I was heartbroken when a pastor told me, “The truth is that we are unable to provide the professional care that many of our members need.” Now, this wasn’t a bi-vocational pastor of a small church. This was a seasoned pastor—one of ten—in a large conservative church with thousands of members. He explained how he had contracted with a local counseling firm to provide “Christian counseling” to couples who were experiencing problems in their marriages. The pastor was convinced that the counseling center could tap into resources that were not available to him in the church.
As we spoke, all I could think about was how in the history of the church, Christians once had a whole-hearted belief in the sufficiency of the Scriptures for counseling. Yet we see in today’s culture that many believe that the Bible is inadequate; that it needs to be supplemented with something more.
Helping suffering people has been a ministry of the church since its inception. We read throughout the Scriptures how the power of the Word has helped the suffering and provided hope for those who are hurting. The early church fathers wrote in detail about the usefulness of the Scriptures to address
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