Therapy and psychoanalytic forms of counseling are a billion dollar industry in the United States. There are millions of Christians every year who are looking for help with their emotional and behavioral problems from non-Christian counselors. These are people who have no biblical interest or spiritual insight and are in fact in many cases hostile to our faith. Even Christian counselors are often not biblical in their approach, and and sometimes encourage their counselees to deconstruct their faith and train them and teach them to deflect their issues back onto the church - the church that maybe has loved them and cared for them over the years but somehow has become a problem. There are many Christian counselors who practice in this manner.
Counseling as an industry itself is intended to self-perpetuate by keeping people locked into normalizing their problems so that there is no way of having absolute victory over reckoning things in their life and finding the solution they need.
Today, we want to ask the questions, "what if the church reclaimed its responsibility to counsel the hurting people within their churches?" and, "what if the local church was trained and prepared to receive the hurting, and no longer had to refer hurting congregants outside of the church to find help.” We've invited professional counselor and faculty professor of biblical counseling at Living Faith Bible Institute, Jonathan Kindler, to sit down with us and to have a conversation about what it looks like for the church to take back the role of counselor. Specifically, we discuss both the need for the church to counsel its own members together with a Bible principle guided framework for doing so.