Thinking Robustly in Community

Thinking Robustly in Community

Many of you know that I’m working with a group of pastors, professors, and educators to launch the new Biblical Counseling Coalition. The following thoughts are my own, not theirs.

However, they do come in response to the process of crafting a Biblical Counseling Confessional Statement. And I write these thoughts more for myself than for anyone else—to clear my head and to remind myself that I need to think robustly in community.

Thinking Robustly

Our goal in crafting the confessional statement is to capture and communicate in a robust and positive way the core of what makes biblical counseling truly biblical—and to do it succinctly. Not an easy task.

We began draft one with a collation of existing documents. A team of individuals worked together to craft a consensus-building first draft. Honestly, it read like a committee had written it—because they had! But it was a start.

We then sent this draft to a leadership team of thinker-practitioners. From that we crafted draft two.

We then sent that draft to a larger group of pastors, counselors, and educators who self-identify as biblical counselors. That process created draft three.

The leadership team worked with that input to craft draft four. And with some more tweaking and feedback and edits, a draft five.

We’re now in process with a draft six where “friends of biblical counseling” are offering feedback.

I’ve enjoyed the process very much. It has been and continues to be very stretching.

Here’s something I’ve learned (about myself and others) as I’ve interacted with scores of people:

It’s easier to say, “I’m not sure I like that wording,” than it is to say, “Here’s what I would say instead.”

In fact, to encourage ongoing dialogue and to keep learning as we are writing, I try to gently push back on the push back, especially when it tends toward the generic. I always say something like this:

“Specifically what would you write instead that is succinct yet robust, and that positively captures the core of biblical counseling thinking on this topic?”

Thinking in Community

I’m also being reminded of something else. We all have a natural inclination to present our view. We find it harder to represent views that faithfully articulate the consensus of a group.

Throughout the process we’ve tried to say:

“Don’t think of this as what you would write. Instead, represent the center of what biblical counselors would say about this issue.”

That’s not easy, either. We’re all better at representing ourselves than at representing others. When we do that, we tend to talk past one another instead of talking to and learning from each other.

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How can we learn to think robustly in community?