first one is where is my home? Well, my home is not in a professional identity. My home is in…I'm part of a family in a church. Yeah, and our pleasure is to know Christ together and encourage each other in that.

That's my home. And that's what I bring to my work at CCEF. Jonathan, what you're saying is that another extension of being at home in the church is that I'm also thinking about another person is family; that these are these are not just sort of these objects of study. These are brothers and sisters, and we're brothers and sisters right off the bat. And we anticipate that we will enjoy that familial relationship even more, so that that certainly is, I think, a natural ethos for for us, and certainly our colleagues at CCEF.

You know, this description really starts out with, you know, biblical counseling is the ministry of the Word done face-to-face. Often that phrase, the ministry of the Word, is heard as something that is more public and more specialized to someone who preaches. And then the second sentence highlights something similar it shares the same interests as. And then it names it the preaching of the Word, in that it brings the many facets of the gospel of Jesus to the details of daily life.

Can we talk for a minute about just what an important opportunity there is for that ministry of the word to be done face-to-face? How the Scriptural calling is not only the public proclamation of the Word, although the two are related and both are essential, but the private ministry of the Word?

I have opportunities to preach and teach, and also to counsel. Now I'm a more natural counselor than I am a preacher or a teacher, but my experience in preaching and teaching is that if your eyes are open and you're more or less looking at me, well, you're you're with me and we're all in this together. If your eyes are closed, you're not meditating…you're sleeping.

That's about as much as I know is going on in the hearts of the people I'm speaking with. I used to have this weird affectation that I didn't know about for a number of years, until somebody pointed it out. I would say something when I would preach and I'd say, “Okay, okay,” it was “okay.” In other words, I was so accustomed to ministry that was face-to-face and having some response, I would have this, “Okay? Is that all right?” Well, what do you think? Shake your head! do something!” 

You can imagine that as I think about the ministry of the Word, I think about it publicly, but the pleasure of the personal, face-to-face ministry of the Word—where we can know, we can be known, and we can learn from each other.

There's a partnership together. There is this process of discovery in the Word, and what Christ has done in us is a process of discovery: “How is Jesus going to guide us today?”

So yeah, the pleasure of being able to do that face-to-face. What a wonderful gift that is that it's it's probably the most profound reason I pinch myself every day and say, why do I have an opportunity to do this even as a job? Is it my vocation?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I share a similar background to you. I was a pastor for quite a long time, but probably best feel suited as a counselor and even in the pulpit. You know, when I'd be sharing, you know, maybe the best compliment somebody would give me is, “Hey, that felt like I was in a counseling session with you. It felt like we were just talking.”

And that give and take is what I love so much about counseling and what I love about interpersonal ministry of the Word in churches. Right? It's conversational. It's happening in the foyer after church on Sunday, it's happening as you're getting ready to teach the children's class with your coworker, it's, you know, happening as you're moving chairs in and out of the school, as you're getting ready for the church service. There's just something about the local church being face-to-face that, context-wise, is just suited for all of the “one anothers” of Scripture—the regular gathering, the cadence, the rhythm of drawing people from the community into this place where we know the Lord and we know each other.

And in many ways, I think it's a foretaste of heaven. It's a foretaste of our future. Right? Church is getting us ready for what our future is going to be, which is, as Revelation  7 says, it's going to be a true worship of God with people from every tribe, every tongue, and every nation. So I try to think of that even when I gather for church on Sunday morning, is, this is the start of something that is that the best is yet to come, right? That Sunday is the beginning. It's the first fruits of something that we're going to one day enjoy for all of eternity.

Jonathan, you're talking as if this is wonderful and normal and beautiful, and it's certainly normal and beautiful, but it's not ordinary in any way. What you're identifying is in some ways one of the more dramatic movements from the Old Testament to New Testament. There are a number of things that the Kingdom of Heaven has come in with Christ.

They're recognizable, but some things are profoundly different. The way we approach suffering is certainly profoundly different in weakness, weakness is the new strength. But what we're saying is that the passage behind what Gunner identified is the Ephesians 4 passage. And we're saying that the face-to-face ministry is  a ministry of the Word. It's it is it.

It elevates that ordinary ministry. It's what pastors do. But in Ephesians 4 it's identifying this is what pastors and others are instructing us to do. We are the ones who do the ministry of the Word. So for the Word to be for, for all of us to be involved in that process is utterly, it's just extraordinary, where it doesn't seem to be anticipated in the Old Testament, you had ordained positions. You were, you could be the king, but you were a priest, in which case you were working in the Temple and you also had teaching responsibilities, it seems. And then you were prophets out in the woods somewhere. There's a bunch of wild people who would come in and exhort when there was false teaching and people, people were spiritually asleep.

So you had these, these, these groups of people who were authorized to do ministry, and they were authorized to do ministry because the Spirit was on them. And now the Spirit rests on us all. And so, as a result, the Scripture uses ordinary people in ordinary conversations before a church and after church that that is heightened.

We weren't anticipating to see it before. Yeah.

And I think that's such a good observation because, you know, you think about prophets and priests, and yeah, prophet: you get the special calling from the Lord, priests: you need to be born into a certain tribe in order to qualify. The New Testament just completely widens that paradigm. And we're all called to speak truth in love. And that's that democratization of care, like you said, it is extraordinary. It's not just held by a select few, but we're all engaged in it.

Yeah. Jonathan, I began thinking, I'm in a professional counseling organization. What does it mean to think pastorally, to inhabit that pastoral role? But what you're identifying is, is really the preponderance of my own ministry, both in giving ministry and receiving the ministry of other people. It's not in that professional context. It's in small groups, and it's in the questions that are raised in small groups.

It's people in small group who recognize that sometimes I'll be the last one to give a prayer request. And sometimes there won't be time to give a prayer request. I said, “Okay, well, let's close in prayer,” and somebody will say, “No, you haven't told us what's on your heart!” and little things like that.

That. So wow, this is a family. This is a family that cares. And it forces me to consider what is it that I need from Jesus and that little tiny movement in response to a question from another person who is doing the work of ministry? In my own heart, it has that small step of change that  affects my heart.

So you're talking about pastoral ministry in a professional context, but we're also talking about how the bulk of ministry, the work of ministry is, is in those ordinary five-minute conversations while you're moving chairs, while you're on the way out from church, when you happen to catch that, somebody seems to be a little bit more withdrawn that particular day, and you inquire just a bit more.

I'm reminded of that striking phrase in Romans one where Paul the Apostle is writing to the church and he says, “I want to visit so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith.” And he completely flattens a relationship that anyone looking on could have seen as more of a hierarchy. And certainly there was a unique experience that he had had and a particular authority he had been given as this delegated emissary to the Gentiles. And yet he consistently calls himself that servant of Christ, servant of the people, brother, sister. He communicates who he is and who they are in relationship. And there's that beautiful vision there and in other places where he's consistently asking them for prayer, or telling them how their lives ,and where they're at spiritually, poorly or well, is deeply impacting him.

And love that. I love that reciprocal mutual vision of ministry, which is different from a context where it's only seen as one person giving and the other person receiving, rather than all of us, as the tagline to instruments in the Redeemer's Hands says, “People in need of change, helping people in need of change.” Or as your book says, Ed, just “side by side.”

I there when you look at some of the professional literature and wrestling with how do people change, you find a relatively quiet part in that literature where where there's desire to run neck and neck with the changes that come about in close relationships, with friends, talking to other friends, and you recognize that the psychotherapy literature is often trying to attain that elusive goal where people really love each other. And so much of personal change takes place there, and it takes place there, even in people who aren't followers of Jesus. How much more do we anticipate that that growth in being built up is going to be accented now that we have the Spirit? So as I think of ways that I've been ministered to, it hasn't been a professional setting, of course.

The most recent one was out to dinner with a couple that are just dear friends of ours. And, and over the course of our dinners, we usually rotate who's going to be speaking the most. And it depends on, on the things that are happening in their lives. And, they notice that, that there was something that I was struggling with.

And for an hour they asked, they encouraged and they prayed for me, which it was, and the reason I'm citing that is because, you know, the Spirit changes us in, in small ways and, and gradual accumulation of the ministry of the Word from other people. And, but, I can look at that time and say there were… it was a leap in my own growth as a result of that.

And it was just ordinary people anointed by the Spirit doing the work of ministry.

We had some friends recently visited from our former church and they sat down on the couch. We hadn't seen them for about a year and a half since we'd moved from Texas, and they just started asking us questions about our lives. And you know, when someone starts asking you questions about your life and the relationship is such and the people are such, that you can tell it's not going to stop for a little bit, that they're going to keep covering all of the bases.

And it was like we were at the center of their hearts, and they were simply circling us in a very loving way and just asking about each of the kids, asking about each dimension of our lives, the various responsibilities following up on past things that we had shared. And it was a striking experience, as someone who's often asking the questions to just be receiving that kind of cascade of love and grace and care and knowing that there was not any significant component to our lives, or arena of our lives, that they would overlook.

And even if we shared something in one category, they were asking about that, there was a hallway from that one to another category. They would sense that and dive into that next adjoining room, if you will. And it was really sweet to receive, and there was an understanding mutually too that at some point the conversation would shift and we would begin asking and hearing updates from them.

Some of those were sprinkled in before, but we knew we would get there. And just what a sweet experience that is to have that outside of any of the particularly professional or formalized elements that can be helpful and that are necessary in some situations. But there is that at homey-ness and also the beautiful thing of it even was a living room, and we're just there talking.

And then we bring out the cupcakes and we enjoy those. And everything about those moments, I think was a picture of what we've each received in churches. And what is so beautiful about this vision.

Who would have thought: the way the church unfolds, the work of ministry being done in your living room? And oftentimes it begins with a question of just, “How are you? What's on your heart?” And, you know, questions like that? 

Gunner, it's been striking to me how few people in the world have ever actually truly been asked a question in the way that people wanted to know.

What strikes me with your friends is not only did they ask that question, but you knew they meant it. And you knew that they weren't going to, they weren't going to relent until they truly knew the things that were on your soul, and they were going to place them on their own souls. These are great stories, aren't they?

They're such ordinary stories, but they're all examples of how indeed the work of counseling is the work of ministry. And it's at home in the body of Christ. And the Spirit is pleased to use the Word, oftentimes, through people to us. What a great kingdom, isn't it? 

It is unbelievable. It reminds us, you know, and of the first conversation we had on our distinctives about “The personal God gets personal with us.” And you know the story, Gunner, that you related, right. We think of God himself comes to us. He's the first question to asker, right? He's the one who is intimately, you know, curious about his people.

So he comes to Adam and Eve and he says, “Hey, where have you been? What are you up to? I want to talk to you. I want to be in relationship with you. And  that then gets passed on to his people, to his children. Right. We come to other people now and we say things like, “How are you? Where have you been? Tell me about what's going on.”

And so that expression of your friends coming in to meet you in the living room, that's not something that we just kind of come up with on our own because it's a good technique or a good skill, but we do it because we serve a personal God who does those very things with us.

And so as ministers of the Word, as ministers of this new covenant, that's how we do life, right? That's the new way that we do life together. And yeah, like as you have said, it's absolutely extraordinary. It's very humbling. It's messy. Right. So all the things we're talking about, it's not as if it always goes perfectly. There's, you know, detours and hardships along the way, but in the end, it's worth it. As we look at this vision of what Scripture gives to us for the church and for how we're supposed to be growing together in Christ's likeness.

I mean, I'm thinking of a question that I don't know, Gunner, you're the boss on this one, but I'm thinking we work in a parachurch environment, and here we are talking about that counseling is at home in the local church. So it does raise questions. What does that even mean? It means my role, my identity is pastoral, but that's a little bit distant from the local church.

It's a particular identity. So I'm wondering, “What does that actually mean for us? What are meaningful links between professional counselors like ourselves, a parachurch organization, and in the church? How is there a meaningful connection that we have as we seek to serve the church? Does that question makes sense?

It does. Maybe I'll just share a couple thoughts by way of larger framework, and I'd love for us to unpack that a bit, because we do in the second part of the description, get into a little bit of that question of how biblical counseling moves out and appears in places outside of the local church, but that question of the church and the parachurch is something I've wrestled with for a long time, and it's because my first full time ministry, when I began at 21, from 21 to 36 years old, those first 15 years were all in the parachurch, in Christian colleges and seminaries, doing work in what were known as student life departments, where we're working with the students, providing discipleship, counseling, leadership development, sometimes discipline, community building. And at the same time, I was receiving my theological education, and it was a strong theological education. So I was hearing about the centrality of the church and therefore the centrality of the local church. So here I am, pouring all my time and energy in terms of my weekdays into the parachurch, while receiving instruction and agreeing with it on the centrality of the local church, and of course, experiencing that in my daily life.

And I think two frameworks came to mind for me when it came to the Christian colleges I was part of. I realized there's a sense in which it's a boot camp and battle relationship, where there's a preparation that students were receiving that we wanted to ensure had a trajectory in their hearts toward the local church. And so as we encourage them and the kind of one another interactions that we hoped they would have within a dorm setting, encouraging one another and having a private ministry of the Word, even as 19, 20, 21, 25 year olds, over time, I began to be more, much more active and explicit about trying to cast a vision for how that kind of muscle memory and training and heartbeat for them would translate into a small group meeting in a home and their local church, how it could make them a more welcoming presence. When people arrived, that was one: it was a preparatory, and that's because of the season of life I was investing in.

I think the other framework that's been helpful to me has been what I might call the bride and the bridesmaid, where the local church is the bride of Christ. And yet there were many other kind of bridesmaid organizations that are meant to accentuate and support the work of the Bride of Christ and the work Christ is doing in his bride.

And that helped me place myself in these organizations as having an important role. And yet that was meant to spotlight and to serve and to equip the church as much as I could, rather than taking that central place for those organizations. And that's part of why I'm so thankful for CCEF, because that's part of the mission statement, is to restore counseling to the church.

Yeah, I think in the present environment that we live in, where there are various denominations, no denomination has the resources to reach out to all the places that the church wants to reach: into prisons, into missions. How do we, how can a church or what many times even a small denomination, how can they oversee missionaries that go out and all the logistics associated with that food pantries.

So there are good reasons why parachurch ministries exist. How can they maintain that meaningful link to the church? That's our question. I'll give you a couple. Well, let me tell you a story first. I'll give you some ways that that link happens in my own care for other people. When I first came to CCEF, my thought was CCEF wants to work its way out of a job.

That's our goal, that this all happens in the context of a church. And that sounded good to me. I was hoping we wouldn't work our way out of a job too quickly, but it sounded right until we had a group of pastors at CCEF and luncheon with them and basically “Help us. How can we serve you? And also, what have you heard? What have you seen in us where you need to instruct us?”

So it was really a very nice dialogue. I happened to mention to one of the pastors that one of my goals was to work our way out of a job, and he rebuked me and he said, “No, what I want is, I want I want there to be people around who I can entrust my congregants to, who are going to be like-minded, who are going to be offering the same kinds of things. You're going to be functioning like an auxiliary church staff or an adjunct church staff. That's what I want, because no one pastor is going to be able to take care of all the pastoral counseling needs within their church.” So that story was helpful to me. Where we're serving the church doesn't necessarily mean working our way out of a job.

It means how can I grow in pastoral care in a way that I understand some of the things that are happening around us, some of what neighbors are saying, what's the world saying? How can I grow in skills in such a way that some way I can, I can be a small part and bless a local church?

So that freed me. So now that if I go on to the question, what does it look like when I think of myself, link to churches. Yeah. Okay.

This would be typical. Who was one person in your church that you can talk to about what we're doing? Because I'm speaking to a person. I'm counseling because for you to be able to speak about these things to others, it's going to be good for your own heart. Then it'll be good for somebody else's heart.

Who's one person in your church that you can sit down with and speak about what we're doing together? And of course, who is one person or two people or a small group who can pray for you? So I am not the only one who's praying for you. So that would be that's a small thing.

But that my observation in my own pastoral care is those people who have other people praying for them and who know sort of week to week the things that are happening in their lives. Those are the people that I tend to see the work of Christ is just more obvious. It's more dramatic. There are rarely exceptions there.

So that's that would just be one really very simple way that I recognize that I need the local church and the people I care for and need their local church.

And Gunner and Ed, what I hear both of you guys saying is, implicit is one of the ways that you're making that connection is you're being fairly explicit in your conversations to build that bridge back to the church. So it's not just a one-way street where, you know, people from the church are coming to CCEF, and that's the end goal.

We're trying to actually build a bridge back to, “Hey, who do you have in your local church praying for you, or Gunner, you saying, “How do these skills work out in the context of a small group?” And, you know, in my experience, I think that that is a key part for organizations to keep in mind is that we realize that we're not an island, right?

That we're not just an organization unto ourselves, but even the idea of being parachurch. We come alongside the church, we don't replace the church. And I think that's important for us to remember. I think it's important for us to to be seeking feedback from pastors, from people in churches, about what they're going through, how we can help them, and it even puts a question in me, you know, I'm curious about the kind of the origin story of biblical counseling for pastors, which is a course that you've kind of spearheaded here at CCEF.

How did that come about? Did it come about from a particular pastor or a counseling session, or how did that, how did that come to fruition?

It came in all kinds of different ways. But as I think about it now, it's pastors who are the ones who clearly have the most influence in their churches. How can we think together? How can we grow in care? And perhaps, you know, we put it this way: we all have areas where we want to grow.

We all have goals in our lives: we want to lose weight, we want to exercise more, we want to eat better. Pastors have goals in their preaching: how can this be increasingly clear and helpful and vivid? Well, the one of the things I want to do in that pastor's course is how can we have goals? What are our aspirations in the way we care for the souls of other people in our preaching, in our personal ministry, and our 1-to-1 ministry?

How can we grow in that? And what is our aspiration for leading people to care for others? What are the two ways that I can lead my people in caring well for the souls of the people who are next to them? So pastors have all the influence. It's just the way things are. It's how the church is structured.

I'm just thinking about you and I in our time as pastors, you know, in seminary, we don't get a lot of training on that. And both of us probably would have greatly benefited from something like that, because I think that pastoral care for so many pastors is seen more as a burden and not a blessing, right? It's seen as something that's hard, it's unfamiliar, it's confusing.

And I know that's something that, you know, I've always appreciated from you. That is that there's an elegant simplicity to how you talk about pastoral care and caring for other people. Well, I think pastors, you know, being in the local church, like you said, being in a position of influence, they need help with that, right? They need someone to come alongside even them, helping them understand how to care well for people in their church, so thanks for doing that.

I can remember a pastor coming into a preaching course and it's really a fine, pastor. I knew who he was, and he talked about how he prepared for a sermon, the sermon, for 40 hours in a week. And so there are various reasons why pastors are hesitant to be alert to some of the pastoral care issues in their church.

It's time consuming, and they’re limited people. And how are they going to find the time to do those things? So certainly one of the ways we want to encourage pastors…a few different ways. One is, just consider the times that you already have. We're not talking about making up more time, but how can the times you have with people, those times before and after church, before and after meetings, how can they be even weightier than they've been?

How can they be done with greater vigilance? This even at these times the Spirit is at work. So, so with pastors, I think it's how can those smaller natural movements be used pastorally? Guess the other thing is, pastors are always thinking, “Okay, how can the ministry of the Word be extended into the body of Christ here? And how can I participate in that? How can other people be doing more and more of that ministry?”

Well, guys, it has been really rich to talk about the way that the local church is home for biblical counseling and how biblical counseling is so pastoral. And I love the way we've gotten to talk about how that really does play itself out in the details of life on the street, as we often say at CCEF, of real life, and the real issues of the heart.

Ed, you mentioned earlier, Ephesians 4, and Ephesians 4:15 is actually mentioned in our distinctive description. And that would just love to end with this from Ephesians 4:15-16, this incredibly compelling vision of the daily activity the Spirit creates through us in our churches and where it's leading. So I'll close here, Paul says, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way, and to him who is the head into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

That's really the embodiment of distinctive number six. Care and counsel are pastoral and at home in the church.