Steve the Biblical Counselor - Christians Who Sell Jesus

Selling Jesus

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Allow me to introduce you to Steve. Steve is a biblical counselor. He believes that God has called him to minister to the broken in spirit and he sincerely wants to help people be healed and whole, walking in victory over sin through the power of the gospel.

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But he's concerned that if he charges the same rates for counseling sessions as other prominent biblical counselors in his area, he'll end up alienating the poor.

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During times of prayer, he believes that God has placed a desire within him to simply give counsel for free.

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But older and more experienced counselors have talked him out of it. God gave you common sense and you need to be responsible and provide for your family, they say.

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Besides, if people don't pay you for your counsel, they won't value it. So, Steve has reluctantly decided to charge half of what most people usually charge.

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Although Steve believes that the Bible is sufficient for godly wisdom, he has failed to turn to it for answers to the simple question as to whether he should require payment for speaking truth and love to broken people.

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He has failed to heed Jesus' command to give freely in Matthew 10 .8

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and allowed the conventional worldly wisdom of his superiors to eclipse the sincere desire

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God has placed on his heart. He has also believed the lie that biblical counselors are somehow above raising support, as most missionaries do, to be able to minister freely and without compromising their sincerity.

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Steve is a tragic example of someone with an honest desire to honor God, but who was derailed by the blindness, complacency, and carnal pragmatism around him.

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He's trapped in a fog of confusion. In the end, biblical counselors are offering to lead people to Jesus through the scriptures with wisdom, truth, and sincere friendship, things that cannot and should never be sold.

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But Steve is unable to see this fact. So this is a really interesting case and I think it's probably representative of a lot of people who are conflicted about the

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Jesus trade in general, but more specifically when it comes to something that's so clearly ministry.

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I want to read a quote by Heath Lambert in his book

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The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams, and he says at the beginning of the book, the fact is that counseling is ministry and ministry is counseling.

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The two are equivalent terms. Counseling is the word our culture uses to describe what happens when people with questions, problems, and trouble have a conversation with someone they think has answers, solutions, and And he says later on, counseling is by definition a theological task.

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There's a second group misunderstanding this issue, and ironically, they are conservative

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Bible -believing Christ -exalting ministers of the gospel. These conservative ministers fail to grasp that counseling is an essential part of ministry and so disconnect theology from counseling.

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They demonstrate the misunderstanding every time they say things like, oh, I don't counsel people,

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I'm a preacher. Or, counseling takes too much time away from my other ministries.

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Or, I don't think the Bible has anything to say about this problem, you need to go see a professional. Such people mean well, but they are wrong about the theological ministry -driven nature of counseling.

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Each of these groups fails to understand the intrinsic connection that counseling has with ministry and theology.

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So, I thought that would be a good opener just to kind of frame this discussion as we think about counseling in light of the

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Jesus trade and selling Jesus and the Dorian principle. Just a book recommendation for those out there who maybe haven't gotten their feet wet with the biblical counseling movement.

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There's a book called Competent to Counsel by J. Adams, so definitely go get that, put it on your shortlist to read.

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It'll blow your mind in a lot of ways if you haven't read Adams before or if you haven't taken a course, a detailed course, on biblical counseling.

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And, of course, this book that I just read from, The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams by Heath Lambert, highly recommended.

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So, getting that out of the way, this is a really sensitive topic. I think probably, in my experience, the most sensitive when it comes to confronting the

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Jesus trade. It's maybe one of those sacred cows or maybe an idol in some people's minds.

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You can't touch biblical counseling or challenge people in this area. You can't ever say that it's wrong to charge money for this.

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You're a bad person if you're confronting this issue within the biblical counseling world. People get really up in arms about this for some reason.

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Maybe I'll just throw that out there. Why do you guys think people are more sensitive about this? I would imagine it's because people that have gone into counseling often have committed years of their life and a lot of money into education to be able to do that.

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Also, there isn't currently a big culture of supporting counselors, whereas pastors also commit a lot of time and money into education, but they know that there is a strong culture of supporting pastors, whereas we don't have that for counselors yet.

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So, yeah, I think people also have this compartmentalization going on often within the church where, just like this quote that I read, they tend to think, well, when you have certain problems, you need to go see a professional.

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Ministers aren't professionals, and we're used to paying professionals. I think there's generally a good desire of people to protect ministry and ministers from false accusations or slander, which is the initial knee -jerk reaction when you hear good men be charged with very serious sin.

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That's what we're talking about here. We're talking about people that we would all acknowledge as very good men, and we're talking about something that we all acknowledge as a very serious sin.

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So, it is pretty natural for people to want to rush to the protection of good men and good ministry.

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Because the Bible even says, don't bring a charge against an elder without one or two witnesses. Now, we have the one or two witnesses.

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Not only do we have the testimony of Scripture, but given the thing itself, which is plain on each counselor's website who charges, there's no two ways about it what they're doing.

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But yeah, the response to that, of course, is, well, it doesn't matter how well -intentioned they are.

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The fact of the matter is that this is very serious and it has to be addressed. Yeah, that's a really good point. Really helpful.

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I hadn't thought too much about that. But yeah, that instinct to defend good people, because they are good people.

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We're not saying the opposite. We are acknowledging, as we always do, and it's helpful to reiterate this, we are always acknowledging that most people who are selling ministry are good, well -intentioned, well -meaning people who love

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Christ sincerely and who want to help people sincerely. And so, we're not denying that at all.

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We're not pointing fingers and saying these people are through and through diabolical, right? Biblical counselors are doing a super important job that everybody realizes, like, this is really important.

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And so, I can understand how people would be like, you're going after those people? I mean, and we're not saying that it's easy to be a biblical counselor here either.

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It is one of the hardest jobs on the planet, for sure. It takes incredible amount of wisdom.

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And so, just want to acknowledge that really clearly up front. Yeah, and I think we could give a heads up to our listeners, too, that this is what you're going to hear a lot of.

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We're going to be going after some of our favorite people, some of the best people, because we care so much about them and this issue.

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Some people might be curious, well, why aren't you going after the Benny Hens of the world and the Joel Osteens of the world and things like that?

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And the answer is, in part, because a lot of people already are. And two, we need to be worrying about the sin in our own camp, not just the sin outside in false churches.

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Right. So, to this day, when I mentioned I'm a missionary, I live on the free generosity of God's people, individuals and churches who are supporting me to be able to freely give ministry on the field.

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And so, this is something that is common sense and common knowledge for basically everyone in the church that missionaries live on support.

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They don't go to the field and then say, before I plant a church here, I'm going to charge everyone for the planting of this church, and they're going to need to pay my salary.

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These people who are going to be part of this church, right from the get -go, and they're going to need to do all this stuff in exchange for me planting a church and sharing the gospel with them and whatnot, discipling them.

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That would be ludicrous to most people to think of a missionary model that way. But when it comes to counseling,

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I usually challenge people, why is it impossible for us to think of counselors as missionaries, as foreign missionaries?

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And of course, there's always lots of objections and complaints about that because they're like, well, if I work in the States and nobody will support me because, you know, they only support you if you go overseas, and that's more sexy to say you're going to Africa or something, and then people will give.

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But fundamentally, you know, that kind of excuse and pragmatism is just at its core a lack of faith and an excuse for, you know, not doing something because you think it may not turn out or it may just be a little harder.

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In any case, like, to this day, no one has given me a clear answer as to why biblical counselors can't just raise support and be supported as missionaries.

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And that's what I would recommend, you know. It's a very simple solution. It's not complicated. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that model.

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It just takes faith, you know. And I think that's what it comes down to in our conversation so often is, like, challenging people to have faith that God will provide, that their master will give the wages that the laborer deserves, that he will provide for his people who are harvesting, that he's a faithful master and you can trust him.

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Yeah, and God providing doesn't necessarily mean he's going to give you the salary that you want. It might involve sacrifice.

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It could involve working bivocationally that, you know, lots of people in ministry have to do around the world.

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We're not saying that, well, because everything's theology, therefore everything should be free, right?

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We're saying there's something particular about giving biblical advice that requires it be freely given because it was freely given to us.

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And so if the biblical counselor really believes that the work he is doing is distinguished from the work that the

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Christian counselor, to use that term again, or, you know, the counseling that's basically a secular model with a

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Christian label slapped on it, if they really believe that what they're doing is different, it must be distinguished as different.

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And it must be distinguished, not arbitrarily, but the same way that Paul said that his preaching must be distinguished from other people's preaching in 2

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Corinthians 12, which is by not charging for it. One of the fundamental, the most fundamental blind spots that I see when people think through this is a denial of the sinfulness of the human heart.

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And we have to acknowledge that counselors are also sinners and they suffer temptations. And one of those temptations is that when you put money into a mix, into the mix of something that is very, very akin to friendship or is pastoral ministry, you begin to compromise so many things and you begin to tempt the counselor to draw this out so that the income is consistent, steady or increased.

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If you are a counselee and you're dealing with some kind of sin, a counselor who's being paid by you is going to be,

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I think, less prone to confront sin in your life. Because confronting people's sin, which is often what a biblical counselor should be doing, is not the greatest way to keep people returning to pay you

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X amount of dollars an hour, right? I mean, you risk offending people, you risk turning them away every time.

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This is like a pragmatic concern, but it also is a biblical concern because it has to do with your biblical view of man and temptation and how money can pervert and pollute a relationship in that sense.

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Jonathan Yeah, I've got a quote to add to that. Steve Vyers, who's an ACBC, that's the

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Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, is an ACBC board member. He said this in the book,

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Counseling the Hard Cases, this is one reason it is so valuable to do counseling ministry in the context of a local church where counseling services are offered free of charge.

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The conversation is not rushed by financial concerns, and we are free to take the necessary time to get to know a counselee on a deeper level.

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The counselee, in turn, becomes convinced that we are not simply going to toss out pat answers or shallow solutions.

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If you're here listening and you're like, I don't, this isn't a problem. Like, all the great biblical counseling people, they're not actually charging.

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This is all done through the church, right? You guys are kind of blowing this out of proportion. So, if you go to ccef .org

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slash counseling, you can read this. This is one of the flagship organizations of biblical counseling in the world, formerly led by David Powlison, who

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I love, by the way. Love his book, Speaking Truth and Love. Go drop everything and read it.

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Absolute gold. In spite of that, this is what it says on the site. How much does counseling cost?

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Does CCEF take insurance or offer financial assistance? It says our counseling fee is $90 per hour.

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And then they say later, if you can't afford counseling, basically get your church to pay for it. Instead of them saying, we'll make an exception or we'll offer it freely, we'll reflect the generosity of Christ, just beg your church to cover it and we'll just charge you the same amount anyway.

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It's a little ugly as well when you dig deeper on their counseling materials, and they're not even willing to share those freely.

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PDFs of manuals and booklets on different issues in counseling, you would think, oh, well, at least they're giving those away, right?

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Absolutely not. And in fact, they're what we would call copyright maximalists.

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And so, they're going in deep on their site. If you click on this whole section on permissions and stuff, they really go deep in making you feel afraid of ever quoting them or using the material without their permission, even in fair use.

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I mean, they really go out of their way to kind of fear monger in that sense, which was really sad to me to see.

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Yeah. So, like you said, they end up charging far more for the training materials and things like that.

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There's a lot of things like, for example, just videos of how to think about things biblically that are not accessible.

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You have to pay some fee to get access to them, and it's necessary in order to complete the training. And the fee is pretty substantial.

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So, yeah, there's a lot of that. Almost all the training centers charge for their training.

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A lot of the mentors, most of the mentors, I believe, charge for the mentorship that is necessary in order to complete the certification program.

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And as far as the counseling itself, most of the counseling centers and most of the churches don't charge exactly.

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However, a lot of them do, and we'll be releasing an article, Lord willing, soon on this with more details.

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And it's interesting, too, what their website, what the ACBC website says about charging for counseling.

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Biblical counselors must care for counselees in making decisions about whether and how they charge fees for counseling.

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The Bible is clear that ministers of the gospel of Jesus are entitled to earn their living from the gospel.

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This principle can extend to biblical counselors who serve Christ in vocational ministry. At the same time, the

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Bible is clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a precious gift that should be offered without price, and that it may be necessary for ministers of Christ to selflessly serve those in their care.

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Sounds like they've got the right balance here, right? And then the next sentence says, biblical counselors, therefore, must seek to love their counselees in discerning whether to charge fees and how much to charge.

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Right after having acknowledged the biblical concerns, which include giving the gospel freely, then they say, well, you know, should you charge, and then how much should you charge?

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It's kind of up to you. You know, your circumstance may be different, and you might want to charge this much for the gospel.

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You might want to charge this much. And I want to highlight what they say, they are entitled to getting their living by the gospel, right?

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This sense of entitlement is the age -old mistake that we see over and over and over in these kind of debates and arguments, is the assumption that getting your living by the gospel means and can only mean that you sell the gospel to get your living.

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You know, it's just crazy, but people quote that all the time to argue that you can sell the gospel or sell ministry or sell spiritual things, sell truth, and they just don't stop to think that that is not what it means.

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It means that you are entitled to be supported by the free generosity of God's people, and that's how you'll get your living.

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I had a friend in the Philippines send me an image that was advertising counseling, and I'm not sure if it was biblical counseling, but said in Tagalog, if you'd like me to listen to you, that'll be this much money.

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If you'd like me to give you advice, that'll be this much money. If you'd like me to shed tears with you as your brother, that will be this much money.

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And, you know, it was like four different levels that was, you know, how committed do you want me to be to this thing? Was this a joke?

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Is this a joke or this is real? It was not a joke. Wow. It was not a joke.

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This is like the, do you want the pro plan or the basic plan?

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You want the enterprise plan? You know, and some of the, not the counseling, but some of the

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ACBC training centers have charging plans like that. You know, if you want this with additional mentorship, or you want this with notes provided for you, or you want, you know, and they have different levels where you can pay more and get better training.

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What would you guys say to someone who said, you know, charging money is needed to make sure it's professional, that you're getting professional counseling?

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Because I've heard this, that it won't be professional unless they charge. Recently we had someone come to our church and tell the counselors that she was talking to that she was in a bad financial position and she was looking forward to getting in a better one so that she could go talk to real counselors.

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So she identified the counselors we have at our church as, you know, I don't know, fake counselors, but yeah, there is this idea that if you're paying for it, it's professional because I guess that is the definition of, you know, being a professions vocational, but that doesn't mean that it's quality.

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You can pay for all kinds of things that aren't quality. In fact, a lot of things you pay for very poor quality and some of the, it's not just a cliche.

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Some of the best things in life really are free. Just like the gospel is free. One of the reasons why people,

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I've heard people argue that money should be involved is because it makes it more professional because it keeps someone at arm's length.

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And so, you know, you're not doing it because you love them. You're doing it because you're a professional.

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You're doing it like that's your motive so that they know that it's a professional relationship. It's not like, yeah, you want to keep them in as arms at arm's length when you're in a professional relationship.

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But is that the, I mean, that's obviously not a biblical model of ministry. Paul shared his life with the people discipled.

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Do they teach that in biblical counseling or is that something from just another counselors? Yeah. Something that's explicitly addressed in a lot of the materials

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I've been going through because I actually trying to go through ACBC certification right now. One of these pieces of material explicitly talked about the difference between biblical counseling and secular counseling in this aspect of actually building relationships and friendships with your counselees as opposed to keeping them at arm's length.

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What you brought up, John, comes down to an idolatry issue. This idolatrous relationship or belief that money can imbue everything.

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It's so powerful that it can imbue everything with quality. And that comes from a materialistic culture that has been brainwashed over and over with the mantra.

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If you pay more for something, it's going to be higher quality. The marketing machine wants you to believe, right?

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And I mean, I know professional counselors who, you know, they do charge fees, but they've worked for many, many years and then they do offer the services for free at times as well.

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And so, you know, if you're claiming that the free counselors are the unprofessional ones, well, there are professionals who have charged for a long time and then do offer for free later in life or for whatever reason.

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So, to end this conversation, I want to read a brief paragraph from an article I'm working on. David Powelson writes the following in his excellent book,

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Speaking Truth and Love. He says, The activities we call preaching and teaching and those we call counseling and daily conversation are two facets of a single activity, the ministry of the word.

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So, just as most believers rightly cringe at the thought of a preacher charging an entry fee to hear the ministry of the word, we should recoil at the thought of a biblical counselor putting a price tag on his work.

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Without a doubt, Peter and the early church would have called it a grievous sin, the sin of selling the gift of God for money.

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Acts 8 .32 To deny that the bible gives a clear answer to the question of whether to support or sell counseling is to deny the sufficiency of scripture.

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And such a denial undermines one of the most central pillars of the biblical counseling movement.

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Charging fees for biblical counseling is a plain violation of scripture's teaching and Christ's instructions for ministers of the gospel and turns counselors into peddlers of God's word instead of people of sincerity.

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2 Corinthians 2 .17 Deborah Dewart has provided much scriptural support to this position in her excellent article on counseling fees, and I would encourage you to go to sellingjesus .org

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and read that article. I promise you, it will raise some issues that you have never thought about.

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So, to conclude, biblical counseling is a beautiful and important ministry that should flourish within the church through generous funding.

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Many counselors have already proven that the biblical model is possible. They are supported well by the offerings of their local church and other believers.

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Selling truth, wisdom, and friendship is not necessary to make the ministry of counseling sustainable.

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God will provide through the ways He has sanctioned in His word. His resources are unlimited.

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He is a compassionate and generous Father. Just as the first disciples trusted

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Him to give them the food they needed in order to do ministry, biblical counselors are called to do the same as they rest in God's love and faithfulness.