Thinking Carefully About Disorders & Biblical Counseling | Deepak Reju

Getting to Know Deepak Reju and the Call to Care for Troubled Souls

Welcome to another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean DeMars with my guest Deepak Reju.

That's right. Thank you, Sean.

Oh, I like your voice. Oh, by the way, you get us started with prayer.

Yeah, let's pray together. Lord, in your kindness, you've given us today to be able to not only get up but to worship you with everything that you've given us today. So give us strength, wisdom, hope, joy, patience, and love.

Not because there's anything good within us because there isn't, but because of what Christ has done and not only dying on the cross but being raised three days later so we can live a life for him and not for ourself anymore.

We pray this all in your son's.

Name. Amen. Amen. So, Deepak, we first met when I was a member of a church where you pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church. I was there just as a member in 2011, and me and my wife were going through not anything crazy, but there was one little tricky thing in our marriage.

We hadn't been discipled. It was a little embarrassing. Set up an appointment with you to get some counseling, and brother, you served us so well. It was so useful, and it was just one meeting. And then I came back to CHBC in 2016, I think, and we had a standing appointment every Friday with you as an intern, and that was so helpful.

It was so useful. And then also during that time, I just got to see you shepherd the flock. I got to see you train up a small army of biblical counselors within the church, some paid, some not paid, and I just thought like, man, this is a guy that I need to pay attention to because he's serving the church in the way that I hope to serve the church one day as a pastor, whether or not I have all the same giftings and talents that you have.

So brother, I'm just really honored that you're here with us, and we just finished up a conversation with a bunch of local pastors because I didn't want it to just be us. I wanted you to meet with them and talk with them and serve them, and I think that they feel pretty well served as well.

Can you just introduce to our audience who you are and maybe why we're having this conversation?

Yeah. Thank you for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here. Delightful to have the time with you and to be back here with you and Decatur.

Decatur where it's greater.

Where it's definitely greater.

Definitely greater, yeah.

Deepak Raju, I am a pastor in Washington, DC. I have been on the staff for 16 years, but I've been around the church since 1991, so I've been around it for 30 years.

Wow.

And yeah, I love being a pastor. This is what I wanna do with my life.

Yeah.

I hope to do this until I die, and then even if I have to retire at some point, I'm not gonna retire. I'm just gonna keep discipling, shepherding, teaching.

You might even try to come back and haunt people as a pastor.

I don't know, that's me.

Just like, I have a word from the Lord for you.

I have five kids, ages 18 down to 10, two boys, three girls, married to Sarah, who I met at the church 22 years ago. She's been a faithful and diligent partner for many years. And we love being there.

DC has been our home. Our kids have grown up there. We know what it's like to live in the city. And aside from the five kids and my wife and having a chance to pastor, the church gives us the privilege of writing and teaching other places, going out and trying to equip other churches.

But then in my own personal life, I love reading, I love coaching my kids. So I'm typically on a soccer field every Saturday. I love really good pizza dough. Really good pizza dough? Oh, yeah, man. I'm on a quest for the best pizza on the planet.

Oh, man. Okay.

So the Northeasterner in me, growing up in a small town where the grandmother from Italy was the one cooking in the back kitchen. And when I got to high school, it was her two sons who took over the kitchen.

Classic family style Italian restaurant.

Oh, dude, if I would have known that, I could have just taken you to Sbarro's for lunch.

I don't think so.

Domino's?

No, I don't think so. Nice try.

Going in the wrong direction here. Nice try.

Okay, all right.

But yeah, the Lord has been very kind and I'm really grateful for the life that He's given us.

Praise God, brother. Hey, you are apparently a pizza aficionado. I didn't know that. But you are, in my mind, kind of like the biblical counseling guru, right? You probably wouldn't take that title for yourself.

Although as you age, it's almost like your body is taking that identity. But I mean, even just like we had a really tough counseling situation here at Sixth Avenue and I just called you because I was like, man, this is a brother who I trust.

I want another set of eyes on this. I think it'll be helpful. But I mean, how did you find your way into...

Into this?

Yeah, because some pastors tend to focus more on missions and evangelism. How did you...

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great question. There were early signs, like when I was in college, we would go down to Florida to do evangelism projects. You'd be two cars of us and people would rotate in and out of my car to tell me their life stories.

Oh, wow.

Or I would go with friends. The college I went to, a lot of people came from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey. And so I would find rides back home with friends who were heading up to the Northeast. And then I'd sit down and this was just me.

I would say, we got four hours in the car together. Why don't you go ahead and tell me your life story and I'll ask you questions along the way. And people at the end would often say, actually, you probably know more about me than a lot of other people in my entire life.

Because I just sat and listened and listened to them tell about their life. One of my mentors would do this on a plane all the time. I really kind of learned it from him, where on a plane, he would just take an interest in the person next to him and ask them questions about their life and take an interest in who they are, what the Lord has made them to be, what they're trying to do with their life, what their suffering is.

So it's just come natural. I'm a people person. I like spending my days with people. I like getting into their life. If I ever have a sabbatical, the thing I hunger or crave for is to sit down in front of someone and get into their heart.

So there's a place for small talk and everybody needs to do small talk. That's what helps us grow in relationships. But what I really want is I want to know your heart. I want to know what you worship, what you desire, what you hate, what you're fearful of, what gets you up in the morning.

What sun does your planets revolve around? That's the thing that I'm going after.

And you're always like that. That's just your natural...

That's just my disposition. If I'm gonna be with someone, I just want an opportunity to really get to know you. And if it takes me time, because I can be patient. One brother who I did premarital counseling for 16 years ago, we've been meeting once a month for 16 years.

And he's a dear friend. He's grown a ton in his faith over the last decade and a half and has been much more the church than me. But yeah, I mean, I love being a part of his life.

So basically there was this natural disposition that I'm assuming other older, wiser brothers in your life saw and said, yeah, you're a good preacher and you're a good Sunday school teacher, and we think you're gonna be a good pastor, but we think you should really emphasize this aspect of your ministry and seek the training to equip you to do that.

And that was Mark Dever. For me, I came back to CHBC after having done my MDiv at Southern Seminary. I worked as a personal assistant for a year and also the smaller church. So I'm the staff manager that year also.

So you changed the ice and restocked the fridge. Well, and wiped, cleaned up the kitchen, took out his garbage, everything else you expect. But halfway through the year, he said to me, I think your gifts are in counseling.

Because at that point, were you thinking more preaching?

I actually didn't know. I'd been having dozens of conversations with him about what direction do I go with my life? I'd done my MDiv, how best could I be used for the kingdom? So Mark was the first one who deliberately said, I think this is the place you should focus your time and energy.

So you had already gone to Southern, you were back in DC, and now he's basically saying, I think you should go back to Southern.

Well, that's where it ended. It ended with him saying, why don't you go back to Southern, get a degree in counseling? What I wasn't expecting is then he said, and then come back around. And then why don't you work alongside of me?

And that would help balance our team. But I wasn't sure. So there was two more key conversations. The second one was with Matt Schmucker, who I'd been meeting with pretty regularly. He had been discipling me that year.

He said, I see a lot of different things in you, but this area, it seems like you could swing different bats, but this is a place you could swing a really big bat. And if you're gonna go up to home plate, you wanna swing a really big bat for the sake of the kingdom.

Well, that clicked. It just made sense for me. Like, okay, well, I could suddenly begin to see all the things like the car rides and people telling me their stories and my natural interest in people. Okay, well, this seemed to be a good way to use my life.

Plus I'm first child, I'm Asian American, high difference for authority. So godly men speak up. I didn't resist at all. I just thought, well, this makes sense. Why wouldn't I follow their counsel? Why wouldn't I try this out?

The third conversation was then Mark arranged for me to sit down with the late David Paulson, who I'd never met before. So I drove up to CCF and basically, if I was gonna enter into counseling, I just had a lot of questions.

How does this work? How do you think through it? What's the relationship between scripture and what I do? Just really basic questions. So I took an hour and a half appointment, asked him every question I could ever imagine to just figure out what it is.

And I remember an hour and a half, I'm squirming in my chair, thinking my time's up. And David, as the kind of grandfather figure he was, just kindly said, I'm enjoying myself. You wanna keep going? Let's just keep talking.

Yeah.

We talked for hours.

Praise God.

Typical of him.

Yeah.

He cares about the person, not the schedule. And I would say that was...

That's just tough in ministry.

It is, but that conversation was a trajectory setting conversation for me, because I had to have someone who knew what he was thinking and what he was doing and had a theological background give me some basic parameters early in the game so I knew what I was doing.

Right.

And there was a lot more that had to grow, but I just needed somebody to point me in the right direction and then I could start running. And that's what I think all three of those conversations helped me to do.

Mark helped me figure out what I should focus on, Matt helped me own it, and then David pointed me in the right direction in figuring out what ended up being. Like, I really wanna know how the Bible helps me come alongside troubled souls.

Yeah.

That's the summary. I wanna build a bridge from the text of Scripture to adultery, pornography, suicide, eating disorders, you just go on down the list.

Yeah.

Does the Bible have something to say? And that's what I'm doing. I just wanna make this text of Scripture come alive in the hardest things in the Christian life.

The Pastor and Counseling and the Process of Shepherding Members in Need

Well, brother, speaking of counseling, one of the first books that I wanna talk about that you've written is a book that you wrote with Jeremy Pierre, a friend of yours from Southern. What he teaches there?

He's the chairman of the counseling department. He's a professor of counseling.

Gotcha. And you wrote The Pastor and Counseling, The Basics of Shepherding Members in Need. Give us the lowdown on this.

Yeah. The typical book I'd give anyone who's interested in counseling is Paul Tripp's excellent primer, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands. The blessing of it is it's a wonderful overview of what we're trying to do.

The difficulty is it's a beast, it's 300 plus pages. And in my line of work with all the pastors who I've got relationships with throughout the country, especially former interns, former staff from our church, will call up and say, I'm about to do my first hard case.

They're showing up maybe tomorrow morning. What do I do? And I wrote this with Jeremy with an eye towards, if you have two hours, we can give you a feel for what you need to do in the room. But unlike other counseling books, which lay out a lot of principles and stories, what we go for is process.

From the first point in which you have contact to the first counseling meeting to the point where you know actually you can wrap things up. When do you make the decision? What are the parameters to decide?

Actually, we can end this counseling process. I wanna work through that process with you from beginning to end. And for it to be a short, readable, clear primer that's gospel centered.

That is very ambitious of you. You're trying to accomplish a lot, a little bit of space. It's been out for how long now?

I think around 10 years or so.

And what kind of feedback have you received? Do you think you would basically achieve what you set out to do?

Yeah. We've actually received a ton of feedback from pastors grateful for this being something they read to help orient them. Plus a lot of professors have used it in classes. That's where I've actually heard about it a lot more of students who read it while they were in seminary.

So yeah, I think it's accomplishing what we're looking for, which is giving pastors a basic primer. Though Mark Dever in our pulpit when he gives away books, when he gave it out to our congregation, he said, if you're ever gonna do counseling, this is actually gonna be useful for you too, because it's gonna help you figure out what you need and what to look for to get everything you can out of the process.

So he said, it's not just for pastors, though the title communicates the primary audience.

Sure. Because pastors will probably be doing this most often, most intensely.

Yeah.

All right. Two questions about this book. Number one, now that it's been out for 10 years, what's something that you wish you could change or add to the book that maybe you left out?

Yeah. Wow. What a good question. I think there's... I hadn't thought through abusive marriages to the degree that I've had to work through over the last few years in just simply getting in the trenches, like reading, thinking, getting training on it.

I didn't have that when I first started. And so, for example, if I'm convinced that I'm dealing with an abusive husband, I stop marital counseling, because the abusive husband is gonna manipulate the process, and there's no way a wife living under his tyranny can be honest in the counseling room with us.

So then you divide and go...

So we divide until we're convinced that he's genuinely repentant, and that's gonna take a while. It's gonna take a long time. I didn't have that when I wrote the book. That's something I've come to learn in the trenches through making tons of mistakes and beginning to figure this out with the team, getting training, and other things like that.

So do you think second edition, maybe add an appendix on that?

Certainly. I mean, certainly there's... As now I formally teach marital counseling, I have a whole section on this. Okay. Where do you teach that? Oh, well, I mean, anytime somebody asks me to teach how to do marriage counseling, I got a morning seminar on it, like a three-hour thing.

Plus then I now have what you heard in May, a one-hour session, especially on abusive marriages.

Yeah.

Which is excellent.

Are you gonna publish that somewhere or do something with it?

No, I mean, that's... Well, I mean, project number two, three, four, and five for Jeremy, Pierre, and I is actually... We're working right now on a series of marriage counseling books.

Okay.

So we're writing the primer for a marriage counseling book, which we're... He's in chapter two, I'm working on chapter four, even as we speak. And that's book one of a four-book set, of which book then two, three, and four are primers...

Sorry, they're small paperbacks about specific troubled marriages. So one's gonna be on adultery, one's on the marriage which has an angry spouse, third on the marriage that has a severely depressed spouse.

And if that goes well, then we'll do the abusive marriage, we'll do...

Gotcha. But you're gonna test the waters.

Well, the publisher's gonna see if it sells or if just you and my mom buy copies.

Right. Well, I mean, I know all two dozen of our listeners and viewers will go buy a copy of... Hey, is that gonna be like the length of like a little CCEF booklet or like a non-Marx church questions booklet?

The primer will probably be like 150, 200 page book overview of counseling. And it's the same thing. We don't go for principles and stories, we go for process. First time a troubled couple walks in to the very end when the process ends, what does it look like?

But then the paperbacks are meant to be soft cover, 100 pages basically to hand to the couple who's in that troubled situation. So if the husband comes in with his wife and she just committed adultery, I need to hand them something at the end of that first meeting that would begin the journey with them that first month in knowing how to begin to work through that.

That's what we're trying to write.

Gotcha.

Adultery, anger, depression, just resources that the pastor or the counselor can hand over to the troubled couple.

Yeah, that's so useful, so useful. Second question in relation to this book, if... So this is kind of nuts and bolts, step one, step two, step three.

Yeah.

What would be... If you could... Let's say that there's a conference for pastors, Crossway very generously says, hey, this is gonna be a conference for pastors who are seeking to grow in their counseling abilities.

We wanna give them this book and one other book, and we're gonna give these two books away to every person in attendance. Deepak, what book do you think we should give away with your book? What do you think?

Wow, what a good question. I mean, if we're looking general counseling, it's Instruments in Redeemer's Hands, because that's the more expansive version of what we talked about. Plus it gives... Just like we do, we try and give a theological backbone, but then very practical.

And same thing, he gives a good theological backbone, practical. But I just work through Darby Strickland's Is It Abuse? And it was so helpful in thinking through very specific categories. And right now, it's really common to ask about, what about emotional abuse?

Mm-hmm.

Because everybody gets the tyranny of physical abuse.

Physical, sexual, even spiritual, it seems...

Physical, sexual, spiritual, but emotional...

It's tricky.

It's tricky, and not many people know what to do with it. That's one. The other one, which she brought out, which I thought was really helpful, was financial abuse. So the husband, who... The wife has no idea what the finances are, and he manipulates the finances in a way that he demonstrates his tyranny by...

He gives her a little allowance, nothing more. Or in the worst situations, the husband refuses to pay for basic essentials.

Yeah. Yep, seen that before.

And so all the ways that a husband can manipulate the finances to carry out his tyranny, she was so helpful in dropping down into each one of those specific categories and giving live examples. So you don't just hear the principle, you get a feel for what...

Case studies.

You get a feel for what it is. That one, I feel like that book was really transformative for me in just beginning to understand dynamics that I knew, but I needed some help with.

That's good, brother. Let's pause the book tour, one book in, and talk a little bit about abuse.

Yeah.

I think one of the main questions from pastors in this climate is... It has to do with trying to figure out when something has crossed the line from being a jerk, being harsh, being mean, to being abusive.

Jonathan Lehman is going to talk about this in his new book, but he said recently, I thought it was really helpful. We live in an age where anytime someone misuses their authority, it's called abuse of authority.

But to have authority and to be a fallen human being is to guarantee you're gonna misuse it, right? And so I've heard you, brother, share about this spectrum. Now, you did this in terms of marriage, right, stuff, but I think it applies more generally, right?

So if there are pastors listening to this, or even church members listening to this, and they're thinking through a really tricky situation, what's that spectrum you would give.

Them?

Yeah. So what we're describing, what Darby spends her life working with is marriages where you have a textbook abuser, a guy who's a tyrant, controlling, manipulative, the wife lives under years of oppression.

She's, in every sense of what we're describing, a true victim under his abuse of tyranny. But what I wanna leave room for is a guy who I'm just gonna call a jerk. He's immature, he's young in his faith, he might have been a Christian for a while, but he just has not grown, and it's demonstrated in the way he lives.

He screams, he does stupid things, he might even... He just does things that, unfortunately, many of us as young husbands have made mistakes and done. But I don't want to quickly throw him in the bucket of abuse.

And by abuse, I'm describing a Pharisee and a tyrant who, in using his authority, the wife, literally, her image bearing qualities degrade in front of us over the course of years. So she becomes a faint image of what she used to be.

And the word picture that I use is, if you picture that husband taking a sledgehammer to a car and beating the car, and eventually the frame of the car begins to break down, it's a systematic breakdown of a.

Person's personhood. So in contrast to that, the jerk would be the guy who does some cosmetic.

Damage to the car, right? Box a windshield off. And he does stupid things. In our current climate, he can quickly be thrown into the bucket of abusive. Whereas, if you've worked with these guys over years, what you see is, I was an abusive, but I did a lot of dumb things my few years of marriage.

And I have no business of being self-righteous on these young guys, and that's what gives me a lot of mercy for them. I can tell the difference between a young guy because he's willing to follow my lead.

He is repentant. He's here regularly. He's in the word, but he's not a tyrant. I can take him under my wing and say that was stupid. Why did you do that? I love you, and we're going to change this, and he's going to follow my lead.

And it may take some time, and he may make mistakes, and he might do it again, but a year or two years or three years from now, he's actually going to look different. Five and 10, 15 years from now, he might actually be an elder.

That's a great time horizon. I think people expect three counseling sessions, and if he's.

Changed, no. Think in five-year chunks. I described to you some of the guys I've been discipling. 16 years with that guy. 16 years. And there's quite a few of those guys I've been discipling. None of them are elders, but I'm going to disciple them for years, whether they ever become an elder or not, because I see deliberate and slow incremental growth, and we're moving in the right direction.

And so long as these guys are moving in the right direction, I'm willing to be in the trench with them and help them out. And so what I ask for the wife, if I think he's immature, foolish, and he's just got to grow up, both emotionally and spiritually, then I ask, let me get in the trench with both of you.

Let me care for you and him, and let's work at this together and give it time. So I had a couple who showed up. They came to our church. They were commuting from further away, and the husband, about two or three Sundays in, approached me after an evening service and said, our marriage is terrible, and we need help.

So I got in the trench with them, and for a year, I met with them every week. And it took a good year to turn the whole ship. But I don't know how many meetings that is, but it was a lot of work. But once we got to year two, did I stop?

No, we didn't meet as often. We started spacing, and I was a pastor, so we started meeting twice a month, but I still met with him for another year because now I'm shifting out of him making tons of mistakes and doing really mature things to now he's following my lead.

He is actually starting to make better decisions. She's beginning to feel his leadership change, and yet now he needs discipling. I can't let him go yet. Now I need to help him begin to understand what those key decisions are, how to lead in the mundane, and as they became pregnant for the first time, how to become a parent.

And then it was the beginning of the third year where they were actually... They had made a pretty significant turn that they finally confessed to me, hey, we didn't wanna admit this early on, but we had dreamed of one day becoming missionaries.

And I was like, are you... First, I was like, okay. I'm glad you didn't say it early on because I wouldn't have been able to say it at the beginning. There's no way I could have said yes, but now I see the possibility.

But I said to them, I need you to not rush yet. You're on the right trajectory. We need to keep doing work. And so we did. We did. And by God's grace, they've been out on the mission field now a few years now.

It was a sweet end to the story. But what I love is at the end of the process, as they were engaging now our elder board and the chairman of the elders, an organization that was very interested in them came in and said, let's get you on the field now.

And we said... I said to the chairman and the chairman backed me up and we worked with that organization. We said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're almost there, but there are a few more things.

And if you throw them on the field right now, under the stress and pressure, as you know, from having been on the field, they could implode. And one of the staff members at our organization fought back really hard and even said to our chairman, why are you guys in the way?

And I love that the husband said, because they asked him, don't you feel controlled by these elders? He said, I don't feel it as.

Control. I feel like it's an act of love. Yeah. Because you guys weren't saying at the end of the day, we can control you. We're just telling you, yeah, this is what we would counsel you.

Well, and now I was saying like, I want to make sure a hundred percent sure that you guys are.

Going to be ready. Yeah. We want you to go to the field and succeed. Yes. Yeah. We can get you.

There faster, but you may come home sooner. Yeah. And so in that sense, like they stayed, we worked a few more months and then we were all on board. We were all like, you're ready. Yeah. Go. And they did.

And they've been on the field many years and they're doing really well. And they come back for check-ins when they're stateside. So yeah, I mean, that's the kind of investment. Like I want a deep investment.

I want to care for guys who they might be in there. Their marriage might be horrific and they might be making really dumb decisions, but that's different than a textbook abuser. Right. And I just want that category under the current culture.

Yeah. I mean, you can get online and read all kinds of stuff related to abuse and then throw people in that bucket. Yeah. Which is why I just kind of created that continuum. It's like saying,.

There's a difference. Okay. So I had a pastor recently say this to me, you tell me how it sounds to you. He said, in our church, our elders recently have felt like we are simultaneously trying to protect women and children, but let's just say women from abuse.

But also we strangely for the first time are trying to protect men from accusations of abuse, which in many ways can destroy their lives just as much as a woman's life can be destroyed by being abusive.

Thoughts on.

That? Yeah. I mean, in the current culture, accusations can come quickly and fast. And I'll make some caveats like rightfully so in the sense of lots of churches have been incompetent, have been reckless, have treated victims poorly, have shunned them and shamed them.

And so it feels like we're barely beginning to figure this out in a way we should have years ago. Sure. So there's still a significant problem with churches mishandling how they deal with abuse. Now understand that I'm 100 there and realizing and recognizing and fighting for us handling it better as churches.

Right. And hence I put things in writing, I've talked about this to just help the church do better. With that being said, in the current cultural climate, accusations can come quickly and if we're careless, you can ruin a man's whole reputation and pull him out of ministry.

And especially in an internet world where everyone is their own self publisher, you can put anything and everything out there quickly. So if you're in pastoral ministry, you'll get plenty of people who won't like you because you gotta make leadership decisions and people will oppose you and go against you.

And you may be the target of a discernment blog series. Yeah. Well, okay. So when I first started pastoral ministry, you would get nasty letters. Now you get people who will write about you on Twitter, who will post things about you.

That's a part of the current.

Culture. There may be a very tricky situation in your church that is very complicated and the elders are working together with these people to try to handle it with as much balance and nuance as possible.

And someone may decide to do a big blog post or make a video on the internet and then they have 20 ,000 people who have an opinion about it that have like this much information that the elders have. How do you respond to that?

I mean, do you just keep your head down and say like, yeah, we're just accountable to the Lord and our congregation. But sometimes even when stuff like that goes public, it affects the way the congregation handles things, right?

Because the congregation can read those blog posts or watch those videos. I mean, you probably haven't dealt with that, but I mean, any thoughts on that?

Oh yeah. I mean, well, at this point in my career, I've had people who have clearly expressed their frustrations, who go after you, do things like that. But ultimately, I'm accountable to the Lord, I'm accountable to my wife, and I'm accountable to the congregation and the elder board.

So if I'm being irresponsible, if I've done something wrong, then the church, my own local church needs to hold me to account. And if I've done something that disqualifies me, they need to fire me. They need to evaluate it.