Should Christians be licensed by the state to counsel on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

We're answering one of your questions on the podcast this week, and the question is whether or not Christians should be licensed by the state to counsel.

In order for this question to make sense, you need to understand something

of the context for it. And let me explain first to our international listeners. We're very glad to have

people from all over the world listen to truth and love. And what you might not understand if you're

in an international setting is that in the United States,

the practice of counseling is regulated on a state-by-state basis through secular counseling

licensure. That is, each and every state gets to decide the requirements for who will be certified

and what they have to do in order to be

certified. And there is something of attention between those who are licensed by the state to counsel

and those who do biblical counseling, believing that the scriptures mandate that counseling is a

practice that Christians must engage in in general,

and that pastors and other ministers of the gospel must engage in in particular. And so there's

something of a turf war between state licensed counseling and biblical counseling. And what some people

wonder is, should I be licensed by the state in order to do counseling if I

really believe in biblical counseling? And that is the question that we're representing on the podcast

this week. And so should that happen? And let me give an answer to that by talking in a few

different categories. First of all,

some people will decide that it is good for them to pursue a license by the state in order to do

counseling. They will decide this because they have the mindset of a missionary. They want to take Jesus Christ

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