Community Groups and Biblical Counseling

Good morning!  Today's post is a re-post of the BCC's Grace and Truth Blog's series on the relationship between small groups and biblical counseling.  It is such an encouragement to read about other churches that have the same vision and practice as DSC in regards to our Community Groups.  Biblical counseling is an all God's people, all the time paradigm.  By God's grace, He is the one effecting change in a person and He chooses to use broken vessels to accomplish His will.  Praise God that it is not up to me to change a person!  I get to watch God change the person and that is an incredible thing to observe.  God is good and active in the lives of His people!  Again, these posts are at the Biblical Counseling Coalition's blog, Grace and Truth.  Enjoy...

The Ministry of the Word in Everyday Life

Our church, Covenant Fellowship Church, started as a church plant in 1984 with a team of a couple of dozen adults and children relocating to the Philadelphia suburbs. We are part of the Sovereign Grace Ministries family of churches. The church currently has a membership of about 1,500 people. We are committed to a pastoral care model built on Gospel centrality and biblical counseling. The pastors of the church care for the spiritual needs of the people in the church in preaching and teaching, in their personal ministry, and in creating structures of care for the church. We are committed to doing personal biblical counseling as a significant and ongoing part of our ministry responsibilities.
To be committed to care through biblical counseling, however, doesn’t mean that the pastors are the designated counselors within the walls of the church. While the call of the pastor presumes that he has gifts, skills, and experience in the care of people, biblical counseling doesn’t succeed or fail on the expertise of the one giving it. The emphasis isn’t on the gifts of the counselor, or the fact that counsel is coming “from the pastor,” but on the power and sufficiency of God’s Word. Therefore, we see counseling in a broad sense first—as ministry of the Word among ordinary people in everyday life.

Community Group Ministry

Our basic structure for ‘counseling,’ as understood above, is our Community Group Ministry. Small groups have been an integral part of our church since its inception. In fact, for the fifteen years that the church met in rented facilities, small groups were the sustaining context of the church on a day-to-day basis. That orientation remains very much who we are to this day even though we now occupy a building and have the programs and ministries that a building allows a church to provide.
Our Community Groups (as they are now called) have some features that make them distinct from the way small groups are structured in many churches. For one thing, the Community Groups are the primary context where members of the church receive the care provided by pastoral ministry. While our pastoral staff is dedicated to availability, responsiveness, and counsel to any member, it is neither biblical, practical, nor ultimately helpful for the members of the church to depend on personal pastoral meetings for care. People need the effect of the gifts the Holy Spirit distributes throughout the body of believers. We all need the ‘one another ministry’ that is embedded in biblical community. And we need the shared experiences of suffering, weakness, and change that are essential to the maturity and witness of the church. The Community Groups serve that function in a primary way at Covenant Fellowship Church.
Community Groups are so essential to who we are as a local church that they are an essential expression of membership in the church. In other words, to be a member of Covenant Fellowship Church, a person is committed to attending and actively participating in a Community Group. If a person is not involved in a Community Group they are not positioned to receive the pastoral care that the church has promised to them. As pastors, we are committed to the care of God’s people given to us through membership and seek to help anyone who is not participating in a Community Group find a way to experience this necessary care. Simply put, a person’s care from the church, whether it is meeting practical needs or addressing spiritual struggles, is intended to be centered in the familiar and supportive environment of the Community Group.
Our Community Group leaders, therefore, are more than just facilitators of the small group. They carry a responsibility to ensure that every member of the church has access to the practical care of the church and that the pastors are kept abreast of the needs and challenges the people in the church face. Our Community Group leaders are the primary laypersons who have personal ministry responsibility in the church. Prior to becoming Community Group leaders, they will have demonstrated a mature ability to offer counsel to others as brothers and sisters in Christ, will have gone through our general discipleship and leadership training courses, and will have had specific training in the responsibilities of Community Group leadership. Small group leaders meet as groups with pastors once per month for the purpose of their own care and for ongoing training in personal ministry.

The Personal Ministry of the Word

But we are not looking for the Community Group leaders to ‘do the counseling.’ We have sought to teach the church that ‘counseling’ is one expression of the personal ministry of God’s Word in community; alongside discipleship, intercessory prayer, biblical fellowship, wise advice, confession, encouragement and shared study of God’s Word. It is in the multiple layers of relational ministry that counseling occurs.
For example, if someone is struggling with acute anxiety, he or she may meet with a pastor who will help position them through formal counseling for change. But the pastor will involve the Community Group leaders, friends, and even at times a brother or sister who has struggled with the same issue to create a network of prayer, support, and counsel for that person. Since we view change as a work of God that takes place over time, this ‘community based counseling’ provides the insight, support and accountability to help a person with lasting change over time.
It is the cooperative work between creative pastoral engagement and enduring community fellowship that serves as our model of biblical counseling in the church.

Join the Conversation

What could you apply to your ministry from the way Covenant Fellowship Church blends creative pastoral engagement and enduring community fellowship?

Building a Bridge

I just read about the following church planting organization.  What an encouraging direction that this organization and biblical counseling are moving in.  As Desert Springs Church partners with organizations like Acts 29 to be a church planting church, it is awesome to see a growing partnership between biblical counseling and church planting!  I hope you are as encouraged as I am.  I am excited to see what God does at Redemption Rio Rancho for His glory and praise.  May God bless Redemption RR and future plants to draw numerous others to His Son, Jesus Christ!




Two major Christian movements emerged in the 1970s: the modern church planting movement and the modern biblical counseling movement. The North American Church Planting Foundation (NACPF) is working to build bridges between these two movements.

The NACPF

The NACPF is a non-profit organization that exists to support and promote church planting efforts in North America. Among a handful of other ministry priorities, we emphasize the importance of biblical care and counseling within each church plant. It is our hope that a biblical counseling mindset will become the norm within the world-wide church planting community.
Throughout the landscape of established churches, as well as new church starts, biblical counseling theory and practice is less common than we would like. The churches that are born out of the current church planting movement represent, at least in part, the future of counseling in the local church. We believe an infusion of biblical counseling philosophy and practice into the DNA of new church starts is an essential key to the furtherance of the biblical counseling revolution and the continuance of effective soul care by local churches.

Values

Initiated in 2009 by Open Door Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC, The North American Church Planting Foundation is a network of like-minded churches, church planters, and sponsors that advocate three core values: Gospel, Community, and Mission. The NACPF establishes a culture of soul care among church plants by emphasizing the role of biblical counseling within each core value.

Gospel: Through the NACPF, we are working to fulfill the Great Commission by upholding and celebrating the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Through the NACPF, we are committed to proclaiming the hope of the Gospel and the surpassing riches of God’s grace toward us in Christ. In fact, the grace of God and the power of the gospel are both inextricably linked to our appreciation of biblical counseling. The churches within our church planting network are equipped and motivated to change through an insightful study of the Scriptures, personal ministry to one another, and through a caring culture of biblical community.

Community: By God’s perfect design, all Christians need community. We believe the New Testament model for local churches (plants) is one of cooperating, sharing, and growing together. This “one-another” quality within the Christian faith can only exist in a gospel-centered community. As a result, the NACPF is planting churches that are not merely places where people share burdens and fellowship about life. Rather, they do so with a unique perspective as they intentionally build each other up in Christ. This is the essence of a Gospel community, committed to grow as a community knit together by love through the mutual ministry of the word. Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, it is our desire to display the sufficiency of the Scriptures through the ministry of every church plant.
Relying on the Bible as our central resource for lasting change and restoration, we have gone to great lengths to shepherd and train future church planters in practical and godly biblical counseling ministry. NACPF church planters progress through an internship process by which they are equipped and mentored to counsel biblically in a local church context. Church planters are asked to complete biblical counseling criteria including, How People Change, Helping Others Change, Instruments in a Redeemer’s Hands, and other practical biblical counseling equipping tools. Even after the church is planted, the planting team has an on-going relationship with their sending church for further training and coaching. In terms of biblical counseling, we owe much to the instruction of Dr. Robert Jones, Director of Biblical Counseling at Open Door Baptist Church.

Mission: No conception of the Gospel is complete without an understanding of its outward momentum. Our God is a missional God. Churches within the NACPF intentionally structure their ministries and services to welcome those who have not heard or embraced the good news.
We believe that Jesus’ Great Commission is not merely intended to make converts, but to so magnify the glory of God that His name is known throughout the world. We take seriously God’s command to make disciples who know, love, and grow in Christ. Here is yet another connection to biblical counseling which must not be overlooked; the mandate to minister the good news to believers and unbelievers alike. In this respect, we seek to plant church-planting churches who will grow to the point that they are ready to plant self-sustained, theologically healthy, gospel-centered communities who also fueled by a sincere commitment to the Great Commission.
The NACPF is grateful to like-minded organizations such as CCEF, NANC, and the Biblical Counseling Coalition for their magnificent efforts to equip pastors and laity for biblical counseling ministry. We hope that together we can plant churches that glorify God and build up the body through the cure of souls. Learn more at www.nacpf.org.

What We Can Learn From Other Biblical Counselors...

“How come you have been so successful at this business of counseling,” he asked?

I responded something like this. “Dave, all I can tell you is that I work with Divine authority. I listen to what people tell me about their lives and then I engage them with the Word of God. As they respond positively to the Lord, I coach them in the implementation of the Word to bring course correction and work hard at training them to walk in His way.”  - Dr. Howard Eyrich (Biblical Counselor for over 40 years)

Biblical counseling can be seen as a daunting task.  Daunting because we (the church who are all called to be counselors) can buy in to the notion that it is up to us to fix other's problems.  When we begin to think that, we remove the power of God's Word in the hearts of other's lives and rob Him of glory.  It is not up to us, we are the messengers whom God called and promises to equip.  He is the one who is at work in the hearts and lives of His children.  In His grace and mercy, He chooses to use broken people to help other broken people.  Praise God!  Much like evangelism, we are called to proclaim God's Word, the Gospel, to a dying world and it is up to the Lord to draw and save.  God owns the results of salvation and of helping hurting people in the midst of their problems.  When we can have this right perspective, helping others isn't so daunting after all.  It is exciting to see what God is going to do next!  To get to see Him work in front of our fallen eyes is a blessing.  We can then engage hurting people, get messy with them because we want to see the glory of God work mightily in our own lives and in the lives of those we are trying to help.  What a great God we serve!

The Biblical Counseling Coalition's blog, Grace and Truth, has been posting a series going of lessons learned from biblical counselors.  From two years into their ministries to 40 years.  Great lessons that all lead to the grace of God and His work in the lives of others.  I recommend them if you are wanting to get some helpful tips and some great encouragement from them.  You can find them at: Grace and Truth Blog  There are also other posts that are super helpful and I hope that you are encouraged by the variety of counselors that have contributed to this blog.