How biblical counseling can benefit our mental health

This episode is on understanding the benefits of biblical counseling on our mental health along with what we mean by the term biblical counseling. Our series on mental health has helped us understand its connection with human dignity. Though God created us as perfect, embodied beings, sin has marred the human experience holistically, not only crippling our relationship with God, but with our bodies as well. As a result, mental illness is a part of living in a broken world, but the gospel has not left us without hope. 

While we live in the presence of spiritual and physical brokenness, Christ has promised to redeem us, making right what has gone wrong, and that includes our bodies. In the meantime, we live in the tension of what God has already done in providing Jesus, and what he has promised to do in making all things new. And he has given us the gift of the Church and each other to help us as we walk in this world. Specifically, for those who may want specialized help, the Lord has provided counselors to assist us in the daily fight to grow in Jesus in the midst of both our spiritual and mental struggles.  

Joining us on today’s episode to discuss the role of counseling in the church are Jonathan Holmes and Brad Hambrick. Jonathan Holmes is the founder and executive director of Fieldstone Counseling in Northeast, Ohio. Before founding Fieldstone, he served as a pastor for 15 years. He graduated with his M.A. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and has authored and contributed to a number of books.

Brad Hambrick serves as the pastor of counseling at The Summit Church in Durham, N.C. He also serves as assistant professor of biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, is a council member of the Biblical Counseling Coalition, and has authored several books.

Episode Transcript

Narration: We live in a world full of counsel. Yet not all counsel is equally helpful for Christians. Jesus exhorted us to be wise as serpents. We need to test what we are hearing and believing against the truth of God’s Word. Here are Brad Hambrick and Jonathan Holmes to help us better understand the Bible’s importance in the counsel we give and receive and what we mean by biblically based counseling.

Brad Hambrick: If we wanted to give kind of a biblical marker for how to think about this, we might look at the two types of life disruptions that emerge from Genesis three and then ask, “Why would it be important to have a biblically grounded counselor for each of those?” And so if we look at Genesis three, that’s where the fall happens. That’s where sin entered the world. And so some of our life struggles emerge from our unbiblical beliefs, values, and choices. Let’s just take anger. If you’re working with a counselor on anger, anger basically says two things. This is wrong and it matters. You want a counselor that as you’re evaluating, hey, am I righteously angry because what I am upset about really is wrong, or is it just violating a personal pet peeve? 

Having a counselor with that shared faith background allows you not just to be affirmed, but to actually grow in the way that you’re expressing your faith and being an accurate image bearer of God in a world in need of salt and light. 

But out of the fall, it wasn’t just sin that entered the world at Genesis three, suffering also entered the world in Genesis three. All of creation began to moan from that point forward. And so let’s say you’re not working in an area of high personal responsibility like anger or addiction, but you’re talking about grief or trauma that we want to be able to grieve as those who have hope. A counselor is going to point you towards some greater sense of where you draw meaning, how you determine that life and effort is worth it in a world where life is hard. And so having a counselor that shares your Christian values is going to take those grittiest parts of life, and again, not just help you find relief, which is important. I don’t want to downplay that at all, but also being a part of building up your faith as you find relief from those kinds of hardships. 

I don’t think it’s surprising to anybody to say we have polarized views emerging on most subjects in our day and age. And so you have some people who think counseling is everything. And they would be, they might not say it this way, but they’d be very content to have the Church become a mental health clinic. And we teach optimal human functioning via the words and example of Jesus. And then you have other people who look at counseling and they see it as one of the cutting edge of culture war in our day. And it’s one of those spots where a lot of pivotal issues, they find some of their most practical expression. And so there’s that tendency to elevate counseling or denigrate counseling, like happens with every other subject. And so that’s one where asking somebody, what is it that you’re wanting to pursue counseling for? What’s your goal? Like at the end of counseling, how would you want your life to be better? And with that better, what would you be pursuing? And so I’m even as somebody who’s my vocation is, I’ve got counseling right there in my job title, I don’t want to elevate counseling as an end in and of itself. Counseling is something that’s meant to help people flourish, and they flourish for the reasons to which God called them.

Jonathan Holmes: What I would tell people is that what undergirds biblical counseling, and in my opinion, distinguishes it from secular counseling, is just that every aspect of who we are, what we do, and what we say in the counseling room is shaped by scripture. Our goal in counseling is to see the individual as God sees them, and to understand that at the core, every human being that we are privileged to speak with is an image bearer of God. And I would say in secular counseling, you’re not going to get that. I would say at least a primary goal in secular counseling would be problem or symptom alleviation. So whatever problems you’re coming into counseling with, we want to alleviate those, mitigate those, or even get rid of those. And while that’s definitely a goal, I think that biblical and Christian counselors share our goal is even deeper than that. We really want change that happens in the heart to come to fruition in the lives of the people that we see. And so biblical counseling wants to approach people holistically, both body and soul, and we want to offer them the words of scripture. Those are the words of life. Our words matter to some degree, but at the end of the day, the words that really matter are going to be the words that Christ himself spoke and has given to us through scripture.

Narration: In past generations, talking about counseling and mental health would have been considered taboo in the church. While there is still work to be done today, seeking counseling, especially from mental health struggles, is more accepted and even celebrated. Here’s Jonathan with some encouragement about the current landscape of counseling and mental health.

Jonathan Holmes: There’s quite a few trends, mostly positive, that I’ve seen, and the first of which would just be a broader awareness of mental health. I hear people even using that phrase, mental health. I hear people talking about depression, anxiety, OCD, different disorders, or psychiatric mental illnesses that we face and that we encounter. And so just people’s level of conversation and vocabulary, I find increasing, especially within the church. 

A second trend I see is that there does tend to be a little bit less stigma surrounding counseling. I think when I initially, you know, was growing up with my parents and my parents’ generation, counseling was seen as something that was fairly negative, that only a select few people who were really broken or really messed up kind of needed to access. And I would say in a very good way, I think we’ve really seen mental health and being able to access it and get it has really broadened. So people are talking openly about getting counseling. You have ministry leaders, pastors, pastors, wives, elders, nonprofit leaders talking about their time in counseling or talking about people that they are seeking out for help. So I think that’s a positive trend. 

A third one that I see is a desire to have counseling that is accessible and affordable. And one of the things I think that definitely changed the accessibility for counseling was Covid for so many people. Counseling was not accessible. Maybe you live in a rural area and didn’t have access to quality Christian counseling. And now, post Covid, everybody’s used to logging onto Zoom, everybody’s used to logging on to some type of virtual platform. And there’s certainly downsides to that, which I think we could all talk about in another setting. But the overwhelming positive is that there’s a lot more access for people to get care and to get counseling. 

The last trend that I see is a desire to use counseling as a part of an overall strategy for change and for help, rather than it being a silver bullet. So we kind of talk about wraparound services and counseling. And so counseling can be a part of a person’s overall growth. So care in the local church, maybe having conversations with your medical doctor as well as having a counselor. So counseling becomes an overall part of a care plan. In care for an individual, a spouse, a couple, and not just a silver bullet for an individual or for a person.

Narration: The church should be a safe place to care for the hurting and the sick. Jesus told us so Himself in Mark 2:17 when He said, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. Extending this type of care doesn’t always come easily though, because it’s hard work. Here are Brad and Jonathan with some advice about how to start implementing a culture of care in the local church.

Brad Hambrick: I think one of the mistakes that we often make when we think about having a counseling ministry in the church is we look at the professional model of counseling and we try to create a pseudo professional model in the church. So we think, ah, okay, well, who we’ve got to work with is laypeople. And so we need a lay counselor and we need them to use intake forms, intake case notes, and create a treatment plan. And so we’ve got to take them through training, meaning it begins to look like something that is very pseudo professional. And so when churches are thinking about this, my suggestion is don’t look to the professional model and mimic it. That’s not really what fits the life of the church. I think models like group based counseling and mentoring, counseling that replicate from within, that don’t share as much of that formality. 

The other thing on that other side of culture of care, let’s say that a church creates a good counseling ministry. Here’s the error I see on the other side of that. That counseling ministry becomes where the church sends all the crying people. And if that’s where a church sends all the crying people, having a counseling ministry actually took us further from what God intended, not closer to it. And so that enriching of one another or friendship care in the life of a local church is really important, both for the church being what God intended the Church to be, which is most important. But then, even from a therapeutic perspective for the aftercare, that as a Church, we’re never going to give every member their own privatized counselor. So we need friendship to carry most of the ball, especially in the aftercare phase.

Jonathan Holmes: I think a great place to start is just even acknowledging that there might be some deficits, both in your knowledge and understanding of mental health care, as well as the things that your people are facing. We know, statistically speaking, that in any congregation there are going to be people that you are caring for, preaching and leading that are faced in experiencing mental health struggles, whether it’s in their marriage, or whether it’s at work, or whether it’s with their own family, with their own children and teens. So this isn’t an esoteric issue that only affects a small amount of people. This is something that I would say on a global scale, a national scale we’re facing. 

And so, as such, how can we grow in understanding that? Maybe it’s consulting some trusted resources. Organizations like the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation where I serve, has numerous resources and training courses and videos and blogs and podcasts specifically designed for people in the church. Maybe it’s even networking within your own church community or your local community with other mental health providers, learning about what are some of the issues that your particular community, context, are facing. 

And then I would say an additional step would be what would it look like, and I tell churches when I consult with them all the time, what would it look like to raise everybody in the congregation’s mental health IQ or just relational IQ by one point, what would it look like to do a sermon on that topic? What would it look like to mention depression, anxiety, abuse in a sermon? And I think that some of those are small steps. They’re very easy, typically little to no cost financially that all of us could do within the church to just simply raise awareness of this really important topic.

Narration: The Christian life is not a solo venture. We need each other, and we don’t need to be ashamed about that. We were not designed to carry our burdens and struggles alone. Sometimes we’ll need the help of a professional counselor. But oftentimes the help we need can be found by looking to those sitting next to us at church. Here’s Jonathan with how we can help one another and with encouragement for those who realize their weaknesses.

Jonathan Holmes: I love this because at the core, I think it just taps into the reality of who we are and how we’re designed to live in community. When you look at Ephesians four, it’s this beautiful passage that comes off of the heels of just some really rich theological gospel truth. And in Ephesians four, Paul tells the church there, he says, hey, individually, all of you have a calling that you’re called to fulfill in your individual life, to fulfill the life that God has called you. And then in the middle of chapter four, he talks about how he’s given gifts to the church to equip and to edify the body, whether they’re evangelists, teachers, or apostles. But then when he closes out the chapter in verses 15 through 16, he talks about how all of us, though, are to be speaking the truth in love and growing up in together into Christ. And I love those bookends of both the individual, the corporate, and then just the body priorities. 

I tell people this all the time. All of us counsel. You counsel every single day. You’re constantly offering advice in words of wisdom to people. And you don’t need to carry the title of counselor or professional counselor in order to do that. And so what I always want to remind people, especially in a local church, is you’re already doing counseling, whether or not you realize it or not. And what our goal then is, is how can the counsel then that we are speaking, that we are offering, how can we make sure that it is laden with Gospel truth? How can we make sure that that counsel aligns with scripture? How can we continue to grow in our understanding of the people that we’re speaking with so that our words are rightly attuned to their situation and their circumstances, their troubles and their sufferings? So in many ways, I tell people when I’m talking about Fieldstone. In an ideal world, places like Fieldstone would be put out of business because the counseling would be taking place in the local church, and that would be a deep passion of ours here at Fieldstone. But like we said earlier, a lot of churches aren’t prepared for that. And so in the in between time, just, you know, really passing along this culture, we all are counselors. We all have opportunities to speak truth in love. I think it is something that churches can take some practical steps towards training, equipping and really edifying their people.

Narration: In God’s infinite wisdom and kindness, he has made us to need community and he has gifted us with a forever family in the church. This is good news because in a fallen world we need to be encouraged to continue in the faith through all the ups and downs of life. Biblical counseling is a wonderful means of grace in a world fraught with strife. In our brokenness, including mental health struggles, may we have the courage to seek the help we need, the faith to trust the Lord’s work in our lives and the endurance to walk in the light with every tool that he’s put at our disposal.