October 26, 2022 Show with Ed Wilde on “Legal Issues in Biblical Counseling”

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Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

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Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 26th day of October 2022.

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And by the way, folks, if you are interested in seeing a brief video of a television news interview

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I gave to a CBS TV news reporter on Monday, just send me an email to chrisarnzen at gmail .com

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and I will send you the link. The interview was in response to a recent event that occurred at the

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Bethel Assembly of God here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Where an armed woman was threatening violence to congregation members, apparently with the intent to kidnap the pastor and hold him for ransom.

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Obviously, a disturbed woman. Thankfully, she was arrested before there was any harm done, any physical harm done to anyone present.

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But I gave a very brief interview on that with a CBS TV news reporter, and I will get you that link should you desire to see it.

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But I'm very excited to have a first -time guest today. He is a very important guest, and we're going to be addressing one of the most important issues that we could possibly be addressing in the 21st century, in this very frightening litigious age where those on the left, politically and even religiously, are seeking to cripple and destroy the

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Church of Christ. And the guest that is here today to help pastors and counselors and Christian leaders prevent that from happening as best as we can on this earth is

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Edward Charles Wild. He is an editor, along with T. Dale Johnson, Jr.,

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of a very important book that anyone in Christian leadership needs to get their hands on,

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Legal Issues in Biblical Counseling, Direction and Help for Churches and Counselors, published by New Growth Press.

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And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trump and Zion Radio, Ed Wild.

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Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm really quite honored to do this, and I will also tell you this is the first interview

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I've done of the book so far, so I want to say thank you for that, too. I have some coming up, but you are the very first person to get this.

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Well, praise God, I am delighted to have the honor and privilege to be that person. And to give you all listening a little bit more details about Ed, he is an author, he is an

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ACBC certified counselor, an Associated Attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, and years ago

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I got Alliance Defending Freedom involved in a case where the notorious former president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Barry Lynn, was threatening to sue my dear friend,

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Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries after a debate the two had, a public debate at a

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Presbyterian church in Huntington, Long Island. The debate was on, is homosexuality compatible with biblical

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Christianity, and Barry Lynn, who is an ACLU attorney, lost that debate so badly he threatened to sue

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Dr. James White if he dared to distribute the video of that debate, and I contacted the

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Alliance Defending Freedom, which was at that time called the Alliance Defense Fund, and they immediately agreed to be

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James White's legal counsel, and when they went to the hearing to discuss this,

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Barry Lynn and his attorney did not show up, so the judge obviously granted in favor of Dr.

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White to distribute the video as he pleased, so I just throw that in there. And also, my guest

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Ed Wild is an adjunct professor at the Master's Seminary, and we are going to be discussing the aforementioned book,

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Legal Issues in Biblical Counseling, Direction and Help for Churches and Counselors. As I informed you before the show,

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Ed, we have a tradition here on Iron Troupe and Zion Radio, a tradition that seems to be greatly loved by many in our listening audience all over the world.

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That tradition is that whenever we have a first -time guest, that guest gives a summary of their salvation testimony that would include the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, they were raised in, and any kind of providential circumstances that our

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Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them, and that would include you, so I'm very interested to hear your story.

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Well, thank you very much. Yes, I'm glad to hear that ADF did such a fine job with them.

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I'm an attorney associated with ADF, but I actually work at a law firm outside of a private practice in Pasadena, and we do do

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First Amendment work there, among other things, with my partner, Michael Overing. We've known each other for a long time.

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And another thing that's not in the bio that you got, I actually was on staff at a church and oversaw, among other things, counseling at a church in the

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Los Angeles area for about eight years, too. So to get on to my testimony,

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I was raised as a Christian. My parents were professing Christians. I remember going to church from some of my earliest times.

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I had a grandfather who even did late preaching. I had two uncles who had been pastors.

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So I was very involved in church from my earliest memories. I can't remember as a child ever not going to church someplace.

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However, as I started to grow up, one of the things that happened with me was, and it started when

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I was in high school, and it became perhaps more acute when I got to college, is I began to wonder whether I believed the things that I believed because they'd been taught to me or because they were true.

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It wasn't that I had directly some particular crisis of faith, but more just a wondering if my beliefs actually were mine.

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I remember having a thought similar to that when I was a child. When I was a kid growing up, we had something at our school called release time.

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And in release time, there was an hour out of the week where the students were all released to go to religious education.

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So the Protestant churches went to one place, the Roman Catholic churches went to a different place. And my best friend at the time was the

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Roman Catholic side, and I would go to the Protestant side. And I began to wonder if I had his parents, would

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I have believed the things that he believed. So by the time I got to college, I began to question what

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I believed, not because I had some particular reason to believe that it was false, but just merely wondering if I believed these things because I'd been taught them, or if I believed them because I found them to be true.

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So beginning in college, I underwent not quite a systematic analysis of my faith, but a pretty thorough one.

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And I tried to read what other people believed about things. So I read the Bhagavad Gita.

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I read Koran. I read about Hinduism. I talked to atheists.

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So I spent time trying to find out what everybody else believed about what they believed and why they didn't.

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I also tried to believe out, I tried to learn about why some people didn't believe

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Christianity was true, what sorts of arguments were being made that the Bible was not in fact true, and how strong were those arguments.

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I wasn't a lawyer yet, but I apparently already had sort of an inclination towards the strength of arguments then.

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And after having done that, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't come up with a good reason for believing the

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Bible was not true, and I had no particular reason to believe that these other different religions or anti -religions or non -religions were true.

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I didn't find better evidence or better reason to believe these things other than what

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I was taught. And so, at this point, I feel very comfortable with Christianity and the truth of Christianity and the truth of the

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Bible, and I've not had anything which has shaken my faith. I know, for instance, every year

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Easter Time magazine is going to run some cover story about how they finally found

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Jesus' body someplace in Jerusalem, and it will always be defunct as always. So those sorts of things don't bother me anymore.

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But that would probably be the biggest thing that gave me difficulty was just trying to make sure that my faith was my own and not something that I merely inherited.

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And when did you realize that God had placed a call upon your life to enter into the field of law?

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Well, I don't know that I'd even say I went that far. What happened was, I was an

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English major in college, and when I started to get towards the end of the time, I was trying to figure out how

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I could make a living. And so I realized that I could read or write, and I was working at a law firm at the time, and I figured, well, they read and write, so I know how to do that.

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When I started to get an overlap of church and legal matters, it actually came a few years ago, because when

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I finished up college, I went to law school, and I practiced as a lawyer for a number of years.

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And then I got married, and I had studied very hard on my own.

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I'm kind of an auto -dickhead, so I learned Greek and Hebrew by studying. I learned theology and church history by just reading a great deal.

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And I was an elder at a church in Burbank, and we were looking for somebody to take a particular pastoral position, so I ended up taking over the pastoral position.

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I'd already been teaching at masters in the undergraduate department, teaching business law and some other classes.

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And then after I came on staff at the church, I began to teach some classes that had things to do with church government, discipleship, things like that.

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I completed a master's degree in biblical counseling here at the Masters University, and I started to teach in the biblical counseling department also.

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And I was on staff at the church. Then I left being on staff at the church about 2015, and I went back into practicing the law again.

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And at that time, the questions about legal issues started to come up. Having had an unusual kind of background, having both worked at a church and worked in the law,

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I had some experience that a number of other people didn't have. Then John Street, who is very involved with the directing of ACBC and is the chairman of the biblical counseling department here at the

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Masters University, put me in touch with Dale Johnson, who is the director of ACBC.

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And so before COVID hit, actually, we started talking about and putting together what became this book.

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And so we started to talk about what sorts of issues come up with pastors and counselors in the work.

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And I also started teaching a class here at the Masters University on the topic. And as I worked through the issues with the students who very often are quite involved in their churches, oftentimes they're pastors themselves or they're leaders in their church, we started to come up with a good list of the kinds of problems churches come up with or face with the legal system.

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And that has enabled us to put together a good list of what kinds of topics we needed to cover, and that ended up being the book.

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So it was the legal issues and the church issues, something that came together over the course of time, teaching in that area, and then having been a pastor and also being a lawyer.

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Now, this book could not be more timely. I am not aware of any other book exactly like this.

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Perhaps you're aware of something that I don't know. I'm sure you are. Actually, on that point,

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I can tell you that I don't know any other book like it. In fact, a great deal of the book actually came from the notes that I had in teaching the class here at Masters University because I couldn't get any book that was anywhere near this in terms of how does pastoral ministry interact with the legal system.

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So there may be such a book, but I've not run into it myself. Well, you have the book divided in two parts.

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The first part is how do I protect a counseling ministry in the church? And part two is how do

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I protect myself and my counselees? Obviously, the two most important aspects of this whole subject, as people who are

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Christians and who are conservative and who have biblical values, very often are cowering in fear in greater degrees in our current day because of the litigious nature of the left.

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And it is, as I said, quite a growing phenomenon and a disturbing phenomenon.

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The issues that are involved in this book are very thorough as well.

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Should pastors even be involved in counseling? There are even some within evangelicalism who think that the sermons preached should be sufficient to any counseling needs that the congregation have, and then there are others who radically oppose that view.

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But in your opinion, in regarding to the legal risks, should pastors be involved in counseling?

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Well, absolutely pastors should be involved in counseling. And both on the legal side and substantively,

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I think that it is a critical part of pastoral ministry. I can answer both of those questions.

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I imagine for this particular interview, you're probably more interested on the legal side. But I think that pastoral counseling is something that is ministerially needed for the church.

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And some of the reasons for that are, and this gets to the question that you asked, shouldn't, should pastors just be preaching?

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And some of them think, well, if I'm just preaching, that may give me more protection when it comes to the legal system.

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And I would say absolutely, one, they should be doing counseling, or they should learn how to do counseling.

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And two, the legal complications are actually not different between being a preacher in the pulpit and somebody who is giving counseling in the counseling room, provided we're actually doing counseling and not doing therapy under a different name.

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And so it might be useful here at the outset to explain the difference between what we mean by doing counseling, biblical counseling, biblical soul care, those are names that are used, and doing therapy.

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So if you don't mind, I'd kind of like... Oh, yeah, that's excellent. Please do. Okay. All right.

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First off, what is therapy? Therapy is a practice to try to help people feel good with who they are and what they're doing.

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The basic paradigm for therapy has a great deal to do with Sigmund Freud, even though most psychotherapists of any stripe would not consider themselves

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Freudian. But Freud set up a basic paradigm to understand human beings, and without using his technical terminology, it would go together something like this.

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Human beings are born with a certain set of desires, things that we want to do.

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If we were talking about postmodernism, they would refer to those sorts of things as preferences.

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The society at large will stand in the way of that. So picking up an idea that comes perhaps from Rousseau, you have this idea that the individual is really what the good thing is, and the culture at large is bad in some way.

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And the culture is bad because, in a Freudian understanding, the culture keeps the individual from being able to do what he or she wants to do.

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So there will be limitations on my sexual practice. Human sexuality seems to be an enormously important area when it comes to the conflict in our culture.

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So the sexual desires of a particular person in and of themselves cannot be good or bad things.

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They're just there. The culture, whether taught by the parents or society at large or whatever,

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Freud refers to that as a super ego. If any of you had an introduction to psychology and read any

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Freud, it comes in and says there are certain things you're not allowed to do. This creates a conflict in the human being between the things that I want to do and the things that I'm not permitted to do.

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Psychology then is taken very broadly when we're talking about clinical psychology, and it's really problematic to use the word psychology sometimes because psychology refers to a number of different disciplines, all the way from how do my senses function at a neurological level to how do we treat somebody for anxiety, how do

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I talk to them about that. And it refers to 190 -some schools in the

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United States. So there's not anything in particular which is psychology. It's a great many different things.

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But I'm going to use it here just to refer to the general idea when we're talking about clinical psychology and giving therapy, would not take a moral position on any of those sexual desires.

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And that's being enforced, by the way, as a matter of law in a number of states. We can talk about that later.

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The difficulty which that places on Christians or, indeed, anybody or to any sort of traditional ethic, particularly sexual ethic of any religion when it comes to trying to be a licensed psychologist.

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But they have these particular desires. Society comes along and says you can't do it. What a therapist does is a therapist very narrowly has the job of trying to help this person navigate that conflict between what they want to do and what they're not allowed to do.

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So they try to help the person feel better about the desires that they have. So if I come to see a psychologist and I'm feeling difficulty because I find myself experiencing same -self attraction, rather than helping me to not follow along and act out on that same -sex attraction, the job of the therapist is to help me feel good about that same -sex attraction.

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So the therapist's job is to help somebody feel good about whatever it is they want to do and to help them avoid the negative consequences which might come about from trying to act out on the things that they want to do.

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One of the areas that is showing up in psychology and the law and just in the culture at large is what they are now referring to as minor attractive persons.

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We used to refer to them as pedophiles. So we have people who find themselves sexually attracted to children.

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The psychologist doesn't have the job, the therapist doesn't have the job of trying to help the person to not be attracted to children.

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They have the job of trying to help the person feel okay about that and avoid negative consequences like going to prison for having sex with children.

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So that's what a therapist's job is. A therapist's job is to help people feel bad.

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There'd be circumstances that feel bad, feel good, not feel bad. And in certain circumstances, we can look at that as a relatively benign thing.

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You know, if somebody's feeling anxious, how do I help you feel not anxious anymore? And as a general matter, not feeling anxious is probably a good thing.

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It's very unpleasant to feel anxious. And in fact, it's a command of Christ not to be anxious.

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Right. And we can talk an example about the difference I'll give you in just a moment when we look at like, for instance,

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Philippians chapter 4 about the difference between the way a Christian might think about such a thing and the way a psychologist might work with it, about anxiety, for instance.

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But the therapist's job is just to make the person feel okay. When it comes to morally complex issues, so for instance, if we're talking about what is required of a human being when it comes to matters of human sexuality, trying to help you feel better about some sort of sexual desire, which is prescribed for Christians, we'd have to look at, you know, helping somebody work out

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Romans 118, in which case I would have to look at that as something rather negative.

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We're trying to help the person suppress the knowledge that God's law written on their heart to feel okay about the fact that they want to engage in sinful behavior.

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So that would be one of the places where there's a difference. What a Christian is supposed to do when it comes to, we're talking about biblical counseling, is we're not doing therapy.

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We're trying to train people to think and act like Christians.

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And oftentimes the result of thinking and acting like a Christian will have effects.

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So for instance, we would hope that thinking and acting like a Christian would help somebody not to be anxious.

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We brought up the issue about anxiety. Yes, and be anxious for nothing. And so a therapist working through it might do something like try to find out why you feel anxious, might prescribe certain sorts of breathing exercises.

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If you get anxious around a particular circumstance, we might try to train you to notice how you begin to feel anxious beforehand, to train you to not feel frightened about that thing.

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It's not really a bad thing, something like that. But let me give you an example. There was an example that came up some years ago when

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I was teaching theology of biblical counseling, which illustrates a fundamental difference between how

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Christianity would approach a particular topic about feeling anxious and how a psychologist or a psychiatrist might.

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There's a horrifying story that I believe it took place in Canada where a young woman, she was in high school, went to a high school party and she became intoxicated.

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She was raped by some boys who photographed it. In fact, they filmed it, and the photographs were posted online.

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The film was. And needless to say, the young lady felt horrified and ashamed and wrecked.

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And very, very sadly, the young woman took her life shortly thereafter.

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She had to leave the school. And she was under the care of therapists and psychiatrists at the time she committed suicide.

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And since therapy as such is going to have to limit the human being to what we may be socially, physically, to our environment and to our body, the most that they could offer this young woman is to try to get her to not feel bad about having been the victim of a crime.

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And you end up defining the shame that the woman feels as really what is wrong here.

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And you have this strange sort of thing where there's something wrong with her for feeling shame about the crime that was committed against her.

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And so what they'll do is, for instance, they'll give her medication, anti -anxiety medication or antidepressant medication, in the hope that her body won't be able to experience the emotions that she's experiencing.

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They'll try to tell her she shouldn't feel bad about what happened to her. But if we think about it, for instance, from a

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Christian perspective, we have a rather different set of concerns here. We can look at this and see there is this woman who is the victim of a hideous crime.

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And the Bible will very often use the word shame to refer to both that subjective feeling of being ashamed, but also being the victim of my enemy.

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Shame is the sort of sensation in place that happens to us when we come into contact with sin, when we've been sinned against, and when we sin.

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It's part of sin. It's part of the being separated from God. And if we can tell this woman that, you know what, it's not wrong that she feels ashamed, but rather than just feeling better, what she needs is she needs honor.

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And Peter in chapter 1 refers to the fact that we will receive praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

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This woman needs to be vindicated. She needs more even than just these young men being, and I use the word briefly, these monstrous people.

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She needs more than them being convicted. Having been involved in the legal system for years, I can tell you that winning never really provides the vindication that people hope that it will.

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Even if these men went to prison, even if they received the death penalty for what they did, she would not receive the degree of vindication which would make up for what had been taken from her.

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But the vindication that she can get from Christ will give her His glory,

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His honor, His praise, more than makes up for anything, the sins that have been committed against us, the righteousness of Christ, and the judgment against the sin against her.

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Somebody who can say, you are not what these monsters said about you, you are what I say about you, and you will, as we sing in our song, be bright shining as the sun for 10 ,000 years.

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So there's far more that can be given to somebody in this. And that's an example of just the difference in terms of outcome.

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Another way that might be different is, for instance, if you look at Philippians chapter 4, when you brought up anxiety and about how anxiety is a command, to not be anxious.

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In fact, could you pick up Philippians 4 when we return from our first station break? Yes, absolutely.

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And if anybody has a question for Ed Wild, please send it in to chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence.

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Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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And I could readily understand any question about counseling would likely give rise to people having very personal, very private, very intimate questions.

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So obviously I will grant your request in these cases to remain anonymous. But if you're just asking general questions about general principles, about the area of biblical counseling and other things that involve our discussion, if they're just general questions, please give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

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Don't go away. We'll be right back with Ed Wild right after these messages from our sponsors. I'm Dr.

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Thanks for helping to keep Ion Sharpen's Ion Radio on the air. I'm Dr.

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Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

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It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word and to enthusiastically proclaim

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soon that many of you are responding I'm back now with my guest today Edward Charles Wild who is the co -editor of Legal Issues and Biblical Counseling Direction and Help for Churches and Counselors and before the break,

42:28

Ed you were just beginning to cite a quote from Philippians 4,

42:33

I believe Yes, in fact one thing I do want to make clear here is that it may seem like we've gone a little far afield in discussing the difference between therapy and what a pastor should be doing but we'll see in just a minute

42:49

I hope that the legal importance of that so it's really not octopic in fact, it actually lies at the core of providing protection for pastors and other people ministering in the church when giving counsel so I'll explain how that works out so while this may seem like a direction it's actually the straightest line to where we need to go to give you an example in Philippians chapter 4 we have the verse which speaks about the fact that do not be anxious about anything but let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus and anyone who's ever done pastoral counseling or biblical counseling will have heard the person say something along the lines of I was anxious,

43:41

I prayed and I don't necessarily feel better so it didn't work that's a very common sort of thing to happen there but what

43:50

I want you to understand is is that if you look for instance at the entire chapter of Philippians 4 not to mention the whole rest of the

43:56

Bible or certainly even just the rest of Philippians that the command to pray takes place in a matrix of other commands and assertions so for instance immediately before that Paul begins with his discussion about the fact of the rest of my fellow workers whose names are written in the book of life so he speaks about an eternal hope he speaks about the return of the

44:19

Lord and then he begins right after the commandment to pray and right after this commandment about Thanksgiving how we are supposed to conduct ourselves in terms of our thought life whatever is true, whatever is honorable and such to think of those things and Paul says then also to do the things which

44:40

I taught you to do the lack of anxiety then that is promised here in the middle of this passage is something that takes place for somebody who has a hope fixed upon heaven who is certain about that who has been thankful to God for what they have who has given their cares to God who has directed their thoughts towards things that are good and right and just and honorable who has been obedient to the commands of God and otherwise living the way a

45:10

Christian should so the lack of anxiety is not the direct aim of the passage but it is one of the blessings that God can provide to somebody in biblical counseling or pastoral counseling what we are doing is we are seeking to train people how to think and act and live as Christians we are providing, if you will, religious instruction we are trying to make disciples sometimes biblical counseling is referred to as intensive discipleship training it is the same sort of thing that the pastor should be doing in the pulpit you are just doing it with somebody who is in a personal conversation where you have a chance for them to ask questions to clarify what it is that they are doing to give them encouragement or rebuke that is tailored to the place where this particular person is but in substance, in a lot of it it is really not different than what they are doing in the pulpit you would ask that at the beginning certain pastors are thinking

46:16

I should just preach and I should give up on counseling well, if they are going to do that then they have to give up on preaching also because the things that they should be doing in counseling are the same things they should be doing in the pulpit and the things they are doing in the pulpit are the sorts of things they should be doing when they are counseling individually when you realize that we are not doing therapy and that what we are doing is providing instruction and how to live and act and think like a

46:46

Christian it should provide some clarity to whether we should do this or not does that make sense, Chris? Oh yeah, definitely in fact, unless you haven't finished concluding with that thread of thought we do have a number of listeners waiting to ask questions and if you are free

47:04

I would ask the first one that has come through why don't you just go ahead and do that and the point, by the way the point

47:10

I wanted to make there is and I will get to the question but I wanted you to know why that's important overall to the question about doing biblical ministry and the law that there's a number of different particular issues that come up in counseling that we address in the book and I think

47:29

I need to make something clear here I get absolutely no money from the book neither does Dale so I'm not making any money by doing this this is not for my own personal finance this is for the blessing of the church the money is all being donated to ACBC so neither one of us are getting anything from this but when it comes to the issue about can

47:53

I go ahead and act like a Christian without getting in trouble the safest way to do that is to be making it as clear as possible that I'm not doing counseling in terms of doing psychotherapy but rather that I'm giving instruction and being a

48:06

Christian but other than that I would be more than happy to take whatever questions you have Great, and I'm sure you would agree before I ask the question that there would be absolutely nothing wrong if you were receiving financial benefits from the publishing of this book as many

48:22

Christian authors make a substantial part of their living that way it's just that you have chosen not to do that I would agree a workman is worthy of his hire and I completely agree on that particular point but on this particular because I sell my words and my talking and all the rest as an attorney and as a professor so I certainly expect to get paid for the work but on this particular occasion

48:51

Dale and I were both very concerned about this work getting done and the importance of it and so we both have effectively volunteered our time and it's been a substantial amount of time as have all the individual authors in this book all of them have effectively volunteered their time so this was a labor of love for all of the various professionals because these people all spoke about their professional capacities because we all believe in the importance of this topic for the church and just are concerned for the protection of the church generally

49:25

Okay, we have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York who says when someone is looking for a biblical counselor when one cannot be found in the congregation where they are a member isn't it very careful

49:40

I'm sorry isn't it important to be very careful that they seek a biblical counselor and not necessarily one that is labeled a

49:52

Christian counselor Isn't there often a difference between the way that people identify themselves as counselors because in this day and age even someone calling themselves a

50:03

Christian counselor can be guilty of teaching and counseling using absolutely bizarre and unbiblical ideology

50:13

Yes, in fact, yes there's a few different things that are involved in that so when somebody is referring to themselves as a

50:19

Christian counselor typically that means that they are a licensed professional counselor of some sort so in the state of California for instance, somebody can be a licensed vocational social worker or a marriage and family therapist there's a few different designations about what you are to be a licensed professional counselor of some sort and you are permitted to use whatever school or authority you want for purposes of that so you can be a therapist

50:52

I can be here in the city of Los Angeles I can find people who use tarot cards witchcraft,

50:58

Hinduism, Islam in addition to using cognitive behavioral therapy or Freudian psychology or Jungian or Adlerian or whatnot so all the person is saying is that I could be a little more perhaps than I'm a

51:14

Christian who is a therapist the other problem with this is that if you are somebody functioning under a state licensure you are required to work within the scope of what the state is requiring you to say so the state has certain limitations on what can be said and not said and that really is causing problems for Christians who are licensed therapists to be able to counsel somebody for instance saying

51:47

I'd like to counsel you for the reduction of same -sex attraction that's becoming very difficult

51:53

I believe that that is an infringement upon their First Amendment rights both to speech and to religion and quite problematic and it's causing a great deal of grief for some

52:03

Christians who are in that position the other part of it is that merely saying that I'm a Christian therapist of some sort or Christian counselor that doesn't require them to do much of anything else the terms of what they're allowed to do and not do are set more by the state than by their

52:19

Christianity and I've seen a number of instances where I've had people who have gone to see a

52:26

Christian therapist in fact I'll give you an example of a pretty egregious example

52:31

I knew of a situation where there were two people who were within the church they're both professing to be

52:37

Christian in fact I don't want to cut you off during an important part of that story so we're going to go to our midway break first and then when we return we'll have you continue that story if you don't mind okay great and if anybody as I said has any questions for Ed Wild our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com chrisarnson at gmail dot com as always give us your first name at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside the

53:06

USA only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter please be patient as this midway break is always a bit longer than the others it's out of necessity to comply with the

53:19

FCC regulations that Grace Life Radio of Lake City, Florida must, to which they must comply to localize this program to Lake City, Florida geographically so please be patient don't go away we will be right back with Ed Wild right after these messages

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It's such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners from all over the world

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Dr. Joe Moorcraft I'm Joe Riley a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland going back to 2005 one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

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Dr. Joe Moorcraft if you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters

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Always mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Before I return to my guest today

01:07:45

Ed Wilde co -editor of Legal Issues in Biblical Counseling Direction and Help for Churches and Counselors I just have a couple of more very important announcements

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Last but not least If you are not a member of a biblically faithful Christ honoring doctrinally sound theologically solid church no matter where you live on the planet earth

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So send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put I need a church in the subject line if indeed you do need a biblically faithful church

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That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Ed Wild on legal issues on biblical counseling

01:11:19

Our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail .com And right before the midway break

01:11:24

Ed, you were beginning to tell us a story that was quite disturbing in regard to a counseling session

01:11:32

Yes, there was we had a situation where there was a couple they were members of a

01:11:37

Christian church and one of the members of the church was one of the members of this marriage and one of the members of the church was found to be involved in an adulterous relationship

01:11:50

The wife had brought them to the pastor in the church who was giving them counsel The husband had gone to a

01:11:57

Christian counselor The pastor as he was supposed to do told the man to immediately break off the adulterous relationship

01:12:08

The Christian counselor said not so fast we don't want to be upsetting here why don't we see if there's some way we can work something out and take a little bit of time before the adulterous relationship he puts away

01:12:21

So Yeah, Wild had the right response to it But the question that came up was you know, basically is there a difference between going to see somebody who refers to themselves as a

01:12:33

Christian counselor or somebody who's being a biblical counselor and while there are many very faithful people who are licensed as therapists of some sort who are

01:12:44

Christians I don't want to paint with an overly broad brush but the fact of the matter is just calling yourself a

01:12:50

Christian counselor is no no certification that you in fact are going to have somebody who's going to provide you with Christian counsel

01:12:58

I think might be the right answer Well, Bobby in Hartsdale, New York thank you for the question that evoked that story and if you give us your full name and mailing address in Hartsdale, New York you will receive compliments of New Growth Press and compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service a free copy of Legal Issues in Biblical Counseling Direction and Help for Churches and Counselors edited by my guest today

01:13:28

Edward Charles Wild and also T. Dale Johnson Jr. and we thank

01:13:33

New Growth Press for their generosity in providing for us a limited number of copies for listeners who submit questions today and we also have someone who is using an alias obviously we have

01:13:53

Lam Lam I don't know why it was required to have Lam twice in this alias

01:14:00

Lam Lam from Valley Stream, New York and Lam Lam says

01:14:05

I am so excited to hear about the book Dr. Wild has written bringing awareness and help to the church in the spare of Biblical Counseling thank you can

01:14:16

Dr. Wild clarify that to prevent this potential danger about lawsuits the counselor has to put out the disclaimer about the advice and help to be given will be based on the

01:14:31

Bible and Christianity belief or should the counselor have some knowledge of the law thank you for this talk with Dr.

01:14:42

Wild brother Chris ok the answer to that question is first off about truth in advertising a lot of the book discusses that particular issue so there's a couple of chapters where I talk about how do we distinguish along the lines of what we talked about at the beginning of this but there's also an extensive discussion of an intake form which we suggest that you use when having a

01:15:11

Biblical Counseling Ministry and in that form we explain what we do and we don't do now since the law can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction it would always be wise to have somebody in your particular state who's an attorney read it over to make sure that it meets the particular requirements of your state or your county because there's a number of jurisdictions within the state of the

01:15:34

United within the United States that control that but one of the things that we have in there is we make very plain that we are providing

01:15:40

Biblical instruction how to live as a Christian and we're not providing psychotherapy we're also not providing a number of other things we're not giving you legal advice we're not giving financial advice we're not going to come over and fix the plumbing in your house there's a number of things you know that we're not going to be doing for you when we're doing this so it's really important to make that clear so the counselor should not only say that but one of the things that we suggest you do is that you have them fill out the form where they have to go through and affirm what we are going to do and not do in the counseling situation second question should you have some knowledge of the law yes there's a number in fact one of the things we didn't talk about at the beginning was there's about four different places where if you're involved in ministry at all particularly if you're involved in counseling ministry that you need to have some area of the law or at the very least you need to know that you need to have the help of somebody who understands the law so having a relationship with an attorney and I'll just briefly give you the four basic areas one area that you're going to need to have knowledge of the law involves things that we can put in the context of business

01:17:01

Chris you were talking earlier about the fact that you know when I made mention that on this particular book

01:17:07

Dale and I aren't being paid for it the money is being donated to ACBC but a number of Christian authors make a living by doing that and they absolutely should

01:17:14

I think that's a good thing if you're going to be running a ministry you know you were talking about the fact that you had to give a particular announcement so that you could meet

01:17:23

FCC requirements and also so that you could make a living you know you're trying to run this radio show it takes a lot of work it takes a lot of money and you have advertisers who come on it all those sorts of things are important if we're going to have a church you're going to need to have a building you're going to have insurance somebody's going to have to either pay rent on that building or purchase that building you're going to have employees you're going to have former employees you're going to have to hire people there's a great many places that a

01:17:53

Christian ministry is going to be involved with that are simply business kinds of questions and if you're going to do this you need to know what is required to meet the requirements for having a business if your church is a religious non -profit or you have a counseling ministry that's an

01:18:09

LLC what do you need to do to qualify in your state how do you pay taxes on this what sorts of taxes do you need to pay and not pay and so on so that's one general area that the knowledge of how a business should work second big area is that counselees themselves are going to be involved with the law so for instance the class they teach here at Masters University for the graduate students in counseling and the law we spend a great deal of time talking about what happens to people when they become involved in the legal system counselees we're going to be dealing with people in Christian ministry who have gone to jail so how do we go and minister somebody in jail so I had a very dear friend

01:18:50

Frank Masculinardo who is the chaplain for the Los Angeles County Jail System and he came in and spent time with my students explaining to them how do you get into the jail how do you do this do you have a counseling ministry by the way in your church or in your area is there anybody ministering to the people in prison there do people in prison need

01:19:09

Jesus and they're very often quite anxious to hear that we have a young man who is at the

01:19:14

Masters Seminary now who became a Christian in jail he'd been living on the street got arrested went to prison and is now going to be a pastor praise

01:19:23

God it's a wonderful story his wife was living on the street in fact the fact that he became arrested led to his salvation which led to his wife getting off the street so that the baby that he didn't know that he was going to have to be born in a safe place they both became

01:19:40

Christians it's just one of the most wonderful stories I know that's definitely a

01:19:45

Romans 828 story it is absolutely in fact if you could put me in touch with him later

01:19:51

I would love to interview him I will take care of that I can make that happen he's a great guy and the

01:19:59

Lord has really blessed him and his family so we have I had another one of my former students who deals with women involved in domestic violence she's done work with women who've been trafficked and such and so the woman might be a victim of a rape or a beating or something and you might have that person as your counselee how do you walk them through the legal system because there's enormous pressures or single mothers who find themselves in divorces or people being bankrupt so understanding how the legal system affects the people who are in our ministry is another aspect of it and then there's two sets of issues that involve the counselor as counselor and how to protect yourself one area is how does the counselor protect themselves from the counselee and that's sort of what the question specifically went to we discussed that in the book one of the ways of doing that is by the counseling intake form where we make very clear what we're going to do and not do and the final area which is where a lot of people first think of the relationship between counseling and the law is the relationship between church and state what is the government going to say about what

01:21:14

I'm doing you have the question earlier about should we just do preaching and not do counseling and we actually have questions into ACBC oftentimes they get filtered over to me when they're legal questions and so we had a church in one location who was wondering maybe we should just stop doing counseling at all because of the potential legal liability you know the counselee suing us or the state coming after us and unfortunately

01:21:41

I don't know that forever we're going to be free from the state coming after us there are certainly people who are in the state that want to go after that and we can talk a little bit about that but the other part of it is that the best protection we have for doing that is by being very clear that we're engaged in religious activity we're not doing therapy that's one of the reasons that I belabored the point at the beginning of this podcast was the distinction between what we do in counseling as a pastor or biblical soul care or biblical directive ministry of some sort and what a licensed therapist would do

01:22:19

I have a question you may be too young to remember this I don't know how old you are but I'm way too old

01:22:27

Chris I'm 60 years of age oh that's how old I am all right so we both we have we remember the world when it used to be different well this actually is an incident that took place and I can't remember exactly when but I think it was in the late 80s or early 90s perhaps you may remember hearing about this because I think it made nationwide news but there was a woman who attended a congregation in what is known as the

01:23:01

Church of Christ they've also been known as a restorationist movement church pejoratively they have been called

01:23:09

Campbellites and the Church of Christ they're not all the same because they have in common a couple of the things they have in common with Baptists is they strongly believe in local church autonomy and independence and they have a authority structure where the only one outside of the local church's elders that have authority in that church are

01:23:36

God himself and his word so that's where they have a commonality with Baptists but many of those within that movement many of the churches do not even believe in the concept of church membership they also have such a radical position typically on only using the

01:24:01

Bible that you will rarely find one that officially has a confession of faith or a constitution and that got this

01:24:13

Church of Christ in trouble when this woman who was discovered was an adulteress she refused to repent and when she refused to repent the church made her sin public knowledge she was excommunicated and she sued that congregation because she said

01:24:34

I wasn't even a member of that church they had no business doing that they had no business telling people my my personal private activities and there was nothing in the there was no constitution that mentioned anything about this prohibition so I can't remember if you are familiar with the story

01:24:57

I can't remember whether or not this woman won her lawsuit I think she may have but is this a lesson to be learned about churches and how detailed they need to be in regard to statements of faith whether they call it a creed or a confession at least have some kind of a constitution whatever you call it so it's very clear where you are coming from and what the responsibilities of members are you are absolutely right in fact unfortunately that's not the only one of those sort of cases and I would expect them to be if anything more common as we go ahead because the culture more broadly is likely to be less and less comfortable with Christian morality and the implications of that so a couple of things there first church membership is a very useful thing for a number of reasons and if you just want to be self serving and only think about the legal issues it's clear for that too let me give you an example if two men start punching one another they're going to end up in jail unless they're both boxers because they've entered into an agreement with one another that it's legal for them to hit one another as hard as they can and try to give the other man a concussion any other place than a boxing ring that would result in jail time for both of them so we're allowed to do things to one another if we have a contract which allows us to engage in this behavior that's why we can have baseball matches and football matches normally a giant man tackling another man would be a crime but instead it's going to be on Saturday afternoon we're going to watch college football teams do this to one another and we're going to cheer so in other words my church should stop tackling people as a part of church discipline i'm only kidding well when when you say that i'm going to be a member of this church and this is what we do and this is what we uphold you agree to that other things that i would recommend that the church do i would recommend that the church not only have formal membership in this regard and there's other biblical reasons for having very clear inside and outside of the church but to have in the church bylaws of the constitution someplace where you describe the disciplinary process and how that will work so i when i was on staff at the church one of the things that i made sure was clear in the church membership was that if somebody had been involved in formally involved in the disciplinary process they wouldn't be able to resign until that was completed after we had made clear we're instituting a formal investigation into this that the church preach on this at least once a year so it's not only just clear but that the church have a clear proof that it has been regularly teaching on this particular process and why it is and that in the intake form that's in the book we have a discussion in there about the fact that the information that we obtain in counseling might be necessary to disclose to the church as part of a disciplinary process and also i think one of the things i need to make clear too is that if we find out somebody if you find out in a church somebody is committing a crime against a child you report that to the police right away i think that that goes without saying and we have that in there that we may need to report to the police if there is a child being hurt in some way so if we find out that a child is being sexually abused we're going to be making a call to police we make that clear in the intake form and that's something that i just think has to be a matter of course because churches aren't set up to investigate crimes and we certainly don't want to run interference for people who are committing crimes by the way i forgot to tell i think bobby in hartsdale new york and lamb lamb and valley stream new york that you have each one a free copy of legal issues and biblical counseling co -edited by my guest today compliments of new growth press and also compliments of cumberland valley bible book service cv bbs dot com who will be shipping the books out to you at no charge to you or to iron sharpens iron radio you have to give us obviously your full names and mailing addresses for us to do that uh let's see here we have uh joseph in south central pennsylvania joseph in south central pennsylvania asks are there any states in the united states that currently have reached the point where a person is likely to win a lawsuit if they do not like the way they have been counseled or disciplined in regard to sexual activity or a host of other reasons that the left would want to defend them to continue practicing um that would be this goes back to the therapy counseling issue and where we were if you were in the context of doing counseling or excuse me if you're in the context of doing licensed therapy psychotherapy in the state then yes that would be something which may actually be the case in just about every state that such a thing could arise now would they be likely to win a lawsuit like that I mean the person complaining so the law is likely the case in most states

01:30:46

I haven't gone through and investigated all of them but if somebody were a therapist and licensed therapist in that state and somebody came in and wanted counseling on some particular action some particular sexual conduct and the counselor because of the fact they were a

01:31:08

Muslim even and they came in and said you can't do that because that contravenes religion and what is the truth on this particular point that they could very likely be sued and would likely lose because the culture broadly speaking has undertaken this understanding of human beings that accords effectively with that Freudian discussion we had at the beginning.

01:31:34

So for instance a few years ago there was the Obergefell decision where the United States Supreme Court found a constitutional right to homosexual marriage.

01:31:43

That right really wasn't grounded in any history of the law, the words of the constitution, in any

01:31:50

Anglo -American tradition of the law or liberty. It was grounded almost solely in a very modern understanding of human psychology that runs along the lines that I listed at the beginning where human beings have desires.

01:32:06

The desires are not bad. They're merely prescribed by people who are bigots and therefore we need to make you feel good about them.

01:32:13

And therefore any sort of restriction on sexual activity at least at the moment between adults is a bad thing.

01:32:20

So we have the law actually very favorable towards any sexual conduct between adults and quite the culture is pointing where the law is going to go because the law and the culture are going to remain roughly in step with one another.

01:32:36

The law moves more slowly because it takes a little bit more work for the law to change. But yes, there's a number of places where somebody who if they were a licensed therapist could get in trouble.

01:32:47

That is the reason why the counseling given in the context of religious instruction, the

01:32:55

First Amendment protects the freedom of religion. And religion includes the way we conduct our life.

01:33:04

That wasn't a problem until recently. If we go back 100 years ago in the United States and there were three men who worked together in a bakery and one was a

01:33:13

Jew and one was a Roman Catholic and one was a Presbyterian, although they had different religious practices to varying degrees on Saturday or Sunday, come

01:33:22

Monday morning their ethical life would be remarkably similar. They would have the same understanding of what marriage is about how human beings are supposed to comport themselves, paying their taxes and all the rest.

01:33:34

So there really wasn't any difficulty when our religious practice outside of Sunday morning or Saturday if you were a

01:33:42

Jew would differ. However, we've reached the place where people are trying to argue that we should have freedom of worship but not really freedom of religion.

01:33:53

And what that would mean is this. Freedom of worship is whatever you want to do in your religious house as soon as you close the door, none of us know what you're doing.

01:34:02

So the state wouldn't care if you're Trinitarian or Aryan or you want to worship the devil.

01:34:08

We really couldn't care less whether you offer incense or don't offer incense or wear robes or don't wear robes.

01:34:15

None of that is our business. However, as soon as you open the doors and you come outside, the state can start to regulate what you're allowed to do and not do.

01:34:24

Freedom of religion would say the way that we conduct our lives on Monday morning is as much part of my religious obligation as the way that I worship on Sunday morning.

01:34:35

In fact, part of my worship is how I treat my wife and being chaste and how I treat my children and all the rest.

01:34:41

So we do want to make it plain that we're giving religious instruction and part of our instruction is how we conduct our lives.

01:34:47

At present, plainly and unambiguously legal, excuse me, religious instruction is still protected by the law.

01:34:56

So we still have a First Amendment protection for speech and religion if we are being very, very clear that we're engaged with religious practice.

01:35:05

Hopefully the laws will change so that Christians who are involved in the field of therapy are permitted to give morally appropriate religious instruction there too.

01:35:17

But that's going to remain a matter of some judge striking down the laws in a number of states.

01:35:24

Where the problem can arise is when somebody who's in pastoral ministry, a pastor, is giving what effectively amounts to doing therapy.

01:35:34

They're trying to do therapy. They're using clinical therapeutic techniques.

01:35:39

They're describing what they're doing in terms of doing therapy and they think of themselves as doing that. So we have somebody now practicing psychotherapy without a license and they'll be violating the laws governing what is allowed to be done and not being done in psychotherapy.

01:35:56

So a perilous pastor is likely to be somebody who's going to cause this problem by not understanding that the goal of the church is to create disciples and if we stay there and we create disciples and we're very clear about that, we at the present will be protected by the law.

01:36:14

Will that be the case forever? There's some very, very troubling things coming up in the law in that area.

01:36:22

And Joseph of South Central Pennsylvania, you have also won legal issues in biblical counseling and please give us your full name and mailing address and cvbbs .com

01:36:36

will ship that out to you and once again we thank New Growth Press for their generosity in providing us these copies.

01:36:42

Let me take this time to make an announcement. I would ask all of you who have won and will win a copy of this book that when you're finished with it, or even right away, please give it to one of the elders of your church or a deacon who may be involved in very important decision -making or a biblical counselor in your church so that it can be of best use and I'm not saying that quote -quote layman or ordinary

01:37:16

Christians in the church are not valuable, don't get me wrong, but this is a very unique book and I'm asking you to please pass it on to those who could use it best.

01:37:28

We have an anonymous listener who says, is there a difference when it comes to being vulnerable to a lawsuit between a biblical counselor and a church who is only counseling members of the church and is doing that for free, and a biblical counselor who is actually setting up an office in or outside of a church and seeing people from the community, whether they are

01:37:58

Christians or not, or whether they are members of that specific church or not, and charging for the services?

01:38:05

A good question. The answer is yes and no. Unfortunately with the law, nothing in the law is ever 100%.

01:38:14

So this is one of the topics that we address with some links in the book, and what we want to do is, we want the

01:38:26

Christian who is providing discipleship training to look as plainly and clearly to be a

01:38:33

Christian who is engaged in discipleship training. The more that the

01:38:39

Christian doing this looks like somebody who does psychotherapy, the more somebody from the government may be willing to look at them as if they are trying to practice psychotherapy without a license.

01:38:55

So we have a number of things. You know, you need to have a license now to do hairdressing in California. I don't know if that's every place, but there's a madness about everybody having licenses.

01:39:06

In the area of psychotherapy, you do need to be licensed. And the state, again, something we talked about earlier, doesn't care that you use the

01:39:14

Bible. They really don't care if you use the Bible, and they don't distinguish between psychotherapists who may reference the

01:39:22

Bible verse and psychotherapists who may reference tarot cards. They're perfectly comfortable with both of them, provided that the psychotherapist does and says the sorts of things the state approves them doing and saying.

01:39:35

The person who's a biblical counselor who is not seeing only members of the church who is taking money for it and has a stand -alone ministry, absolutely, they can still be doing

01:39:47

Christian ministry. There's no question that Christian ministry can look like that. Like you brought up earlier,

01:39:53

Chris, it's perfectly appropriate for Christians to be paid for writing books and giving talks and all the rest.

01:39:59

Those are valuable things. We pay for people to do talking and writing and other circumstances. There's certainly no reason that Christians should not be paid for that.

01:40:08

So being paid for giving religious instruction is appropriate. We pay our pastors to give religious instruction.

01:40:15

However, when you are a stand -alone entity, and you're taking money and you're seeing people who aren't in the church, you're going to have to be even more clear about the fact of what you are doing and not doing.

01:40:29

You're going to have to emphasize the distinction between you being a biblical counselor and instructing people and how to live and act as a

01:40:39

Christian versus what a psychotherapist might do. You can do it, you're just going to have to realize that you need to be even clearer about what is the nature of your work and what is the end of your work.

01:40:53

Does that make sense, Chris? Oh, absolutely. And a questioner from earlier who used the alias

01:41:01

Lam -Lam, Lam -Lam asked, did I miss some two of the four points that Dr.

01:41:09

Ed Wild was giving about the knowledge of the law for counselors? I don't know that, maybe you'd know.

01:41:15

Did I stop you from continuing on a thread there? I don't think but I'll be real quick what they are, so I'll just repeat them because it is important and these are some of the things we talk about in the book.

01:41:25

One, every Christian ministry is going to function like a business at some level. Corporate ownership, taxes, employees, all the things you need to know.

01:41:35

Two, people involved in church ministry to others need to be aware of how the law is going to affect the person to whom they are ministering.

01:41:44

You're going to minister people in jail, people who have been bankrupt, people getting divorced. So that's another place where the law interacts with Christian ministry.

01:41:52

Understanding that process will allow you to be a good counselor and to be properly sympathetic and know as a practical matter how to help the people.

01:42:01

When you understand the difficulty of divorce, you will be understanding about how the church may need to provide help for taking care of children or financial support or some such.

01:42:14

There are issues where number three, the counselee versus the counselor.

01:42:20

Unfortunately, sometimes people sue their churches, sometimes people are going to sue their counselor.

01:42:26

Counselors are very worried about that. How do we regulate that relationship so as to provide protection for the counselor?

01:42:33

What should the counselor do? Finally, number four, the relationship between church and state.

01:42:40

What is the state going to be doing to us? How do we know how to live with that? How do we respond to those difficulties?

01:42:46

That would be the four areas. Business, counselee in the law, counselee versus counselor, government versus counselor.

01:42:53

Great, and we are going to our final break. It is going to be a lot more brief than the other breaks. If you have a question, send it in immediately to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

01:43:01

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Ed Weil. As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

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They will get you legal counsel in all 50 states. We are now back with Ed Wild, and we are continuing our discussion on legal issues and biblical counseling, and we have an anonymous listener who asks, you probably recall

01:49:34

Anita Bryant, who in the 1970s had her acting and modeling career destroyed because she became an outspoken advocate for Christian schools to have the liberty to hire

01:49:50

Christian employees and to not hire those that were involved in homosexual activity.

01:49:58

How much of a danger is a church in today when they refuse to either maintain the employment of somebody who is discovered to be an active, unrepentant homosexual, or refuses to hire one?

01:50:14

Okay, that goes again to the nature of doing religious work. One of the things when

01:50:21

I've been involved in the leadership of a church, because we wanted to make clear, was that every single person who worked at the church was expected to be able to do church things when they were there.

01:50:37

So if somebody just showed up at the church and wanted counsel, let's say that somebody shows up at the church and the only person who's there happens to be somebody who works as a janitor.

01:50:49

We'd want that janitor to be able to sit down with the person, give them the gospel, pray with them, because they walk into a church, so we expect the janitor, and believe me,

01:50:59

I have nothing bad to say about janitors. We would not get along in the world without them, but I was trying to figure somebody who's at a church who has the least obviously religious occupation there.

01:51:11

I would expect every person who works in the administration of the church to be able to pray with somebody, to give the gospel, to be able to sit down and read the

01:51:19

Bible with them. So if the church is making very plain that we expect everybody who's on the property of this church to also function in a ministry capacity, then it's appropriate to have ministry capacity be an element of their work.

01:51:39

But if you're just hiring whomever to be church secretaries or to be janitors or any other function of the church...

01:51:48

Even musicians who are involved in the very worship of God, I know churches that hire and pay nonbelievers to sing, perform instruments, and I just think that is absolutely horrendous.

01:52:02

It's madness, and so a church who's acting like that, yeah, the church is... Because if the church is just thinking, like, well, you know, like, let's say that I pick somebody to work in the church in the administration as the bookkeeper for the church, and he's an adulterer, but he's not homosexual, so I will allow him to continue on if he's an adulterer, but when

01:52:24

I found out he's homosexual, I fire him. Well, you're just picking what sins you find acceptable or not. That's not the way a church can function, so make everybody a minister, and then you don't have to worry about it.

01:52:35

And I'm assuming that you're saying that, you know, they're not actually given an office as a minister, or you're just...

01:52:42

No, no, no, not the office of a minister, not at all, but we expect everybody who is working for the church to be able to do just basic elements of church ministry, praying for people, reading with them, all the rest.

01:52:54

I don't mean elevating everybody to being an elder in the church or some official pastor. You're right, thank you for catching me on that,

01:53:00

Chris. Great, well, that's a very, extremely important piece of advice for people that might not have ever thought of that before, because, to tell you the truth,

01:53:10

I never thought of that either. But thank you, Anonymous, and Anonymous, you have won a free copy of Legal Issues and Biblical Counseling.

01:53:19

Thanks to our friends at New Growth Press, and thanks to our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.

01:53:27

Hope to see you We'll be shipping it out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.

01:53:34

Let's see, we have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York.

01:53:41

And CJ says, what do you think qualifications should be put into place before someone in leadership in a church will recognize someone as a biblical counselor and give them that accountability and role to be responsible for?

01:54:02

Well, I am a member of ACBC, the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors.

01:54:08

I know it's not the only biblical counseling certification group, but I think it's important that people who are going to be involved in formal church ministry have appropriate and adequate education and understanding of what they're doing.

01:54:25

If we have somebody who has a poor education in Christian theology, for instance, in the pulpit, it's possible that that person can inadvertently take positions about the doctrine of God or such which are contrary to what

01:54:42

Christians believe. And they can accidentally, if you will, say something about the nature of God or the nature of Christ.

01:54:49

You know, when you get into things like the Trinity, which can be very difficult to discuss. And so, not because they want to be a heretic, but because they're poorly educated, they have a problem.

01:55:00

We wouldn't let somebody, I have a friend of mine who's in North Carolina who's just opening up a car repair shop.

01:55:09

And he's being very careful to find men or women to do the work who have education in how to repair a car.

01:55:16

We should have at least as much concern with people who are dealing with the human soul and things as critical as the

01:55:25

Bible, that they have a proper and full understanding of such things as we do with somebody who would work on a car.

01:55:31

I had somebody come out to take a look at my washing machine the other day because I'm not mechanical. The man had better experience and education than I did and he could tell me what

01:55:40

I needed to do. So we should take human souls and the Gospel as seriously as we take washing machines and dryers.

01:55:50

Well, I know that you have to leave a little bit early, so I want you to now summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding the topic of your absolutely invaluable book.

01:56:05

Okay, I'll end with this. Obviously, I can't tell you everything you do need to know about the law, but it is a great part of wisdom to understand appropriately how what you are doing in Christian ministry in any aspect interacts with the law because it's a place in which you and the people in your church are interacting with the government.

01:56:28

It's unavoidable. I've known too many Christian ministers and people in church leadership who believe that trying to be careful of such things and understand such things was somehow a lack of faith on their part.

01:56:40

It absolutely is not. It's completely appropriate to understand how this works just the same way as you would want to understand how anything else going on in your church works.

01:56:52

If you need to fix the lighting in your church, you hire an electrician. It's appropriate to know these things, and since the culture is running so contrary to what we want to do, it's necessary for us to be even more careful in these matters than perhaps we needed to be usual about previously.

01:57:09

I hope this book is help to the Christian church in the United States. I hope that we can do more on it.

01:57:16

I also want to end with saying thank you to Masters University. They gave me a very nice place to conduct this interview where I would not be interrupted.

01:57:24

I want to say thank you to my law partner, Michael Obering, because he was very generous in saying it's worth our time for me to take a couple hours out of our work day for me to do this.

01:57:35

I want to say thank you to you, Chris, to all the people who participated. I hope this has been a blessing to you and to the rest of the people.

01:57:42

I know it's been a blessing to me, and I'm quite confident it's been a blessing to everybody who's listened. I want to give your website for Digital Media Law.

01:57:52

It's digitalmedialaw .com. Digitalmedialaw .com. Do you have any other contact information that you care to share?

01:58:01

In fact, if the person wants to find me, if you just go to the California Bar website, it has my telephone it has my contact information on there.

01:58:13

If somebody wants to contact me, if you want to ask me about the law in Texas or Oklahoma, I probably can't help a whole bunch because I'm not a lawyer there.

01:58:20

ADF is a great resource if you need something in particular about First Amendment work.

01:58:26

My partner and I do do First Amendment work and we can appear in federal courts around the country if that would be something that would be useful.

01:58:33

Thank you for the opportunity of speaking with the people in your audience, Chris. I really do appreciate it.

01:58:39

You've been very generous and kind. Oh, my pleasure. And just so our listeners know when they're searching for you, my guest's name is

01:58:46

Edward C. Wild and that is spelled with an E at the end. Thank you so much,

01:58:52

Ed, and I look forward to having you back on the program soon and frequently, God willing.

01:58:59

Well, that's going to depend upon you, but thank you very much. I hope that I want to thank everybody who listened today, and I want to remind you all of a couple of things.

01:59:18

Please, if you are interested in purchasing jewelry or having custom designed jewelry for the

01:59:24

Christmas season for a loved one or perhaps yourself, please go to royaldiadem .com,

01:59:31

royaldiadem .com, and mention that you heard about them from Chris Aronson of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio so that we can receive 100 % of the profits from that sale.

01:59:42

Again, thank you all of you for listening, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:59:48

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.