Ministry for All of Life
I’ll be spending the week at Capital Bible Seminary (CBS) in meetings with Ambassador Enterprises. I thought this would be an apropos time to share a few ministry memories from my fifteen years with CBS. Read my first post about CBS: Discerning God’s Will. And here’s my second post: I Feel His Pleasure.
The “D” Is For Discipleship
When I was hired, I suggested that we call the program an MA in Discipleship. Besides the fact that the abbreviation would have been “MAD,” the Board also believed that having “Counseling” in the title was significant.
I said I had no problem with “Counseling” in the title, as long as we kept and emphasized “Discipleship.” So we named the program the Master of Arts in Christian Counseling and Discipleship (MACCD).
I often tell my students that any time you earn a Master’s degree, it means you have so mastered something that you are not only able to do that work, but also to equip other also to do the work of the ministry.
Sailing the 4Cs
But equipping in what? From the earliest days of the launch of the MACCD, we have been focused on “4C” equipping. We derive that focus from throughout God’s Word, and we outline it based upon several passages, including Romans 15:14.
“I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another.”
Our 4Cs, which I more fully develop in Spiritual Friends and in Equipping Counselors for Your Church, are:
• Character: Full of Goodness—Heart
• Content: Complete in Knowledge—Head
• Competence: Competent to Instruct—Hands
• Community: Brothers/One Another—Home
As I reflect on equipping in biblical counseling, both in the church and in educational institutions, it seems that comprehensive training is not the norm. We all tend toward one of the 4Cs. If we are not intentional, we will emphasize that C and de-emphasize the other 3Cs.
We’ve all seen it. If content = head, then picture a counselor who is all head knowledge and no heart—no love and compassion.
If character = heart, then picture a counselor who is all heart, but does not know how to help you relate God’s truth to your life and relationships.
If competence = hands, then picture a counselor with huge hands—skilled as a “technician,” but who treats your soul like an engine part and reaches into his/her toolbox to “fix” you.
One of my Japanese students, Megumi, called community the container within which the other 3Cs function. What a beautiful picture.
Community and “Labs”
In the MACCD, we always seek to model the type of ministry that we desire students to have in their church setting. So we modeled and experienced community.
The most in-depth setting for our experience of one-another community is our lab classes. In labs, we don’t simply learn “counseling skills” (we do that, but much more). We experience Christian life together. We minister to one another. We provide biblical counseling so that we can grow in character, content, and competence in the context of community.
I’ll never forget the very first lab I led. Sister Ellen Barney asked me, as the lab began, how I was handling the transition from pastoral ministry to seminary professor. She asked with the concern of a wise sister in Christ.
I had a decision to make. I could provide a quick response and move on to the text, or, I could allow Ellen and the rest of the lab to engage me in one another ministry. I did the latter.
Ellen and Dwayne Bond, and the rest of the lab minister to me. They helped me to work through, even grieve, the process of leaving pastoral ministry. They helped me to work through the pressures and stresses of launching and leading a program by myself.
That lab not only shaped and changed me forever. It shaped and changed the MACCD forever. It modeled what we were about, including the vital insight that the teacher/professor/pastor/counselor is a human being also and needs spiritual friends!
The Rest of the Story
This is the final of three posts about ministry memories from CBS and the MACCD. But it’s not the end of the story. CBS/MACCD will forever (yes, eternally) be part of me, part of who I am, part of what has shaped me into the person I am still becoming.
I thank God for CBS/MACCD.
Join the Conversation
Of the “4Cs,” which one do you think churches and educational institutions sometimes tend to de-emphasize?
