Counseling Unbelievers on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson 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.

This week on the podcast, we are dipping into our mailbag. We have been asking for our listeners

to send in questions, and this week we are addressing one of those very specific questions.

And the question goes something like this.

How do we, as a counseling ministry, focus on ministry toward our community?

And then from that, what do we do when we're counseling unbelievers?

What a great question that's posed.

First of all, let me say that I am so grateful that you would have the mindset that counseling

ministry can be missional, that we can utilize as a ministry of the church.

The church becomes a place where hurting people go.

They desire to go to, and that you have a vision that says we can reach out to people

in our communities that are hurting.

I'll give you an example. When I was serving in a local church ministry, led a counseling ministry

there, we had lots of opportunity. I can remember the first six months I was there. We were

establishing a counseling ministry. I was somewhat discouraged. We weren't

receiving a lot of people for counseling. And then it was like all the sudden we had several

people who had come in, who the Lord had done tremendous work in, and without any advertising,

word of mouth just began to spread. And we became overwhelmed with people from our community. We

were intentional about being missional for our community. We wanted to give a distinct perspective

of our church that we were for our community, wanting to help our community, and not wanting to

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