I recently spent a week at one of the largest pastor’s conferences in the United States to share how BCC seeks to help churches. As I talked with many pastors, a few themes stood out to me about care and counseling in the local church.
Most churches and pastors are overwhelmed and don’t know what steps to take to improve how they care for their people. Here are some of the main concerns I heard:
“I’m not a professional counselor”
Many pastors feel like they don’t know how to counsel their people because they didn’t receive much training in seminary.
“People don’t open up or share”
Some pastors think their people don’t have enough trust to share their personal problems and prefer some separation from the church.
“Nobody else is qualified”
Many pastors assume they need a professional counselor in their congregation to develop or lead a quality care and counseling ministry.
“We can’t address the deeper issues”
Some pastors think they should only do spiritual counseling, and they outsource the serious cases after a meeting or two.
We have discussed these objections in previous articles, but here’s the bottom line:
Effective care is required by the Great Commission and
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