Two Reasons to Incorporate Counseling in the Local Church
Tim Lane
Counseling in the Local Church Series: Click | View Series
Why should a local church and its leaders seek to incorporate counseling within the context of the local church? After all, won’t that distract the church from being truly missional and instead make it insular and self-focused? Shouldn’t counseling be left to the professionals who are highly trained to deal with people’s problems? These are all good questions that deserve an answer. In my first two posts I will argue for why the church should counsel. In the following posts, I will give guidance for how a church should think about accessing outside help. Here are the first two reasons a church should counsel:
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.
Compassion
As Christians, we are on a mission. In John 17:18, Jesus says, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” Jesus came on a courageous mission of compassion to rescue us from ourselves and to restore all things. He did this as the incarnate Son of God. He did not preach a message from heaven but instead “became like us in every way” (Heb. 2:17) though without sin. When a church commits to counsel people, they are saying that they are willing to get down in the trenches of daily life and love people with the redemptive compassion of the incarnate One. They are saying that good preaching, as important as it is, is just the beginning of ministry of the Word, not the end. Ministry of the Word that does not track at the level of people’s sins and sufferings in a rich and meaningful way is not sufficient and does not display the amazing compassion of the God of Scripture. A church should counsel if it wants to display the compassion of Father, Son, and Spirit.
To be continued.
