You want to do a good thing. You want to help hurting people. You want to mobilize your church to be a source of care for its members and community. You want to point people to the hope of Christ amid their hardships.
You want to invite people into a community of care where everyone acknowledges their brokenness and seeks redemption together. You want to break the stigma of counseling and cultivate a community where everyone is okay being a “work in process.”
You want to make the church a more real and authentic place. You want to change a culture of surface level prayer requests and head knowledge Bible studies. You want to see everyone in your church go deeper with Christ because of the presence of a counseling ministry.
You want to find out what would happen if we all quit “playing church” and opened ourselves up to the possibility of God changing our personal, emotional, and relational lives. You want to be a conduit of people experiencing all that God wants to be and do in their lives.
The fact that you’re reading this article means you want to do a very good thing!
Because it is so good, we are left asking questions. Why isn’t this already happening? Why aren’t churches already doing this? Why aren’t there a multitude of models that churches can adopt and adapt to fit their context? Why do church leaders often get nervous about liability when we just want to help people?
These are important questions and there are important questions behind these questions. This webinar series is about helping you understand the questions behind these questions so that you can do the good thing you want to do with excellence.
Here is an underlying premise of this webinar series: the more important something is, the more important it is do it well, and the more dangerous it is to do it sloppily. Because a counseling ministry will invite people to be vulnerable with the most sensitive parts of their life, it will – for better or worse – have immense influence. With great influence come great responsibility.
This webinar series is meant to help you think well about creating a counseling ministry. “Creating a counseling ministry” is different from “training counselors.” Training helpers is only one part of the process and not the first thing to be done. We will start by clarifying common points of confusion that incumber a church starting an effective counseling ministry.
If you are ready to take this journey in a way that values quality over expediency (that is, doing things well more than doing things fast), this webinar series will be very satisfying for you.
[This article is an excerpt from my Spring 8-part webinar series on “Mobilizing Church-Based Counseling.” You can RSVP for all 8 free webinars here. You can overview the dates and topics at bradhambrick.com/webinars2022spring.]