Biblical Counseling Is Really About Discipleship
Aaron Armstrong, at his blog site, Blogging Theologically, just posted this review of Equipping Counselors for Your Church. 
From Blogging Theologically by Aaron Armstrong
If someone came to you and said they wanted to start a biblical counseling ministry in your church, what might come to mind? That seems like a lot of work? Do we really need another ministry to administrate? After reading Bob Kellemen’s recently released book, Equipping Counselors for Your Church: The 4E Ministry Training Strategy, I’m convinced that’s the wrong question. Why? Because biblical counseling is really about discipleship.
The goal shouldn’t be to start a biblical counseling ministry in your church. The goal, Kellemen argues, should be that your church is a place of biblical counselors. “You don’t need another program,” he writes. “You want a congregation saturated by the vision of every-member ministry and equipped to offer one-another ministry. Even more, you want a congregation where every member is a disciple-maker” (pp. 33-34).
In this book, Kellemen unpacks his vision of “every-member, one-another ministry” while offering practical advice based on his decades-long experience in bringing counseling & discipleship to the core of a congregation’s, from planning and equipping to implementing and replicating.
There’s so much that’s compelling about this book that I couldn’t begin to do it justice (especially given its length), but here are a couple points that I found particularly helpful:
1. Kellemen’s understanding that we’ve wrongly defined biblical counseling as solving problems instead of discipleship. He writes:
We’ve made it a subset of discipleship focused on reactive work with persons struggling with sin. Instead, we should think of biblical counseling as synonymous with comprehensive personal discipleship. Biblical counseling is focused one-another ministry designed to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. (p. 35)
This is a hugely important distinction that moves counseling from a reactive discipline to a proactive one. Reactive ministry has its place certainly, and the concept doesn’t remove the need for qualified, licensed counselors who can deal with issues requiring a medical diagnosis. Kellemen’s every-member, one-another ministry concept encourages people to work out their salvation in community.
2. Kellemen’s principles of envisioning, enlisting, equipping, and empowering God’s people have a much broader application. Reading the book, I was struck at how easy it is to transplant his advice into a different context. He does a great job of providing specific application to the subject at hand, but it’s easy to go beyond it in a good way. If I were starting any ministry, I’d want to see what I could use from this book to help with envisioning what it could be and enlisting the right people.
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